#247 – Dick Bernard: Musing about Taxes

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I’d consider Gerald Harris, editor/publisher of the LaMoure Chronicle and a couple of other North Dakota weekly newspapers, a friend, even though I have only met him in person one time, and then briefly, and even though we may well walk different paths ideologically.
But when I get to his town to visit my relatives, one of my must-buys is his newspaper, and I buy it so that I can read his opinion.
He tells it as he sees it. Dammit! And he seems willing to share other points of view.
So, I bought his newspaper on Saturday, and read his column, which was about re-doing the U.S. tax system – an ever popular coffee shop topic, whether in bib-overalls and seed caps, or business suits.
Gerald’s scheme was three tiered: 1) get rid of all deductions for anything, making a tax department unnecessary; 2) apply a Value Added Tax to all goods produced; 3) make some kinds of Sales Tax universal on everything. To deal with the vexing problem of people with nothing, he proposed an allotment of $600 per month per person, payable in two lump sums each year. The lucky poor would get $3600 checks twice a year, to steward carefully or squander…their choice.
The other culprits in his scheme: those evil politicians – always the easy ones to kick around, even though they are doing our collective bidding…so they can be elected or reelected.
I sent this reponse to Mr. Harris, which he may or may not reprint this week:
“Saturday afternoon after Mass I was standing outside Holy Rosary Church chatting with a couple of LaMoure friends. A young woman, dressed in summer clothes with a couple of small inexpensive backpacks, approached us and asked how to get to ______, a North Dakota town we knew was five or six driving hours away. She had been put out of where she’d been staying in LaMoure, and told to walk home. She didn’t even know the direction to walk. My friends helped as they could, staying with the young woman until they were comfortable she had the help she needed.
I learned the next day that the young lady – she said she was 21 – probably was taken to Jamestown for the late bus, and delivered to relatives in Bismarck. Perhaps this will show up in the police report in this weeks Chronicle. It was a quiet drama – one which most of the churchgoers probably weren’t aware was even happening, though they were milling around nearby.
After this unanticipated encounter, back in my room, I read your musings on reforming the tax system in this country, including the quotation provided by “a banker”** and your suggestion that each person get $600 a month, paid in lump sums twice a year.
Opinion intersected with harsh reality.
Taxes is easy to kick around, especially by those who are expected to pay it. The scheme always seems to be how to avoid as much taxes as possible, and switch the remaining tax burden to somebody else. The rich have platoons of lawyers and lobbyists to skew the law in their favor. Unlike Corporations, who are now, legally, “persons”, people like that young woman have no clout, no knowledge, no voice….
Greed is always a silent player in these conversations about individual rights versus community responsibility. The richer one is, it seems, the more that person feels entitled to their riches, as if he or she really “earned” them.
North Dakota is, I have heard, one of the wealthier states in the U.S. Why is it that there seems an inverse relationship between wealth and true generosity?
I wonder what has happened to that young woman I saw last Saturday; I wonder if anybody much cares.”
I sent the editor a link to this recent column on the issue of the rich and taxes.
A e-friend reminded me that Richard Nixon, long ago, had once thought of a yearly stipend of $25,000 per family to stimulate the American Economy….
** From a banker: “I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of the people.” Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Thomas Cooper, 1802.

#246 – Dick Bernard: Down and Dirty Political Advertising

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The lead letter in yesterday’s Woodbury Bulletin was mine*:
“The Woodbury Bulletin’s Aug. 25 “Our View” (“Hoopla over YouTube video on local GOP website…”) causes me to think back a few years.
I had written a letter, published in the Bulletin, which criticized a local legislator. It was, as are all letters I write, signed with my real name and town. I was a Woodbury resident, [then as now], listed in the phone book.
Your paper came out on Wednesday. About 3 a.m. the next morning our doorbell rang twice in rapid succession. I went down, turned on the light, and on landing was what the Woodbury Police Report later referred to as fresh “feces”.
Happenings like that tend to shake one. They say “I know where you live. Shut up.”
That had never happened to me before, nor has it since. But I remember.
That incident happened in the good old days (or so it seems) of political conversation in this community, state and country.
Now we’re facing over two months of political advertising everywhere whose intention is either to canonize one candidate or crucify his or her opponent. Anyone who believes any of this stuff is a fool.
But the makers of the ads really don’t care. And they know the slickly prepared pieces are essential to “win”.
Cost for this “feces” is probably way up in the billions of dollars each season.
It comes to our mailboxes, over our radios and through our televisions.
As is well known, all that is necessary is to plant the impression of good or evil in a potential voters mind.
You do this very simply: by constant repetition.
It isn’t funny, and it certainly isn’t productive for our community, state and country.”

As noted above, I was responding to an earlier editorial over a piece of offensive website content that had become national news. It turned out to be the local website for the local Republican party.
The website featured, for a time, a “funny” piece of video, produced somewhere, that compared “hot” Republican women, with “dog” Democrat women. You had to have a sick sense of humor to get any “laughs” out of the caricatures particularly of the Democrat women – real photos, probably, not even photo-shopped, but in this digital age when a minute or two “on camera”, particularly if you don’t know you’re being filmed, can yield (charitably) less than flattering images.
The editorial had no time for the offensive website. Of course, the editorial had to be “fair and balanced”, thus criticizing my own favorite news program which, I would admit, at times can be edgy and, while accurate, over the top. While I think there is a huge distinction between the “hot” and “dog” web production, and what I watch every evening, there is a point well taken: the sinning doesn’t stop at party lines.
Shedding light on it won’t stop it. About all that can be said is that old standard: “caveat emptor” – “let the buyer beware”.
If something, particularly political advertising, is too good, or too bad, to be true, the odds are certain that it isn’t “true”. All one can be is aware.
Caveat Emptor.
* – For whatever reason, the editor of the paper doesn’t include my name at the end of this letter in the on-line version. I hadn’t requested anonymity, but the earlier incident – which indirectly involved the paper – must have impacted….

#245 – Dick Bernard: A Painting Project in the Garage

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For the last ten years I have been driving into An American Garage that had never been painted. Yes, there was 20 year old dry wall which had been taped when it was built but it was, you know, a garage.
We don’t live in the garage.
I finally reached the ‘tipping point’ – got sick of it looking as it did when I drove in – and several days ago got down to the disagreeable business of painting it.
Today I’ll finish the job.
Of course, being an American Garage, ours is a repository of the assorted flotsam and jetsam of family history, and that had to be moved, first. Moving that junk around was a major impediment for me. That junk was really what made the task “disagreeable”.
Into the junk I dove, and amongst the treasures unearthed was this:

It was a hastily made sign for a memorial march on October 25, 2002, the day U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone, his wife Sheila and several others were killed in a tragic plane crash ten days before the 2002 election. I was one of tens of thousands of marchers in a massive memorial that October evening. (The scrawled text: “To Paul and Sheila, You’ve passed the torch of Peace and Justice to all of us. Rest in Peace.”)
Sen. Wellstone was a favorite of mine. I had watched his career evolve since the 1980s. He was cast as a radical liberal, the way “politicians” are labeled, but if one looked at the totality of his record, he was a very reasonable fellow, and he was odds on favorite to win his third term the coming election day. Though he had finally voted against the controversial Iraq War Resolution a scant two weeks earlier, he was a favorite of veterans groups. Sheila was a champion of causes for “we, the people” as well. But their lives ended in the woods near Eveleth MN that Friday morning in October.
The next week former U.S. Senator and Vice-President Walter Mondale agreed to take Mr. Wellstone’s place on the ballot, but it was too late in the game.
Politics being what it is, politics was played like a fiddle around the Memorial service for the Senator a week before the election. There, the Senator was only a memory (we were in attendance). Republican Norm Coleman won a very narrow victory.
It is appropriate that I found, this week, that sign I carried in Mr. Wellstone’s memory eight years ago.
Politics is raging in this country like an out-of-control forest fire, and some “Tea Party”-like candidates around the country are very scary. If they win, and govern as they promise, the American people will have genuine reason to regret the short-sighted decision to elect them.
We need, collectively, much more adult behavior from ourselves than I have been seeing in the last year. We can pretend we can have it all, without the commensurate responsibility, but such has never worked, ever. We will pay the piper, ultimately.
The Wellstone’s do live on in training people for political engagement. I have never had reason to think of attending “Camp Wellstone”, but I know some wonderful legislators who have, and in fact met with one of them during a break in my garage painting duties on Monday of this week.
Today, I’ll finish the last part of my project in the garage.
I’m glad I started it.
Some of the stuff I discovered will be tossed; others will be ‘garage sale’d’.
But that placard from October 25, 2002, will go back with my memorabilia.

#244 – Dick Bernard: Making a Disaster into a Catastrophe

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It’s Saturday evening, September 11, 2010.
A few hours ago, looking for something to watch on TV, I happened across the Weather Channel, which at the time was playing a program about the evacuation of Dunkirk, France, May 27 – June 3, 1940. It was an incredible rescue, thanks to a nine-day break in often treacherous weather on the English Channel. In all, 338,226 English and French soldiers were ferried to England by large boats and small; 40,000 French soldiers were captured by the invading Germans, presumably becoming casualties of WWII.
It was a heroic moment, facilitated by what some would later call a ‘miraculous’ set of weather circumstances. It was a very interesting program.
Dunkirk was almost two years before Pearl Harbor and the entry of the U.S. into World War II.
In those years before sophisticated media, the public learned of events largely after the fact through newspapers, telephone, radio and black and white images later conveyed in film. Winston Churchill became a heroic figure through good decisions, a great deal of luck, and a gift of oratory.
It was a simple time.
I was three weeks old.
As I write, after 9 p.m. CDT, my spouse is watching the History Channel, which is replaying archival tape of 9-11-01.
It is dramatic, with sounds and images as recorded in an age where media had become ubiquitous and instant.
It is not necessary to recite what I hear, and what is being shown on a large screen HD color TV elsewhere in my home. Even up here, it is a riveting film (which I do not plan to go down to watch.) I’ve “been there, done that”.
There were almost 3000 people killed on 9-11, about 2600 in New York City, 263 in four planes (including the 19 hijackers), and 125 at the Pentagon. There were casualties who were citizens of 70 different countries. Of the hijackers, 15 were Saudi Arabian, none were Iraqi. The word ‘al Qaeda’ came into the vocabulary, a phrase which I understand simply means “the base”, and responsibility was fixed on Osama bin Laden, a Saudi, who was harbored by the Taliban government in Afghanistan at the time.
We are now nine years down the road from this disaster, which has in the intervening years become a catastrophe which has captured our country and is destroying us economically and morally (i.e sanctioned torture) as well.
Over 4400 American service people have been killed in Iraq, and several million Iraqis were killed or displaced by the resulting Iraq War. Conservatively, about 100,000 Iraqis have been killed in the conflict since 2003. In some sources, only the “Coalition of the Willing” casualties are noted.
Afghanistan, the initial target of our national need for revenge, was for all intents and purposes abandoned in favor of invading Iraq, and we are now mired in Afghanistan in a conflict which, to be honest, is militarily unwinnable, and politically impossible to leave.
We close 9-11-2010 with conflict raging over an Islamic Center near Ground Zero, and an apparently cancelled burning of Korans in Florida.
We do not seem to learn our lessons well.
We had an opportunity, after 9-11, to choose a different fork in the road of relating to the world.
We chose War, indeed to celebrate War following 9-11. It was a politically popular decision Afghanistan Oct 7 2001001. I have seen pieces of the World Trade Center at the International Peace Garden on the border of North Dakota and Manitoba, and seen in the Peace Chapel there front pages of World Wide newspapers featuring the collapsing World Trade Center in flames from September 12, 2001. Somehow they seem incongruous and out of place, there.
It is not too late to choose peace, but the door is closing fast.
The TV show has ended. I didn’t watch….
Sunday morning, September 12, 2010:
My e-mail inbox has this headline from the New York Times, 4:17 a.m.: “On Sept 11 anniversary, rifts among mourning“.
The “rifts” have absolutely nothing to do with “mourning”. Rather it is like picking at a scab for nine years, not allowing it to heal.
So long as 9-11 is kept as a potent political issue, its dead cannot rest in peace.
We should be ashamed.

#243 – Dick Bernard: September 16 and 20, 2001, and a Day for Peace, September 21, 2010

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Today is September 11. 9-11. Why the title “September 16 and 20, 2001”?
September 11, 2001, was a Tuesday, and by the next Sunday, September 16, the initial shock had largely worn off, though confusion reigned.
(A good illustration of what was happening comes from a chart I’d seen many years earlier, where a normal Crisis Sequence for we human beings had been explained, and I had kept the handout which is below. This chart comes from the early 1970s, and I’ve preferred to keep it as I received it, then.)

The words on the chart are probably difficult to impossible to read here, but the chart itself is straight forward and logical: normally, shock lasts a very short time; the normal person has moved on – gotten perspective – in a matter of months. The continuing hysteria surrounding 9-11-01 is abnormal behavior which has to be fueled and encouraged externally.
So it is.
The essence of the ‘peaks and valleys of the illustration:
Phase: Duration of Phase
IMPACT: Hours
RECOIL-TURMOIL: Days
ADJUSTMENT: Weeks
RECONSTRUCTION: Months)
This posting is about the “Recoil-Turmoil” time: September 16, 2001, a Sunday, and September 20, a Thursday, in Minneapolis MN.

We went to 9:30 a.m. Mass as usual at the Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis. The Church was filled more than usual that day.
We had a visiting Priest, Father Dandurand, for that Mass, and I wrote about his homily (sermon) to family members. The relevant portion of my September 24, 2001, e-mail follows:
“The Sunday after September 11 [Sep. 16] our Priest was faced with the universal dilemma of his colleagues of every denomination, everywhere: what should I talk about? In the end, he briefly and very powerfully focused on the Gospel reading for the day (Luke 15: 11-32) on the Prodigal Son, his father, and his responsible – and very angry – brother. [The Priest] chose to focus on the angry brother, and on the absolute need to replace anger with forgiveness.”
The [next] Thursday, September 20, 2001, I had been to a regularly scheduled meeting of the Catholic Archdiocese Social Justice committee. Understandably, the agenda of that meeting changed to accomodate the need to talk about September 11. I had described that meeting in my letter, and continued “…At the aforementioned Social Justice meeting, one lady commented on the aftermaths of a conciliation message preached by her pastor. Three families quit the parish. And so it goes…goes…and goes….”
Today we remember nine years, and the hysteria is once again ginned up. The 1970s Crisis Sequence presentation laid out what we all know is true: regardless of the event, a normal person/society moves on, and it is a matter of months. The devastation of the Haiti earthquake happened only eight months ago, and Haiti has been off the radar screen of almost everyone for months already.
Fear and Loathing are useful political tools, used to manipulate and control. They can only be effectively used with someone willing to be used.
After September 11, 2001, our society had a choice of two forks in the road: to Reconcile, or to War. We all know the fateful choice and its consequences for us and everyone else.

Something else was happening in New York City on September 11, 2001.
As the first plane was about to hit the World Trade Center, a group of children and adults had gathered at the nearby United Nations building to celebrate the International Day of Peace, which then coincided with the opening of the General Assembly of the United Nations. As some children played music, the first plane hit the tower, and the program was cancelled.
As such things happen, this September 11 event also celebrated a singular accomplishment by a young Englishman who had successfully lobbied the United Nations over several years to standardize the International Day of Peace at September 21 of each year. You can read about him and what he accomplished here.
September 21, 2011, is a specific, symbolic Day of Peace. Whether by yourself or with others, participate in it today, and strive to make all 365 days of every year days of Peace.
COMMENT ON THIS POST FROM MARCIA BREHMER:
Here are the lyrics to a song sung by Peter, Paul & Mary called “Fair Ireland”….It kind of reminds me of what’s happening with 9/11…with just a few change of the word, eh?
Blessings,
Marcia
They build bombs and aim their pistols in the shadow of the cross
And they swear an oath of vengeance to the martyrs they have lost
But they pray for peace on sundays with a rosary in each hand
Its long memories and short tempers that have cursed poor ireland
Its long memories and short tempers that have cursed poor ireland
We have cousins on the old sod and we dont forget our kin
From boston we send more guns and we tell them they can win
Then we turn back to our green beer and to macnamaras band
Its true friends with false perceptions that have cursed poor ireland
True friends with false perceptions that have cursed poor ireland
They weave tales of wit and magic and their songs are strong and free
But they fail to hear each other, prisoners of history
Orange flags wave for the british to greet the armys clicking heel
And irish curse their irish brother for the altar where they kneel
And now provoked to greater anger by the distant royal hand
Its old hatreds and young victims that have cursed poor ireland
Old hatreds and young victims that have cursed poor ireland
So were left with retribution its the cycle of the damned
And the hope becomes more distant as the flames of hate are fanned
Who will listen to the children for theyre taught to take their stand
They say love and true forgiveness can still heal fair ireland
They say love and true forgiveness can still heal fair ireland
Only love and real forgiveness can still heal fair ireland

#242 – Dick Bernard: A School for the Feeble-Minded

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When I was growing up in the 1940s and 50s, we would occasionally go to visit my Dad’s parents in Grafton ND.
While there, one of the certain trips was to the city park, Leistikow Park, on the bank of the Park River. It was an awesome place in the eyes of small town kids in the big city of Grafton (which probably was well on the short-side of 5,000 residents in those years).
Approaching the park we always passed what we knew as the State School for the Feeble Minded. There was one particularly large building that I remember, and on summer days the lawn was crowded with people we knew were very different from ourselves. Even in those years, when there was at least the beginnings of recognition of special needs, the perception was that these people were more-or-less warehoused, much as they would have been in an insane asylum. The financial resources and the political will were not yet there to help these persons who were very different from we supposedly normal folk.
We looked at those people behind the fence much like someone would look at animals in a zoo.

Undated photo of the main building at Grafton


By the 1950s enlightenment was beginning in states across the nation. Apparently, even though I remember the school only as the School for the Feeble Minded, its name had been changed even before I was born to the less descriptive “Grafton State School”.
By bits and pieces, everywhere, came new programs and attention and funding for “MAXIMIZING human potential for greater SELF-SUFFICIENCY*”
I’ve come to know about the importance and richness of the special needs community in the years since my youngest child was born Down Syndrome in November, 1975.
Heather is nearing 35 this year, and is a phenomenal human being.
This week I drew the pleasant duty of picking Heather up at her daytime work facility, Proact*, in Eagan MN. (It is Proact’s operating philosophy which I quote above.)
Off hours she lives in a pleasant suburban home with a couple of other special needs adults.
I’ve written before about her active engagement in after hours athletic activities most recently last month.
Last night, Heather watched the Vikings and the Saints at her sister’s home. She’s an avid sports fan.
It is easy to take for granted the safety-net we have constructed in this country for those less capable of competing on their own. It is easy to say they’re a waste of precious resources.
In a bygone day my Heather could have been one of those behind the walls of that School for the Feeble Minded. I sometimes wonder how it would have been had she been child, and I parent, 100 years ago. What forces would have worked on me, then.
Those were not the good old days.
And as for going back…when I picked up Heather yesterday, one of her workmates gave her a hug as she was leaving. Then this friend, named Mary, reached out her hand and said to me, “hi, I’m Mary”.
Can’t get any better than that.

Dick and Heather as photographed by the Smooch Project www.thesmoochproject.com

#241 – Dick Bernard: The Tyranny of the Minority; and the (theoretical) Power of the Majority

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Last night on the national news of one of the Big Three (CBS, NBC, ABC) I watched a reporter contextualize for viewers the conflict over allowing 2000-era federal tax cuts to sunset (expire) for those earning over $250,000 a year. The over-$250,000 group is said to represent about 2% of American taxpayers. For the rest of us, the holiday would continue.
In order to be “fair and balanced” (I suppose), the perhaps-three minute report focused on the negative impact on “small business”, and employment, if the two percent over $250,000 small businesses would lose their tax break in 2011. Two business owners were interviewed, and of course, said that they’d have to cut some jobs if they had to pay more taxes.
At the end of the segment, the reporter took pen to white board, and gave his interpretation of reality: as I recall the numbers, he said that 2 1/2% of small businesses are in the $250,000+ category. BUT this represents almost 900,000 small businesses.
Segment over, back to the news…. Those poor business owners.
One might feel sympathy for these entrepreneur small business owners, and especially for the employees they say they’ll have to let go, but there is a “wait a minute” aspect to this – an aspect not touched (intentionally, I believe) by the news program.
What was not stated was that 97 1/2% of American small business, apparently nearly 24,000,000 of these businesses, the overwhelming vast majority, would not, under the Presidents plan, be faced with the possibility of going back to 2000 era tax rates. Only the two or so percent who are the wealthiest among us would have to wear the hair shirt of the additional tax, which means only going back to the rates prevailing at the time the ill-advised tax cuts were made.
We should feel sorry for those over $250,000 folks for having to help the lessers among us recover from near catastrophe?
Sorry.
(I don’t think the break point of $250,000 is nearly low enough. But that’s for another conversation.)
I think back to my own work experience. I worked an entire career, and within my constellation of relatives and friends, I would probably be considered to have made a really good living.
In my working years, it would take several YEARS of earnings to equal $250,000. I never got close to reaching a six figure annual income. Nonetheless, I lived well (by my standards). By no measure could I be considered “poor”…or “wealthy” either.
The ‘tax holiday’ between 2001 and the present was good for me. I have all my old tax records so can retrace all of those steps, and do an essentially ‘apples to apples’ comparison. Federal tax went down; state tax stayed pretty constant; property tax went up, but not by a lot.
I had ‘more jingle in my pocket’ those tax-holiday years, but I can’t really say that it did me any good at all. And when I compare it against the catastrophe it spawned in huge federal debt to pay for a war; and all of the credit card debt we all incurred living outside our means, it certainly wasn’t worth it.
I’m within the 98% of Americans who will indirectly benefit if the tax holiday is lifted for the top 2%.
Why, then, can the top 2% high-income folks count on the rest of us fighting their anti-tax battle for them, which is exactly what they are counting on?
Tables-turned, they’ve generally never been in the corner of the least among us.
It’s very simple: we have been taught to fight amongst ourselves, and to want what is unhealthy. To be rich is a positive value….
Have we learned anything? I’ll see how election day 2010 plays out.
If we choose to go back to the days of the 2000s that almost killed us, it’s our fault…and it will be our problem.
COMMENT received from Michelle Witte September 9 2010
Dick – what has become of facts? If I were in charge of the DNC
communication machine I would run 24 hour ads about what the facts really
are around these initiatives. For example – when we in Minnesota had the
transportation/gas tax bill in the state in 2008… there were dire reports
of businesses closing, the evils of taxes, etc. I then calculated what the
FACTS were and how it would affect our family. I figured that based on our
Honda minivan driving about 12,000 miles a year at 16MPG we would pay
perhaps $38 dollars A YEAR extra. And for $38 I would get…. an amazing
array of infrastructure improvements. $38. I can’t even fill a hole on my
driveway for that. Get a grip people – taxes allow you to access resources
for a much lower cost than you could if we just all got our cash and then
hand to build our own roads, levies, social security system, food protection
system, schools, ambulance, fire… on and on.
So, let’s look at the sunset of the Bush Tax Cuts – first of all – they are
not RAISING taxes. They are putting back in place a tax structure which
COMPLEMENTED the highest economic growth in the last 30 years during the
Clinton Administration. Those soaring profits we all once enjoyed came on
the back of those taxes being in place. So, we’re now talking about simply
restoring those taxes.
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that a family with income of
$300,000 per year would be paying approximately $3,995 more in taxes under
Obama’s plan. That sucks. But it’s certainly not crippling. AND… looked at
the way it should be – those families got 10 years of a tax BREAK while the
rest of us did not.
My neighbor is an accountant and actually voted for Dems after seeing the
effects of the Bush tax cuts on her wealthy clients. They got huge
$10-20,000 checks back from the government after doing their taxes that
first year – they didn’t need it, weren’t expecting it, and clearly, it did
NOT lead to a robust economy where all those people who were business owners
were hiring employees, etc. Instead, people simply extended their credit and
greed and put the economy in the tank. Why would we repeat that again?

#237 – Dick Bernard: "Howze your boy doin'?"

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A couple of national surveys in the past week have caused me to think back to a conversation in Minneapolis in mid-December, 2009.
I had gone to the premiere business club in Minneapolis to hear a panel discussion on Minnesota politics. It was a breakfast meeting, and I sat down. Presently, someone joined me. The name sounded familiar, and we compared notes. We had had some contacts 25 years earlier on a particular issue.
We talked on this-and-that as new acquaintances do. At some point we tip-toed into politics. My breakfast companion said he’d voted for Barack Obama in 2008. He also recounted an apparently recent business meeting where somebody he knew well, a mover-and-shaker in the business community, had come up and said, “Howze your boy doin’?”, a direct reference to now-President Obama.
We went on to other things, but the one thing I have never forgotten about that breakfast conversation was the “boy” reference to Obama. I’m left to fill in all the blanks. “Boy” is not a compliment to African-Americans.
This past week came two national surveys which were rather startling in their dissonance. In one, over 70% of the American people surveyed laid responsibility for the dismal state of our country on Republican policies particularly in the eight years of the Bush administration. But another survey, one taken since the 1940s, said that if given the choice, over half of the respondents would vote for a generic “Republican” in November, and only slightly over 40% for a generic “Democrat”. This was a greater gap between the parties than there has ever been.
The two surveys, side-by-side, make absolutely no sense: a collective death-wish perhaps? But in this case, the figures don’t lie.
How can all of this insanity be?
It is, likely, a combination of many circumstances. Some percentage, probably distressingly large, just don’t want a “boy” in the White House.
The Democrats, charged with the responsibility of cleaning up the abundant messes left behind in the wake of the years preceding 2009 are left with very disagreeable work…and the minority Republicans are doing an excellent job of obstructing every attempt at progress, and the resulting inadequate progress will, paradoxically, be politically useful against the very people who have been the leaders in even limited initiatives for change.
Business, naturally closer to Republicans, might be doing less than it could to increase employment: cruelly, hardship among the rabble is to its advantage in the short term. (Other reports indicate business is awash in available money which it has so far been reluctant to use for assorted reasons.)
Then there are those on the left who are angry because Obama and the Democrats have taken too moderate a course.
Of course, every one has their own pet issue which is NON-NEGOTIABLE.
We all want what we want, apparently. The common good be damned.
Thursday I was out at the Minnesota State Fair, just walking around, and happened by the booth of the Independence Party. I happened to notice the parties slogan: “Real solutions. No special interests“, and that slogan intrigued me.

Minnesota State Fair booth September 2, 1010


Rather than having “no special interests“, the Independence Party, the party of Jesse Ventura, is totally comprised of people with their own special interests. It is more special interest laden by far, than the traditional parties. It’s members don’t want to be constrained by other peoples priorities.
Maybe the American people at the national and local levels will wave their magic wands in November, and vote back in the very crew that they know almost destroyed them in the eight years prior to current Obama/Democrat administration. They will all do this self-righteously.
I’d only suggest that they all be very, very careful what they hope for….

#235 – Dick Bernard: The "sustainability" of Rage

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It was a bit over a year ago – July 24, 2009 – when I wrote my first blog post about Health Care Reform.
It was about that time when I got the first of many forwarded e-mails raging about intrusion of the government into health care policy, citing chapter and verse from some huge draft bill then beginning to float through Congress. The intention was to “kill the bill”.
August, 2009, became the “days of rage” when Congresspeople came home for recess, and were tarred and feathered by hostile loudmouths, whose performance was duly reported in the media.
It was a very nasty time.
In due course, a few months ago, a Health Care Reform actually passed Congress and was signed by the President. It was by no means adequate, but under the circumstances it was the best that could be done.
Since then, the focus of the Rage has been turned to other things, most recently, once again towards Muslims and their places of worship.
Rage, as it usually manifests in Anger and Fear, is no doubt a good seller. Rage, and its ‘children’, has a good market.
Sometimes I do wonder, however, how sustainable or even useful rage really is.
Endless rage is really debilitating. Worse, even if its aims are realized, its results are rarely positive. So…you defeat Health Care Reform – you “kill the bill” -, or burn down the site of a proposed Mosque. What do you really accomplish?
I don’t have the data, but I think I can very safely say that in vast numbers of murders, the killer initially feels a positive rush of accomplishing something really good*. “Take that, you ____ .” Often the victim is someone well known and close to the perpetrator – I’ve heard police say that intervening in “Domestic disputes” is among their most dangerous duties. A 911 call to somebody’s house is not one approached casually.
Up until now, it has been easy to identify the angry and rageful in the political debate. They appeared at rallies with outrageous placards and quotes. They despise and they hate, openly.
Last Saturday’s gathering in Washington D.C. marked an apparent change in tactics by those behind the organized rage: it was described as a gathering of nice down home folks; all polite, no signs. A very family friendly event.
It was all a tactic.
The rage continues, only it is better hidden. The smiling person without the sign is the same person who had the hateful sign in public a few weeks ago. All that is different is the marketing image.
As the righteous killer always finds out, the pleasant rush of success at his or her accomplishment is short-lived. There are negative consequences to killing someone or something.
Rage is difficult to sustain, and it is very unhealthy to the person who carries it, particularly long term.
The current campaign of rage, even if it appears to succeed short-term, will not last. But it can do an immense amount of possibly irreparable damage to our society at large.
It is up to us to be the witnesses for positive and continuing change.
* – A number of years ago I attended a very interesting study series on the “Ten Commandments”, conducted by a Catholic Priest and Jewish Rabbi. One of the text references said this about the Hebrew law on Murder: “The Hebrew text does not state “you shall not kill”… but “you shall not murder”. The Sages understand “bloodshed” to include embarrassing a fellow human being in public so that the blood drains from his or her face, not providing safety for travelers, and causing anyone the loss of his or her livelihood. “One may murder with the hand or with the tongue, by talebearing or by character assassination [emphasis added]. One may murder also by carelessness, by indifference, by the failure to save human life when it is in your power to do so.” Etz Hayim, Torah and Commentary, The Rabinical Assembly The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, p. 446
By this standard, contemporary American Politics would cease to exist, or have to be considered a society of murderers.

#234 – Dick Bernard: August 29, 2010

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Posts directly related here and here.
The Glenn Beck extravaganza at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 2010, has come and gone.
Today’s Minneapolis Star Tribune estimated the crowd at “Tens of thousands“; then, in the same article, mentioned “hundreds of thousands“; and even “a million strong” (my Congresswoman Michele Bachmann). There are no official estimates, only what somebody or other said there might be. The reader can believe what he or she wishes. The high estimates come, of course, from the people who have a vested interest in making it sound like there were oceans of people gathered there in support of their agenda. Whatever the case, there were a lot of people, overwhelmingly white, including an unknown number and probably large number who would be like me, had I been in Washington DC on Saturday. I would have wandered over to see what was going on…. Regardless, there is a lot of difference between “tens of thousands” and “a million”…such is how estimates are used, to sell a dream…. In this case, reality takes a back seat to fantasy.
(I need context for such large numbers as supposedly appeared in Washington DC on Saturday. 20,000 (“tens of thousands”) compares with 1,000,000 as 2 compares to 50. It is as if some people showed up at the small park outside my house, and one person said there were two people there, and another said 100, and somebody “fair and balanced” said that must mean there had been 50 there. You can easily count 100 people; when you claim 1,000,000 it’s a wild, wild, guess. The only reason for the 1,000,000 estimate is to shape the historical rendition of the day. Here’s an independent estimate with rationale: 87,000 attendance.)
There will be endless analyses of this event.
The rally was supposedly to “restore honor” to the United States, presumably because people like me and the persons we support are bringing dishonor to the country.
By nature and by habit developed over many years of daily work with differences in points of view, I appreciate and respect honest differences of informed opinion.
This is not what I am seeing today. What is going on now, in this country, is very troubling in three specific respects:
1. We are being fed lies, and to a very disturbing degree gullible people are believing these lies and acting on their belief. Johnathan Alter of Newsweek has a good commentary on this very sad reality. We are being manipulated by deliberate lies.
2. The campaign of misinformation and disinformation is largely funded by wealthy interests who have no interest whatsoever in the interests or aspiration of the rabble they are inciting to act to throw out the hated liberals – people like me – accusing us of all manner of evil behavior. Frank Rich of the New York Times ties this together nicely, with links to the research.
This is not an issue of whether or not the wealthy should have the freedom of speech; but what is happening here is profound abuse of this right, and complete contempt for the accompanying responsibility to tell the truth. “If it works, do it” is the mantra.
3. Most dangerous of all, in my opinion, is the tendency people have to focus on their one or two single “hot button issues” and to do all their decision making based on their beliefs (or biases) around these issues. Not only does this make them susceptible to lies and distortions funded by people who don’t even care about their issues, except to the extent that they can be manipulated through these issues; but this country becomes “governed” through a coalition of huge numbers of tiny “islands” of people united around issues. This is dangerous to our society.
I live, and have lived for years, in a “coalition” of 24 quadhomes (96 homeowners) which has its own sets of rules for the respect and maintenance of our collective property. We are like a small town in the midst of a larger city. It is not hard to imagine the scenario if each of these 96 homeowners had the unfettered right to make their own rules for themselves, with no responsibility to their neighbors. Similarly, a small minority can cause chaotic results – temporarily – if they are savvy politically. Breakdown can and will cause chaos if allowed to take root in our country. We are the most complex and (probably) still the most powerful country in the world, and we cannot personally decide our countries fate on our own pet issues, or through misinformation. We risk losing everything we value.
Beck’s throngs on Saturday represent plenty of people who are no doubt committed to their version of overthrow of a duly elected government and, most importantly, imposition of their own values on everyone else. While they represent only a small minority of this country’s population, they will all likely vote in November. The only reasonable way to counter them is to vote ourselves, and promote a more positive and constructive agenda of positive change.
I speak as an honorable person, and as a liberal.