#426 – Dick Bernard: Labor Day 2011 and "The Help"

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We went to the film, The Help, Sunday afternoon. It was time very well spent.
There are many reviews: Go to IMDB for many of them and other information about The Help. If you haven’t seen the film, consider taking it in, either in the theater, or by other means.
The Help is about Jackson, Mississippi, in 1963, and about relationships, such as they were between Negro domestics and the families they worked for.
Sitting behind us in the Grandview Theater in St. Paul were two women who commented back and forth from time to time.
During the film, one of them said to the other, “that’s the way it was“. She apparently was from 1963 Mississippi, or perhaps even Jackson, the setting for the film. They sat there through the film credits at the end so I saw them as we exited: two older white women, my age.
1963 was a watershed year in the Civil Rights movement, captured best by Martin Luther King Jr in his book “Why We Can’t Wait“, published in early 1964, after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. This book is an excellent companion for the movie. It is a book I go back to frequently.

Our guest for the movie was Cathy’s long-time friend, “Annette”, who I wrote about in December, 2009.
Back then, 21 months ago, she’d just been fired from her job in a bank for what turned out to be no reason other than the new manager wanted somebody else.
There was no need for a justifiable reason, as those domestics so well knew in 1963.
Annette is Black, single, in her 50s, probably 30-years or more an American citizen, raised in one of those tiny Caribbean resort islands.
Her family was not a family of domestics, but nonetheless knew their place and their roles back home. She is a neat person.
She said she enjoyed the movie, but she was uncharacteristically quiet.
I didn’t know till afterward that she’s unemployed again.
After over a year of unemployment which included knee replacement surgery, she finally found a job at the Twin Cities International Airport. It was a long bus ride, then eight hours on her feet in one of those food concessions in a concourse. It was scarcely above minimum wage. She had hoped to make 12 weeks, but she finally quit the job after only 10 weeks, last Friday. Her legs just couldn’t tolerate the punishment of standing all day.
So, she spends Labor Day joining the ranks of the unemployed again.
Annette won’t be out on any picket lines today or ever. It’s not her nature, and besides she can’t physically do it. She may end up going back to the island where she at least has family, she said.
“Good riddance”, some might say.
Meanwhile, our country lurches into a permanent election season, candidates braying about this or that as they seek office in 2012.
Ours, like increasing numbers of American families, has long-term unemployed among our own members.
Unless there is serious action, there will doubtless be more as the months go on.
Finally, in “The Help”, the domestic workers get mad as hell, unite, and their cultured and genteel overseers get their due.
But The Help is only a movie about a novel.
Rather than expecting today’s unemployed to advocate for themselves, or go out and get a job that doesn’t exist, we need to do the heavy lifting, politically.
In the long run, those without means will exact their revenge: our economy will get weaker and weaker because there is less and less money to spend. None of us will escape.
We don’t need this to happen. It’s in our court.
END NOTE: The film caused me to seek out an old Reader’s Digest article I knew I had saved, written by Mary Hatwood Futrell, daughter of a “domestic”, and then President of the over 2 million member National Education Association. The article is here: FutrellRdrsDigJul1989001
POSTNOTES:
If nothing else, this film should encourage reflection and discussion.
1. My personal knowledge of “Negroes” did not begin until Army days in 1962-63. I grew up in North Dakota before the military bases, and the race-of-choice was “Indians” who were restricted to Reservations and hardly respected. By chance, at the time of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech in Washington D.C., I was in an Army division on maneuvers in rural South Carolina. It was there, for the first time, that I saw first hand the separate and unequal division of the races in the south. It was an eye-opening experience to say the very least.
2. The film has also caused me to reflect on growing up in a public school teachers family in the rural midwest in 1940s and 1950s. Succinctly, in those ‘good old days’, teachers were treated with scarce more public respect than the domestics in the film. The significant difference, of course, was that racial animus wasn’t part of the equation. Public School teachers, before collective bargaining, were Public Servants (caps intended) – officially and publicly respected, but dismissed at will. Their travails were very small compared with the plight of the Indians and Negroes, but they were travails nonetheless.

#388 – Dick Bernard: Gay Marriage in New York State

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Early last evening I was watching my usual news program and a guest was talking about how New York Legislature was about to pass a law authorizing same sex marriage in the state of New York. I’ve been around political decision making for long enough, and closely enough, to question the judgment of a premature announcement of a bill which would be, but had not yet, passed and was still questionable…one doesn’t announce a victory with ten minutes left in, say, a basketball game.
But announced it was. And it happened. And it apparently has already been signed into law by its architect, Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
There will be countless opinions flooding the news on this issue. Here is my small ‘squeak’.
This is great news, long overdue. As I understand the law, my Catholic Church doesn’t have to marry Gays; neither can it block Gays from getting married.
This is a very big deal on a great many levels. To me, it is one more piece of evidence that sanity is beginning to return to the political conversation – and by “politics” I mean “people”, generally.
I’m straight, and I thus have no direct personal “frame” to understand the Gay perspective. But that’s the most important reason why such a Law as this is good.
Even most religious leaders who despise what they consider the Gay lifestyle seem to agree that God approves of Gays – at least they admit this on paper. But they don’t understand how it is to be Gay, thus they attempt to throw the theological “Book” – their interpretation of the Bible – at it. “Belief” is made to reign.
I really don’t care if my local Archbishop doesn’t like this new Law, or if my local legislator recently went with the majority to deliberately bypass Minnesota’s Governor and authorize an initiative on the 2012 election ballot to enshrine into our Constitution a provision making gay marriage unconstitutional.
New York went with common sense last night.
(I wonder if our Legislature rules are similar to those in Roberts Rules: where decisions made can be reversed if people who voted on the prevailing side move and second to rescind their previous action. If so, maybe this is still a possibility. In fact, I had this as one of my possible questions at a Forum with Legislators a couple of Mondays ago.)
What happened in New York State overnight was a huge big deal. It won’t make the issue go away in other places. But it will be instructive; and it will empower people like ourselves to speak more confidently and informed about this issue.
I think of two evenings ago, at our annual suburban political party picnic.
This years event was in relative terms lightly attended, largely due to chilly and uncertain weather. We had the usual political speakers, but the first one was very unusual for us. Teresa Nelson, Legal Counsel of the Minnesota branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, addressed us about two issues she felt were absolutely critical for basic civil rights in the upcoming year.

Teresa Nelson, June 23, 2011


The first issue was the proposed constitutional amendment on marriage; the second was another proposed constitutional amendment on a voter id bill whose only purpose is to suppress citizen right and ability to vote. Both are, among many others, national initiatives appearing in many places in slightly different forms.
We citizens have work to do in the coming months. Too many of us have not been engaged. If this applies to you, now is the time.
I offer one last thought on the marriage issue:
My hobby for 30 years has been family history.
In the course of researching my French-Canadian side I came across the marriage contract between my first Bernard ancestors in Quebec, in the year 1730. The translation of this contract is Quebec Marriage Cont001
It is worth taking the time to really analyze this contract: who it was with, what it says, etc. (Here’s the summary: the 1730 document was a civil contract, between the parties and the State, to be followed, two weeks later, by the religious Matrimony….)
Of course, Quebec then was an exclusively Catholic country, so the marriage ultimately had to be finalized in the Catholic Church.
But the U.S. is not Quebec. And the Catholic Church in today’s Quebec is, I’m told, all but completely irrelevant….
UPDATE: This over nite blog post does a good job of defining what’s going on with the political decision making on this and other issues as well.

#381 – Dick Bernard: Detente, June 3, 1990: the Gorbachevs come to Minnesota for a visit

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June 3, 1990, was a chilly, somewhat blustery and threatening rain day in Minnesota.
It was also the day that USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa, came to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul to visit. It was a ‘coup’ of sorts for we in the hinterlands of the U.S., as outlined in this New York Times news article preceding the visit.
Then, as now, I considered such events worth following so, since it was Sunday, I got a general idea of the time schedule and route, and decided to try to get a few amateur snapshots (click on photos to enlarge).
The Gorbachev motorcade came down I-94, from Minneapolis, through the stretch that is now under reconstruction, exiting at Lexington Avenue in St.Paul.
I was, then and now, an amateur photographer, running around with an old Nikkormat, using ordinary and relatively slow film and a couple of different lenses. These were the days long before digital photography. Taking pictures was work.
I photo’ed a welcome sign in English and Russian along the freeway, and managed to get rank amateur photos of the Gorbachev’s car at the exit ramp to Lexington, then later, of his arm waving to the crowds on John Ireland Boulevard near the Minnesota Transportation Building near the State Capitol. I passed on trying to join the throng at the Governors Mansion in St. Paul, where the Gorbachevs were hosted by then-Governor Rudy Perpich and his wife Lola. One street over, if I recall, was the always crowded Grand Old Days on Grand Avenue.

June 3, 1990, on I-94 eastbound near Snelling Avenue, St. Paul


Gorbachev, June 3, 1990


I decided to wait out the afternoon and see if I could see the Gorbachev’s plane take off at our International Airport.
While the weather continued overcast, and the time was getting late, once again I got lucky. There was no oppressive security along Post Road paralleling the south runway at the airport, and about the time the Gorbachev’s were scheduled to depart, the last rays of the days sun peaked out from behind the clouds to the west, giving me sufficient light to take my snapshots.
There were people there with me, watching, but relatively few.
The Gorbachevs plane, I believe it was an Ilyushin, was followed in short order by a United States of America plane.

Gorbachevs leave the Twin Cities June 3, 1990


June 3, 1990, early evening, Twin Cities International Airport


Today is 21 years since that memorable Sunday in June, 1990.
A great deal of history has passed us by in those 21 years, recorded and interpreted in many ways by many people: fact mixed with mythology, and all shades in between. “History” is an interpretation; never exactly as it is portrayed by its teller.
It is not my intention to try to write my version of those 21 years since June 3, 1990, and the time preceding; nor to speculate on the years to come in international or domestic relations. But the passage of history does give much food for thought. Today’s politicians and others, particularly those who view politics and other matters as war, pure and simple, might learn something from that time of detente. Winners and Losers both lose in the long run.
This day I remember two people, Lynn Elling and Professor Emeritus Joseph Schwartzberg, still living, who and were and are committed to making a positive difference for a peaceful future on this planet earth.
Two contributions, one each from Lynn and Joe, to our world community are highlighted here.
Each day I draw inspiration from them to try to do my part to contribute to a sustainable and peaceful future of our planet.
I invite you to do the same.

Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev from the front page of Minneapolis Star-Tribune June 4, 1990


UPDATE, 3:35 p.m. same day: Retired newspaper columnist and current blogger Nick Coleman gives his take on the Gorbachev visit here.

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

#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.

#367 – Dick Bernard: "I Am", the documentary

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May 4, largely on the recommendation of our friend, Annelee, we went to the documentary, “I Am”, at the Lagoon Theatre in Minneapolis.
Wherever you are, I would highly recommend you see this extraordinary and thought provoking film.
Then seriously consider the implications of what you just saw.
The official website is here.
Doubtless, there are other on-line commentaries.
For me, it was one of the most powerful commentaries on the titanic clash of contemporary western culture versus the natural order of things that I have ever seen.
The film boils down, in my opinion, to a conversation about “competition” versus “cooperation”. Of course, our contemporary world is ruled by competitors, who won’t like this message (and who control the media message we daily consume). But the outcome for their descendants is inevitable…competition is a fatal disease.
In the long run, competition doesn’t have a chance and thus we who play by competitions rules don’t either.
But, see the film for yourself, come to your own conclusions, and hopefully let others know about it.
Because it is an ‘art film’ release, it is guaranteed a low audience, initially.
My recommendation: everyone should see it.
SUPPLEMENT: 100 Years
Not from the film, but (in my opinion) directly related.
For a time last fall I watched a most interesting TV ad. The actors were a Mom and her little girl. The little girl was trying to blow out a hundred candles on a birthday cake. The message was that it was really, really hard to blow out a hundred candles, and that we had at least 100 years left of Natural Gas in this country, so not to worry.
The ad didn’t play very long…I’m guessing there were people who saw it as I did.
Recently, the exact same text has surfaced, from the same company, on the same topic. The only difference is that there is a single actor, a nice/Dad-like/young middle-age Engineer Type man conveying the exact same message: we have at least 100 years of Natural Gas left, and isn’t that reassuring?
In the recorded history of humankind, 100 years is but a tiny fraction of a second in time; far, far, far less if one considers the time it took to create this natural resource now all but depleted.
But the message is everything: not to worry.
When the gas is gone there’ll be something else…or so we hope.

#364 – Dick Bernard: "The Wicked Witch is Dead" The killing of Osama bin Laden

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I wrote a friend a bit earlier this evening saying I probably wouldn’t comment on the killing of Osama bin Laden a day ago.
I’ve changed my mind…a little.
All day I kept thinking about the hit song from Wizard of Oz, “The Wicked Witch is Dead”. There are endless analyses of what L. Frank Baum, author of
“A Wonderful Wizard of Oz” in 1900, might have been trying to convey in his characters and his story. I won’t enter that fray. The song did keep coming back to me.
The crowds celebrating the death of bin Laden last night and today reinforced the celebratory nature of the song.
Speaking just for myself, I believe President Obama picked the best of the bad options, and took a huge risk in opting for the mission into Pakistan. Close in mind was President Carter’s failed attempt to spring the hostages in Iran in 1979. So much is out of control in such missions.
This mission succeeded, with unknown future ramifications.
Oh that such decisions were to be easy.
I thought back to an uncomfortable conversation at the Nobel Peace Prize Festival a year ago.
At the neighboring table in the display area was a man, an Indian from India, who was a long-time and close advisor of Gandhi’s grandson. He was helping a friend of mine with her book selling.
It would be fair to say that he was extraordinary in all ways, including intensity. There was no escape from at least considering his line of reasoning. He didn’t expect agreement, nor did it seem that he necessarily even wanted agreement, but neither was it easy to wiggle-waffle around. He much preferred that the person be eye-to-eye and deal with whatever the topic might be.
He told me a little about himself, and then he circled round and presented a scenario, which I remember to be something like this: you are on your property, and you are approached by someone who you know to be very dangerous. You have a weapon, but you believe completely in non-violence. The person approaches the fence and shows every indication of doing violence not only to you, but to everyone else who also occupies your space.
“What do you do?“, he asked me.
I really had no idea what to say. By now, I was caught up in who he was, and who he represented, and what his life philosophy had to be, given he was apparently a disciple of Gandhi.
“What would he say?” I asked myself, hoping to give him an answer he himself would have given.
He knew I couldn’t figure out what to say, and he had me.
After an appropriate silence he gave his answer: “you must kill the invader if you can, because if you do not, he will do infinitely more damage.”
On one level his comment made sense.
On another, it still troubled me greatly.
But it seems to apply to the issue of the death of Osama bin Laden, though the long term implications of bin Laden, and war generally, is many degrees more serious, and no one knows for sure the future.
I’m troubled that people cheer on the news that somebody was killed.
On the other hand….

#351 – Dick Bernard. A Cup of Coffee at Wally's in Westchester

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A brief trip to Chicago in early March was to attend the burial of my Uncle Art.
As it happened, my hotel was in the “village” of Westchester (pop. app 17,000), a middle class suburb where my Uncle and family had lived for over 20 years till his first wife died and he remarried and moved about 1980. I had visited Westchester with some frequency back then, so I knew the town pretty well, and it was an opportunity to re-see it.
For many years I have made a practice of seeking out the local “flavor” when I travel. So, on Saturday, March 5, the hotel offered breakfast with the room charge, but I got in the car and wandered back into Art’s old neighborhood to find something in the neighborhood, and finally noticed a promising sign:

Wally’s was in one of those ubiquitous small shopping strips that dot American communities. It was your standard “coffee and donut” place. I was the only customer at the time I entered.
Westchester is a middle class professional community, and Wally’s was not fancy as I would have expected, actually quite spare in its decor.
Something immediately caught my eye. Posted very visibly, twice, was an article from the April 9, 2010, Chicago Tribune. I read the article. The proprietor Walid Elkhatib, had been a franchise holder for one of those immense donut and coffee chains, and in 2010 had lost his franchise after a long legal battle over his refusal to market a certain kind of sandwich which went against his Muslim beliefs. The article was fascinating, and I wanted to talk to “Wally” but he wasn’t there at the time.
A little later he came in, a very engaging sort of guy. Customers came and went. Wally had a particular affinity for youngsters, and had a bowl of donut holes he called “munchkins” for the young children.
I lingered a bit longer and had an opportunity to talk briefly with him. He’d been in business since 1977, he said. With full knowledge of the franchise company, he didn’t market the sandwich because of his beliefs, and there were no questions.
But ultimately after September 11, 2001, the corporation turned up the heat, and the end result was his losing his franchise – huge loss. All that remained was his storefront, on which he held the lease, and a local trade which he had known for many years.
When I walked in the place, I had no idea of the earlier corporate link. After I knew, it all fit together (his apple fritters are delicious, just like in the old corporate stores you’ll find in every state.)
He and I had never met before, and didn’t have much of an opportunity to chat, but there was lots of content in those few minutes we visited.
It is clear to me, particularly from an earlier Chicago Tribune article, that the sandwich really wasn’t the issue; it was Wally’s religion and the post-9-11 hysteria that led to his downfall.
The community? It is predominantly white, Christian, middle class, professional.
He said that the local community gave and gives him very strong support. The legal issue was between the Corporation and himself. He lost.
He’d planned to retire, but the legal case did lots of damage to his savings, and he needs to keep the business.
I hope to be able to stay in touch with him.
I wish I had a photo of Wally behind the counter, but I didn’t have the presence of mind to take a photo at the time. I came back later, and he’d left for a couple of hours, and I couldn’t return….
(I couldn’t come up with an internet copy of the Chicago Tribune article posted in his shop, or the specific court case. I will keep looking.)
NOTE: This history of this post goes back to a simple act of kindness shown by a Muslim family in western North Dakota in 1953-54, as described in my September 5, 2010, blog entry.

#350 – Dick Bernard: Part 18. The Scourge of Half-thought, and the danger….

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Today I was at the local copy place, making a photo copy of my mother’s first contract as a teacher. Busch Esther 1929 contra001.
At the next copier, a young woman was making large numbers of copies on colored paper. A somewhat older woman, though much younger than I, was with her.
We struck up a brief conversation. It turned out that the younger woman was a 4th grade teacher in a neighboring public school district. I gave her a copy of Mom’s 1929 contract. The other woman was the teacher’s mother. “Teaching is a really hard job“, the Mom said, referring to her daughter. Shortly into my Mom’s contract the great economic crash of 1929 occurred. I wonder….
Earlier I had sent around a commentary recently written by a veteran of many years in the trenches of public education, particularly teacher union work. I’d like the young woman to have this commentary as well, but likely will not ever hear from her or meet her again. But for the readers of this blog, here is Bob Barkley’s commentary. (Disclaimer: Bob Barkley is a good friend whose professional career mirrored mine, though at the national level and in another state.)
Later in the afternoon my wife and I watched 60 Minutes and saw a segment on the revision and treatment of a certain word – the “N” word – in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. The segment featured teachers and students at our local high school, one mile from our home. It was a surprise to say the least. And excellent. It was refreshing to see an example of real discussion and debate within the public school setting involving teachers and students.
Economically, most all of us live in almost heavenly economic conditions compared to Mom and those farmers she worked for in 1929-30.
But public policy, especially public education, is, and has for years become, a major ideologic battleground in the United States. It is a hard, uncertain, place to be.
At the moment, at least, the juggernaut that is the “Power” establishment seems to have the upper hand in setting in place regressive public policies under the many guises presented: “reform”, diminishing or destroying the impact of unions, controlling curriculum, bringing that young woman’s salary and benefits to heel, et al. The young lady has more to worry about than those colored sheets of paper she was working with.
I have come to observe an alarming degree of what seems to be half-thought by most everyone in society, most especially Power People – the ones who can do the most damage. (By “half thought” I mean an utter lack of thinking through anything beyond the short term “win” or “loss”.) There are endless examples. People see an issue only through their own lens, and at the moment. The long term is what happens now, this year, on our own terms. In fact, “half-thought” might be giving far more credit than deserved. We want exactly what we want, now. Too often, we want what we want required of others, too.
The young teacher I saw this afternoon is likely too tired and overwhelmed with doing what she is supposed to do in the classroom to pay much mind to things like attempts to destroy her rights to collective representation or due process for dismissal or anything like that. She’s too young to remember the struggle to get what she has. There are legions like her, too busy to think of anything beyond doing what they’re directed to do.
In the 60 Minutes segment, the issue being “debated”, between two obviously highly professional colleagues, could be decided, case closed, by implementation of state or federal Laws limiting or eliminating their options – closing off their debate. You win or you lose. Period.
There are winners and losers in the half-thought society I mention above. The winners prevail in getting the RIGHTS to decide. The losers are given the RESPONSIBILITY to do what is imposed on them. It is not healthy for winners or losers or our society.
I still quite often see a TV commercial for a particular alcoholic beverage which seems to touch this issue. It is apparently a play on a more famous quotation, “With great privilege comes great responsibility“. The commercials says: ‘With [enjoyment of this] great [alcoholic beverage] comes great responsibility.” In other words, get drunk with our product, but don’t blame us afterwards….
It would be good for the movers and shakers – those out to “win” at any cost – to pay very serious attention to the “responsibility” piece, the long and global view.
As for the rest, the victims of this Power-grab, I hope they get themselves organized and that they hang in there.
They, not the rich and powerful, are the salvation of this country of ours.
There’s will be a really, really difficult job. But if they lose, we will all lose.