What Obama has faced

It’s a sad fact that much of the opposition to Obama in the South is racially motivated. During the Helms/Gantt senate race in 1990, a former acquaintance said, “I don’t like Helms, but I could never vote for a n . . .” What’s especially stunning is, the man was an ordained minister. I was appalled. Gantt was an outstanding candidate. This is the North Carolina I’ve come to know since moving here in 1976, and I imagine the same attitude prevails throughout the South — and probably even in much of the Midwest.

What’s especially sad is that it takes a huge turnout of black voters to elect decent candidates, regardless of race. It speaks poorly of my fellow whites. In both elections Obama was by far the best candidate, but he was only elected because of the black turnout. The obstacles he’s faced since he took office are largely race-based too, and I suspect it’s because the white ruling class, fearful of the changing demographics in the US, wanted to do everything in their power to make a black man appear incompetent and incapable of governing. And the scheme is working, because although it’s the Republican party’s refusal to function that continues to mire the country, Obama is getting the blame, and other Democrats are suffering from the fallout.

In part I fault the media for not putting things in perspective when they report on a story. It is a hard fact that Republicans have blocked necessary legislation in the Senate and kept it from the floor in the House, and reporters should not hesitate to remind news consumers of this regularly. But viewers are only left with the idea that when stuff doesn’t get done it’s Obama’s fault because he governs alone. The fact that Republicans vowed to make Obama a one-term president and then to block anything he does is not old news because it has an ongoing effect.

I can understand why Obama is reluctant to raise these points, and I can understand why black journalists might hesitate too — he, and they, will be accused of whining, or of naturally coming to the defense of a fellow black person. But I believe many whites see it the same way as I do — just not enough will turn out to vote, I’m afraid.

I hope I live long enough to read the president’s book when he leaves the White House, and I hope he’s candid about his impressions as the first black president.

A Declaration that Americans forgot

I don’t remember how I first learned about the The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but for some reason it was in my head and I looked it up to see if I was remembering something real. I’ve since posted about it, Twittered about it, and Facebooked about it. I have no doubt in the world that I’ve raised public awareness about this important UN document (yeah, right).

A bit of background: the Declaration was adopted by the UN General Assembly on Dec. 10, 1948, as a result of experiences during WWII, and almost every nation in the world voted to adopt it — US included. Eleanor Roosevelt, a powerful advocate of human rights, chaired the Declaration’s drafting committee. (It should be mentioned that the number of nations voting to accept was 48, and there were no “no” votes — although [no surprise] the Soviet Bloc nations and China were among the few that abstained.)

This is significant because of the sweeping coverage of the Declaration, and one of my favorite articles is number 25 (1): “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.” I urge you to read it again. Overall, the Declaration is amazingly detailed on exactly what rights humans are accorded, and the fact that so many nations signed it suggests that everyone agrees.

Except most notably the US, as things have turned out. Most of the rest of the world’s industrialized democracies leave us in the dust in the human rights department. What bothers me a lot is that the Declaration is such a well-kept secret. Every American should know what our obligations as human beings to each other are, and every American should know that nations can and should guarantee these rights for their people. But so help me, I’ve never heard it mentioned by even the most progressive pundit in the most progressive periodical or on the most progressive television show.

I want to know why. The Declaration hasn’t been repealed. If it had been, I’d find out when I Googled it. Wikipedia would have an update. A news search for Universal Declaration of Human Rights reveals little — at least not in the American press. We can check the papers come Dec. 10, for that’s the anniversary date of the Declaration’s adoption. I won’t get my hopes up.

End this madness (updated)

Here we are again, on the verge of our annual madness. Okay, so it’s six days away, but that qualifies as a verge — and there’s still time to end it. (Note: the original post was added six days before clocks were moved ahead in 2012.)

I’m talking about Daylight Savings Time, or setting the clocks ahead, one of the dumbest things we do each year. And I know if Congress passed a law today that restored sanity to the management of time, it would be awhile before it could go into effect.

So maybe we need a hew and cry. No one I know likes having to change the clocks — especially having to move them ahead an hour each March. It’s an awful long wait to get that hour back.

I don’t understand why a movement to get this thing repealed doesn’t get any traction. I wrote my congressman last year and suggested he introduce a bill to get Daylight Savings Time repealed. It’s a win-win, I told him. Need a compromise? Then how about setting the clock back a half hour next fall and LEAVING IT THERE FOREVER. He’d be a hero, I suggested. Did I hear back? No. Was such legislation introduced? No.

So maybe we need to take matters into our own hands. Maybe everyone should keep their clocks and watches where they are and continue operating on Standard Time. Let’s call it a protest. Let’s persuade Microsoft to quit updating our computers for the time change. Let’s tune in for the Six O’clock News at seven (their time), and miss the news that there’s a protest going on. Let’s show up an hour late for work and dare them to fire us. If we stick together, we can’t lose.

Okay, I’m delirious, but understand this — the delirium is a medical condition caused by the anticipation of setting the clocks ahead, which results in a lot of unhealthy anxiety and aggravation. It makes me nuts. I hate it, hate it, hate it, and I’m not alone. We MUST take into account that it’s not a good idea to disrupt my circadian rhythm. I might explode and ruin a perfectly good chunk of the known universe. For Pete’s sake, let’s end this madness.

Postscript: There are a petitions out there to end Savings Time. Here are a few (I’m not gonna ask twice — sign the damn things):

http://www.petition2congress.com/6284/end-daylight-savings-time/

http://www.standardtime.com/

http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/end-daylight-savings

How to destroy a president, a man, and a country

In an Oct. 2010 interview with the National Journal, Mitch McConnell was quoted as saying, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president” — the first time McConnell made this vow publicly. But author Robert Draper reported what really happened in a book about a meeting of top Republicans right after Obama was inaugurated  and even the most impartial observers marveled as the GOP strategy began to unfold.

While Republicans bear most of the onus for crippling Obama, conservatives in the Democratic party did their share to undermine the president. The first stimulus wasn’t big enough, and many economists warned that it would not revive the economy as hoped, but Democrats from red states wouldn’t go along with a bigger package. Economists warnings came true, and high unemployment numbers were a glaring reminder of a slow recovery. Obama got the blame.

In his 2008 campaign for the presidency, Obama promoted the idea of a public option as part of health-care reform. Yet during the debate that dragged on for over a year after the inauguration, it was never on the table — thanks mostly to every Republican and a handful of blue-dog democrats. The result — an Affordable Care Act that almost no one was happy with. Obama got the blame.

With the slow recovery and lingering unemployment, the mid-term elections in 2010 promised to be problematic for Democrats — and sure enough: they lost the House and lost seats in the Senate as energized Republicans turned out and indifferent Democrats stayed home. Obama’s problems were about to begin in earnest as Nancy Pelosi turned over the Speaker’s gavel to John Boehner.

The first thing the Republican leadership did once it had control of the House was to make Congress a part-time branch of government. No longer would the House be in session most of the year — it would now be on recess most of the year, with representatives showing up in Washington once in a while for a few days. And when they did show up, they did . . . nothing. To grapple with the slow recovery and lingering unemployment — and give some badly needed attention to our crumbling infrastructure — Obama offered up the American Jobs Act in Oct. 2011. It went exactly nowhere as John “Where are the jobs?” Boehner refused to bring it to the floor for discussion.

And so it went.

Obama so stunned Republicans when he won reelection in 2012 that they performed an autopsy on themselves — not that a cause of death was ever revealed. But like a zombie, the GOP kept eating the flesh of American democracy. “Obstruction” was on everyone’s lips for a while, and it did seem as though people had had enough of the Republican stranglehold on progress. GOP popularity bottomed out when they shut down the government in 2013, and most observers felt they were politically doomed for the foreseeable future.

Then came the Obamacare rollout, with enough technical glitches to turn it into a late-night joke. And Republicans seized the day. It doesn’t matter now that Obamacare has turned into an unqualified success despite its flaws, nor does it matter that it doesn’t reach every uninsured American only because a number of Republican governors refuse to go along with the expanded Medicaid provisions of the ACA. Obamacare became a joke with Obama’s name attached, and he’s paying such a price that Democratic candidates can’t even brag about it in their campaigns. Like the disciples who denied knowing Christ, they have disavowed Obamacare, and Obama himself.

Obama’s biggest mistake in all of this was being too much of a gentleman and a statesman. He had every right to repay Republican ugliness with his own. My own view is that Obama felt the US was having a hard enough time getting used to a black president. An angry black president would not have gone over well. So he tried to do his job in the only way available to him. The result? He got slammed for doing what every president before him has done — issued executive orders to get around congressional activity wherever he could. Threats of lawsuits and even impeachment followed.

We’re now a few weeks away from another midterm election, and unless a miracle happens and Democrats become reinvigorated, conservatives will have own of the three branches of government. Think nothing has gotten done since 2011? Just wait. If Americans had been paying attention, Republicans would be going the way of the Whigs at any moment. But blame Obama has worked, and Democrats will probably pay at the polls. This will set the stage for a Republican president in 2016 — and when that happens, Democrats may never get back control of government, and we can kiss America goodbye.

And in case anyone needs a reminder, remember what happens when conservatives own the government? Depressions happen, and I don’t want to think about what will follow.

Mothers, don’t let your babies grow up to play football

I lost interest in football back when Joe Namath was quarterbacking the NY Jets. I remember how opposing defensive players would rush him, deliberately trying to inflict further damage to his already ruined knees — not that Namath didn’t bear some blame for putting his physical health at risk. For me, the excessive violence ruined what might otherwise have been an interesting game of strategy and skill.

Before I knew there was such a thing as football — or American football — my game was Fussball. My father, a German immigrant, played on a club team against club teams made up of immigrants from other European countries. I’d watch him play on chilly Sunday afternoons in Queens, NY, and even as a small boy I came to understand that Fussball, which meant football in German, was called soccer in the US. But soccer is football, because it’s played with the feet, while American football is played primarily with the hands. In fact, it’s illegal for any player except a kicker to move the egg-shaped football with their feet.

Today American football is under scrutiny because of the cumulative effects of head injuries that are claiming the health and even lives of older players, some of whom committing suicide in a way that preserves their brains for medical study. On my block we did play touch football when we were kids, and except for the inevitable skinned knees that were the risk of playing on asphalt, no one got hurt. It’s hard to imagine touch football becoming a multi-billion-dollar game though.

It’s harder to imagine an American landscape without football. Despite the risks, Americans just love violence, and parents would have to uniformly deny their kids the permissions required to participate to have an ultimate effect on the player pool. It won’t happen as long as many continue to see a football scholarship as the ticket to college.

Because we don’t usually see the grievous effects of a concussion immediately, most are not turned off enough by the violence as I was. And when we hear of a retired player shooting himself in the chest in order to preserve his brain for dissection, we don’t really make the connection to what happened repeatedly to that player during games.

I suppose over time things may change. There’s too much at stake for Professional Football to ignore the problem, even if the victims are relatively few in numbers. In my opinion, modern helmets give a false sense of security because of how the brain is encased in the skull — and the brain isn’t immune from Newton’s First Law of Physics, which states that a body in motion tends to stay in motion.

Visualize it this way: When a 260-pound running back builds up a head of steam, his brain is traveling at the same speed. When the back comes to a sudden stop, his brain keeps going at his original speed because it is surrounded by a cushion of cerebro-spinal fluid, which gives the brain room to move about bit. But when the brain does come to a stop, it slams against the inside of the skull, which can cause bruising — and no helmet in the world will prevent this because nothing humans can devise will cushion the brain inside the skull. And if this happens too often, permanent damage can develop. And it does, unfortunately, as the number of  former players with brain damage will attest.

What — another epiphany?

A lot of Christians think John 3:16 is their ticket to heaven. You know — For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life . . .  or, you can be a real shit and still get into heaven. Wikipedia puts it this way: “It has also been called the ‘Gospel in a nutshell,’ because it is considered a summary of the central theme of traditional Christianity.” I bought into it myself when I was a kid, but after my epiphany (see the previous post), I began to think about the various elements of my former religion. John 3:16 was one of the casualties.

Aside from the fact that I’d stopped believing in God, I simply couldn’t accept that a religion supposedly dedicated to goodness would reward someone with eternal life if they just believed in Jesus, no matter what else they did in life — and as far as I can tell there are no exceptions. But it was only today that I figured out what’s wrong with the whole notion.

I should note that I had to do a little further reading to find out more about the Gospel of John, and the first thing I learned was that its author is not known, only that, according to the gospel, it was “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” Then, the verse as it appears in the King James version is its seventh translation from the original Koine Greek. Finally, it’s impossible to know just how many times early versions of the bible were transcribed before the invention of the printing press, but it’s a safe bet that transcriptions were never identical, either because of errors or because of what individual transcribers thought was meant by what they were copying.

What settles it for me is this: as interpreted, the verse expects you to accept that the god Christians believe in would reward evil people with eternal life just because they believed in Christ — and if Christianity is the religion Christians think it is, they wouldn’t buy it either.

Count me among the countless people over the millennia who have interpreted the verse when I offer this: however it was worded in the original Greek, its intent was to reward those who were faithful to what Christ taught — which raises the bar considerably. Christ himself didn’t found Christianity, but if he had he sure wasn’t going to make it easy.

Do NOT violate my sense of decency

I began life as a Lutheran, not that I had anything to say about it. When you’re a few weeks old, you can’t tell your folks that you need a little time to think about it before they assign you a religion. About seven years later, we moved to the suburbs, and because there were no Lutheran churches handy, I was now a Presbyterian. Hey — what did I know. Several years later, my Presbyterianism was confirmed, and I was eligible to drink communion wine (or grape juice, which at the time I thought was puzzling, since wine was a stand-in for the blood of Christ, and here grape juice was a stand-in for the stand-in ?).

What hadn’t occurred to me up to this point was that when I was a newborn someone decided in my behalf I was a Christian without asking me, and I grew up thinking I must be.

But that changed in my middle 20s, when I had one of those epiphanies — in a dream, I think. It must have been in a dream because I woke up one morning knowing the truth, or what I’ve been satisfied since is the truth. “God didn’t create man,” I’d concluded during the night, “man created God!”

When I told my mother (the one who’d designated me a Christian in the first place, she asked me what I meant — and I proceeded to explain (in something of a parable, I guess): “Back in prehistoric times, when cave men were finally able to string thoughts together and communicate crudely, a bunch of them were sitting around a fire wondering why things were. But because there were no encyclopedias or Wikipedia at the time, they didn’t know and had no way to find out, so they figured the great spirits must have created everything. As time went by these spirits coalesced into an organized set of gods — and finally, in the interest of economy, one god.” (I don’t think I used the word “coalesced” then. I’ve also come to realize since then that while people might think there’s one god, there’s really several versions of that god.)

What followed in human history was knowledge, and here we are today. Some deny much of this accumulated knowledge and still believe as the ancients did, but most have accepted the laws of physics and science and nature and so forth even while believing in God. A relative few believe reason trumps faith altogether and cannot buy into the idea of faith, and I happen to have become one of those overnight back in the 1960s, when I had that epiphany.

Now, I have nothing to prove my version of the truth — there is no record of that gathering around the campfire that night. There are only the stories those ancestors of ours handed down through the generations over thousands of years — and my version parts company with those stories from the get-go. My truth makes sense because science informs me of why things are and how they happened, not the hand-me-down memoirs of stone-age people.

I will never condemn or attack people for their peaceful personal beliefs, not will I try to persuade them to believe the way I do. Everyone has to find the truth in their own way, and if their truth differs from mine, oh well. What I resent is when people attack me for my beliefs and try to persuade me to see things their way. It violates my sense of decency.

Thous shalt not be hypocrites

Conservative Christians, who advocate prayer in public schools, at sporting events, government meetings, and other places, and promote themselves publicly as being faithful Christians, ignore the words of Jesus, from Chapter 6 of the Gospel of Matthew:

[5] And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.

[6] But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.

[7] But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking.

I have to wonder: if people who profess to be followers of Christ don’t practice what Christ preaches, how can they call themselves Christians?

Rants of a bleeding-heart liberal?

And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.

The meek shall inherit the earth.

Judge not, that ye not be judged.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.

He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.

Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.

On ending racism

Many Americans are shocked when racism rears its ugly head. “In this day and age? Aren’t we past that?” No, we’re not — and we’re a long way from even having a serious conversation about it.

The fact is, people aren’t born racists, but it’s also true that racism is passed on from generation to generation. The racist slurs and remarks a child hears in its formative years usually leave a permanent impression, and it takes a remarkably strong and self-aware person to deliberately overcome such negative influences so they don’t pass them on to their own children. For this reason, it will still take many generations for racism to be a thing of the past in America. But if we could talk about it from this perspective, it might happen sooner.

On a personal note, I grew up steeped in my father’s biases, which were quite typical of the day, and as a kid I wasn’t much different from most of my peers. My maternal grandmother’s unflagging tolerance helped counter my father’s attitude though, and a tour in the Air Force erased whatever lingering biases I might ever have harbored. By the time I was a parent I’d shed them all and wound up raising a remarkably unprejudiced son.