PRENOTE; about the Supreme Courts decisions, if you wish, here.

POSTNOTE: Letters from an American: Heather Cox Richardson comments on the early history of American independence, here; and here.

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All best wishes for a good 4th of July.  And to Canadians, as well, celebrating Canada Day, today [July 1].

Going through some of Dad’s personal papers last week I came across an 8×10 photograph of the Liberty Bell.

The photo was a promotional piece from an advocacy group.

I’ve seen the bell in person (in Philadelphia, 1972) and whether photo or reality, it is awesome, one of the powerful representations of U.S. history.  A brief history of the Liberty Bell can be read here.  (At  the end of the brochure is a brief video about the history of the bell, including its naming.)

It is in the nature of countries to have significant dates and symbols, flags and other representations of national pride.

This particular July 4, upcoming on Tuesday,  leads me to focus on Canada Day (July 1), and a local celebration  sponsored by the Canadian Consulate in Minneapolis 10 years ago, June 28, 2013.

Here’s what seems to be the outline of some of this years July 1 celebrations in Canada.

Here’s a long and interesting article about Canada’s road to independence; complicated but very interesting.  This particular history tends to forget the French era in Quebec from 1534 to 1759, beginning in 1867,  I’ll leave the argument for others, but my earliest French ancestors were in Canada at least from the early 1630s and perhaps earlier.   And the French-Canadians called themselves “Canadiens” to distinguish themselves from others in Canada.  No matter.  All’s okay.

Of course, Canada is not our only geographic neighbor in North America.  To the south is Mexico, whose day of independence is September 16, 1810.    Here’s the Library of Congress rendition of the Mexican evolution to independence.

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As you can note, the histories of Canada, Mexico, ours, and indeed all countries are complex.  History is not easily reducible to a single specific symbol, or a specific date.  Indigenous folks were late to be recognized as people most everywhere.  The major colonial players were Spanish, English and French, all at about the same time.

Every country among the 194 nations in the world have significant milestones in their own histories.

I chose here to highlight the three major nations that comprise the North American Continent.  Much is made of the distinctions between these countries.  But regardless of rhetoric there is great interdependence among these countries, indeed all countries of the planet, in these times.

June 26, 2013, I saw our interdependence with out neighbor celebrated in person at a social event hosted by the Canadian Consulate in Minneapolis.  Then-Consul Jamshed Merchant invited us to the Consulate Canada Day celebration.  Representatives of the United States and Mexican government, and of course Canada, gave brief comments on how the three nations cooperate on a daily basis in many ways.

Sharing the platform with the speakers were four flags: those of Canada, United States, Mexico and the state of Minnesota, pictured below.  (The green is part of the Mexico flag.  As I recall, the speaker in the photo represented Mexico).  Note the sign: “Growing Stronger Economies TOGETHER“.  If I recall correctly, the rhetoric around the NAFTA agreement (North American Free Trade Agreement –  adopted 1994) was getting more intense: who gets what from cooperation, not an easy question with easy answers.  Today, I’d like to modify that sign, for all of us: “Growing Stronger Together”.

Each year of the event – I attended several – Canada had a brochure for those of us attending.  Here is the brochure for 2013: Canada-U.S.001.

I have fond memories of all of the gatherings I attended.

Whatever the case, you get the idea.  People and countries which work together do better, than fighting with each other.  It’s a lesson we find it difficult to learn.

Also, recent posts: Canada and Gratuitous Force.

Happy Day to all, whatever your personal relationship to the term “Father” might be.  I specifically remember, this day, Marshall, who died March 30, 2023, at the doorstep of 87 years.  Marsh is survived by Karen, two daughters, grandkids and a constellation of other relatives and friends.

My vivid memory of Marsh was not long after he and I met in 1982.  He had just learned the location of the gravesite of his first ancestor in Canada, which we (Dad, Marshall’s spouse, and three other voyageurs) then visited at the Cimitiere Mont-Royal on Mount Royal in Montreal.  All of us, except Dad,  were in our 40s.  Time flies.  Bon Voyage, Marsh.  Memories….  Here’s a recollection of Marshall from 2015.

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Age is an endless accumulation of experiences of all kinds.

Friday morning I was doing my usual walk around the indoor soccer field near home and onto the field came a green monster which sounded ominous and looked like a gigantic grasshopper.  Slowly it crawled, and then it stopped.

Another walker, a lady in her 90s, a friend, was resting and I stopped and said “what would our ancestors think about this?”  We chuckled.

I asked the crew two-man crew what was going on, since I saw nothing obvious.  Matter of fact: “Ventilation fan problem”.  Its four feet planted firmly, the monsters ‘hand’ rose to the ceiling about 40 feet up, carrying its operator.  Mission accomplished, down it came, and crawled back where it had come from.

So much for the excitement on Friday morning.  (Here’s what the green monster was.)

Continuing the walk, I passed another walker, a man, an older friend I see frequently, who walks slowly with two walking sticks, and seems to have a limit of maybe 200 feet before needing to rest in place, but is indomitable, every day doing a few rounds.

What did he think?  What he’d seen reminded him of when his job was de-icing aircraft at Twin Cities International Airport.

He knew the drill from  long work experience.

What we watched, our ancestors, not all that far back, likely couldn’t have imagined.  It was another reminder of the cumulative nature of human progress.  Among all of the species, we do not seem to have boundaries on what we can accomplish.  We each have our own particular gifts.

Not everyone has exceptional talents in whatever area, but some do, and the accumulation of knowledge has served us well.  We routinely experience, what others could not even imagine generations back.  Individuals and groups among us  invent things, while “wily coyote” and other mammals are stuck with certain intellectual boundaries.

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The retired de-icer gentleman mentioned earlier had a career I wouldn’t have imagined him doing in his younger years.

Next time I see him, probably Monday at the same place, I’ll recall for him my friendship with Myron Tribus, possibly one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever met, whose career started collecting eggs on the family farm in northern California in the 1920s, and ended with a prestigious position at MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

When I met Myron, he was retired from MIT, and we were on an education policy discussion group moderated by the National Education Association.  This was in the 1990s.

At some point, on a side chat, Myron was remembering WWII days and Minneapolis when he was an officer in the Army,  a young engineer assigned to a group testing assorted schemes for de-icing aircraft.  Minneapolis was an obvious place to field test their technology – weather.  He said their experience had been written up in Time Magazine at the time.  I looked it up, and sure enough – here it is: Tribus Jan 14, 1945 Time Magazine.  In fact, I found two articles on the topic – the second in the Reader’s Guide for 1943.  I sent both to Myron, then in his 80s, and he enjoyed the memories.

Myron died in 2016.  I am richer for having known him.

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This musing space of mine has always been ‘Thoughts Towards a Better World’.  I have two thoughts on this one on this Father’s Day 2023.

1. Little things mean a lot.  In some small  way, the simple action on Friday gave an unexpected  positive connection between several people – a connection neither expected nor dramatic, along with an example of progress over the centuries, one generation building on previous generations.
2. But with this comes a caution:  progress is happening so quickly now that we may well be setting ourselves up for possible future serious problems if we aren’t careful.  Things like Artificial Intelligence have raced far ahead of our understandings of the technology, or societies management of it.  This reminds me of the forever childrens game of seeing who can make the highest stack of blocks.  Here’s an on-line example. The stacks can get pretty high, but a point is ultimately reached where it collapses.  We don’t want this to happen.  We have to manage progress so as to permit it to continue.

Happy Father’s Day.

Here’s downtown St. Paul, less than half mile away, 3:05 p.m. on Wednesday June 14, 2023.

downtown St. Paul MN June 14, 2023, 3:05 p.m.

This afternoon, as predicted, we got a package from the Canadian Wildfires – the same ones which nearly blacked out metro New York City and much of the northeast a few days earlier.

(I searched “Canada wildfires June 2023” and linked is what I found.)

As those who have experienced what we did would likely attest, the unpleasant ‘fog’ was aggravating.  If we’re fortunate,  it will move on, quickly, to someone else’s neighborhood.  My apologies to those who get what we got.

To me, today’s ‘smog storm’ (my descriptor) is simply another indicator that we are a world without borders.  We still harbor the illusion that we can control our borders, which are breached millions of times a day by wind streams, airplanes, ships, human beings on the move, disease….

Covid-19 was a stealth visitor whose ultimate outcome could have been predicted at the outset.

We delude ourselves into thinking that isolation will protect us; that walls can be built to keep others out; that one country can be found to be responsible for a disease, etc., etc., etc.  That being in a gated community gives security.

There will probably always be resistance to world government; indeed world government in and of itself its no guarantee of success.

Perhaps the best we can do is to refine and expand ‘best practices’ where individuals, small and larger groups, towns, cities, states and nations work in coalitions of the willing to make this a better world, the world that we share.

Success is often a succession of small incremental steps, which appear to be hopelessly small, but in aggregate and over time make a real difference.

Let’s keep working.

PRENOTE: Tomorrow night on Twin Cities PBS, Channel 2, 8 p.m CDT., part 3, last segment of “Living With Hitler”.  I have watched the first two segments, and this is really excellent.  Everyone should absorb the hard learnings of the results of the Third Reich.

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Last Thursday I attended a public meeting reporting on the results of the 2023 Minnesota Legislature.  The host was our local state Senator.  The two page summary handout is here: Minnesota Legislation 2023.

I attend these kinds of gatherings frequently.  This one was particularly interesting, there were many kids there, and Moms reporting, and art from work done by prisoners as rehab therapy.  A group which appeared to be Chinese American featured a spell-binding performance by a lion, given life by two young people.  Note the little girl in foreground of the picture.  She was with the program!

June 8, 2023 Hong De Lion Dance group performs.  

If you’re Minnesotan, you know the general drift.  This year the legislature, house and senate, and governor, were Democrat – an unusual occurrence here.  The elected Democrats – I am an active Democrat – decided to stick together and pass one of the most positive and progressive legislative programs ever.

A message today from MN Gov. Tim Walz says it well:

“Yesterday I was asked whether there would be a Republican backlash to the historic progress we made this legislative session. Here’s why I said I wasn’t worried:

Everything we accomplished this year was grounded in a very Midwestern value: Mind your own dang business. 

While GOP-led states were passing abortion bans, banning books, and bullying the LGBTQ+ community, we took action to protect the freedoms and rights of all Minnesotans. 

We codified abortion rights into state law, banned the harmful practice of conversion “therapy,” made Minnesota a refuge for gender-affirming care, and more.

The bottom line? In Minnesota, we don’t demonize our neighbors. We welcome everyone in, and we celebrate our diversity.”

Minnesota is characterized as a high tax state.  I hear almost no complaining about that.  In 1927, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said memorably “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society”, and that is very true.  Taxes, effectively used, pays dividends for everyone.

This is more truthful than an alternative view I once heard in person from a guy very upset with taxation generally.  He slapped his rear-end, the side with his wallet, and angrily exclaimed in a loud voice: “I want MY money, in MY pocket, RIGHT HERE”.  This was at a meeting, and he was in my small group.  A young ally of his, at the same table, apparently was thinking about this declaration, and said he liked to do off-trail bicycling, and they were spending tax money to build a local trail, of which he approved, for his personal benefit.  The trail didn’t impose on non-users.  It was a winner in all ways.

So much for getting rid of community, which is what society is, after all.  Community is Sharing.

Personally, we are fortunate to pay taxes.  This year our state and federal came to about 19% of income; about one-third of this was to state.  This has been fairly typical over recent history, hardly confiscatory.

A detailed review of all of the legislation passed this year would likely reveal things I personally would wonder about.  No matter.  They were important to other groups of citizens in other communities.  This is what society is. We all know this from personal experience.

The last few years we have been afflicted by destructive political relationships in this country.  There seems no justification for a society where one-half plus one seeks to win, the rest are losers.

There was a day when political differences like this could be complementary, not adversarial.  Most of our history as a society has dealt with issues in competition, rather than enemies in combat.  The ideal goal is resolution, not domination.  Best we relearn the skills we already have.

After the meeting on Thursday, I decided to look up government in Minnesota by ideology.  Here it is: Minnesota governance by ideology, 1901-present.  It is very interesting.  In numbers, Minnesotans have been divided by ideology, but most often we’ve worked things out cooperatively.  It has been 10 years since the Democrats last had the majority in all three branches; to the best of my knowledge, the Republicans had that advantage often in the earlier 1900s.  But there have been many years of divided government, currently often not constructively.

In one sense or another, all of us have elements of “conservative” and “liberal” in our makeup.  The difference, these days, is that one ideology tends to focus on the individual exercise of raw power; the other tends to more orient to the community at large.  Just my opinion.

POSTNOTE: I learned that I had one personal success in this session.  It took 17 years, but an idea I presented in 2006 – a very simple idea – finally was enacted this session.  In the fall of 2006, I noticed that on the application for drivers license, a kid was automatically registered for the Draft regardless of age.  Right below, on the same form, the same kid could register to vote. Both were effective at age 18, but for the Draft was automatically registered.  I asked, why not apply the same rule to both?  The simple idea was killed every year, but this year it passed.  Hooray!

POSTNOTE June 13: This mornings e-mail brought a Heather Cox Richardson “Letters from an American” well worth your time.  It is here.  Heather’s writing is well worth the small cost to subscribe.