#162 – Dick Bernard: Afghanistan

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Last night I made the wise decision to attend an informative talk and ensuing conversation entitled “Afghanistan, Pakistan – and India? The Curse of Bilateralism in American Foreign Policy. Afghanistan in Regional Perspective.”
The speaker, William Davnie, had extensive experience in the U.S. State Department, some of which was in the South Asia area. He, along with informed comment from many in the filled meeting room, contributed to my too-meagre knowledge of South Asia – an area which has been reduced to bad words like Taliban, and ‘they’re all alike’ kinds of descriptors. I won’t even attempt to summarize what I thought I heard last night, since I don’t want to garble someone else’s very coherent message, but my main take-away was to convey the sense that the entire South Asia situation is very complex, and the news media, politicians and military don’t make it any simpler to understand.
In the question period I asked if there was any “Afghanistan for Dummies” books that could be recommended. No recommendation was offered (See last sentence, below.)
It was the bombing of Afghanistan in October, 2001, that prodded me into getting off the couch and into the peace and justice fray. I could see nothing good coming out of that action, which 94% of Americans approved of at the time. I haven’t seen any refutation of my snap judgement of the 2001 situation over the last eight years, but news reports, positioning of advocates, films like “Charley Wilson’s War” and “Kite Runners” haven’t been very enlightening either.
A while back, I attended another briefing on the South Asia area which was officially off the record. That session was a good complement to last nights session.
It was the richness of the group interaction at the meeting last night that helped me better understand the multiple quandaries in the south Asia quagmire.
Yes, Davnie didn’t think President Obama made the right decision in sending more troops into Afghanistan; he seemed aware, though, of the dilemma faced by the President in making this decision.
In the shorthand way that we receive, and even demand, information, “Afghanistan” has, for most of us, a single meaning. Someone, perhaps the speaker, perhaps someone in the audience, said that’s tantamount to saying that “United States” has a single meaning, including during the time when we were systematically eliminating the Native Americans, and holding slaves. It isn’t so simple.
Assorted tensions, alliances, etc between Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and other places were briefly discussed. The interests of the U.S., Russia, China, Iran in the area…the assorted ethnic groups which complicate matters in all of the countries…the long history of the region – all of these came into the conversation.
Particularly interesting note was made of the Pashtun ethnic group which makes up 40% of Afghanistan’s 32 million people. It would be one thing if the Pashtun’s were only in Afghanistan, but 15% of the population of Pakistan are also Pashtun – a significant minority in Pakistan, but nonetheless extremely significant since they number about 25 million of Pakistan’s 170 million people. There are more Pashtun’s in Pakistan than in Afghanistan. Taliban is the radical faction of the Pashtun ethnic group….
Then there’s India next door to Pakistan, with one billion people.
The U.S., of course, has a complicated and controversial role in the region, in large part governed by assorted political considerations. For example, U.S. military versus civilian agents (i.e. diplomats) is hugely disproportionate: 240:1. Even today 20% of State Department slots are unfilled; 20% are below grade. In the field, only 12% of military are in forward kinds of positions, while 68% of State Department employees are forward employees. If the military seems dominant, it is because it is dominant, and it is the American political will that it be so, the speaker suggested, and this has been true throughout our history. Politicians reflect the public.
The job for those of us who disagree with this assessment is to continue to make the case for diplomatic rather than military engagement be the most important.
Before we left the room, Mr. Davnie did recommend one writer that he trusts on the subject: Andrew Bacevich. You might want to look him up.

#160 – Bob Barkley: Context and alignment are everything.

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Context and alignment are everything: Context determines how we think about things, how we see things and how we see each other. It is our unconscious reality – one we create for ourselves or is created for us through marketing and such.
As a result, many, no, most if not all, of us go through our lives in what can only be called fantasy. This is because context is not actual reality. It is simply the way we view reality at a particular point in time. Authentic learning is the process of consciously reflecting upon and adjusting one’s context to fit a new reality. Those who do not adjust are doomed to that fantasy.
Thomas K. Wentz in Transformational Change states it about as simply as it can be when he writes: “You can’t do things differently until you see things differently.” “Contextual blindness,” Wentz later adds, “is oppressive and demoralizing.” Wentz was applying this observation to business management, but I contend that it applies across the board to all personal and organizational settings. How many marriages have been torn apart by couples not sharing a common context for their thinking and behaving together? Is there a family anywhere that can’t relate to that observation somewhere amongst their kin? I doubt it.
Peter Barus, an extremely bright, wise, and articulate acquaintance of mine via the Internet, captured much of this with the following: “…human beings have no direct awareness of what is actually going on in the world around them, whatsoever. Instead our brains construct a kind of virtual-reality model of the environment, organizing the chaos of sensory input according to an arbitrary self-referential logic, simply ignoring whatever doesn’t quite fit, patching the gaps with bits of recorded memory, and we live as if these multi-sensory movies-in-the-head were reality. It is a survival adaptation that works astonishingly well. The brain needs to predict the immediate future well enough to keep you alive in the great outdoors, and it’s pretty good at this. You can go through life without ever waking up from this dream, and things will sort of automatically turn out ok, mostly. At least there will be a sort of continuity that is sufficiently reliable to increase population.”
This façade of reality that we all live with is context. And real context is something we can influence. It can best be described as creating focus and determination – Kennedy’s vision of “a man on the moon in ten years” set a context for the nation. It established focus on what could be, and how to get there, rather than on its improbability.
As we are ending the first decade of the twentieth century, context seems dramatically influential in our world. Are we focused on getting affordable health care for all, on reducing man’s negative impact on our climate, on removing money from undue influence in politics, on establishing an authentic sense of community where we all care for each other – that accepts that we all belong together? Or have we established up front, in a predetermined context, that all of that is unrealistic and impractical?
Do we common folks simply have a different context – a different sense of reality – than our elected leaders? I hope that is what it is. I hope neither of us is ignoring the need to learn and adjust – to grow our reality and refine our context. What else can explain Obama’s departure from what he promised in his campaign? Does he simply see things differently now? And if so, why does he not attempt to share that change with us? Tis a puzzlement.
But context is not all there is to it because, as Wentz observes; “When the context has changed, entirely new content will be created.” That new content can be both invigorating and productive or it can be chaotic and overwhelming. Which it is becomes a matter of the related concept of alignment.
So, if Obama’s context has changed, and he fails to share it convincingly, we are stuck with a predictable chaos, and the nation will stay unaligned. And I have to admit that this is what I feel right now – chaos.
What Kennedy’s statement did was get everyone headed in one direction and fully aligned. Clearly our nation isn’t there at the moment. The opening sentence of George Labovitz and Victor Rosansky’s book, The Power of Alignment, is the following quote from Jim Barksdale, CEO of Netscape: “The main thing is to keep the main thing, the main thing!”
What is Obama’s “main thing?” I do not know and few seem to. He must correct this and soon or the chaos will continue.
So, context, either new or old, absent alignment ends up creating chaos. The role of leadership is to assure a shared context and foster alignment. This component is sorely missing from our recent national leadership on almost any issue. And the context that has been created and fostered by corporate and conservative-leaning leaders – of both parties and the media – has developed and exploited our unconscious reality to the point where the demise of our society is real, if not imminent.
Bob Barkley, counselor in systemic education reform, author, and retired Executive Director of the Ohio Education Association. Worthington, Ohio.
Email: rbarkle@columbus.rr.com

#158 – Bob Barkley: "Useful to those in power…."

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I have been reading Howard Zinn’s A Power Governments Cannot Suppress. It is a collection of his essays on a variety of topics all of which portray the benefits of civil action to reign in the powerful.
About half way through there is an essay on Nationalism. In it I was struck by the term applied to certain factors that are “useful to those in power.” I had not thought of this label applied to many of the attributes the concern me but it is about as apt a description as I have heard for many of these negatives.
There is nationalism – the blind support for the fictitious boundaries that separate people only, for the most part, due to the pure chance of their birth. Nationalism is used to rally support for “your country” against any other country that does not agree with your leader’s espoused definition of what is best for your country. It is terribly useful to those in power in your country, and they almost always exploit it to their ends. Often those citizens who are not in agreement with their national leaders at a particular point in time are labeled as traitors to their nation.
There is religious fundamentalism – the extreme and historically and theologically unsupported allegiance to a literal interpretation of conveniently isolated and selected excerpts from the Bible or other holy document. Those in power in the US and in many Middle East countries almost always introduce or close their official statements with some utterance of loyalty to a popular divinity. It is exploited to the point that there is almost never a second thought given to it.
There is imperialism – the assumption that through whatever means your country has at its disposal, and for whatever purpose/need your leaders assume is justified, your nation can impose itself on others. By dramatizing that purpose/need, a nation’s leaders exploit popular zeal for imperialistic invasion and occupation of foreign lands. It is extremely useful to those in power to trumpet the threat of others to the selfish and often shortsighted wants of the people. Such behavior is specifically inconsistent with the teachings of all major religions yet this is conveniently ignored by those in power – EVEN many of those in power in these religions.
There is patriotism – the expectation for all those in a particular country to steadfastly display loyalty to one set of beliefs about how a country should behave as defined by that country’s leaders. Allegiance to those leaders themselves is misplaced for allegiance to what the country actually stands for or the principles upon which it was founded and established. Almost without exception national leaders define patriotism as loyalty to their particular beliefs and goals and anyone who does not espouse those particular beliefs and goals are branded as unpatriotic. In deed, we go on to celebrate events and people who have adhered to the popular beliefs and goals at a particular time in history even when history proves beyond doubt the inappropriateness of such adoration. Columbus Day comes to mind.
There is divine sanction – the almost incredible and inane conclusion that whatever evil or violence a nation imposes upon others is justified by some message from a divinity of some sort. While this grows out of the religious fundamentalism spoken to earlier, it is unfortunately and often unconsciously adhered to even by those that would not be considered religious. “In God We Trust” emblazoned on the coinage of the nation or on our license plates is an example of the aura of divine sanction that subtlety engulfs us all – often with not a second thought by many. We even have presidents who proudly proclaim that “God told me to do it,” or “I prayed about what to do” to explain away their actions that seem inappropriate to many of us.
There is the claim of moral purpose – the ultimate in an ends justify means mentality. And too often the moral purpose is, in fact, immoral and is little more than violent revenge and reactionary and driven by emotion rather than reason. At these times the hard work and competence demanded of nonviolence is rejected out of hand. And, throughout history, in the case of military super powers, the easiest alternative is military action justified by some strange morality.
There is the sense of moral superiority – the illusion that whatever is done is acceptable because of the erroneous assumption that ones own country is surely more moral than any of its competitors/enemies. This sense leads to the claim of moral purpose. Those in power almost never reveal any thought that their country could be wrong and is certainly as moral as it could possibly be – at least comparatively. And the people find it convenient to fall in step with such thinking, so leaders exploit it without exception.
To sum this up there is the over riding loss of any sense of proportion – the inability and/or unwillingness to apply reason and deep thought to the grand scale of what is happening around us. We have been wired to emotional and shallow reasoning. Psychologists have been pointing this out repeatedly. It is not new but it is fatal if not challenged. It is an outgrowth of a combination of stunted education and continual spin by the media and politicians. It is easier to follow than think, and leaders exploit this phenomenon endlessly.
All these characteristics are present in trump today. They serve our leaders well and we the people poorly. They must be raised to public consciousness and publicly challenged.
Bob Barkley, counselor in systemic education reform, author, and retired Executive Director of the Ohio Education Association. Worthington, Ohio.

#154 – Dick Bernard: Haiti…and Power

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Two weeks ago today, 4:53 p.m. Haiti time, Port-au-Prince (Potoprens in Kreyol) and area were devastated by a massive earthquake. Today, two weeks later, coverage of the disaster is decreasing; finding fault or blame is increasing; and the attention of the world and U.S. body politic is shifting back to more mundane things, like the Super Bowl.
It will take years for Haitians to recover and the international community will be central to their recovery, but how long will people care? It’s an important question.
Long before the latest catastrophe struck Haiti, I’ve been thinking about what I believe is a pertinent and basic “conversation” in, particularly, westernized society…and that is the conversation about Power.
Boiled to its essence, I believe there are two classes of people: those with Power, and those without. Those in Power presume they have the right to control agendas and conversations. They do this in sundry ways: controlling information, money, and on and on and on. You can be born into Power, work to get into Power, or be identified as useful to Power. But it’s a club entered by invitation only.
The official Haiti conversation is almost totally dominated by traditional Power.
Power isn’t a partisan deal, and it isn’t Republican or Democrat either. It can be cliques who through one means or another control access or agendas. It can be seemingly out of Power people who have a following. Power is ubiquitous. One way to stay out of the Power circles is to diss Power…. Power people prefer followers.
In Haiti, most of the people are about as Power-less as any people are anywhere in the world. Most are illiterate (I’d maintain this is far more by design of the Powerful rather than lack of motivation of the Powerless). Educated people can be troublesome. The language of the ordinary Haitian is Kreyol; the official and international language of Haiti is French…. Even language disenfranchises the ordinary Haitian.
Of course, there are decent Power people, and indecent ones. It is a complicated process to identify the difference, so usually everyone in a particular class is typecast in various ways, as “good” or “bad”. Such simplicity is not helpful.
The out of Power people far, far outnumber the people in Power, and the Powerful know this: thus the strategies to disempower those not in the inner circles, by disinformation, or discipline or otherwise. If one’s neighbor ends up in jail for no good reason, one notices.
There’s a way out of Powerlessness and that is by no longer being willing to play by the rules established by Power. If the folks in the neighborhood were challenged to play a National Football League team, using NFL rules and criteria, one knows the result…but if the NFL rules and criteria were thrown out and replaced with the neighborhood rules, the results could be very different. But one first of all has to believe that there are other rules of engagement than those mandated by the Powerful.
I’ve long been enchanted by the mantra I hear at demonstrations: “Ain’t no Power like the Power of the People, like the Power of the People, say WHAT? There ain’t no Power….” The chant is delivered with gusto, but I have come to believe that the chanters really don’t believe their own message. And they leave their power on the street, unrealized.
The ordinary Haitians, the ones who will disappear soon from the media screen, but are there in the neighborhoods, will be the salvation of their country. All one can hope is that the commitment of the Powerful will be a bit more towards Justice than the traditional Charity*.
Stay engaged. If you feel you have no power, try to look at your Power a bit differently.
It’s 4:53 p.m. Haiti time. Time to click on Publish.
* My own very brief interpretation on Charity vs Justice was written on return from Haiti in December, 2003. It is accessible at this link page 17.

#152 – Dick Bernard: Who deserves medical care? A personal experience.

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Recently I attended a greatly informative information meeting on the realities about, and need for, Universal Health Care. The meeting was facilitated by the Minnesota Universal Health Care Coalition.
The experience led me to recall my own personal history, which was published as a column in today’s edition of the Woodbury (MN) Bulletin. The column follows:
Forty-five years ago this month my wife, not yet 22, was actively engaged in the very difficult work of dying. Our first child was not yet one year old. We lived in a tiny apartment in the small town in western North Dakota where I was teaching school.
Barbara, who had kidney disease, was too weak to take care of her son; she was in the hospital about as much as she was at home. I took our son to the babysitter each morning.
At the end of May, 1965, I came home to pick up some materials I had forgotten, and found Barbara unconscious on the floor. I carried her down the stairs to the car, drove her to the local hospital, where she was transferred immediately to the hospital in Bismarck.
She had no alternative, they said, but to have a kidney transplant.
We had no insurance.
Finally University Hospital admitted her; she was there for almost two months, and she died July 24, 1965, leaving me with a year old son and medical debts equal to almost four times my to-be teacher salary.
I was on the verge of filing for bankruptcy, but was saved by North Dakota Public Welfare which agreed to pay the University Hospital portion of the bill; and by one hospital which forgave my bill with them. When it was all over, I owed about a year’s salary worth of bills, which then became manageable.
Six days after she died, two days after she was buried, Medicare was signed into Law, July 30, 1965.
To me, that government action was totally irrelevant, then.
Years and years have passed, and now I’m well into my Medicare years, and, if anything, over-insured with things like Long Term Care insurance, hoping that I have the right coverage. Unlike most, I can afford this luxury.
Back then in 1963, two weeks out of the Army and in a new job and in a new marriage, I passed on signing up for Blue Cross coverage so, somebody can say, it was my fault we were uninsured. Truth be told, even then, knowing what I know now, my wife would have been excluded due to an unknown (to us) pre-existing condition. The kidney disease did not manifest until shortly after I declined to sign up for the insurance.
I look at the current health care debate, the information and the abundant misinformation, through the lens of my own past. It is, I guess, a luxury that I have.
Now there’s group insurance – for the fortunate; and because of government foresight in the same year my wife died, Medicare for we fortunate elders.
There is absolutely no excuse for us to quibble and squabble over who deserves to be insured in this still wealthy country of ours. It is – or it should be – a basic and equal human right for every one of us, no questions asked.
At minimum, our kids and grandkids, faced with greater future uncertainties than we had to face, deserve our foresight more than our selfishness.
I urge you to learn more, and truly dialogue more, about this most critical issue. An excellent source of information is www.muhcc.org, a group dedicated to moving us from a patchwork and unfair system of health care, to more universal care. Doubtless there are other sources of information, but this is a place to start.

#146 – Dick Bernard: Armies of One

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Wednesday of this week a good friend from the old teacher bargaining days, Paul, met me for coffee at a St. Paul restaurant. He, his wife and I talked about many things, and part of our time was about the raggedness of today’s political conversation in this country, even within “birds of a feather”.
Among other meanderings was the recollection of how difficult negotiations really is for those idealists who actually do the bargaining. Not only is there the obvious disparity in positions between the formal “sides” – in our case, labor and management; even more difficult was the internal “scrum” of priorities within the group we were charged with representing. Individuals and small special interest groups within the union made the process even more difficult…and this was totally off the visible screen for most. It could be brutal.
Yesterday, another good friend and I “talked” a bit on-line about how President Obama has done this first year in office. Jeff is in international business and the very nature of his work is constant negotiations, representing producers in this country in dealings with consumers in other countries. His is the same process that involved Paul and I, only a different venue.
Jeff and I bantered back and forth for a bit about the President’s performance, in baseball terms. “[He has] the “potential to hit .425 in Major League baseball…call me disappointed.” “Your response leads to a question: is there a common definition in this country about what is a political “hit” leading to the .425?” “People got excited with his promise…and promises…now he supports [something else].” “So, “People”? Some think he hit a double; others think he’s struck out; still others would toss him out of the game…it gets complicated really quickly, eh?”
I thought to myself: the baseball metaphor doesn’t work too well here.
Then, late in the afternoon came an out of the blue e-mail from a fellow I know only from e-mail, who I hadn’t heard from in a long time, whose common interest with me is genealogy and a cultural group newsletter I used to do. “Bonjour Dick…just curious…were you ever in the military?…if so, when and in what branch?” The question was completely out of his and my ordinary context. I answered the question in more detail than perhaps he expected: yes, U.S. Army, 1962-63, peacenik, etc., etc. Maybe I’ll hear from him today on what made him curious, maybe not.
The assorted “threads” above, plus others, got me thinking about the that old, odd Army recruiting phrase: “Army of One“, which at some point replaced “Be All You Can Be” and in turn was replaced in 2006 by “Army Strong“.
Having been in the Army, “Army of One” made absolutely no sense from an operational point of view. An “Army of One” would be an Army of Chaos. But at the time, it was probably the only effective way seen to get enough of our Nation of Individualists to volunteer for service: “I’ll come in, but on my terms” was their demand. That probably lasted through the first day or two of basic training and they learned the truth….
Here we are, in 2010, where we seem, too much, to be a “Nation of Ones”, regardless of ideology. The whole is much, much too complicated, so we tend to fixate on a single issue or aspect of the Whole, and make it our non-negotiable demand. As my negotiator friend and I learned long ago, in much smaller contexts, that kind of bargaining simply does not work. Sooner or later, a resolution for the whole needs to be found, that will also satisfy the other “side”. Absent that, chaos.
So, we elect a new President, and immediately challenge everything he does, every decision he makes, and even his supporters call him a failure because he didn’t single-handedly and immediately resolve all of the very real problems that were on his plate coming in.
I think President Obama understands this conundrum. We should too.

#139 – Dick Bernard: Part II Real Time Health Care in the U.S. from another perspective

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Part I, yesterday’s post, turned out to be a very positive experience. The exam revealed nothing worthy of note – the next appointment in five years. Everything was very efficient and the five medical staff who worked with me were very friendly, from the person who checked me in, to the doctor who did the procedure. The bill, when it comes, will be paid by someone else. All I’ll see is the basic paperwork.
I was apparently the doctor’s last appointment of the day. We rode down in the elevator together and chatted. He’s been a specialist for over 25 years. Not always do procedures go so well. Part of his reality, he said, is the need to deliver sometimes very bad news to patients….
Yesterday’s appointment was at a hospital on the bank of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis. Over 44 years ago, July 24, 1965, at another hospital on the other side of the river, less than a mile from where we were visiting in the elevator, I personally encountered the bad news side of medicine when my then-wife died late at night of kidney disease. She was only 22. We were uninsured. Hers/Ours was the second story I wrote in what has turned out to be a long series on Health Care Reform.
That night I left the hospital – I was there by myself – and went to the local Western Union office in deserted downtown Minneapolis, and sent telegrams to relatives in California, telling them of her death.
My wife had received outstanding care in 1965, but it was to no avail. And we had no insurance.
The very last thing on my mind that night in 1965 was how I’d pay the medical bills. I had a year and a half year old son; three days earlier I’d signed a teaching contract for the fall, so I had a job upcoming, in a town and metropolitan area I’d never lived in or near before. But all those details wouldn’t hit me until a few months later.
First, my car broke down early in the fall. When you have money, no problem. I didn’t. Problem. I needed a functioning car to get to work – both jobs.
In October, 1965, it finally hit me that I would have to file bankruptcy, and I prepared the balance sheet for an attorney (a copy of which I still possess). Succinctly, almost all of my debts were medical bills from one place or another; those debts were almost four times my then-teacher salary.
Not long after that, I got very lucky. North Dakota Public Welfare agreed to pay the largest portion of the bill, which amounted to two-thirds of the total that I owed; and our last local hospital – a community hospital -forgave our bill there. Suddenly the remaining bills became at least manageable. I was lucky because I couldn’t even establish with certainty that we were legal residents of North Dakota. Somebody had to bend some rules.
Life went on, and now I’m at today.
I’ve lived, literally, in both worlds of American Medical Care – the present one where, at least in my case, care is assured and largely paid for; and the one where care is accessed only at some unseen person or committees whim.
In both worlds, the care was and is excellent: I have huge respect for medical professionals. But there was a world of difference.
There is absolutely no excuse for today’s situation where medical care is a privilege and not a right for all; where we engage in endless debate about who qualifies for health care. We have our policy priorities mixed up.
I think that a very substantial part of today’s American medical system – probably a substantial majority – agrees with me on that.

#133 – Dick Bernard: The Dust Bowl

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COMMENTS follow this post.
Last evening I watched most of a History Channel program on the horrors of the Dust Bowl of mid-America in the 1930s. Interspersed with film and commentary from the actual events, were recollections of survivors of the Dirty Thirties, as well as a fascinating effort by scientists to reenact in the present day what people living in farm houses back then would have actually experienced.
The present day experimenters could turn off the wind and dust making machines at will, and did. They could not tolerate what the residents in the 1930s either survived, or didn’t, when the horrible winds and dust storms and plagues of insects and rabbits and on and on destroyed much of the midwest, especially in Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas, but all throughout the northern plains as well.
My uncle, soon to be 85, remembered what he recalled as the worst year, 1934, in North Dakota. He was 9 years old. It was horrid. There was no escape.
To have gone through it was to be seared forever…or was it?
I was born in 1940, young enough to miss the worst years of the Depression, and to remember some things about the last years of World War II.
Memory or not, I was totally immersed in the attitudes generated by these life-altering times in American history.
The 30s and first half of the 1940s were times of self-sacrifice, and a need for working together. The nature of humans was no different then than now…the assorted attitudes that plague us now, plagued them then. The difference was that there was, for them, no real choice but to concentrate on survival. Prosperity for the masses was not an active dream. Surviving the dirty thirties, and then getting the war over with were the priorities. People had to pull together. Those who didn’t were noticed….
1945 brought the end of the war, and after almost 20 years of hardship, life began anew. The baby boom began. Today, one of my cousins is 63 – she was one of the first of millions of baby boom babies.
That boom was to last until the end of the 1960s.
An attitude began then that, I believe, has become our fatal flaw as a society.
Those who’d been through the Great Depression and World War II in sundry ways made a pledge to their kids and grandkids to protect them from all that was bad in those years. The boomers made a similar contract with their kids.
A consequence of this new contract, in my opinion, is to diminish the values that allowed America to survive the bad times: a collective will to sacrifice and to work together. Looking out for #1 became a primary value.
In the 1930s, it was not until a dust storm reached Washington D.C. in the later 1930s that the then-Congress began to enact crucial legislation for the dust bowl states. It was a classic “NIMBY” (“not in my backyard”) response to a huge problem. Until the problem was virtually unsolvable, the Congress was essentially an inert mass. The rains came almost before the actions of the People’s House in Washington. Even then, a sense of unity among the “united” states was tenuous.
In a lot of ways we are in a similar quandary today, only much, much worse in long-term implications.
We dodged a financial catastrophe by a whisker this year, and we’re now living as if there wasn’t – and won’t be – a problem later.
Many pretend that climate change is no longer an issue, because some pilfered e-mails allegedly prove it isn’t a huge future problem.
We dismiss a coming crisis as fossil fuels become ever more scarce…and expensive; we ignore water tables receding due to use for irrigation – water resources that cannot be replenished by putting a hose in the ground.
Too many of the same heroes who are extolled as part of the Greatest Generation are now saying that the benefits they have reaped, like Social Security and Medicare, are too expensive to provide for the generations following them. Ironically many of today’s generation seem to agree: it is every one for him or herself. The youngsters too young to decide – our children and grandchildren? Their problem.
We are back to the individualism that led to the ship sinking with the late 1920s financial catastrophe (my Dad’s parents experienced the bank closing at the same time as Grandpa’s employer shut its doors in 1927, two years before 1929.) Both my families were casualties of the Great Depression. It took a long while to recover, somewhat.
Only time will tell if I and people like me are “chicken littles” saying “the sky is falling”.
My guess is we have a pretty clear view of the future if societal attitudes do not dramatically change: not pleasant, indeed, grim. Indeed, even deep change now may be too late…but its worth a try.
Bob Barkley, Dec. 20, 09: In regard to your piece, “Dust Bowl,” it occurred to me today, as I was once again trying to make inroads with my right-leaning sister, that attitudes have context. They don’t occur in a vacuum. For example most Americans believe what they were taught about the nations history, but that version most of us were exposed to was seriously skewed. Consequently I sent my sister two books — both by Howard Zinn: The People’s History of the United States, and A Power Governments Cannot Suppress.
Your story regarding the dust bowl provides part of your context. I was raised well into my teens in Jersey City, NJ during the Boss Hague days. I was in a Republican household in a Democratic stronghold. And my Dad was a Lutheran minister in an overwhelmingly Catholic community. Those were two strong components of the context for my beliefs.
Until we know the context in which people think we will not understand their beliefs. Your rural upper Midwest context is foreign to me. This why we must listen deeply to really understand others. It’s hard but essential.
Dick’s response to Bob: Excellent. We’ve ‘talked’ a bit before about the Jersey City days. Don’t recall the exact context, but something I’d written or sent around jogged your memories of the tense years in Jersey City. I think the primary relevance of your comment is that we all need to ‘farm’ our own circles, since our group experiences are so unique…’city slickers’ out east have not a clue what farmers in the midwest are about, and vice versa.

#130 – Dick Bernard: "the gods must be crazy"

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December 13, 2003, I arrived back from Haiti, all imbued with idealism, but pretty certain that Haiti’s democratically elected government would be deposed, though not sure how or by whom. I had met a lot of people who were standing by President Aristide, even though it was clear that his government was being starved out of existence, unable to really accomplish any of his goals for lack of resources. He and his government had been marked for extinction.
January 11, 2004, the St. Paul Pioneer Press printed a column of mine, which Common Dreams still archives, and which speaks for itself here.
As time went on, it became more and more clear to me that the United States, in alliance with Canada and France, was out to get rid of Haiti’s elected leader and his entire Lavalas party. This ultimately happened late at night February 29, 2004.
A week before the coup was accomplished in Haiti, distinguished Knight-Ridder senior military correspondent Joseph L. Galloway wrote a column appropriately headlined “If U.S. returns to Haiti, get the job done“. Essentially he endorsed the 1915 U.S. “solution” for Haiti, in which the U.S. Marines began their occupation and control of the country for 19 years “Good men and true, and they took and pacified the entire country with a loss of only three Marines killed and 18 wounded” was the essence of his story. He appeared to support the Bush administrations decision to restore democracy by (effectively) destroying the existing democracy (which he referred to as a dictatorship – interesting how words can ‘sing’.)
Haitians of course have a different spin on the reality of those 19 years from 1915-34, and all the years before and after, including the coup d’etat of February 29, 2004, and its fore- and after-effects. But who cares about that? Old news…. Most recently, Aristide’s Lavalas has been denied standing as a political party in upcoming elections for supposedly technical reasons.
The 2004 coup did not bring peace and prosperity to Haiti. Less than a month after President Aristide was safely out of the country, Haiti disappeared as news in the U.S.
In May, 2006, Mr. Galloway and I had a brief e-mail correspondence about the current situation in Haiti. He had just retired from Knight-Ridder, and said, after defending his earlier comments, that “I’ve been going to America’s wars for 41 years…from Vietnam 1965 to Iraq January, 2006. I am not going to study war anymore. Instead, I shall study peace.”
About Haiti, he said “what I said and meant [in the February 22, 2004, column] was that if we went in again we should be prepared to stay and help rebuild a nation and educate a new generation of Haitians to a different kind of politics and governance than they have endured for centuries now…nobody seems willing to invest what is needed to make Haiti something other than a nation of poor people ruled by a very tiny oligarchy.”
Truth be told, U.S. troops scarcely touched Haitian soil during and after the 2004 coup. Nation-destruction was accomplished by U.S. Aid to anti-government de-stabilization folks, while the legitimate Haitian government was economically starved to death.
After the coup, the United Nations, through “Peace-keeping” forces, became and remains the U.S. surrogate in Haiti. It is far too early to tell what changes in direction will come from the Obama administration after eight years of a Bush foreign policy. I have heard that there is now an immense embassy in Haiti, an enduring symbol of American pre-eminence in that still desperately poor country.
I bring this up, now, since most recently Mr. Galloway has argued against U.S. continuing engagement in Afghanistan (here). He is now extolled as a hero of sorts on the Left.
I would like to believe that his motives are pristine and sincere, that he ‘beat his sword into a plowshare” and “won’t study war no more”, but like the Kalahari Bushman who found an empty Coke bottle in the desert, and couldn’t conceive of what in the world it could mean, I’m not sure where (or if) what he says and what he means intersect. I feel like the Bushman and that Coke bottle on the desert floor: “the gods must be crazy”*.
What I see, now, as the “gods” are the “chattering class” – talking heads of all ideological stripes – who are attempting to establish their own version of reality. Left, Right, makes no difference whatsoever.
For now, Mr. Galloway is my sample worthy of study. And he’s not coming across as very real. He is highly respected, deservedly so. I’m hoping that he truly had a conversion of heart in 2006. (I tried to meet him in person in D.C. in May, 2006, but it was a close call…didn’t happen. I’ll hope to get this writing to him where he now resides.)
Meanwhile, I stand by my comments in my blog post on December 1, 2009. The ice is thickening here….
* – Some video clips from the 1980 film “The gods must be crazy” are available on YouTube, for anyone interested.

#128 – Dick Bernard: Health Care Reform. Death by a thousand cuts?

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I have been following the Health Care Reform debate as carefully as any ordinary person reasonably can. I’ve written often about the topic in this space since about July 24 of this year (see the Index under categories.) There is a particular reason for this interest: when my first wife died of kidney disease at age 22 in 1965, we were basically uninsured, and without kindness of many local hospitals and doctors and, yes, public welfare, I would have begun my life as single parent of a year and a half year old son by going through bankruptcy. Ultimately the “crushing debt” of uninsured medical expenses was made manageable and my son and I could survive. (see July 26, 2009, post: Story #1).
Barbara’s two years of what turned out to be a terminal illness, and the time following for me, was not pleasant. One does not soon forget such a close call with catastrophe….
“As we speak”, through the magic of television, we are witnessing selective parts of the dirty business of making Law. Political Sausage Making has always been nasty business. Putting all of us within recliner-distance of somebody or other’s “spin” does not necessarily contribute to good policy. Just because the latest ad, or news conference, or talking head says it is so, doesn’t necessarily make it so. But we all make off-the-cuff, spur of our own moment, highly biased decisions on what we may know very little about. Hopefully there are adults somewhere, making some wise long-term decisions….
It seems consensus in the knowledgeable class (the medical community, for instance) that deep reform of Health Care is essential. This is not a “liberal” issue, and has not been a liberal issue for a long while. The status quo is an invitation to long-term disaster for people like ourselves.
As best as I can determine, when the 2009 Health Care Reform bill actually passes, however watered down it is, there will be, within it, a great number of positive, indeed essential, changes in public policy. They are found within those 2000+ pages that critics demand be read page by page (but which same people would never think of actually reading, much less trying to comprehend.)
The bill will squeak through with, likely, no Republican votes…or perhaps one or two. Whatever the Republican vote, it will be strictly a tactical one. We are guaranteed ten months of dishonest rhetoric that the bill is a disaster, the fault of Obama and the Democrats. There is everything, politically, to gain by defeat, or by enlisting outrage; ironically, outraged supporters have everything to lose from going back to the status quo that existed before the bills passage. but never mind that.
Too many people my age – the Medicare age – will lead the conservative charge against the evil of things like “public option”, forgetting what they take for granted – Medicare – our biggest “public option”, and forgetting that the same kind of sordid debate now happening took place when Medicare was passed in 1965. And forgetting that arguably the most efficient medical system America has devised, Veterans Administration Hospitals and Clinics, are entirely public. The critics of reform don’t want certain kinds of people – “those people” – to be publicly insured; or certain kinds of treatment available….
As a long-retired citizen, and union representative, I know that people like me are extremely vulnerable to the whims of private policy. We have excellent and affordable insurance – now. All it takes is a memo from somewhere to cancel what we have, or make it so expensive as to be unaffordable. This is not paranoia. The worst case examples are possible, and they can touch us quickly. That’s why strong government policy on public issues is essential.
Two particular examples (I have more) come to mind as I consider this issue:
1) Big Business, led by groups like U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the insurance industry and the profit sector generally, are the ones who have the truly big bucks to lobby against Reform. Their self interest is Profit, period. Ironically, their ‘base’ of support is the very people who will be most adversely affected by their whims and caprice. They are the ones who pay for those old and dishonest “Harry and Louise” and “crushing debt” ads. “Consumers” are, after all, the ones who generate “Profit”.
2) My supplementary insurance is through my wife’s company – she, too, is on Medicare. We have excellent insurance now. Recently the company has been urging people like us, and its active employees, to lobby against the Public Option. Less than a year ago, all of we retirees were summoned to an almost mandatory corporate meeting of retirees so we could be introduced to an array of – as I recall – 11 Private Options which we could elect if we wished. We stayed with the status quo, rather than deal with the vagaries of some new option which may be different than what we thought it was, or might turn out to be worse than what we had when we actually needed the insurance – an inevitability as one ages. Why lobby us about Private Options earlier this year, and lobby against Public Option now? The answer is pretty obvious to me.
Others with considerably less than the public interest at heart have their well-financed and finely tuned “oars” in the anti-reform and anti-public option “water” as well.
Caveat emptor. Keep the eye on the public interest.
Something will pass, likely soon. If it doesn’t, we will rue the day we celebrated failure.