The Parties Versus the People

How to Turn Republicans and Democrats into Americans

I thought I was perhaps alone in being deeply concerned with the us-vs-us politics of the last couple of decades.  Here's a thoughtful look by a knowledgeable insider.

Book Summary

To banish the negative effects of partisan warfare from our political system, a former congressman, drawing on his first-hand experience with legislative battles, presents a solution-based, practical way to break the stranglehold of the political party system.

Go to

to see the book write-up and a fascinating excerpt.  You can buy a copy there as well, if you like.

"In 1970, 47 percent of the members of the U.S. Senate were regarded as moderate. Today, that figure is 5 percent, and it is even lower in the House of Representatives. The decline of moderate views in Congress suggests a kind of dysfunction: a dramatic gap between the views and attitudes of the American people and the commonalities and differences that exist among our citizens, on the one hand, and what we wind up with in our elected representatives, on the other. Something is going wrong in our politics.

The dysfunction that has almost paralyzed our federal government has its roots not in the people, not in any fundamental flaw in our constitutional processes, but in the political party framework through which our elected officials gain their offices and within which they govern."

The author and former congressman Mickey Edwards came to a strong conclusion in his 16 years in Congress: Political parties are the "cancer at the heart of our democracy."

Edwards is one of the founders of No Labels, an organization devoted to bipartisan (or nonpartisan) political action. He argues for changes in how we elect our representatives -- the role of parties in primaries, redistricting, and campaign financing, he explains, has stifled the ability of voters to find and elect candidates who truly represent not only their interests, but their values. Once in office, he says, congressional members can and should be forced into more productive problem solving by removing or tweaking some of the worst (and most recent) excesses of partisan power.
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The dilemma we face with the upcoming election is that we have no opportunity there to address or resolve our adversarial gridlock.  Congress has settled into a partisan battle, it seems, with little ability to make progress for the good of the nation.

The parties have yet to offer anything we couldn't get at a wrestling match.  We'll vote for our favorite, perhaps, but we won't have solved our greatest challenge.  We don't need a political victory for one side or another, we need to be healed as a nation.

Muslim Peace

Dear friends in Djibouti - Dad and I met on a desert transit.

As-salamu alaikum. 

 Peace be upon you.

It's a greeting among Muslims, and the traditional response is 'and also upon you.'

If you have Muslim friends, they'll laugh and help you pronounce it, so you can use the greeting as well.

So, can we truly be at peace with one another? Is it really that easy to greet and enjoy one another across such a divide as Christian and Muslim? After all, there's a lot of turmoil today on that front, and a lot of folks we know about are working hard to widen the gap. Riot and murder, hatred and violence, and the fury of a burning ideology have plunged nations again to the brink of their own destruction.  Muslim, Jew, and Christian; is there reason?

Christian and Muslim children at play in Ethiopia;
it doesn't even cross their minds ....

The story is told of the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, and a crabby neighbor lady. It's said that she would dump refuse in his path daily, perhaps to show her disapproval and disrespect. The Prophet never responded in kind but went on his way until the day came that she failed to appear with her garbage. Concerned, the Prophet inquired and found that she was taken ill. When he visited her home and sincerely offered his help, she was undone; humbled and ashamed of her heart and behavior. The book says he was sent as mercy to mankind.  Nice.  I suspect Jesus would have approved.

Muslim and Christian children
and their families share this 
neighborhood.  Nice folks, 
welcomed me graciously.

Muslim friends flagged me down and

insisted I give them a ride home.  They

knew I would be glad to, of course.

Oh, there's reason for the violence, of course. There are reasons aplenty for one group to slander, vilify, and slaughter another over their differences.   I suspect, though, that neither the Prophet, peace be upon him, nor Christ himself would acknowledge such people as followers.

On the desert's edge, Muslim friends wave as we

part for a season.  They'd welcomed me, a Christian,

as a frequent visitor among them and instructed
 me on the issues of survival.

Can two friends from across such a wide chasm sit together and pray, share a meal and laugh a bit, and then part, speaking a blessing of peace to each other?  Of course they can.  It happens all the time.  All the time, all over the world. 

It's just not news.

Go see for yourself. 

 

 

 

Dear Lord and Father of mankind,

Forgive our foolish ways;

Reclothe us in our rightful mind,

In purer lives Thy service find....

... it's the world you love, isn't it.

And not just my little group.

 

God's favorite

It's good to be an American ... but God's favorite?

We've done wonderfully well, we Americans, and we've inspired so many others around the world, but our record is as yet unfinished and far from pristine. Civil rights, equal opportunity, freedom to speak and debate, freedom to work; folks come to live and work in America as perhaps the best place their world has to offer. There are two sides to that idea ...

    We've stated our values, but how did we act them out?  

          Looking back, it perhaps wasn't all that great a beginning.

We hold these truths to be self-evident ...

While we were proclaiming that 'all men are created equal',
we were driving out the native American men,
women, and children of the land.

... that all men are created equal ...

As we gave our word and covenant that each has the right to
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,
we had already brought 200,000
African slaves to the colonies.

... that they are endowed by their creator 

       with certain unalienable rights ...

Native American and native African, even indentured Europeans
displaced, killed, enslaved.

... that among these are life, liberty,

         and the pursuit of happiness.

Life? By the time these words were penned, around 80% of the native American population had vanished. Of the estimated twelve million original inhabitants, only a few hundred thousand survived at the end of the nineteenth century.  

Liberty?  An estimated 645,000 Africans were abducted from their homelands, brought to the U.S, and enslaved. By the 1860 census, there were 4 million as their children were born into slavery.

Equal?  At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, the United States, Britain and Australia rejected Japan's proposal of a "racial equality clause" in the League of Nations covenant.  Arrogance and racial discrimination towards the Japanese had plagued international relations since the forced opening of the country in the 1800s, and continued through the decades up to World War II.   

Through the twentieth century, we backed dictators who took our money and sided with us; no matter that their repressive regimes were cruel, inhumane, or even murderous, and we knew it in bloody detail.

We backed Mubarak in Egypt for decades despite his criminal human rights record. We backed totalitarian regimes in Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, how many?  Noriega,  Batista, ...  millions more died.

Weapons of mass destruction declared in Iraq, troop buildups on the Saudi border ... the reports were fabricated.

... of the people, by the people, for the people....

Government today follows the leadership of the elite

and acts on behalf of monied interests.

We've all recognized and
conceded the point.

Today on Wall Street and on Main Street in our cities, we pepper spray the public dissenters, and when we can, we throw them in jail.

Or we have the FBI break down their door in the middle of the night and haul them away to jail and then before a Seattle Grand Jury... on a warrant for 'black clothing' and possible 'anarchist literature'.

It's been two hundred years since such unreasonable search and seizure

were specifically denied to government agents. 

The intentions of those who founded this country were and still are quite noble.  

The goals they set are achievable;
there is so much yet to do
to make it real for all.

Troublesome times with great possibilities.  Let's be realistic; it is good to be an American.  Less than perfect, if we're objective, but good nonetheless.  Let's remember and affirm our values and press on toward the mark.  

Dear Lord and Father of mankind,

Forgive our foolish ways;

Reclothe us in our rightful mind,

In purer lives Thy service find....

See & be Seen

Ever wonder what it might be like, living in the shadow of wealth?  Well, that's precisely the concern.  Some cannot continue living when the wealthy behave irresponsibly.

For example, the Great Recession was triggered by the financial industry behaving irresponsibly.  They did so with government support, taking advantage of business-sponsored changes to the law.  The global economy fell into chaos, and hundreds of thousands who were hovering on the edge of survival died.  Goldman Sachs profited tremendously by marketing loans described widely in the industry as "liar's loans," and the world's poor took the loss.  Thank you Goldman Sachs.  Thank you Bear Stearns, AIG, and Merrill Lynch.  Thank you Republicans and Democrats.  Thank you, you selfish vermin, you who work so hard to win that you're willing to do so without a thought for the cost to others.


Wealth and power seem perhaps more a curse than a blessing.  It's so easy to do harm with such resources.  The obligation of responsibility is a weighty one; one which as yet hasn't shown itself in the financial marketplace.

"Without accountability, the unending parade of megabank scandals will inevitably continue," Neil Barofsky, the former watchdog over the $700 billion bank bailout fund and a frequent critic of the Obama administration's response to the financial crisis, recently told The Huffington Post.

There's no shortage of food in the world, by the way, and famine doesn't kill the rich.  There's enough food, just not enough good governance.  The problem of corrupt power in Rwanda or in coastal Somalia that ensures wealth for the influential ... that's the same problem of corrupt power in the U.S. and U.K. financial industries that triggered the recession.  And the deaths of hundreds of thousands.  That's what it's like to live in a world where you're not among the wealthy.

And now you know; that's how they see you.

Do not wait for leaders,
      do it alone,
           person to person.

A Woman's Place

What is a woman's place? At home? Or on the soccer field!

There were no women athletes in my high school!  None.  Not one. And no place for such things either.

In the south in the 50's, women were in a bind.  Perhaps as we recovered from the war years, many women tried to recapture their former roles as wife/ mother/ homemaker.  As a culture, we seemed to have an idealistic norm for femininity.  Reality took decades to reshape our thinking.

Holy cow, I remember seeing dress patterns like these on the table beside the sewing machine.

Church and school, community and the media, all reflected a narrow view of a woman's place.  She was to be feminine, somewhat fragile, elegant, home-oriented, and ... in many ways, sequestered (protected?) from the world in which men lived.

From a teenaged guy point of view, girls spent most of their self-expression efforts on their hair.  It was mind-numbing to hear them talk about it, and visually painful sometimes, especially when the big-hair thing was in full swing.
My college years in the 60's saw stereotypes crumbling as anti-establishment thinking challenged pretty much all of our social norms.  Conservatives and liberals (radicals?) were at each other's throats.

 

It helped my own thinking when I married a Texas girl.  She'd been fortunate to grow up in a practical, middle-class family that paid only minimal attention to social trends.  Tough-minded, adventurous, ... and a gymnast!  Scuba and skydiving were prenuptial conditions to our marriage upon which she insisted. 

We left home and country and lived overseas for most of my military career.  When we came home, much of what we had known had crumbled to dust.  Holy cow, what is this feminism stuff?

So, here we are five decades later.  Women in sports are everywhere!  Competitive, impressive athletes.  How great it is to see their world open up.  Women think, women teach, women decide, women tackle the business and political worlds.... It's not complete, this coming of age for our culture, but it's a great improvement, and my daughter (who has more backbone than a linebacker) gets to live in it without the artificial restrictions of the previous generation.  I'm so strongly in favor of the changes I see.  Does that make me a feminist?

The above was occasioned by pictures of my friend's youngest daughter.  A pretty young lady, she has beautiful coloration, physique, and natural beauty... and she plays field hockey, soccer, and football.  Well!  She's a powerhouse.  She would have been SO out of place in the 50's.  :)  And check out Women@NASA   There weren't any of those when I was a kid either!

(Just one more reason I love change!)

Islam in the News

This morning, my wife asked why a Florida crackpot pastor with a tiny congregation and a California (convicted felon) movie maker get worldwide attention. Why would anyone pay attention to such nonsense? That's the relevant question, and interestingly, the only major news source asking that question is Al Jazeera.

Is the reaction to anti-Islam film justified? - Al Jazeera 

At issue, the media's sensationalizing drivel from spectacularly inconsequential origins. These two have nothing significant to say to the world. There are millions with more relevant and beneficial contributions who are ignored by the media, perhaps because they lack the sensational splash that helps the stations ratings.

The movie trailer went viral after it was splashed across the middle-east by the news media. It wasn't news, just sensational trash, but it was given center stage as though it was the American stance on Islam. Shallow-thinking viewers believed the media and people died.

The Florida pastor, Terry Jones, has a dwindling congregation of about 50, the church has no mission statement, and Jones has an 'honorary doctorate' from an unaccredited school in California. Jones admits he doesn't know any Muslims, doesn't know the origin of Sharia law, and has never participated in any inter-faith discussions.

He has no knowledge of that against which he protests, he's never allowed his own position to be objectively examined, he has neither credentials nor peer reviewed work to support his philosophy or his actions. And the news media makes him world-known. Nonsense. (And as a friend pointed out today, this 'Christian' pastor seems to have abandoned Christian practices such as 'do unto others...'.)

Note to self; the major media outlets seem to be less than reliable information sources.  None of the major outlets seem to offer reliable investigative journalism. Often it seems that their content leans more toward eye-catching splash.

True? Are any of these media sources objective, unbiased, and legitimate journalism? Most are not most of the time, it seems, and perhaps none are all of the time.

While the originators of the slanderous and inflammatory film are fully culpable in the subsequent violence, the greater guilt rests with the news media that sensationalized and misrepresented the film as representative of U.S. attitudes.

Not all Muslims are so foolish. 

Fortunately.  In many places, citizens have been quick to condemn the violent behavior of the fanatical few.  Libya and Egypt today, both have seen spontaneous crowds of the peaceful protestors.

We have a couple of friends in the middle of all this violence and upheaval.  This, they say, this is not Islam, and this is not the heart of the people. 

Al Jazeera goes on to warn that the religious oppression, hatred and violence is "a toxic brew that inevitably begets more of the same"