The World According to Opa

There is perhaps no other “wedge” issue today that so divides the American people.  Almost all Republicans are vehemently opposed to abortion while almost all Democrats side with a woman’s right to choose.

I stopped to chat with my neighbor the other day after taking our dog out for a walk. He, a much younger man than me, was outside cultivating his rose bushes. Roses seem to be a passion with him. He grows some real beauties. I, on the other hand, prefer air-conditioned comfort and a good book or my computer.

Immediately after we had answered each other’s query about how we have been doing lately, my neighbor asked me where Barack Obama stands on abortion.  Obviously, he had noticed the Obama signs that are posted prominently in both the front and back of our townhome. Caution, I thought, This is a trap.

There is perhaps no other “wedge” issue today that so divides the American people.  Almost all Republicans are vehemently opposed to abortion while almost all Democrats side with a woman’s right to choose. Many will cast their votes on this one issue alone in the fall, even over concerns that they may have about the economy or the war in Iraq.  So I prefaced my response with, “I’m no expert on this, nor am I a spokesman for Senator Obama, but I do remember him saying that he personally thinks it is wrong and that there are way too many abortions each year in America.”

I did not say, although I probably should have, that I am neither pro-life nor pro-choice. I can come down on either side of the argument, which makes me something of a rare bird. Even though my mother once told me that I would not be alive had abortions been safe and legal when she first realized that she was pregnant with me, I can understand and respect the problems inherent in imposing an outright ban.

“Really!” my neighbor reacted. “So, he would favor overturning Roe vs. Wade.”

“No, I don’t think so,” I said.  “Obama has said that he favors reducing the social and economic factors that are behind women opting for abortion to terminate unwanted pregnancies.”

A long discussion ensued. He stressed the moral side of the issue, while I tried to steer the debate to the secular/societal consequences of criminalizing abortion. This had been done in most of America from the mid-1800s until1973. It was in 1973 that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade. The court held that during the first trimester, a woman has the right to decide what happens to her body. This landmark decision rested on the “right to privacy,” which was introduced in 1965. In addition, the Court ruled that the state could intervene in the second trimester and could ban abortions in the third trimester. However, a central issue, which the Court declined to address, is whether human life begins at conception, at birth, or at some point in between.

“Y’know, outlawing abortion in America for years,” I said, “did nothing to prevent unwanted pregnancies, and some estimates put the number of illegal abortions before Roe vs. Wade at over a million each year. Besides, almost every man and woman in prison today was an unwanted child.”

My neighbor countered with his knowledge of Scripture, which he believes is quite literally the Word of God.

“Yes,” I said, “you and I are both Christians, and you and I both deplore the taking of life, especially innocent life.  But we’ve been down this road before.  Banning abortion will not stop abortion.  It will merely drive it underground, into back alleys and sleazy, unsanitary motel rooms.”

I was running late and would already have to leave unprepared for a committee meeting that I was in charge of at my church, so I bid my neighbor goodbye.  I explained my reason for having to cut our discussion short, suggesting that we might continue it when next we meet. However, this was disingenuous of me. I actually hoped to avoid a second round as I now know that reason cannot prevail where passions run so deep.  I do hope though, perhaps in vain, that our discussion planted the seed of reason in my neighbor’s mind. There are many different ways to look at problems like this, and many different consequences to consider for the choices that we might make.

This election year, I am hoping that Americans won’t neglect the bigger picture for the sake of a single issue, be it the abortion issue, the tax cut issue, the gun control issue, or even the issue of how and when to bring our forces home from Iraq. I believe that it’s alright to feel passionately about things, I do… But I also believe that we must begin to act rationally and start pulling the oars of progress in unison again or else this wonderful nation of ours will continue its decline from greatness.

I invite your comments, pro or con.

“Our Constitution is perilously close to being consigned to the valley of the shadow of death, betrayed by a powerful cabal of secrecy-obsessed authoritarians.”

For my birthday this week, a good friend gave me a Barnes and Noble gift card. Although this lady’s political persuasion is quite the opposite from that which my wife and I share, she is perhaps the best friend we have here in the Dallas/Ft. Worth metroplex. I know that she would rather I used her gift to buy some arty coffee-table book or even the latest John Grisham novel, but I think I’ll use it instead to purchase Bill Moyer’s new book, “Moyers on Democracy” (Doubleday, 2008), from which the following is an excerpt…

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“Democracy in America is a series of narrow escapes, and we may be running out of luck. The reigning presumption about the American experience, as the historian Lawrence Goodwyn has written, is grounded in the idea of progress, the conviction that the present is ‘better’ than the past and the future will bring even more improvement. For all of its shortcomings, we keep telling ourselves, ‘The system works.’

Now all bets are off. We have fallen under the spell of money, faction, and fear, and the great American experience in creating a different future together has been subjugated to individual cunning in the pursuit of wealth and power -and to the claims of empire, with its ravenous demands and stuporous distractions. A sense of political impotence pervades the country — a mass resignation defined by Goodwyn as ‘believing the dogma of democracy on a superficial public level but not believing it privately.’ We hold elections, knowing they are unlikely to bring the corporate state under popular control. There is considerable vigor at local levels, but it has not been translated into new vistas of social possibility or the political will to address our most intractable challenges. Hope no longer seems the operative dynamic of America, and without hope we lose the talent and drive to cooperate in the shaping of our destiny.

The earth we share as our common gift, to be passed on in good condition to our children’s children, is being despoiled. Private wealth is growing as public needs increase apace. Our Consti- tution is perilously close to being consigned to the valley of the shadow of death, betrayed by a powerful cabal of secrecy-obsessed authoritarians. Terms like ‘liberty’ and ‘individual freedom’ invoked by generations of Americans who battled to widen the 1787 promise to promote the general welfare have been perverted to create a government primarily dedicated to the welfare of the state and the political class that runs it. Yes, Virginia, there is a class war and ordinary people are losing it. It isn’t necessary to be a Jeremiah crying aloud to a sinful Jerusalem that the Lord is about to afflict them for their sins of idolatry, or Cassandra, making a nuisance of herself as she wanders around King Priam’s palace grounds wailing ‘The Greeks are coming.’ Or Socrates, the gadfly, stinging the rump of power with jabs of truth. Or even Paul Revere, if horses were still in fashion. You need only be a reporter with your eyes open to see what’s happening to our democracy. I have been lucky enough to spend my adult life as a journalist, acquiring a priceless education in the ways of the world, actually getting paid to practice one of my craft’s essential imperatives: connect the dots.

The conclusion that we are in trouble is unavoidable. I report the assault on nature evidenced in coal mining that tears the tops off mountains and dumps them into rivers, sacrificing the health and lives of those in the river valleys to short-term profit, and I see a link between that process and the stock-market frenzy which scorns long-term investments — genuine savings — in favor of quick turnovers and speculative bubbles whose inevitable bursting leaves insiders with stuffed pockets and millions of small stockholders, pensioners, and employees out of work, out of luck, and out of hope.

And then I see a connection between those disasters and the repeal of sixty-year-old banking and securities regulations designed during the Great Depression to prevent exactly that kind of human and economic damage. Who pushed for the removal of that firewall? An administration and Congress who are the political marionettes of the speculators, and who are well rewarded for their efforts with indispensable campaign contri- butions. Even honorable opponents of the practice get trapped in the web of an electoral system that effectively limits competition to those who can afford to spend millions in their run for office. Like it or not, candidates know that the largesse on which their political futures depend will last only as long as their votes are satisfactory to the sleek ‘bundlers’ who turn the spigots of cash on and off.

The property qualifications for federal office that the framers of the Constitution expressly chose to exclude for demonstrating an unseemly ‘veneration for wealth’ are now de facto in force and higher than the Founding Fathers could have imagined. ‘Money rules. Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. The parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us.’ Those words were spoken by Populist orator Mary Elizabeth Lease during the prairie revolt that swept the Great Plains slightly more than 120 years after the Consti- tution was signed. They are true today, and that too, spells trouble.

Then I draw a line to the statistics that show real wages lagging behind prices, the compensation of corporate barons soaring to heights unequaled anywhere among industrialized democracies, the relentless cheeseparing of federal funds devoted to public schools, to retraining for workers whose jobs have been exported, and to programs of food assistance and health care for poor children, all of which snatch away the ladder by which Americans with scant means but willing hands and hearts could work and save their way upward to middle-class independence. And I connect those numbers to our triumphant reactionaries’ campaigns against labor unions and higher minimum wages, and to their success in reframing the tax codes so as to strip them of their progressive character, laying the burdens of Atlas on a shrinking middle class awash in credit card debt as wage earners struggle to keep up with rising costs for health care, for college tuitions, for affordable housing — while huge inheritances go untouched, tax shelters abroad are legalized, rates on capital gains are slashed, and the rich get richer and with each increase in their wealth are able to buy themselves more influence over those who make and those who carry out the laws.

Edward R. Murrow told his generation of journalists: ‘No one can eliminate prejudices — just recognize them.’ Here is my bias: extremes of wealth and poverty cannot be reconciled with a genuinely democratic politics. When the state becomes the guardian of power and privilege to the neglect of justice for the people as a whole, it mocks the very concept of government as proclaimed in the preamble to our Constitution; mocks Lincoln’s sacred belief in ‘government of the people, by the people, and for the people’; mocks the democratic notion of government as ‘a voluntary union for the common good’ embodied in the great wave of reform that produced the Progressive Era and the two Roosevelts. In contrast, the philosophy popularized in the last quarter century that ‘freedom’ simply means freedom to choose among competing brands of consumer goods, that taxes are an unfair theft from the pockets of the successful to reward the incompetent, and that the market will meet all human needs while government itself becomes the enabler of privilege — the philosophy of an earlier social Darwinism and laissez-faire capitalism dressed in new togs — is as subversive as Benedict Arnold’s betrayal of the Revolution he had once served. Again, Mary Lease: ‘The great evils which are cursing American society and undermining the foundations of the republic flow not from the legitimate operation of the great human government which our fathers gave us, but they come from tramping its plain provisions underfoot.’

Our democracy has prospered most when it was firmly anchored in the idea that ‘We the People’ — not just a favored few — would identify and remedy common distempers and dilemmas and win the gamble our forebears undertook when they espoused the radical idea that people could govern themselves wisely. Whatever and whoever tries to supplant that with notions of a wholly privatized society of competitive consumers undermines a country that, as Gordon S. Wood puts it in his landmark book The Radicalism of the American Revolution, discovered its greatness ‘by creating a prosperous free society belonging to obscure people with their workaday concerns and their pecuniary pursuits of happiness’ — a democracy that changed the lives of ‘hitherto neglected and despised masses of common laboring people.’

I wish I could say that journalists in general are showing the same interest in uncovering the dangerous linkages thwarting this democracy. It is not for lack of honest and courageous individuals who would risk their careers to speak truth to power — a modest risk compared to those of some journalists in authoritarian countries who have been jailed or murdered for the identical ‘crime.’ But our journalists are not in control of the instruments they play. As conglomerates swallow up news- papers, magazines, publishing houses, and networks, and profit rather than product becomes the focus of corporate effort, news organizations — particularly in television — are folded into entertainment divisions. The ‘news hole’ in the print media shrinks to make room for advertisements, and stories needed by informed citizens working together are pulled in favor of the latest celebrity scandals because the media moguls have decided that uncovering the inner workings of public and private power is boring and will drive viewers and readers away to greener pastures of pabulum. Good reporters and editors confront walls of resistance in trying to place serious and informative reports over which they have long labored. Media owners who should be sounding the trumpets of alarm on the battlements of democracy instead blow popular ditties through tin horns, undercutting the basis for their existence and their First Amendment rights.”

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I read the above exerpt this morning before going to church.  It was posted just yesterday on AlterNet and brought to my attention in an email last night by another of my friends.  I was struck by its significance with respect to the current state of our Republic and the all but universal cry from the electorate this year for change.  Then, during worship, our congregation was led in the singing of, “Lord, You Give The Great Commission,” the fourth stanza of of which follows:

Lord, You show us love’s true measure:
“Father, what they do, forgive.”
Yet we hoard as private treasure all that You so freely give.
May Your care and mercy lead us to a just society.
With the Spirit’s gifts empower us for the work of ministry.

During worship and the singing of this hymn, I was double struck by the power of Bill Moyer’s latest work. It is social and political commentary at its very best!

I invite your comments, pro or con.

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Bill Moyers (born June 5, 1934, as William Donald “Billy Don” Moyers) is an American journalist and public commentator.  He served as White House Press Secretary from 1965-7 during the LBJ administration. He is President, since 1990, of The Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, also know as The Schumann Foundation or the Florence and John Schumann Foundation. He lives in New York City.

The Framers really didn’t believe in those famous words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”  We are not equal, we never have been — never will be.

I never thought of myself as being elitist, not until Barack Obama was labeled this by Hillary Clinton for comments he had made about the every-day, working class people of Pennsylvania.  But I guess, for thinking the way I do, one might call me this too. 

According to Wikipedia, an elitist is one who believes that those who have outstanding personal abilities, intellect, wealth, specialized training or experience, wisdom, or other distinctive attributes – are those whose views are to be taken most seriously and are thus, best fit to govern.  It does not mean that one who is a member of some elite group, whether academically, socially, or professionally, necessarily looks down upon those who, by choice or by circumstance, do not measure up. Nor does it mean that an elitist necessarily considers him or herself to be elite.

What I’m saying here, in case you haven’t anticipated where I’m going with this, is that we all should want someone this time around who is in-fact elite by virtue of intellect, experience, and wisdom to be the leader of the free world.  Which brings me to the premise of this posting… if we believe that we truly have a demo- cratic process for selecting our nation’s leaders, that there really is such a thing as One Man, One Vote (or I guess I should I say, One Person, One Vote), we’re just kidding ourselves.  Delegates select the winners of elections, voters don’t.  And, within the Democratic Party at least, there are delegates and then there are delegates – superdelegates, those whose votes count more than those of the common delegates.  Why?  Because the elite don’t trust the judg- ment of We the People – they never have.  And make no mistake about it; the Framers of the Constitution were elite as well as elitist.  All were educated, all were relatively wealthy, all were considered to be wise, even if they all were not, and all were free, white men who considered themselves to be superior to any woman and anyone who was not white.

Think back for a moment about what we learned in our govern- ment and/or civics classes in high school.  Recall that there was nothing in the original Constitution guaranteeing individuals the right to vote.  That was left up to the discretion of the individual states, and the rules varied from one state to the next.  But what was consistent from one state to the next was that only free, white men, men who owned property and who were not in debt, were allowed to vote.  So the Framers really didn’t believe in those famous words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” We are not equal, we never have been – we never will be.  Each of us is uniquely special — different from everyone else.  What was in the Constitution, from day-one, was the process by which our Presidents are selected, the Electoral College.

Now, here’s an idea to chew on, one that I already know won’t fly.  I know it won’t because my wife thinks it’s a stupid idea, and her opinion is usually pretty good when it comes to my ideas.  But bear with me, if only for the sake of intelectual discourse.  Logically, I think it makes sense.  I call it “voter scaling.” 

Resolved, we should get rid of the Electoral College altogether.  Further resolved, we should get rid of the delegate selection process too, in all political parties.  Instead, by Constitutional amendment so that it would apply uniformly to all citizens, we should institute procedures allowing us to elect our leaders directly – one man (person), one vote… well, sort of.  To do this in a way that would ensure good judgments and minimize the influence of special interests, wealth, and the status quo at all levels of govern- ment, we should give the most weight to the votes of those among us who are the most elite in terms of education, civic conscience, altruism, and patriotic service.  Notice that I have left out wealth and social status as determinants of eliteness. 

Okay, let’s say that every citizen gets a vote (one point), regard- less of their level of education or other factors.  Let’s say too, that everybody that graduates from high school gets another point (a second vote), completing college would qualify one for a third point, completing graduate studies, a fourth point, completing doctorate studies a fifth point.  Let’s say too, that for serving our country honorably, either in uniform or in something like the Peace Corps, one would gain an additional point regardless of one’s level of education.

We could make this democratic algorithm even more sophisticated by allowing individuals to buy influence, not by contributing to political campaigns as is currently done, but by contributing time, money and other resources, to the common good.  Maybe teachers and civil servants should have marginally more influence.  Maybe sitting judges, winners of the Nobel Peace prize and recipients of the Presidential Freedom Award should get extra points. And just to make sure that nobody feels like their vote isn’t important, perhaps we should consider adopting the Australian practice of fining citizens for not voting.

To really fix what’s wrong with government today, I would further advocate the passage of strong campaign finance legislation and a term-limits Constitutional amendment for members of congress.

But, alas, I know my wife is right.  All this is just elitist blah, blah, blah.  Those who are in power today would never allow any of this to happen.

Feel free, please, to comment pro or con on this.  I look forward to reading your reactions.

Until we are able to close the many social/economic gaps in our country that spawn violent crime, I truly do think that limiting the proliferation and access to hand guns by convicted felons and mental patients should be put back on the legislative agenda.  I would feel much safer knowing that there are not more hand guns in this country than people who might use them. 

A good friend of mine attended a TFN (Texas Freedom Network) conference recently.  He brought back a publication on organizing effective “grass-roots” movements and decided to solicit some ideas.  I answered his email about it suggesting that, in light of the campus killings of twenty at Northern Illinois State University last week, the Kirkwood, Missouri City Council killing of five the week before, and the Virginia Tech campus massacre of thirty-three last April, perhaps it’s time for America to revisit the issue of gun control.

Truly, here in the Dallas area it seems like there is at least one senseless shooting tragedy in the news every day… kids robbing convenience stores and killing proprietors who resist, others blindly shooting through curtained windows of homes hitting innocent women and children.  Hardly ever do we hear about citizens legitimately defending themselves, their families or property with guns; notwithstanding, many Americans feel that they need guns for self-protection.  The number of states with some version of a Concealed Carry law, either “shall issue” or “not restricted” has grown from nine in 1986 to thirty-nine today.  All the remaining states are currently considering concealed carry laws http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concealed_carry.  Clearly, America’s response to increasing gun violence has been to arm itself.

Another recipient of my friend’s email responded to my “reply-to-all” answer by saying, “I suspect from the tone of this e-mail that you would favor a more restrictive government policy toward gun ownership. If this is true, are you sure that there is a cause and effect relationship between gun ownership and violent crime? How is it that our good friends, the Swiss, who have firearms (military firearms with ample supplies of ammunition) in virtually every home in the land, who carry firearms openly in the streets and on public transportation without public alarm, who participate in shooting sports like we play golf, have virtually no gun crime, allow their children to walk or ride public transportation to school unescorted, and can walk the streets of their cities day or night without fear of harm? Are guns really the root of our violent crime problem or could it be something else?”

This lady concluded her response by suggesting that we will likely hear nothing about gun-control debated in this election year because it is such a divisive political issue.  I wrote back saying, “I’m not so sure that you are right about our not hearing anything from the candidates about gun control prior to the November elections.  The Supreme Court has agreed to relook the question of whether the Second Amendment is still relevant to ‘individual’ ownership of guns.  They are doing so in response to an appeal associated with Washington D.C.’s legal attempts to limit gun crime in that city.  The Court is scheduled to hear arguments in March.  A decision is expected by June.  Results in this case either way are, I think, likely to make gun control an issue for debate by Presidential and Congressional candidates this year whether they want the debate or not http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/20/washington/20cnd-scotus.html.”

I went on to say, “Compared to Americans, the Swiss are a very different people.  They’re different in many ways.  They’re better educated for one thing, and they have no recent history of war. They have a higher per capita GDP than other larger European countries, Japan, or even the U.S.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland#Economy. The distribution of wealth in Switzerland is much more equitable than here in the U.S., and the crime rate is much, much lower http://dev.prenhall.com/divisions/hss/worldreference/CH/crime.html.   Although they speak many different languages, they have never had a “civil rights” issue with large segments of their society being treated as inferior citizens, and they control their borders.  Their unemployment rate is currently less than one fourth of ours too http://www.daube.ch/opinions/akld12.html.

Unlike here in the U.S., the Swiss still employ militia as a large part of their self defense forces.  This explains for me why personal firearms are so prevalent there http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_of_Switzerland. We used to rely on militias for national defense too, which was the original basis/justification for the Second Amendment.  Since we no longer rely on militias, those of us on my side of the gun argument wonder how our counterparts rationalize that it still applies.

Rather than comparing us to the Swiss as an argument against gun control, why not consider our closer neighbors for a comparison, the Canadians, as an argument for gun control?  We’ve a lot more in common with them — historically, socially, economically.  Murders committed with firearms per capita have been more than eight times higher in recent years here in the U.S. than in Canada.  Murder by other means (without guns) has been almost twice as high http://www.guncontrol.ca/Content/Cda-US.htm.  This, in my mind, clearly establishes a correlation between guns and violent crime.”

So, until we are able to close the many social/economic gaps in our country that spawn violent crime, I truly do think that limiting the proliferation guns and access to them by convicted felons and mental patients should be put back on the legislative agenda.  I would personally feel much safer knowing that there are not more hand guns in this country than people who might use them http://www.gunsandcrime.org/numbers.html.

Once the Second Amendment question is resolved this summer by the Supreme Court, states and local governments may be free to decide appropriate ownership and use restrictions.  Then enforce- ment becomes a nightmare, right?  So, instead of local, unenforce- able laws, perhaps the following would work to reduce the number of hand guns and, therefore, the violence perpetrated with them:  levying a heavy federally-mandated sales tax on new, legal purchases coupled with annual property/ownership/use taxes; putting some real teeth into a national registry database and allowing sellers to be sued for not properly employing it, and; instituting a buy-back program for weapons such as our Australian friends have done.  The last measure in this list could be paid for with revenue received from new hand-gun manufacturing taxes and an excise tax on imported hand guns.

Shot guns and hunting rifles?  These have legitimate uses by sportsmen and women.  But what to do about assault guns (fully automatic rifles and machine pistols), that’s a whole ‘nuther matter.  These, I believe, as well as all armor piercing ammunition, must be outlawed for private ownership at the Federal level.

Suggesting these things won’t make my gun-loving friends happy with me, I know.  But then, I’m not running for public office.

Enter your comment in the space provided below.

 Maybe the best way to live out the American dream these days is to sell our homes while they’re still worth something, convert our dollars to eros while they still have some value, learn German, and move to Bavaria.

In the wake of much political debate and talk show commentary over the them-versus-us issue of the war in Iraq, patriotism is a word that’s been bantered about quite a bit lately.  We all know what the word means, don’t we… or do we?

My dictionary says that patriotism is a noun meaning love for or devotion to one’s country.  The idea is simple enough, but it’s pretty darn slippery when you actually try to grab hold of it.  What I mean is this:  for Americans to be seen as being uniformly patriotic we must all love and be devoted to our country in the same way and to the same degree.  If we’re not, some of us will think that others are less patriotic… or “un” patriotic.  Take, for example, Barrack Obama’s recent choice not to comply with the conventional practice of wearing a U.S. flag lapel pin to display his patriotism.  Or better yet, John McCain’s opposition to the current adminis- tration’s refusal to abide by the Geneva Convention in the War on Terror.  Both men have had their patriotism called into question for these things.

Because I love my country but hate so much what the current administration has done to it, I too have had my patriotism impugned.  It’s not right to speak out against the country’s leadership in times of national emergencies, don’t you know.  If you’re not in support of the President’s “vision for victory,” you’re not supporting the troops, don’t you know.  Ah… Bull-Squashy!

For me, demonstrating love for and devotion to one’s country means doing things and sometimes sacrificing things so that all can be better-off, not just the top two percent.  It means strengthening not weakening Constitutional protections for individual rights and liberties that were won and defended by generations of Americans that have come and gone before us, generations that left us a legacy of truth and justice.  It means honoring and perpetuating that legacy.  It means giving one’s fair share, and more when one can.  It means standing firm against and opposing autocratic rule.

Now, I’m not about to start burning flags in protest, but I am now able to understand why some might want to do so.  I am now able too to understand why some of my students don’t want to stand in class in the morning and recite the Pledge of Allegiance in unison with a voice heard over the loudspeaker.  They, like far too many Americans these days, have become jaded by all the claims and contradictions made by our elected representatives.  Promises!  Promises!  And the rich keep on getting richer at the expense of the poor.  My students see it every day; they know how hard their parents are working, many of them two or more jobs each, just to keep their kids’ noses above water.  Forget about getting ahead.  They see how expensive it has become to get a college education and what happens when someone gets really, really sick in a family that’s not covered by health insurance.

Never has the gap between the super rich, the just plain rich, and the ninety-percent-plus rest of us been greater.  No wonder we are pulling ourselves apart, polarized by mass-media political appeal to wedge issues like abortion and gun control. What was it that Patrick Henry said? “These are the times that try men’s souls.”

I guess what it comes right down to is that I may not be as patriotic as I think I am.  If being a patriot means that I must also be a loyalist, then all these chest-beating, holier-than-thou Republicans in Texas are right about me.  Or maybe I’m more patriotic than I think, a little guy sitting at my computer on weekends trying to communicate to all the other little guys out there about how in a democracy it doesn’t make “Common Sense” for the reins of government to be put on the auction block every couple of years so that a different set of rich and powerful might have all the say for awhile.  I don’t know.  I just don’t know.  But I do know that I’m sick and tired of all the excuses government makes for not making any progress on the immigration issue, on the subsidizing of economic activities that don’t need help, on fixing the problems that they themselves have created with education, Social Security and Medicare.  I’m sick and tired of the gutting and ham-stringing of agencies that had been legally instituted over time to protect us and our environment against the excesses and abuses of industry, the pharmaceutical industries, the insurance industries, the energy and petro-chemical industries, the banking and commercial credit industries.  Most of all, I’m sick and tired of government spending our economy into bankruptcy for wars it started over false presumptions and lies.

I guess Oscar Wilde knew what he was talking about when he said, “Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.”

One of my good friends recently said, “Maybe the best way to live out the American dream these days is to learn German and move to Bavaria.”  I laughed when he said this, remembering back to the 60’s when the phrase, “America – Love Her or Leave Her,” became a popular response to protesters of the Vietnam War.  But, No, I thought, No, I’m not yet ready to leave her, not so long as there is hope.  Canada is looking better to me all the time, but America’s still a pretty good place to live, I think, and I have to believe that it’s possible to make her a better place.  But that’s not about to happen if we let our arrogance and pride stay in the way.  When we do this we lose the ability to make good decisions and we end up doing stupid things like preemptively invading other countries on lame excuses because they have something that we want.  Gee, wasn’t that why we went to war the first time in the Persian Gulf, to deny Iraq the spoils from doing the same thing?

So, for those of us who are still trying to make up our minds about which candidate to get behind in an election year that’s already been well under way for months, maybe it’s okay for us to rethink our traditional veneration of patriotism, if only just a little bit? Maybe we should consider what it really means before we start criticizing one another for the lack of it.

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