Vision

Non-Option Number 1: Education

Jan 06

My friend and futurist David Houle writes an interesting blog about tomorrow. You know – that pesky day that keeps coming around?

He wrote recently about one of the things that is coming tomorrow: the transformation of education. It has to transform, because the present model is based on a societal structure that has not existed for the better part of a century. It is unsustainable, yet America will continue to require an educated citizenry ready to compete in a far better educated global society. That means that we must change to a sustainable and effective model if your kids and grandchildren are to have a chance at the American Dream, rather than an American nightmare. You can read David’s comments here and have a look at his new book here.

The remaking of the education field is not going to be a battleground; it is going to be a war. It is structurally like the healthcare field, in that there are powerful entrenched interests more focused on themselves than on the outcomes for customers (i.e. students and patients). For example, there are the recipients of endowment money, tenured faculty, book publishers, housing interests, food service companies, insurance companies, the construction industry – the list is long and all are welded to their self-interest in the status quo.

If you doubt the resistance to change that you’ll see as transformative forces on education increase, just recall the attempt at healthcare reform in 1993 led by Hillary Clinton. To be sure, part of the resistance was the early stages of the now familiar M.O. of Republicans, opposing anything proposed by a Democratic president, even if they think it is a good idea and even if they had sponsored identical legislation.

The biggest resistance, though, was from the entrenched interests in the industry, like Big Pharma, hospitals, the AMA and the most powerful resistors of all, the medical insurance giants. The reprise of that resistance was played out in the first Obama term over what came to be known as “Obamacare.” (Side note: Republicans will live to regret having coined that term, intended as a mean-spirited, derisive moniker. That is because Americans will come to embrace Obamacare as a wonderful first step of healthcare reform that serves them well.) Those special interests don’t want their boat rocked because it carries a never-ending cargo of gold to them. So it is for those affiliated with education.

Furthermore, even those who are a part of the education industry and who put the best interests of students first will be stressed when evicted from their comfort zone, because the fundamental human reaction to change is fear of the unknown and resistance.

But, like healthcare, education needs a do-over, if for no other reason than because costs have escalated to such a high level that it is priced out of reach of too many of the people it is supposed to serve. And for the lucky ones who get a college degree, too many are left with crushing debt equivalent to the price of a house you bought, this coupled with un- or under-employment. Here’s a parody of what our graduates are facing, link courtesy of David Houle.

That leads us to the question once again: What America do you want? Yesterday’s America in all venues including education is not an option and tomorrow will come. Now is the time to decide what we want our future to be and what we need to do to in order to create that America. If your kids and grandchildren are to have a chance, our failing to reform and enhance education is a non-option.

O’ That Darned Long Term Reality

Dec 02

Nice election, but what if the real prize isn’t won? What if we have to do something more or we’re all screwed?

Look, it’s a fairly simple thing. George Will explained it years ago in clear terms, saying that we want about $300 billion per year more in services than we’re willing to pay for. Even 70% of self-proclaimed, hair-on-fire Tea Partiers want low taxes, our budget balanced, our debt reduced, Washington made irrelevant except for national defense and, oh, by the way, they want their Social Security and Medicare, too. Sadly, most of us are similarly wired.

We’ve been doing that kind of free lunch fantasizing for decades and have the national debt to prove it. While there always have been huge spenders and creators of enormous debt in Washington, we can attempt to point the finger of blame in any direction we like and it will always be a divining rod that points to us, because we as a society voted for the people who legislated the debt.

Now that debt is causing otherwise (sometimes) sensible people to suggest crazy things. It’s time for a national “get real” conversation about priorities and perhaps that is what is starting in DC. But we have to do more than hope that’s happening, which means that we all have to participate.

America needs a tax system that is congruent with what we decide to spend. Given that historically we’ve had top rates as high as 90% and still grew as a nation, a few points over the current marginal rate aren’t going to kill the golden goose and, really, they won’t make a dent in the lifestyles of the richest 2%.

Comment for the richest 2%: Please stop trying to sell the fiction that you’re the job creators and that trickle-down economics is anything other than a fraud. And tell your legislative buddies to do the same. The rest of us are tired of your 30-year attempt to manipulate us with those fictions.

We really don’t need to spend more on national defense than the next 17 countries (some say all the rest of the world) combined. The Cold War is over and we don’t need to prevent a Soviet invasion of Europe. WW II has been over for 47 years and we don’t need to prevent a Japanese invasion of anywhere. The people in the Pentagon don’t want the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter that they have refused every time they were asked, so congress can stop authorizing still more billions for it. You get the idea – we have to stop defending against threats that no longer exist and buying toys we don’t need. That’s just a starting short list for pruning our absurd national defense budget.

That “get real” conversation has to include our willingness to shift our national priorities from lots of guns to a reasonable consumption of butter. And as unrealistic as we Americans can be, we need to recognize that there are a few things we must do – these are not optional.

We absolutely have to encourage, support and advance education. Were we to follow through with the outrageous cuts that have already been made and make the other proposed cuts to our education system, we would be metaphorically eating our seed corn. We would be ensuring that we will be unable to compete in a world that is increasingly better educated than us, sentencing our young to a dismal future. And enough already with the bashing of teachers and teachers unions. It’s way past time to stop looking for a boogeyman and instead construct an education system that serves our young for generations to come.

We cannot let our infrastructure continue to deteriorate. If you have doubts about such a statement, check with Minneapolis residents about the importance of maintaining bridges for our interstate highways. All of the survivors and all the loved ones of those who died as a result of the I-35W bridge collapse a few years ago wish that we had done a better job of upkeep. You’ll wish the same if a bridge collapses near or on you, like one did on the Fourth of July this year in Northbrook, IL, killing a couple in their car beneath the bridge.

Here’s another way to look at our infrastructure: We can’t afford the 25% loss of electricity traveling through our grid. We need to build a smart, efficient way to transmit electricity. It’s a national priority if you’re going to be able to plug in your electric car, your computer, your blender, your cell phone, your lights, your dishwasher and everything else that runs on electricity and have them work at an acceptable power cost. And it’s critical to have that smart grid if we are to shift away from fossil fuels and stop hard boiling the planet.

About the global warming denial thing – the flat-Earthers need to get a handle on reality, because if we don’t do what is necessary to counter that global threat, we can kiss good-bye all of our cities along every seashore and much of our arable farm land.

Memo to those who want to curtail, cut, eviscerate, bend, fold and mutilate Social Security and Medicare: We as a society are going to pay those costs one way or another. If we kill Medicare we’ll take our seniors away from practitioners who would provide early treatment for seniors’ ailments. Instead we will send them directly to the emergency room. That way we will provide healthcare in the most expensive and least effective method on the planet. In addition, lots of those seniors will die much younger than they would have had Medicare continued to be available. Think: Pulling the plug on Granny. Social Security cuts will produce parallel results. If you want America to save money, forget about abandoning those programs.

Final question about Social Security and Medicare: Why are the richest people in America contributing $43 million to lobby against those programs? Crank your brainpower on that and get back to me with an answer that is sensible for America. Yeah, right.

All of those issues require our thinking beyond the near horizon. The upcoming sequester business is the foolishness of trimming a budget with a meat cleaver. We have to stop focusing on the short-term stuff that tweaks our current senses and instead we must do our best to imitate reasonable adult behavior and plan for our future, as this petition and this petition call on us to do.

Get real, America. Demand grown-up behavior from your legislators. Tell them to leave their tantrums behind them and start having the conversation about the future of America and do it on an adult level. Tell them you require them to make good choices for tomorrow, because it most assuredly will come. The only question is whether we’ll be ready for it.

Making Sense

Oct 14

So much is ethically wrong and even economically nonsensical. I fight every day to keep my thinking out of the weeds, hoping to see the bigger picture and very occasionally I succeed. There are so many battles in this seemingly disappearing experiment in democracy and so many people are suffering with little relief in sight, even for the lofty ideals to which we say we aspire. Here are some examples of that.

Nicholas Kristof has a compelling piece in the New York Times about health and health care and the decisions we make. Economically, it makes little sense to pay over a half a million dollars to treat disease instead of just the few dollars that are required for routine screenings. Ethically, it makes no sense to let our citizens suffer and die because of economically driven poor choices (no medical insurance) or because of a profound lack of resources that prohibits routine health care. The system that makes that necessary is entirely about the greed of those whose hands are on the rudder

The second half of the 1960’s was an era of radical change and it was played out in part in drug experimentation. That flamboyant display of anti-establishment nose-thumbing resulted in draconian laws and mandatory sentencing like the “three strikes” rule that sent our young to prison for having a joint. The establishment surely showed its muscle by trashing the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans for their youthful dalliances. It also cost billions of dollars to prosecute and incarcerate the offenders, forcing our legal establishment to divert limited resources away from nabbing the really bad guys. What do you think about the ethics and economics of that?

On November 6 voters in Washington, Colorado and Oregon will vote on whether to legalize recreational marijuana. That is far less odd, given the historical record, than that today’s establishment folks are in favor of legalization. And even that is less odd than that the illegal suppliers of pot are against legalization because it will slash their profits. Timothy Egan’s piece details this, and at root it’s all about simple human greed.

It is said that money is the root of all evil, but I don’t think that’s quite right. It is simply the tool we use for our human instincts to focus first and foremost on ourselves, to do what we see as in our own best interests. Frequently, human interpretations of that self-interest are quite short-sighted. No, it’s actually nearly always short-sighted, and it leads us down a path of self-destruction. Even the super-educated, self-protected wealthy 1% aren’t immune and they and we are sowing the seeds of our own demise because of our shortsightedness. Chrystia Freeland has written a compelling article about this and Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson’s book Why Nations Fail gives even greater clarity.

Self-destruction is ethically absurd and economically nonsensical, yet our leaders – at least the people we so often promote and elect – seem welded to taking us down that path. They lie to us by telling us that a voucher system isn’t a voucher system, that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, that (baby boomers will get this) we have to stop the scourge of Communism right there in Viet Nam so that we don’t have to fight them in Kansas, that we were winning that war, that Romney will cut taxes 20% but that his scheme won’t be a $5 trillion deficit, that the rich people are the job creators and the list goes on and on. To understand why they say such things, obey Deep Throat’s dictum: “Follow the money.” Yet so many of us believe the lies (or, at least, we don’t challenge them), largely because we are focused on our own concerns, just trying to make life work. But that is short-sighted and ultimately does ethical and economic damage to ourselves.

We’re not going to change human nature; each of us will continue to do what we perceive to be in our own best interests. What we can do is to look up now and then, get out of the weeds and recognized that tomorrow will come. And when it does, we will live in the consequences of today’s decisions.

What are the ethics and economics you want? Look up. See that tomorrow is on its way and that we do not have to continue on a path of craziness. Then speak up. If you don’t make your voice heard, people who want a very different America from the America you want will be heard, because they will be the only ones talking.

Murray-isms

Aug 16

My friend Pat Murray is one of the clearest thinkers I know in the areas of group and individual behavior and I have learned some valuable lessons from him. See if this pairing of one statement plus two questions from Pat’s work stimulates your motivation innards.

YOU GET WHAT YOU TOLERATE – Children teach us this every day. A major part of their job is to push the envelope to find out where the edges of acceptability are. Those edges are often defined by some sort of pain, like physical pain as a result of attempting to defy the laws of physics while riding a bicycle or from adult displeasure over an inappropriate childhood behavior.

So it is with politics. Our politicians will push the envelope and keep on pushing until we tell them they’ve gone too far by punishing them with our phone calls, letters and emails of displeasure and, eventually, with election defeat. The key point is that if you tolerate their behavior, they will not only continue it but they will keep on pushing that envelope to an extreme until you actively refuse to tolerate what they are doing. Passivity and apathy on your part will result in ever more outrageous behavior on their part. You get what you tolerate.

WHAT DO YOU STAND FOR? – Are you clear about what you stand for, what you believe in down to your bedrock, the absolutely most-not-be-violated ideals you will never compromise? Tagging on to that question, motivational speaker Les Brown likes to say that you have to know what you stand for or you’ll fall for anything.

There are people in all areas of our lives who want to sell us something, who want to bend us to their way in order to help them to create a world that serves them. Some of these people are quite comfortable lying to us, misleading us with flagrant, fatuous falsehoods (my alliteration for today) and many of them have very loud megaphones. They feed us a spoonful of verifiable fact to gain our trust and then go off into their stream of dishonesty. Unless you know what you stand for, you can be manipulated easily by these people and become a pawn to serve them while they do harm to you and everyone else in the process. What do you stand for?

KNOW YOUR INTOLERABLES – Yes, I know that “intolerables” isn’t a word you can find in the dictionary, but you understood its meaning immediately. What is on your list of things that you will not put up with? What are the absolutely no-go items? Lying, cheating, stealing, dishonoring the sacred, cruelty, abandoning the helpless, disloyalty? When you make your list, be sure to do a gut check so that you don’t write hollow platitudes, because that doesn’t serve you. Rather, write what is actually true for you.

For example, you may find abridging the rights of fellow citizens to be intolerable, but do you believe in it so strongly that you’ll fight anyone who tries to silence those with whom you passionately disagree? Do you believe in the rights of citizenship with such passion that you’ll stand up publicly for those whose voting rights are being stolen right now? Do you believe in civil rights so strongly that you’ll speak out against the anti-Muslim fever that is both marginalizing and killing some Americans? Speaking of killing, it may be an intolerable for you, but do you make an exception for those who kill abortion doctors? Know your intolerables.

It is true that those are under-the-skin questions likely to provoke. Are you agitated enough to take action? A good starting place is to make two lists: HERE IS WHAT I STAND FOR and THESE ARE MY INTOLERABLES. Your lists probably won’t be very long, but they will have great power for you. And when you’re done, you’ll stop falling for anything and instead will be prepared to stop tolerating all that envelope pushing that violates what you believe in. You might even exercise your citizenship by speaking out to make things better.

It’s Personal

Aug 05

August 6 is the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and it is appropriate to remember in the ways that we can. There are millions of stories connected in various ways to that event and two are very close. They are quite different from one another, yet at root they bear the same message.

Even in the early 1940’s, when an atomic explosion was only a theory and had never been witnessed, the conflagration that would be produced was well understood. That was a different time, though, and the imperative was to win the war with a minimum of American casualties. Estimates ran north of a million dead and injured, should we attempt a land invasion of Japan, so, awful as it was even to contemplate, using an atomic bomb to subdue the enemy looked like the better option. Indeed, in those days, there was little controversy over whether to use such a weapon if doing so would avoid suffering 25,000 marines killed on every island in the Pacific on the way to Japan.

My father-in-law was a scientist, a chemical engineer Ph.D and for decades was a go-to guy for making chemical manufacturing plants operate well. He was so talented that he was called to serve on the Manhattan Project during WWII. What that meant for him and all the scientists working on the Manhattan Project was that in order to honor their duty and responsibility as Americans to help win the war, they would have to set aside their concerns over the moral dilemma of dropping a bomb on Japanese cities. Some, like my father-in-law, had to compromise a piece of their souls to do that, a compromise they came to deeply regret.

While the construction of that new and terrible weapon was ongoing, my father was posted in England and flew a P-47 fighting the Nazis, escorting bombers, dodging bursts of flak, getting shot at and shooting back, sortie after sortie. In today’s more gentle terms, he was in harm’s way, but there was nothing gentle about what was happening. He lived in a world of brutality every day, a world of sudden death and long suffering, a world where human beings saw and did unspeakable things. Indeed, like so many vets, even years later he was unable to speak the raw truth of those days and most of his terrible secrets died with him.

He did not entertain the post war moral analysis made from the comfort of peacetime over the dropping of the bomb. He had completed his tour of duty before that bombing, had served as an instructor to new recruits after his combat days and was on inactive status with the army. Had a land invasion of Japan been mounted, he would have been called back into active service and sent to the Pacific to wage war once again. Dropping the bomb made good sense to him, yet he was anything but absent of regret over those terrible days.

He had been raised to be a good boy and not do harm to others, but it had been wartime and doing what he did was his duty and responsibility, so he, like my father-in-law, did what had to be done. And he, too, had to compromise a piece of his soul, a compromise that came with deep regret. There are literally millions of stories like these from that awful time.

Today we use the word “sacrifice” to describe what our military people have to do. Yet in this country where less than 1% of our people shoulder our military burden, most of us don’t really understand what that means. My father-in-law and my father understood quite well. They did their duty and honored their responsibility for their loved ones and for our country. Their sacrifice was enormous, as both men shouldered a weight that they carried throughout their lives as a continuing torment to their souls. They paid an enormous price for us.

In their sacrifice they left us a country that remains free. Over the years they let me know in countless ways that they believed in personal responsibility and that they expected me and all of us to honor our duty and the responsibility that is inextricably bound to our freedom, just as they did. It’s likely that all of those brave men and women of that greatest generation would expect us to do that. Part of the keeping of our freedom is to sacrifice a piece of our convenience every four years and vote.

It’s personal.

National Despair

Jul 28

There’s no point in waving arms, getting red in the face and snapping at the annoying tweaks that are sent only to distract and manipulate us. If we’re to understand what is behind our national despair we need to focus on the core issue that keeps us stuck in a morass of helplessness and prevents us from the exceptionalism we’re capable of creating.

Perhaps you believe that doing the right thing is the right thing to do. If so, this may fit for you:

I despair over the paralysis of America caused by the people who are supposed to be our leaders but who, instead, feather their own nest and ensure that their system is self-sustaining, much to the detriment of the rest of us.

I despair over the abdication of the regulatory muscle that could have prevented the banking-driven recession that has hurt so many Americans and has undermined the American brand throughout the world.

I despair over the abdication of the rule of law, like claiming that torture isn’t torture, like leading us into an unprovoked war and, every bit as damaging, by the near-complete failure of Congress and the press to do their jobs to prevent all that.

I despair over the public hatred and lies that are repeated by those in leadership positions and by ordinary, angry Americans as well, spreading the venom that has come to be tolerated and even believed by a distracted public.

I despair over angry young men who take handguns, rifles and automatic weapons to movie theaters and schools and kill innocents randomly, this while the NRA tells us that guns don’t kill and that assault weapons with 100 round drums must be legal and, by all means, let’s have 34 round magazines for those Glock semi-automatics.

I despair when the meteorologists tell us that we can expect this year’s drought to be repeated for years to come and, at the same time, people we’ve elected to be our leaders blatantly lie to us and declare that global warming doesn’t exist.

I despair when a congressman or senator shouts bigoted remarks at others and, worse, when those remarks aren’t rebuked by colleagues, the press and the public.

It’s true that we’ve always had haters and liars and that we’ve always had leaders who have twisted the truth because it serves them (and not America) well. We have always had fools and bullies.

But it seems that the American train has jumped the track over the past 30 years, that dishonesty has become the purpose and dysfunction the goal. For example, Ronald Reagan told us this about the Panama Canal: “We bought it, we paid for it, we built it and we intend to keep it!” That was a huge applause line, right up until the day he gave it away.

George H.W. Bush told us over and over, “Read my lips: No new taxes.” Then he raised taxes.

Bill Clinton told us, “I did not have sex with that woman – Ms. Lewinski,” but, well, you know.

Now Mitt Romney is twisting himself every way imaginable to tell us that he’s always been against all those things he was always for.

And these are our leaders.

In any relationship, each has a part in the situation, so ultimately, it boils down to what we – you and I, our neighbors, your goofy brother-in-law, the retired couple down the street and everyone who works at the businesses in your town – have agreed to settle for. We have let self-serving dishonesty penetrate our leadership as we simply went about our lives with myopic focus. The lack of public integrity is so common now that we barely lift an eyebrow when we hear the next whopper. It’s what we expect. And that is the real poison of despair.

There is a glimmer of hope, though, that holds promise for us. We can cure our national despair and it is so simple, so easy and so obvious. We have the power to change everything and it is in our hands right now.

All we have to do is to stop settling. All we have to do is to stop tolerating the intolerable. All we have to do is to demand truth and call out the liars.

It’s time.

Cacciato

Jul 19

In preparation for entering her freshman year in college, my daughter and her contemporaries were urged to read Going After Cacciato, by Tim O’Brien, and to arrive on campus prepared to explore the book in discussion groups just prior to the start of classes. Cacciato is an exploration of experiences of the Vietnam war, of both fear and the heroism of the human spirit. As I recall, she didn’t much care for the book, but I read it and found it enormously inspirational, perhaps even transformational. It is, in part, about coming of age, of fulfilling the destiny of our dreams. We as a nation sorely need a message of destiny fulfilling, of coming of age right now. To that point, have a look at this excerpt from the book.

It is easy, of course, to fear happiness. There is often complacency in the acceptance of misery. We fear parting from our familiar roles. We fear the consequences of such a parting. We fear happiness because we fear failure. But we must overcome these fears. We must be brave. It is one thing to speculate about what might be. It is quite another to act in behalf of our dreams, to treat them as objectives that are achievable and worth achieving. It is one thing to run from unhappiness; it is another to take action to realize those qualities of dignity and well-being that are the true standards of the human spirit.

I am asking for a positive commitment. Live now the dreams you have dreamed. Be happy. It is possible. It is within reach of a single decision.

This is not a plea for placidness of mind or feebleness of spirit. It is a plea for the opposite. For just as happiness is more than the absence of sadness, so is peace infinitely more than the absence of war. Even the refugee must do more than flee. He must arrive. He must return at last to a world as it is, however much in conflict with his hopes, and he must then do what he can to edge reality toward what he has dreamed, to change what he can change, to go beyond the wish or the fantasy. “We had fed the heart on fantasies,” said the poet, “the heart’s grown brutal from the fare.” I urge you to step boldly into it, to join your dream and to live it. Do not be deceived by false obligation. You are obliged, by all that is just and good, to pursue only the felicity that you yourself have imagined. Do not let fear stop you. Do not be frightened by ridicule or censure or embarrassment, do not fear name-calling, do not fear the scorn of others. For what is true obligation? Is it not the obligation to pursue a life at peace with itself?

You have come far. The journey has been dangerous. You have taken many risks. You have been brave beyond your wildest expectations. And now it is time for a final act of courage. I urge you: March proudly into your own dream.

What is your dream for yourself and for America? What is your vision for the country you want to bequeath to your children, your grandchildren and all of our grandchildren? What is the dreamed-of soul of Cacciato as metaphor for America? It is within reach of a single decision right now and we can make it come of age.

Conservatives, Have You Reached Your Popeye Point?

Jun 30

Immediately after President Obama won the 2008 presidential election Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, Republican leaders in the Senate and House, announced to the world, “Our number one priority is making sure that President Obama is a one-term president.” That came as quite a surprise to those of us who thought that their number one priority was to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, that they were in Washington to promote the general welfare and the other things outlined in the Preamble to the Constitution. Not so, as we continue to be reminded.

The Republican Party has devolved into nothing more than opposing anything offered by Democrats and the President. They have even opposed their own bills, once President Obama said he supported them. They continue to oppose the mandate provision of the Affordable Care Act, even though it is exactly what the Republicans proposed in the ‘90’s, then accompanied by their battle cry of personal responsibility.

Since the 2010 mid-term election the Republicans have been telling us that what is most important is “jobs, jobs, jobs.” Since that time, though, the House, led by John Boehner, has passed bills against gay marriage and women’s healthcare. They have voted against immigration reform and have had temper tantrums against ending Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. None of that has anything to do with promoting jobs for Americans. The only job related legislation the Republicans passed was one promoting jobs for our military veterans, and they had to be shamed into passing it.

Two things are clear. First, the Republicans don’t want President Obama to have any wins, so they oppose anything he supports. Second, the Republicans want to run in 2012 against President Obama’s record on the economy and jobs, so they stonewall any effort to make things better for Americans, completely ignoring the suffering of the people in their selfish quest for power.

They have opposed keeping our promises to creditors in hopes of blaming President Obama for a global humiliation of their own making. They have repeatedly called the president a liar, most recently by flagrant fact falsifier Sarah Palin. Oddly, they offer absolutely no proof of prevarication.

They call him “Mr. Obama,” instead of using the proper title, “President.” They accuse him of being an un-American Kenyan, a socialist, a Marxist, a fascist. In short, they have reduced themselves to being pitiful name-calling schoolyard bullies throwing taunts.

Republicans, is that all you have? Tell us you have something more than that, because if that’s all you have, you have nothing.

There is nothing conservative about the party of personal responsibility abdicating its responsibilities. There is nothing conservative about ignoring the suffering of the American people. There is nothing conservative about preventing Americans from voting. There is nothing conservative about going to war and refusing to pay for it and lying to Americans about nonexistent death panels. In short, there is nothing conservative about today’s Republican party. Conservatism is dead. Radical dishonesty has taken its place.

The old Popeye cartoons had a recurring theme. Popeye would get into terrible trouble, pummeled and nearly helpless, when suddenly he would declare, “That’s all I can stands, I can’t stands no more!” A can of spinach would magically appear, he would eat the contents and be revived and then go about righting the wrongs.

The question now is whether you have reached your Popeye point. Have you had enough of the lies, the abdication of responsibility, the demeaning of the highest office in our land? Have you had enough of being manipulated? Is this all you can stands and you can’t stands no more?

Get your can of spinach right now. It’s time for you to start righting the wrongs and reclaim your party.

For Righties

Jun 12

You say you’re a strict constitutionalist and you believe deeply in the principles of that marvelous document. Let’s have a look at that

Of course, you’re a firm believer in freedom of speech. Yet, did you howl in protest when the Republican Party set up “free speech zones” far away from their 2008 convention in Minneapolis and prevented any display of dissent that might become visible to convention attendees or television cameras? How about when Mayor Rahm Emanuel attempted to stifle protests around the then-upcoming NATO and G-20 conferences this year with his “Sit Down and Shut Up” law? I thought all of America was a free speech zone and so did you. “Free speech zones,” indeed

Of course you believe in freedom of religion as outlined in the Bill of Rights, but do you tolerate those who insist that America must be governed according to their interpretation of the Christian Bible? That religious turf grabbing has the practical effect of establishing a national religion and marginalizing anyone who is not a Christian in their mold. And did you hit the Send button to communicate with your representatives in Congress about your disgust with the anti-Muslim hatred that now is masquerading as patriotism? Freedom of religion also means freedom from religion or from any particular religion.

The second amendment was crafted to ensure that immediately following our revolutionary days civilians could quickly be conscripted into an army in case the British invaded again. The second amendment wasn’t and isn’t about the right to own an unlimited stockpile of weapons of war. Since you probably don’t think the British are going to invade any time soon, why exactly do you think you’re guaranteed the right to own those assault weapons? Charleton Heston’s “cold dead hands,” testosterone-filled declaration may give you a dark side thrill of self-righteousness and cause your blood to boil, but your weapons cache is far more likely to make some innocent person’s blood spill.

If you’re a strict constitutionalist, are you taking action to stop Republican state legislatures from stealing the right to vote from millions of our fellow Americans? You should be in the front lines fighting that unconstitutional threat to our democracy.

The framers of the Constitution had a well-founded and deep seated distrust of excess power in a few hands. So, as a strict constitutionalist, you must be outraged over fabulously wealthy people stealing our elections from you and our fellow Americans. What action are you taking to counter that theft of democracy?

If you’re a strong supporter of our military, you probably thank soldiers for their service and perhaps you attend parades in their honor. But did you scream at George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld when they sent our soldiers into battle without personnel and vehicle armor, leaving them vulnerable to being blown to bits or left with debilitating brain injuries from roadside bombs? Are you sending checks to the VA so that we provide the after-action medical help our injured military people need, rather than making them wait a year for medical help?

Surely, you’re marching in protest against the war in Afghanistan, where most of our military deaths are due to bullets fired by the very Afghan security forces our soldiers are training. Part of “provide for the common defense” – that’s from the Preamble to the Constitution – means protecting our military people from pointless conflicts that produce little more than dead soldiers.

The Constitution that you hold as sacred is just as sacred to the rest of us, so here’s my proposition for you: Take a break from waving flags and slinging epithets and start taking action to protect the Constitution. It is long past time that we stop the outrageous screeching that serves only to make us feel powerful for a moment and instead start honoring our duties as Americans. That’s where the real power of the Constitution lies.

It Isn’t Envy, Mitt

Apr 28

Mitt Romney says that the anger of the 99%-ers is based upon envy of the 1%-ers, but like so many other things he believes about “the rest of us,” he has it wrong. We don’t hate rich people because they are rich and there is a critical differentiation that Romney and so many others simply refuse to see.

We want our kids to have it better than we did, so we believe in the American Dream and we applaud those who have lived it and prospered and earned their wealth and success. These people are models for our kids who will inspire them to break through barriers to create the cures for diseases and the products that will make our all our lives better. No, we don’t resent those who have followed that path and succeeded. We admire them.

The people who are resented by the American 99% are those who have become wealthy and continue to get even wealthier by keeping others down. And we resent the politicians who suck up and sell out to these people for their own interests at the expense of everyone else.

Be clear that these are people who have rigged the game, tilted the table against the poor, the middle class and even the upper-middle class. They have spent every waking moment since the inauguration of Ronald Reagan incrementally inching America toward a new economic and military feudal state and have done so by impoverishing all but the top 1%. They are creating an America of subsistence and poverty that is devoid of the American Dream for everyone but themselves.

Paul Ryan’s twice-proposed budget is designed specifically to throw more money to the 1% at the expense of our most needy people and tilt the game still further. The Catholic Bishops weighed in against Ryan’s budget, saying that it hurts the very people – our most vulnerable – that the church seeks to protect. They are right and he is not, regardless of the sweet face he puts on his proposal and the dismissive things he says about his detractors.

The way to reverse the upside-down world that Ryan and the 1% want to create and to stop the theft of the American Dream is to vote for candidates who will make that happen. It is about electing people who will put a stop to the glut of influence money in politics that makes guys like Ryan propose such regressive budgets. It is quite likely that your Democratic candidate answers that description.

So, the way to make a difference is to help the D candidate win, not because s/he’s a Democrat – that would be a dumb reason – but because s/he will vote in congress the way that makes sense to you. So, volunteer in their campaign. Hold an informational meeting for friends and neighbors at your house for your candidate. Their election staff will tell you how to do that. Volunteer at a phone bank. Put out a lawn sign and slap a bumper sticker on your car.

The issue is to be active, because passivity will breed more of the same as we are seeing now and our children and grandchildren will inherit an America that you couldn’t possibly recognize. I do not mean that as hyperbole; my own grandfather would not recognize America today, even as he was an ardent anti-New Deal guy and thought both the income tax and Franklin Roosevelt were the worst things on the planet.

Actually, I take that back; he would recognize this, because the unregulated greed that hurts Americans and led to the meltdown in 2008 and the continuing decline of the middle class is exactly what he saw as a young father in the 1920’s. He’d recognize the influence peddling in Washington, the dumb bubble economy, the spinelessness in congress and more. He would be waving a red flag and yelling, “DANGER” because he would have seen what happens when we do dumb stuff like we’ve done and he would be asking whether there is anybody who remembers history, because Santayana was right – in our refusal to remember history we were doomed to repeat it and we have done just that. The difference is that after Hoover, we learned our lesson and started to make things better.

Today the righties want to do things that will make things worse. The real question is why they would want that. The 1%-ers want that because it makes them richer and keeps them in control. The politicians want that because that way the rich people continue to throw money to them that perpetuates their careers and their wealth building and keeps them in control, too. As for why any Tea Partier would want that – more on that another time.

For now, just be clear that things will get worse unless we make them get better. It is up to those with a ballot in November to stop the theft of America. If we fail to show up, if we fail to man the barricades against this assault on the America we believe in, then the American Dream, that future we want for our children and grandchildren will be lost for generations. Tag, you’re IT.

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