James M. Redwine

Events

Ah, Spring!

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Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) was one of America’s best-known authorities on the universality and similarity of religions and myths we humans have created and lived by for hundreds of thousands of years. Campbell saw these recurring cultural explanations and superstitions as deeply imbedded in our daily lives. One similarity many of these phenomena have is they often center around springtime. While mankind has left countless records of beliefs in supernatural beings long before Judaism, Christianity and Islam, these three currently ascendant faiths each reflect the significance of spring’s influence, especially in stories of rebirth. The famous prosecutor of the Charles Manson Family, Vincent Bugliosi (1934-2015), even based his understanding of Manson’s motives for murdering people he did not even know on Manson’s convoluted interpretation of the Biblical Rapture myth (Revelation: Ch. 14, 15-20).

In the springtime, Jews celebrate Passover with eight days of special prayers and a Seder supper. The Judaic legend is that God gave Moses the laws of the Torah and Moses passed those commandments for living onto the Jewish people. The Torah is the record of those guidelines.

Christians celebrate their belief in a promised rebirth and their God’s instructions on behaving, as delivered directly from God – the Son, Jesus. Christians have a period of Lent leading up to Easter Sunday and an Easter dinner. The New Testament contains those principles to live by.

Muslims venerate the Quran as the word from their God spoken through Muhammad for a period of time they call Ramadan. Each day starts with a meal, Suhar, then a period of fasting ending with a second meal, Iftar.

Jews and Muslims view themselves as descendants from the same progenitor, Abraham, and worship the same God. Christians also worship that God but further deify Jesus as God. These ostensibly symbiotic religious phenomena have not produced consistently symbiotic relationships between and among the three groups.

Repentance, reflection, prayer, forgiveness, generosity, hope and joy are some of the elements in each of these three religions springtime celebrations of rebirth. For Christians, Easter Eggs are a ubiquitous symbol of what many so-called pagan cultures use to represent these same important rituals.

However, springtime is not just for organized religions. It may be mere coincidence that our government sees springtime as a propitious time to suck tribute from us, but I doubt it. When April 15 rolls around the IRS starts its period of concentrated accounting for any money we may have somehow managed to stash aside. It is time for what President Abraham Lincoln, the creator of the income tax to finance the Union’s Civil War, called “A new birth of freedom”, yeah, right.

Call me a cynic, but I do not see it as a mere happenstance that as most of America is awash in the good feelings brought on by Passover, Ramadan and Easter our government is demanding from us what it wants to spend on its own priorities. I see method in the timing of TAX-TIME and spring flowers. I am even a little superstitious that the first hummingbird that appeared at Peg’s feeder showed up April 15. Its avaricious slurping reminded me of other blood suckers that appear for “rebirth” along with the dandelions.

Honor

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Gentle Reader, I was recently invited to address a group of high school honor students. I prepared the following remarks and hope they and you find them worthy of your interest. The theme given for the ceremony for the honor students was, “Write your own story”.  I designed my remarks around that theme.

HONOR

“Honor Students, as you write your life’s story you really only need to keep in mind a few elemental rules.

First, remember you are fortunate to have your American birthright to always guide you. When our son, Jim, first went to the old Soviet Union in 1992 he found complete strangers would pick him and his fellow Americans out and ask them if they were Americans. Jim decided the Americans stood out because they were the ones always smiling.

Then, when I taught judges in Kiev, Ukraine and Volgograd, Russia and the country of Georgia that had once been in the Soviet Union, people would stop my wife, Peg, and me on the street and ask us about America. We simply stood out from those around us. The reason was we were happy and smiling, but most of the natives were dour and stern. What we decided was that we were happy because we Americans had options; our freedom of choice was the difference.

So, Honor Students, as you write your life’s story never lose sight of the essence of being an American, that is your freedom to choose your own path. Of course, your freedom of choice has always been part of your lives. You have learned it at home and in school.

While I learned countless lessons of immense value in high school, I will share just three with you. The first involved the United States Constitution. Now you might think someone who had been to several colleges and even law school might know the Constitution through those schools. However, my most indelible lesson in the U.S. Constitution came from my high school American history teacher.

One cold autumn day our teacher came to class without his regular plaid sport coat. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and a flowery tie. He asked us in the class, “Why do I have the right to wear this short-sleeved shirt?” Naturally, none of us had a clue. He called on me, “Redwine! You should know the answer. The 2nd Amendment, you know, the right to bare/bear arms”. And I never forgot the 2nd Amendment after that.

Then there was our principal who taught me a lesson in sentencing. As a judge for more than 40 years I have been called on to devise many sentences that are fair, follow the law and do good, not harm.

I have many times remembered the wisdom of my high school principal who devised a “sentence” that perfectly fit the crime, that is, the football players including me who got into an out-of-control snowball fight during a lunch hour.

Our principal had us line up outside his office and ordered us not to move or talk while we waited for him to deal with us one by one. We stood in line dreading our punishment for 2 hours until he came out of his office and said, “Alright boys, no more brawls, now go to practice”. I have often thought back on this fair and imaginative “sentence” when I have had to make a sentence comply with the law but show mercy too.

Another lesson that helped guide me through several difficult sociological dilemmas involving the fair and equal treatment of people who came before me in court, was taught to me by my two high school football coaches when we played a game against another high school in a nearby town.

After the game our coaches put us on the bus and we drove to a restaurant in that downtown. Now, I realize to you Honor Students today, segregation is like something from a foreign country and a by-gone age. I assure you it was real.

I did not go to school with African American kids until after Brown vs. The Topeka, Kansas Board of Education in 1954 when the U.S. Supreme Court declared “separate but equal” in U.S. education may have been separate, but it was not equal and it was unconstitutional even though it was written to be the law.

My high school integrated my freshman year in 1957 and we had 3 black players, called coloreds back then, on our football team. So, when we stopped at that restaurant after the game our whole team went in, but the restaurant owner refused to serve our black players. Our coaches said, “If you won’t serve our whole team, none of us will stay”. So, we all returned to the bus.

This lesson in choosing the harder right over the easier wrong made a life-time impression on me as to what choices really matter. This experience made a better judge, and better person of me. It also helped me to recognize the major difference between American judges and the many foreign judges I have observed and taught. Foreign judges often refuse to devise a way around an unjust written law, but American judges will choose the harder right over the easier wrong and apply a legally acceptable but fair alternative to a tough case.

So, Honor Students, please write your own story knowing you have the right to choose where you go and what you do, what you believe and what you find invalid.

As Professor Joseph Campbell who taught at Sarah Lawrence College said, there is only one unpardonable sin, “To be unaware”. Therefore, pay attention as you write your story, do not let your life pass you by.

Also, Socrates told the Honor Students of Athens 2,500 years ago, “The unexamined life is not worth living”. In other words, be curious, challenge the status quo. As Alexander Pope cautioned in his poem, A Little Learning, “Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring”. That is, do not be fooled by too little knowledge or those who espouse it.

The poet Robert Frost advised us to take the road less traveled, or as that great philosopher Yogi Berra said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it”.

Honor Students, remember the sage advice of your mothers and “If you can’t say something nice, say nothing at all”.

And most importantly, as you write your own story, always “Choose the harder right over the easier wrong” and your life story will have a happy ending! If you follow these guideposts, I predict each of your life’s stories will be of great satisfaction to you and of great benefit to everyone else.

As Henry Wadsworth Longfellow said in his poem, A Psalm of Life, “Lives of great [people] all remind us, we can make our lives sublime and departing leave behind us, footprints on the sands of time”.

Honor Students, write your own story your own way and keep smiling!”

IU Wins

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At an IU game

Indiana University football coach, Curt Cignetti, promised his team would win before he ever took the field in Bloomington, Indiana. He has been better than his word and as I write this column on Halloween, I boldly predict the Hoosiers will be 9-0 after they beat Michigan State 34 to 23 at East Lansing, Michigan the day after tomorrow. I realize both the score and the total outcome could be different than what I assert, but that’s why they call them predictions.

I wish Coaches John Pont, Lee Corso and Tom Allen were going to be there to join in the celebration but I know they will be there with spirit and support; Peg and I certainly will be. As I have not been on campus as a student since 1970 and the Cream and Crimson have not had this kind of success since the 1967-1968 season, all Indiana fans now have something to cheer. I could tell when ESPN’s GameDay was at Bloomington before last week’s game, the student body was totally exhilarated.

I am confident that Coach Cignetti has been eagerly awaiting my analysis and game input. Perhaps he’s having a difficult time finding my phone number in Osage County, Oklahoma. If I had not had an accident at our small ranch earlier this week, Peg and I could attend the game and be available with advice.

I’m going to keep this column short as my minor accident while working around our place makes it difficult to write. That’s why I’m dictating this column to Peg; she always corrects them anyway. We will be parked in front of the television Saturday making sure that the Coaches know we are available if they need a quick fix. Our disciplined team will stay alert to the damage that penalties and turnovers cause; we do not expect to see many of either.

♫ “….
Never daunted, we cannot falter
In the battle, we’re tried and true
Indiana, Our Indiana
Indiana, we’re all for you. IU!” ♫

 

Labor Day

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My father’s father was killed in an accident when my dad was nine years old. My father had to quit school in his third-grade year to help his mother support the family. He went to work in an independent coal mine running water to the older workers. The mine was unregulated by state or federal law. The shaft was supported with tree limbs for beams and the coal produced was high sulfur. The dust he breathed helped lead to his death from cancer when he was fifty-eight. He left the mine which closed when the shaft collapsed upon some of the miners. Dad was out of the mine on a water run at the time the supporting tree limbs gave way.

It was not just coal dust that contributed to his health problems. When he had to search out another job after the cave-in, he found work in a cement plant where he breathed in cement dust for several years. He lost that job when he had a heart attack at age thirty-three but had no health nor unemployment benefits from the company. He was out of work and bedridden for six months while my mother nursed him back to health. They were without outside income or insurance during that period. That is why my father went into insurance sales. He and my mother were strong supporters of workers’ rights who revered Labor Day just as they did July Fourth. They knew that law was essential to ensure safe working conditions. Such things as child labor laws, restricted work hours and days, health precautions and minimum wage requirements are not socialist ideals but are some of the building blocks of our economy. Labor Day is a celebration of America’s commitment to fairness, equality and good economics in the workplace.

Of course, as Peg points out, for about half of America’s workforce the bulk of their work is in their homes. Peg says it is ironic that we have a national holiday named Labor Day. She asks, “What about some fairness and equality in labor around the home and, what’s more, what about some recognition not just for ‘child labor’ but for the labor of having a child?” I should have seen this discussion coming when I casually mentioned my days of manual labor for hire.

According to Peg, Mother’s Day is a fine recognition of mothers but flowers once a year just doesn’t cut it. “Where’s the beef?” she asks. “Where is the minimum wage for round-the-clock cleaning, cooking, laundry, deliveries, nursing, sewing, yard work, gardening, child care, carpooling, schedule maintenance, bookkeeping, counseling and furnishing a sympathetic sounding board for every hurt feeling? And what about some time off occasionally? How about some time alone with peace and quiet and a cool drink that somebody else brings to me?”

Well, Gentle Reader, you most likely fall on whichever side of this one-way discussion your gender dictates. So, for now, I plan to change the subject and return to a topic I may be able to discuss without interruption, that is, Labor Day. Oh, not the one Peg is on about, but the one declared by President Grover Cleveland in 1894. So here goes.

Peg got agitated as we watched numerous male politicians on television exhort the wonders of the American, mostly male, workers whose harsh working conditions in the 19th and 20th centuries caused the birth of Labor Day. When it came to Peg’s complaints about work in the home, I felt duty bound to point out that husbands were responsible for much of her complained about female labors. After all, someone has to wear the clean clothes, eat the food and watch the kids play soccer and baseball. It is not all beer and TV you know. And if anyone had ever asked men to have the kids, who is to say we might not have considered it.

Further, most men have no problem with wearing the same comfortable t-shirt and Levi’s for a week or so. And on top of that, beer and chips have plenty of nutritional value to sustain men through football season. I told Peg, gently, that she was being disingenuous in her analysis of the significance of Labor Day. Labor Day for male workers was much like the right to vote for women. While women were wearing white, marching and singing songs about freedom, we men were busy gathering at bars talking about seeking fair working conditions. Men gladly organized for shorter work weeks and safer working conditions as women sought not just the right to vote, but also better working conditions and fair and equal treatment everywhere. The two movements fed off the synergy of one another and, together, made life better for both men at work and women at home and work.

Of course, those intertwined crusades for justice made our country better for us all. So, I guess if Peg thinks Labor Day is truly about all labor, I will, in the spirit of home harmony, agree. After all, I’m getting hungry and the game’s about to start on tv and I’m hoping Peg will bring me chips and a beer.

Independence Day Jeopardy

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Photo by Peg Redwine.

John Adams, our second president, and Thomas Jefferson, our third president, were great friends who became estranged for years but reconciled before they both died on July 4, 1826. Each was an attorney who championed individual liberty and civil rights. Adams believed the date of America’s birth was July 2, 1776, the date the Continental Congress voted for independence. Jefferson thought our birthday was July 4, 1776, the date the Declaration of Independence was signed. Both Founding Fathers declared we should celebrate our founding with special activities.

Jefferson was the first president to host a July 4 commemoration at the White House. Jefferson wrote about Independence Day, “For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.”

Adams sent a letter to his wife Abigail on July 3, 1776 in which he declaimed:

“I am apt to believe that it (July 2, 1776) will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival.

…

It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews (shows), Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illumination from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”

My family, and most likely yours too Gentle Reader, have carried out these patriotic demands for as long as we have been fortunate enough to do so. For more than the past twenty years my family has gathered around July 4 and reveled in the wonder of the United States of America by engaging in a hotly contested Independence Jeopardy game.

Photo by Peg Redwine

This year our son Jim portrayed Benjamin Franklin, my nephews Dennis and David Redwine, donned the colonial frocks of Uncle Sam and George Washington and teams of relatives vied to earn the Independence Day Jeopardy championship. The competition was fierce and only barbeque and copious desserts could assuage those who came in out of first.

It is always good to get our large and close-knit family together, especially over a hotly contested game of colonial history. It is of special meaning in our current atmosphere of political upheaval to remind ourselves what truly matters. So, happy birthday to all of us whether you agree with Adams or Jefferson or choose some other special time around our founding in the first week of July, 1776.

Whose Birthday Is It?

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As I write this column the Weather App on my cell phone says the actual temperature is 98 degrees Fahrenheit with a heat index making it feel like 108 degrees. There is no breeze but that’s okay. If there were, it would simply baste our skin as though we were a slow crusting brisket. I ask you, Gentle Reader, “Why July Fourth?” Does not each of the twelve months have a Fourth? For example, the merry month of May or the crisp, invigorating month of October each has a perfectly good Fourth. And neither has a heat index of 108 degrees! Were our Founding Fathers so fond of their wool frock coats they were impervious to July’s guarantee of a reprise of Joan of Arc’s demise? What was Thomas Jefferson thinking as his Sons of Liberty compatriots dumped the tea into Boston’s Harbor on December 16, 1773? Why not fire off his written volleys against King George III then, when it was cool?

 Our rhetorical path today is an examination of the date of our country’s birthday and how we might celebrate it each year without getting suntan lotion and sweaty grit mixed into our barbeque. To me the solution is as simple as the whole country ignoring the gamesmanship of celebrating George Washington’s and Abraham Lincoln’s birthdays not on February 22 and February 12 as we did all of my school years. Why, with the stroke of a Congressional pen, voila, we now have President’s Day every year on the third Monday in February! I say, hooray! Now how about the Fourth of …?

 Many people throughout the world have celebrated the presumed birthday of Jesus. Yet, no one truly knows for sure when Jesus was born. We do know over the past 2,000 years more than one date has been chosen for Christ’s date of birth. For example, many people in Europe celebrate Christmas on January 07 because they follow the Julian calendar set by Julius Caesar in 46 B.C.

However, in 1582 Pope Gregory developed his calendar. The Julian Calendar and the Gregorian Calendar each gave a different day for Christmas. One was on the 24th or 25th of December and the other gave January 07. Does it matter? Apparently not. I say if the world can pick an arbitrary date for the birth of Jesus, we can re-set the birth of America to a friendlier clime. I respectfully suggest October 04 every year starting in 2025.

On a personal topic, one of my earlier Gavel Gamut columns drew the thoughtful attention of a reader, Mr. Jerry Butterbaugh. Mr. Butterbaugh, thank you for taking the time to read the column and thank you for your interesting perspective. You respectfully presented a different point of view without casting aspersions. Would that our beloved country as a whole could discuss our many serious issues in the same manner. Your points were clear and helpful. I appreciate them.

Also, since my wife Peg is about the only reader I can consistently rely upon, and that only because she has to type and post them, your response was most welcome.