PRENOTE: Tonight, on-line, 7p.m. CDT if you wish.  The Wall, 2018 Click for details.  Pre-register if you wish to join the conversation.  Film is free on YouTube.

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In too many ways I feel like we’re all at a crossroads of history for our Democracy…and “we, the people” seem in polar opposite camps.  Anyone who thinks that being a spectator is enough is fooling only themselves.  Inaction is the most negative side of action.

This week, President Biden talked about Democracy in Philadelphia.  His remarks are here.  Also this week, Texas Democrat legislators left their own state in protest to what they feel are anti-democracy initiatives advanced by the majority in the Texas state legislature.  Their’s is an act of courage.

Several books were released this week about the chaotic end times of the previous presidency.  Readers know I like Just Above Sunset, and the midweek commentaries, “Late Additional Details“, and “The Gospel of the Fuhrer” deserve reading and a great deal of citizen reflection and action.  Each one of us is the solution.

As the week ends, the Biden administration and the Democrats are advancing what I’d refer to as the common persons American economic recovery and stimulus package, and a defense of what all of us have benefitted from in this democracy.  They are very large initiatives, in two parts.  In common citizen terms, it is like doing a remodel of the old house, whose resale value is needing updating.  This is an instance where spending money is essential to making money.  The process of updating will help others: the folks who sell and install the new furnace, etc., etc., etc.  That’s how we recovered from the 2008 near catastrophic economic collapse, which all of us remember.

Sure there’s plenty of “yah, buts” out there – we are a very big, and very wealthy, country after all.  I think of the immense tax cuts (pay raises) for the already wealthy, given by Congress and the then-President in 2017 – long before Covid-19. The recipients of the 2017 gift are the kind of folks who can pony up $250,000 – and will – to take a few minutes flight to the edge of space.

Ordinary folks need a break too. We need to work together.  The alternative is something we very nearly experienced January 6.  My picture for the ages evokes the horror of what almost happened at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.  May such an atrocity never happen again.

A 1905 poster of the U.S. presidents in front of the U.S. Capitol. Found in the basement of Busch farm in ND in 1993.  The last president pictured is Theodore Roosevelt.  No it’s not a perfect poster…or bunch of leaders…but it still represents stability and common purpose.

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This has been a week where the guard is being let down on the pandemic.  I’ve experienced this in many ways at many places.

Monday, one of the staff at my Caribou coffee place pulled up the “social distance” signs on the floor for over a year.  I asked if I could have one, and she fished it out of the trash.

In all sorts of ways, the rules we’ve basically lived under since about March of 2020 have come down, at least for the moment.  Most of us seemed to try to follow the reasonable rules.  Mostly you’ll still see me with a mask at the ready, and most people I see informally hold the social distance rule, and probably the hand-washing, etc. etc.

There remain warning signs that we are not out of the woods.  Tuesday we took our 91 year old friend to the emergency room at the local hospital – a too scary heart episode for him, and he lives alone.  The emergency room was so crowded with people that the visitors who were there with patients – one per patient – were asked to give up their chairs.  The issue was, apparently, too few available hospital beds; and possibly not Covid-19, at least not primarily.  I had not seen a similarly crowded emergency room, and I hope it’s no harbinger.

All in all, a simple visit took 5 hours.  Our friend is back home.  It was a very long evening.  We took turns.

I hope what I witnessed in person at the hospital this week is not a harbinger of the future.

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We recover from the pandemic, or not, together….

We recover from our very near miss on a national political tragedy, or not, together, as well.  May Lincoln’s “of the people, by the people, for the people”

POSTNOTE:

In this weeks mailbag came a counter view, a friend from a different political planet than I:

I wrote a personal letter to my friend.  It’s my own way of confronting such dangerous opinions.  I’m older than President Biden.  Sure, things change, but be careful about making judgements based on gratuitous insults.

Saturday morning July 17, 2021:

Last night we went to our first Minnesota Orchestra concert since March 5, 2020…which was second to the last public event that day, and the last day of such outings during the pandemic.

It was a fabulous concert.  The first full orchestra concert since 2019, the announcer said.  The auditorium, which seats 2089, the sign said, probably was one-fourth full.  The program included a brief announcement: “Dima Slobodeniouk, who was originally scheduled to conduct this week’s concerts, is not Abe to appear with the Minnesota Orchestra this week because of COVID-19 related visa and travel restrictions.  Music Director Osmo Vanska will conduct the concerts in his place.”  As Orchestra regulars know Vanska has, since 2003, been the Orchestra’s music director.  He was to be on vacation, and filled in on two days notice.

The program was fairly brief, but magnificent: Hector Berlioz, Le Corsaire Overture; Florence Price, Piano Concerto; Richard Strauss, Death and Transfiguration.  to read the complete program notes: minnesotaorchestra.org/notes.  I am guessing any of these pieces can be found on YouTube.

Back home, six hours later, the latest on the increasingly bizarre anti-vaccination movement and its increasingly certain dire consequences.  “The Defiant Dead”

Orchestra program cover Juy 16, 2021

Video Phone (“picture phone) demonstration at the White House in 1964, from National Geographic Magazine, December, 1964, page 750

There is so much happening right now, it is impossible to keep track of it.  Are we a nation of the people; or a nation by and for some of the people?  A not so silent war is taking place daily, most everywhere.

We are a nation which supposedly reverences the rights of citizens, and the benefits of democracy, but everywhere there is a frontal assault taking place, most visibly at this moment in Texas, on the basic right of citizens to select their leaders…to, at minimum, discourage certain kinds of voters from even voting.

There are efforts to disrupt and corrupt the hearing into the January 6 insurrection at the United States Capitol…to disappear the record into our national memory hole.

I’ve just completed the new book, Preventable, by Andy Slavitt, about the not yet concluded Covid-19 pandemic of 2020-21.  As of today, there have been over 606,000 Covid-19 related deaths in the U.S.  This is about 15% of the world total (we have about 4% of the world population).  Today, the variant is posing an immense threat to those unvaccinated.   Southern Missouri is a current epicenter, and the states most resistant to vaccinations appear most at risk.  We owe it to ourselves, to each other, and to future generations to learn our cause in the matter, since there will be other pandemics.  Slavitt’s book is a must-read, in my opinion.

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I have made several substantive additions to the earlier post on Haiti and Afghanistan.  You can access that here.

Sopudep School, Haiti, Dec 2003. The youngsters in this photo would now be in their 20s. Photo Dick Bernard

We spent an incredibly enriching several hours at this school.  An educator we met there was assassinated a short time later in the vicinity of the national capitol in Port-au-Prince.  The killing was believed to be related to politics.

I am not sure if this school still survives.

Last evening I was continuing what seems to be a never-ending review of personal “archives” (what most would probably call “junk”).  In yet another envelope of pictures – this from the Busch-Berning family reunion in July 1993 – I saw this picture I knew I’d taken, but had misplaced for a long time.

On the back of the photo was the story: “Teddy Roosevelt was President when [my grandparent] Busch’s moved to ND [in 1905].  This Print was in glass frame – and in very bad condition.  Not worth saving.  Found in basement.  “Portrait” of all President of U.S. through Teddy Roosevelt.  Roosevelt was 26th President (24 are pictured.  Two were elected President twice, not consecutive.”

1993 was 28 years ago, and the print, sadly, no longer exists.  It is my evidence of the value of taking pictures, and saving too much stuff for too long.  Pictures indeed are worth a thousand words…or more.  If you look, closely, the Presidents are named at the base of the photo.  Roosevelt ascended to the Presidency after William McKinley was assassinated; and was elected in his own right in the 1904 election.  My grandparents bought their new farm in late 1904, and moved there in the spring of 1905.

Joe Biden is the 46th President of the United States; like Roosevelt was, a former Vice-President.

The Personal Dimension:

Until I found the photo, the title of this draft was “The 2%“, and the first lines as follows:

In 2010 I was at a celebration of a group called the Hawkinson Foundation which included honoring my friend, Rev. Veryln Smith, for his many years as a peace advocate.

Here is the tribute to Verlyn, as written for the event: Verlyn Smith001.  (Verlyn died in 2012, at 85.)

Verlyn offered his thoughts on peacemaking that evening, and one part of his talk has stuck with me these past years.

The premise I planned to explore in this blog was very simple:  as noted in the tribute to Verlyn (above link), the meat of his career was as a campus minister during the worst days of the Vietnam War.  In his spoken remarks, he said he had no particular attachment to the cause of peace at least initially, and as he thought back to those years, he guessed only perhaps 2% of the students could be considered peace activists.  Most were simply about proceeding with their education.  But the activist 2% made a huge difference, including to him, personally.

He made this remark to a room full of peace activists, who were giving him an award for his years of activism, and thus it has stuck with me.

This comment was amplified for me, twice, in the last 24 hours.

First, I began reading the outstanding new book, “Preventable” by Andy Slavitt, about the Covid-19 pandemic, now hopefully winding down at least a bit.

At page 96, Andy quoted his high school son Zach’s analysis about individuals making a difference: “…each of us can be responsible for 40 lives saved or lost [in the pandemic]…was the best way I knew to do that….”  Zach was just doing the simple math.  Everyone one of us can make things worse, or better, by our own behavior.

Then, this morning at Catholic Mass the Priest, an outstanding homilist, focused on a phrase in today’s Gospel reading, Mark 6:1-6, where Jesus was trying to make a difference in his home town of Nazareth: “3-Is he not the carpenter,^* the son of Mary, and the brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? And are not his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him. 4^{* c} Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his native place and among his own kin and in his own house.”

In other words, as so many of us internalize when we speak to those we know best, the feeling “what does he (or she) know?” is hard to shake.

Even Jesus was dismissed as just “the carpenter” in his hometown.

The point made at least to me was, “march on”; you must, to make a difference.

As for the photo which leads this post: in our society we have gotten very sloppy about our primary role in whether this country succeeds or fails.  Too many of us vote in the most superficial way, perhaps only once every four years for a single candidate, for President.  Great numbers of us don’t vote at all.

We are all the persons ‘in the mirror’.  We get exactly what we deserve.

Pay great attention to the obligation of informed voting for candidates for all positions.  The next election is 16 months away.  You have a great plenty of time to make a difference.

July 4, 2021

PRE-NOTE: I pre-plan most posts, this one, days before news came about the collapse of the building in Miami where over 100 persons are still missing, and the death toll rising.  My thoughts and prayers are with all of those impacted by this tragedy.  I can’t help but think back to the Haiti earthquake of January 12, 2010, where over 200,000 died.  I had been to Haiti in 2003 and 2006, so I directly connected with that tragedy.  We are all one community.  Let’s not forget that.

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Being a young adult in the 1930s.

Recently, sorting through old photos left by my Dad, I came across this:

Henry Bernard, 1930s, Valley City ND

You have to have been there to know where this photo was taken.  Dad was basically under the iconic highline railroad bridge in Valley City ND.  The photo shows he was at the bank of the Sheyenne River.  Here’s the google map.  You should be able to clearly see the highline.  I’m guessing they were on the west side of the river.

The photo is unlabeled.   I fix it as early in the 1930s, taken by my Mom, Esther, sometime after they first met.   They were both country school teachers, and in those days those teachers would come to summer school to earn credits towards a full teaching credential.  Dad’s friend, John, and Mom’s sister, Lucina, seem to have been facilitators. Dad takes it from there, in memories he wrote in about 1980, in his early 70s.  “Esther and I did some dating during that summer.  We did a lot of hiking and I think we managed over the period of the summer, to walk up and down the ring of hills that surrounded Valley City.  I remember that Esther was taking a course called WEEDS and, in our wanderings, she picked up various samples for the class.  They were identified and pressed…[after the summer] we lost contact with each other….” (p. 130)

They reconnected, and married in 1937 “till death do us part” when Mom died in 1981.  After two years of teaching in tiny and depression-impoverished Amidon ND, they came back to Valley City where Dad finished his four year degree, and Mom had me.

Here are Dad’s memories of his post high-school, college and country school teacher days (click to enlarge links): pages 116-123 Bernard Henry 1927-37; pages 124-134 Bernard Henry 1927-37 (2).

This was a memoir of an ordinary man making his way in the often de-spiriting years of the 1930s.

Henry Bernard with students at Allendale #1, 1930.

The Buffalo Hunt

A legendary Catholic Priest in early Minnesota was Father Joseph Goiffon, a Frenchman whose first assignment was to the Metis in the Pembina River area in what later became North Dakota.

Here’s a photo of young Father Goiffon found in a 1905 History of Anoka County MN by Albert M. Goodrich.

I first ‘met’ Fr. Goiffon about 1991, when a lady gave me a sheaf of papers written by him in the early 1900s, after long career as a Catholic Priest, mostly in the French-Canadian communities of Centerville and Little Canada, Minnesota (1861-91).  The memoirs apparently had been written in French, and translated by Mrs. Charlotte Huot.  Like Dad’s, they were written by someone in his 70s, remembering his own long-ago, and very interesting.

Fr. Goiffon was born in 1824, and arrived in then-Minnesota territory in 1857.  After he retired in 1891, and before his death in 1910, he wrote his memories of being a frontier Priest, in what is now northeast North Dakota.  One of the rich recollections was of an 1860 buffalo hunt with the Metis of Red River, which you can read here (click to enlarge, 9 pages): Goiffon Buffalo Hunt 1860 .  For other ND/Metis stories from the Goiffon memories, here.  Click Library, click Chez Nous and go to index under Goiffon.

POINT TO PONDER: I’m older, now, than either my Dad or the Priest when they wrote their memories.  Over and over I’m reminded that elders do have things to say, and they do make sense!  If you’re elder, write your own memories.  Someone will appreciate them, some day.

The stories have been in my possession for years, hidden in files.  What shook them loose was a conversation with my grandson about the 1987 World Series, which in turn began because  my friend, Kathy, had given me the old newspaper kept intact for years by her mother.  (Photo of the cover below).  I decided to give the paper to Parker, now 19, who is a college baseball player, and our conversation led me to realize that there are places in kids lives for elder memory!  Parker was born 15 years after that World Series, and initially thought that the World Series was at the old Met Stadium, rather than the actual location, the Metrodome.  The newspaper, and google, and my own memories, filled in some blanks for him.  We all have a role in the place of memory for our past, our present and our future.

POST NOTE: Several comments to my post on voting, 6/22, and more added today.

Thinking about today brought back to mind this photo from about 1920.

Henry and Frank Bernard and Fosto, ca 1920

Dad provided the photo and his always unique labeling years ago.   Somebody took a picture of his Dad (my Grandpa) and younger brother (my Uncle) with the family dog, “Fosto” in what appears to be the beginning or end of winter in Grafton North Dakota.  Dad would say that every dog they had was named Fosto.  Grandpa, about 48 when this photo was taken, had spent a year on Luzon in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War, 1898-99, and he’d say that someone he’d seen called their dog Fosto, and he liked the name.  Grandpa was a story-teller, a rough hewn old lumberjack, so who knows.  Whatever, he’d trained Fosto and my uncle Frank was intrigued.

Today we’ll see part of the family for lunch.  Everybody is growing up, here and there in the world, so we take potluck.  Possibly I’ll copy this photo for the grandkids, for whom my Grandpa is Great-Great-Grandpa on the genealogy charts.  Time flies.

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Thursday I was at the local sports center for my daily walk, and afterwards came back to take a photo inside the cavernous place.

The Sports Center June 17, 2021

Usually, when I’m there, there are a few of we senior citizens making the rounds, and the field itself is empty.  Group events like these budding soccer neophytes start showing up.

This particular day there was one other guy making the rounds, same time as I.  Usually he’s there with his wife.  I know them as Jack and Joan.  Mostly our task is to make our goal number of rounds – mine 11, his 10 – so usually the conversation is “good morning” or such if our paths cross.

This day we chatted.

Jack and Joan have lived in my town since it was a rural township, rather than its present 60,000+.  He knew the farmer for which the Sports Center had originally been named – Bielenberg – and had seen the changes the passage of many years in a metropolitan suburb have wrought.

Probably he was running foot races back in those early years in a new subdivision a few miles east of 3M world headquarters.  Today, his 10 rounds, must seem like a hundred miles, though it’s only about two.  His doctor has prescribed walking as a desirable alternative to losing a limb due to vascular problems.

This day, Joan, always there with him, was absent.  Yesterday, making the rounds, an errant ball from a youngster hit her unawares, and the fall resulted in a visit to the emergency room, a concussion diagnosis.  It sounded like recovery was likely, but its the kind of things old folks worry about and young folks can’t relate to….

Jack commented about the coach this particular day, who he said was the hockey coach at a local high school.  As he was walking past the little pep talk the coach was giving the kids, Jack heard him talking about the importance of “character and responsibility” and he was much impressed by that wisdom being passed on from one generation to the next.

Just one day and one conversation about one life.

Happy Father’s Day to everyone whose role in any way today is passing along small or large insights of value.  We own a piece of that field called “life”.  We each appear, proceed, and after a while life as we know it ends.  Its up to us to make the best of what time we have.

The sports center, Woodbury MN June 18, 2021

Tintypes like this one usually weren’t labelled. This one, likely 1880s, almost certainly featured my Grandpa, front and center, probably as a teenager, before he left for parts west.  His trip began in rural Quebec thence Berlin Falls NH as a lumberjack, thence to Dakota where he arrived in the early 1890s to join his brother, already there. It is not too much of a stretch that the man behind him may be his father, and the others his nearby family.  He is my own grandkids great-great-great grandfather!

Speculating about the photo…Doing family history for years, I know some things about Henry Bernard’s family, in which he was the youngest of a dozen, of whom few lived in his home area – St. Sylvestre QC – when he would have been growing up.  Only one of his siblings, his brother Joseph, migrated west to Grafton ND in 1888.  He was a young married man and came with his wife’s family, Gourde.  It is quite possible, totally unprovable, that Joseph and his new wife Dezilda, are in this photo as well, and the photo comes about 1887.  It is said that Gourdes, and their nine children, and two spouses, and two infants made the trip west, probably by immigrant train.   My Grandpa, Henry, followed a little later, I think about 1892.  I have a single later photo of Joseph with Henry, and perhaps more forensic work could see if Joseph is also in the photo.  That task is for someone else, if ever interested.  Dick Bernard June 20, 2021.

PRIOR DAY POST: Biden-Putin.