#3 – Dick Bernard: Binghamton NY April 3, 2009

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It wasn’t until late afternoon on Friday that I learned any details of the latest gun-related tragedy, this time in Binghamton NY. Thirteen dead, plus the shooter; four critically injured; possibly some cause and effect of the shooter having recently lost his job for some unknown reason; an apparent pre-meditated intention to kill as many as possible by blocking the door through which people might escape. It was all horrific.
As I write, Saturday morning, April 4, the facts are beginning to emerge: the shooter had two pistols on him, both registered firearms; he’s Vietnamese, apparently a U.S. citizen for decades; apparently knew well the place where he killed the thirteen people, most of them studying for citizenship…. The stories and analysis are just beginning.
Full disclosure: small arms were around me when I was growing up. Shooting gophers when they were pests on the North Dakota prairies was something I was accustomed to: their tails were worth a nickel, a lot of money to a kid, then. A bunch of us kids were playing with my Dad’s 22 calibre rifle when I was perhaps nine. It was hanging in the garage, and it was off-limits…. There was a bullet in the chamber; it went off; luckily nobody was killed (we were lucky). Dad and Mom never knew of that close call.
In the Army, I qualified as Expert with the M-1 Rifle. Thankfully I never had to use my skills. I have never owned a gun, or had an interest in purchasing one, and to the best of my recollection haven’t shot one since the Army days. There’s never been a gun in a home of mine. I have no issue against hunters and hunting in the traditional sense of that word: shotguns, regular rifles, licenses….
The national debate for years has gone far beyond the lines I describe above. We are an armed and very dangerous nation of far too many people armed to the teeth, wallowing in fear and resentment of this, that or the other.
Binghamton, April 3, 2009, could well be the tip of a very large iceberg.
I decided, last night, to check in on the two “poles” of our nation’s fascination/obsession with guns and other weapons to see how they were spinning Binghamton: the National Rifle Association and the Brady Campaign. www.nra.org and www.bradycampaign.org. As of 8 a.m. this morning, NRA does not have a word on what happened in Binghamton; as of last night, the Brady Campaign had commented. You can visit their website, and they can speak for themselves.
Even before the reports on Binghamton, I’ve seen scraps of information. One of the news reports I heard mentioned that in this country of 300,000,000, there are 250,000,000 firearms. The ban on assault weapons has apparently sun-setted; till yesterday afternoon there was no real interest in gun legislation…there are other bigger problems to deal with. Gun and ammunition sales are sky-rocketing in this country. We are awash in dangerous arms. The “Gun Lobby” is feared by politicians.
April 2, 2009 – a day before Binghamton – a New York Times editorial commented on a last minute federal regulation issued in December 2008 making concealed loaded guns legal in our national parks and wildlife refuges. “In December, ignoring proper procedure and the risk to public safety, the Bush administration rushed through regulations allowing people to carry concealed, loaded guns in national parks and wildlife refuges.” (The NRA website posted a commentary on that issue from a Joshua Tree, California, newspaper.) A Judge just threw out the rule, calling it “astoundingly flawed”. It remains to be seen if the court ruling will be appealed by the new administration.
And the top headline in yesterday’s Minneapolis paper, hours before Binghamton, was simple and stark: “Was this gun in the hand of Fong Lee when he was fatally shot by a Minneapolis police officer? Or was the weapon planted at the scene? One shooting. Two stories.”
Guns do make excellent partners for crime: A week or so ago Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speaking in Mexico, made news north of Mexico’s border when she observed that most of the weaponry in the current drug wars in Mexico came from U.S. sources; as did most of the demand for the illegal drugs which has precipitated the violence over drug territories in Mexico.
Those who revere gun rights will begin again reciting the mantra: “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people”, and the like. Of course, concealed hand guns make killing easier.
We love our guns, and other unhealthy things.

#2: Bob Barkley on Social Democracy

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By Bob Barkley, March 2009
rbarkleATcolumbusDOTrrDOTcom
Last week I was participating in a discussion group called Socrates Café. It is normally an older set of folks. This time there was a young man present, the youngest and quietest of all in attendance. Toward the end of our time together someone thought to ask him what he thought. He simply asked, “What is social democracy? And what will it take to get there?” We were all taken with the question and discussed it briefly before parting ways until our next get-together.
But the question dogged me enough that I sought a more satisfactory answer than the ones we offered up that night. Following is what I have come up with.
Simply defined, as I understand it, social democracy is a democratic state that incorporates both capitalist and socialist practice and recognizes individual requirements and aspirations.
Or, in more detail, Wikipedia describes it as “a political ideology of the left or center-left that emerged in the late 19th century from the socialist movement and continues to exert influence worldwide. The concept of social democracy has changed throughout the decades since its inception. Historically, social democratic parties advocated socialism in the strict sense, achieved by class struggle. In the early 20th century, however, a number of socialist and labor parties rejected revolution and other traditional teachings of Marxism and went on to take more moderate positions, which came to characterize modern social democracy. These positions often include support for a democratic welfare state which incorporates elements of both socialism and capitalism, sometimes termed the mixed economy. This differs from traditional socialism, which aims to end the predominance of capitalism altogether. Social democrats aim to reform capitalism democratically through state regulation and the creation of programs that work to counteract or remove the social injustice and inefficiencies they see as inherent in capitalism.”
By its very nature, social democracy would be viewed by most people as “left” of where we find ourselves in the US at this early date in 2009. But it is neither socialism as traditionally thought of, nor is it communism which critics find to be a convenient label for it.
It is interesting that in Black’s Law Dictionary there is no definition of either social democracy or socialism. However, in its definition of “social contract or compact,” it mentions Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and the Greek Sophists as all agreeing “for mutual protection, to surrender individual freedom of action,” and that “Government must therefore rest on the consent of the governed.” And Black’s further defines “democracy” as, “That form of government in which the sovereign power resides in and is exercised by the whole body of free citizens directly or indirectly through a system of representation, as distinguished from a monarchy, aristocracy, or oligarchy.”
All this sounds an awful lot like Lincoln’s, “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish….”
And, as one reads the list below, it is important to stress that balance is most always crucial to developing a political/economic system. In the end, social democracy is driven by a sense of community, which simply translates to “accepting that we all belong together.”
With that basis to guide me, and my own instincts, I was led to conclude that to be successful, social democracy anticipates at least the following:
1. Freedom in the broadest sense, though short of unconstrained individual license
2. Reasonable equity between owners of production and the workers as to who benefits from any enterprise’s success
3. Government transparency to the greatest extent practical with any questions leaning far toward full disclosure
4. Public education that is open, highly supported, theoretically well-conceived, which emphasizes teaching about the dynamics of forces operating beneath the political surface, teaching a broad range of fundamental values, and that recognizes that the primary purpose of education is the preservation and nurturing of a love of learning – out of which all other aims will be best served
5. Higher education that emphasizes deep thinking and liberal arts and away from being little more than a factory for the production of compliant, unquestioning, unthinking, corporate robots
6. Social justice
7. Reasonable but significant corporate regulation – including reversal of the Supreme Court decision that establishes rights to the corporation parallel to those of the individual citizen
8. The absence of special interests inordinate control and influence of government
9. Assuring all citizens of basic human needs such as reasonable housing, sustenance, and health care
10. Widely shared public service – such as all young people providing 2 years of such service (including both military and non-military community and national service)
11. Absolute separation of church and state – particularly the restraining of public policy influence of religious zealotry and extreme fundamentalism
12. Public financing of political campaigns and a system of responsible turnover in public office that assures both full access and limited opportunity for exploitation
13. Regulated and balanced media ownership and programming to avoid consolidated domination of the media
14. Our economy is now global, and our society must adjust to fit this changed and still changing world
15. State control of usury practices
16. Adoption of sensible standards regarding the compensation packages of corporate executives such as limiting them, through taxation policies, to 50 times that of a minimum-wage full-time worker
17. Protecting local commerce through reasonable tariffs and trade policies
18. Progressive taxation policies that allow for the sharing of wealth between the fortunate (the worth-more) and the less fortunate (the worth-less) while still allowing responsible accumulation of wealth (Both the “worth-more” and the “worth-less” are suffering from inordinate sense of entitlement.)
All that said, I was asked by one reviewer to describe what was the role of government in all of this. Right after receiving that question I read a short piece by economist Dr. Robert Costanza of the University of Vermont that quite serendipitously provided me the answer. http://www.commondreams.org./print/40015
Consequently, I would conclude this paper by adding that while much is implied throughout the preceding list, the bottom line role of government is to protect against excesses. This would mean protection from excess accumulation of wealth and power on one extreme and protection against excess poverty and hopelessness on the other. Government must facilitate a shared vision of society – of quality of life – and move responsibly to assure its development.
Robert Barkley, Jr., is the retired Executive Director of the Ohio Education Association and served as the Interim Executive Director, Maine Education Association. He is a former teacher and coach, and a thirty-five year veteran of NEA and NEA affiliate staff work. Currently he bills himself as a Counselor in Systemic Education Reform and has served most recently as a long-term Consultant to the KnowledgeWorks Foundation of Cincinnati, Ohio. He was the first teacher organization staff member to become an examiner for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, the premier business award in the US, which is administered by the US Department of Commerce. He is the author of two books: Quality in Education: A Primer for Collaborative Visionary Educational Leaders, and Leadership In Education: A Handbook for School Superintendents and Teacher Union Presidents. He lives Worthington, Ohio, a Columbus suburb, and may be reached at RBarkle@columbus.rr.com.

#1 – Dick Bernard: P&J#1940: Reflecting on "fear itself"

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This is the first posting on this blog.  The title “P&J#1940” holds meaning for me.  P&J#1 entered the internet world in late September, 2001; P&J#1940 was published March 25, 2009, and is a significant one for me. 

 

1940 is a significant number in my life. It is the year I was born in rural North Dakota, between the ending of the Great Depression and the U.S. entrance into WWII.  A friend says I’m part of the “Silent Generation” – too young for the Greatest Generation; too old for the Baby Boom Generation (1946-47 forward).

 

As I write this, March 24, 2009, the political and policy environment is flooded with conflicting messages.  Some see disaster ahead; some see hope; “experts” are in vocal disagreement with each other.  Many of the people I see every day seem oblivious to the dangers, deep in denial: As MAD magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman always said (and so far as I know, still says), there seems to remain a dominant attitude: “What, me worry?” 

 

It is not at all certain that anyone really knows for sure about where we’re headed.  We’re stuck with a likely harsh reality, disguised only by the fog of finely honed media spin from all sides.  Humans being humans, we tend to pick the piece of spin that fit our own bias.  Today that is very easy (and dangerous) to do.

 

I am not tempted to become like that hermit I met while on Army maneuvers in the Tarryall section of the Colorado Rockies in the spring of 1962.  He had lived in relative isolation, apparently for years, no car, no road, no electricity, trudging to the nearest town once a month to bring back provisions, among which was the previous months Denver Post, which he read one issue per day.  He was “current”, but always a month behind on the news, but living in the past was just fine with him.  I see him and his one-room mountain shack as I write.  It is tempting.  After all, there is that old saying, that old myth, that “what you don’t know can’t hurt you”.

 

That hermit lived in a different time.

 

In the din of today, it is very hard to be hopeful, much less to know what to do to keep hope alive in ourselves, much less others.

 

But it is self-defeating to give up, to succumb to fear itself; or, even worse, to think that this is going to be easy.  So I’ll take in what I can, and impact however I can, however useless my effort sometimes seems to be.

*

In recent months especially I have often thought of what my birth in rural ND in 1940 meant to me, then, and how it applies to me now.

 

From the moment I was born I was immersed in the background experiences of two families set back but not defeated by the reality of the Dirty Thirties.  Somehow they hung on and survived to raise me, the oldest son, and the oldest grandson – the first to be born into the families of my grandparents after the bad years.

 

One and one half years after I was born, six months after I had “met” my Dad’s brother, my Uncle Frank, in person for the first time, he went down with his ship, the USS Arizona, at Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941.  From then till September, 1945, WWII dominated everyone’s existence, including youngsters like myself, not old enough to comprehend all that was going on, but experiencing directly the effects.

 

In short, I may have been in a “silent” generation, but I was thoroughly marinated in others experiences in the years both preceding and following my birth.

 

Each of us have our own stories…and some of those stories match the reality of today – including times and events seemingly without hope, including conflicting opinions (including in our own minds) about how to cope. 

 

Several times in my own life I’ve had to muddle through things without a “map”.  It is part of life.

 

“Life” is what our country, including the so-called “experts”, is going through right now, and will be for, likely, a very long time. 

 

So, I choose to carry on trying to impact in whatever small way I can, wherever I can.

 

*

 

In the early months of 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke the immortal phrase “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/fdrfirstinaugural.html.

 

In his own way, President Obama is doing what he can, in whatever ways he can, in the spirit of FDR, to keep our spirits up, in an environment that could turn out to be even worse than the Great Depression; and in the process he is having to make decisions for the country with no certainty that the decisions will be correct.  Somehow we need to walk beside him, with him, in his shoes.  Be critical, sure, but keep it in its proper perspective. 

 

We need to remember, though, that the President is only one among over 300,000,000 of us.  We owe our continuing efforts to ourselves, and to everyone else with whom we share this country and this planet, and to those who come after us.

 

We all can do something positive.

 

We must be realistic.  We must not give up.