Columns
Mutual Mayhem
The BBC reports Russia has threatened to respond with nuclear weapons against any country that attacks Russia with conventional weapons if that country is supported by a country with nuclear weapon capacity. In other words, if Ukraine sends missiles supplied by America, Great Britain or France into the heart of Russia, Russia may counter-attack with nuclear arms. This would be a change from the “no first nuclear strike” policy as adhered to by most nuclear-powered countries.
Russia is warning Ukraine and its main sponsor, the United States, that the nearly three-year long war between Ukraine and Russia is nearing a critical mass. Russia is not amused by what it expected to be a cakewalk turning into a catastrophe thanks to our massive military and diplomatic support. Russia’s message is clear; however, its threat may be more of the clanging brass variety since “mutually assured destruction” is not just a talking point. The devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki almost eighty years ago by atomic bombs still brings pause to most rational people. Especially since nuclear weapons can produce far greater destruction and result in much greater radioactive fallout that might last for many years over a wider area than atomic bombs.
Of course, if a country believed its best hope to survive an attack was nuclear retaliation, even if it meant its own possible extinction, nuclear war might be its Faustian Choice. History is replete with irrational decisions made by people who have chanced almost certain self-destruction if they can wreak “revenge” on those who would destroy them. The United States should acknowledge the possibility that Russia, or other countries such as Israel or Iran or North Korea, might see mutual, or even the whole earth, destruction preferable to just its own if it feels such a threat.
Our world appears to be on the cusp of expanded wars in several regions and America is deeply involved in at least two, Ukraine versus Russia and Israel versus Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank and Iran. Russia says the nuclear option is a possibility and Israel appears ready to take that same path. The United States is not immune from collateral belligerent fallout if nuclear war is stumbled into by other countries.
World War I began with one assassination and World War II began gradually over several years of small incursions by one country, Hitler’s Germany. World War III is not an impossibility for America no matter how strong and virtuous we see ourselves. We think our international entanglements are well-founded and in the world’s best interests. Of course, Russia, Iran, China, Taiwan, Israel and several other contestants think the same thing. Countries are made up of people and people usually see themselves as more sinned against than sinning. It may be past time for us to look inward before our outward actions bring the opposite from what we have convinced ourselves we are championing.
Believe It Or Not
How does a new religion get started? Islam fourteen hundred years ago? Christianity two thousand years ago? Judaism twenty-four hundred years ago? The Romans and Jupiter twenty-five hundred years ago? The Greeks and Zeus three thousand years ago? The Egyptians and thousands of gods four thousand years ago? Gentle Reader, these are just my guesses; you are, of course, free to make your own estimates or consult Google as you see fit.
However, my actual concern is the religion of presidential politics as practiced currently on cable TV in America. And I know when these new beliefs began. With FOX News, the new Defender of the Conservative Faith arrived when Donald Trump came down that golden escalator in 2015. As for CNN and MSNBC, their faith in a Liberal Deliverance was restored only a couple of months ago when Kamala Harris arose like the mythical Phoenix from the ashes of Old Joe.
As best I can tell, the liturgy of these conflicted beliefs relies heavily on denigrating whichever candidate a particular TV network does not like. Portentous warnings from talking heads claim that the election of the “wrong” candidate will cause crops to fail and Taylor Swift to become the new Pied Piper of American youth.
These dire warnings from CNN, FOX News, MSNBC and even occasionally, PBS, have become as ubiquitous as commercials and as vociferous as a Pentecostal sermon. CNN convenes numerous panels of “Never Trumpers” who have heard directly from on high that a Trump election will immediately boot America from our Promised Land. And FOX asserts that a Harris win will reign fire and brimstone all over our democratic Garden of Eden, or at least, everywhere but New York and California.
But, just as one religion after another from the dawn of recorded history has appeared and disappeared, we can all pray that this election will end before Armageddon begins. I foresee hope for salvation from this endless cacophony of vapidity, FOOTBALL! As we Americans have done since the first football game was aired on TV, we clutch at the hope our team will rise above the fray. We can seize onto the faith in our champions on the gridiron and set aside the ennui brought on by the gaggle of gloom bearers on TV. Unfortunately, football season only lasts through the Super Bowl in February of 2025. Of course, the networks are doing their best to force us to buy every game and the new Transfer Portal and Name, Image and Likeness rules are sorely testing our faith.
And, of course, whoever wins the election will be subject to four years of damnation from some of the disappointed anchors. Those sore losers will likely begin endless recriminations for venal sins they assert just over half of the electorate will have committed by worshipping a false idol. As for us in the captive viewership, maybe the INSP network will have enough Gunsmoke reruns to sustain us until the next two graven images are nominated four years from now.
Labor Day
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.
Hell Hath No Fury!
Abigail Adams (1744-1818) was the wife of our second president, John Adams, and the mother of our sixth, John Quincy Adams. She wielded great influence over both but could not secure for women the right to vote. Her effort in the cause of female rights is exemplified by the following excerpt from one of her numerous letters to John while he was deeply involved in the Continental Congress:
“- I long to hear that you have declared an independency [from Great Britain] – and by the way in the new Code of Laws [The Declaration of Independence and new Articles of the Confederation] which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice or Representation.” (April 1776)
A mere 144 years later most American women who were twenty-one years or older got the right to vote when the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920. However, in the meantime there was hell to pay for a lot of people who forgot the aphorism, “Hell Hath No Fury Like Women Scorned!” (from a 1697 English play by William Congreve, 1670-1729). Perhaps John Adams and his fellow Founding Fathers, they were all men at the Continental Convention, should have listened. Perhaps they might have saved the United States 144 years of angst and saved themselves many nights on the couch.
It is not as if women, and a lot of men too, were not struggling mightily for many years to give females equality. Such courageous heroines as Dolly Madison (1768-1849), Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) and Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906) were marching lecturing, writing and enduring social, political and even physical danger in the cause of female suffrage. And in my own family my grandmother, who had no right to vote until she was well beyond 21, instilled in my mother, who well remembered when women could not vote, the debt she and other women owed to those pioneers. The best way to repay it was to exercise their dearly bought franchise. My 87-year-old sister Janie was imbued with this burning ardor as is my wife, Peg, who is not 87 but whose dearly departed mother lit that same flame in her.
My sister is a testament to how sacred many women, and many men also, hold the right to vote. Janie has been diagnosed with a slowly progressing but debilitating illness that many would have called uncle to before now. However, I am confident nothing will prevent her from participating in an election that might result in our first female president. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote that I bet included Janie’s. But she and her distaff cohorts now have another chance. I have no doubt my beloved, and committed sister will make it to November 05 and, hopefully well beyond, the medical folks are of the opinion that they have no opinion. “It will be what it will be”, they say.
I think it may turn out that Peg’s mother, my mother and even our grandmothers and great grandmothers, all of whom have gone onto their rewards, may find some way to join Janie and Peg at the polls November 05, 2024, only 248 years after Abigail’s entreaty to John. Of course, many will exercise their rights in support of their contemporary female hopefuls but many women will vote for men on the ticket. And many men will freely vote for the fairer sex but will also support the men on the ballots.
In other words, gender will no longer be, and should never have been, a determining factor in either choosing a candidate or having the right to make such a choice. Congratulations to all of us for no longer basing our vital political selections on sex, no matter what that designation may be. Abigail should be beaming wherever she is.
The Crusade Charade
The Crusades were the outgrowth of many factors but they are generally categorized as a series of wars between European Christians and Middle Eastern Muslims occurring from 1096 to 1291 AD involving competing claims over the Holy Land, especially Jerusalem. The catalyst for the first Crusade was a call to Christians made by Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont in France in November 1095. Urban declared that God had willed Christians to oust Muslims from the sacred sites. Urban promised remission of sins for any Christian who died in this vital service of Christ. Thousands of English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and others “took up the cross.”
Later in the New World, priests, clerics and politicians and plain Americans have spent from the 15th century to 2024 spreading the gospel at home and continuing to attempt to control the beliefs and behaviors of Middle Easterners. Manifest Destiny was based on the premise that the god of Christians had ordained that America must eliminate paganism and not commit the sin of omitting to develop the land. Such “crusades” as the Trail of Tears were the outgrowth of European immigrants and their descendants’ beliefs that their god had ordained that America was the Promised Land for Caucasian Christians and that Native Americans had to be evicted, killed or converted to Christianity. This ingrained racial memory from 1492 until today may influence the justification for our invasions into the Muslim Middle East. Just as Native Americans had to be destroyed to save them, Muslims are still the enemies of Christ who must be saved from their misguided faith.
Most recently the United States has continued the tradition of the Crusades by invading Iraq twice and belligerently engaging Iran and such groups as ISIS, Hamas, Taliban, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda and others. America designates these groups as terrorists but they claim to be part of a resistance movement. These organizations are generally Islamic in their religion as were the native Arabs and Persians during the original Crusades. There were Jewish populations in the Holy Land during the time Christian Europeans were seeking to take over the Middle East, but they were a small minority and could not mount an effective resistance to the Crusades.
Today, due to the world’s post-holocaust revulsion of the Nazi atrocities and the beliefs of many American fundamentalist Christians, such as dreamers in the Rapture, the United States is defending Israel’s aggression and is allied with the Zionists against Muslims, especially Iranians. Many of our politicians and much of the national media are on a crusade to support the hegemony of Israel under the guise of its self-defense. Israel has nuclear weapons it developed by spying on the United States and has an extremely modern and powerful military. It has nothing to fear from the rag-tag Muslim militias even if they are backed by countries such as Iran, China and Russia. Israel does not need our military support. And its current aggression in Lebanon, Iran, Syria, Gaza and elsewhere, to say nothing, as most media does, about Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians, clearly proves Israel does not deserve our support.
Israel is conducting its own crusade against Muslim countries in the Holy Land. If the United States cannot find the moral courage to confront this decades long injustice, we should, at least, not supply it with weapons and diplomatic immunity. It is long past the time America atoned for its own sins against our native population and that we not repeat those sins in the Middle East. To do so, all we need is to be guided by those principles of our Constitution and the philosophy of that Christian faith many Americans profess. Perhaps, if we make a good faith effort to act in the Middle East as the country we claim to be, we will not be misled by the Zionists among the Israelis into the same type of disaster those holier than thou European Crusaders had to endure a thousand years ago.
The Foundation
I received my early secular schooling from the public schools in Pawhuska, Osage County, Oklahoma. My religious education was received from my family and the preachers and Sunday School teachers at the First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Pawhuska. There was a great deal of osmotic transfer in both directions, but my church never seeped into issues of government and my schools never wandered into matters of faith.
My favorite Sunday School teacher was Violet Willis who, as a child, had been taken from her Osage tribal home and indoctrinated into Christianity at the government school at Chilocco. My favorite high school American History teacher was Mike Burton who never let questions of historical fact be conflated with matters of religious faith.
My foundations of faith and fact were scrupulously kept separate by the responsible adults, both secular and sectarian. Science prevailed in public school classrooms and lessons of morality were the focus at home and church. Never did I hear nor see any religious material or teaching at school; that was the province of the clergy.
At school I did receive twelve years of education in the history and foundations of America. I learned that our Founders rebelled against religious tyranny and monarchial rule. The separation of our three equal branches of government and especially the separation of religion and government were the clarion call of our republican form of democracy. Although we had to be ever vigilant to keep faith from seeking to control fact.
Such issues as the Salem Witch Trials, the Scopes Monkey Trial and efforts to slip or demand the instillation of a particular doctrine into public curriculum are constant danger signs that our democracy is fragile. Our Founders feared religious intoleration or practice. The very first of our United States Bill of Rights demands:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
And to their credit, those Founders of Oklahoma’s Constitution provided in Article II of Oklahoma’s Bill of Rights:
“Public money or property–use for sectarian purposes. No public money or property shall ever be appropriated, applied, donated, or used, directly or indirectly, for the use, benefit or support of any sect, church, denomination, or system of religion, or for the use, benefit, or support of any priest, preacher, minister or other religious teacher or dignitary or sectarian institution as such.”
No god of any religion is mentioned in the U.S. Constitution and neither the Bible nor the Ten Commandments had any place in our Founders’ careful crafting of our form of government. If our public schools are to post and teach our history, they should post the Bill of Rights and explain to America’s students how our country has managed to survive as a democracy for well over 200 years because it has avoided allowing any religion to control our future leaders.
Perhaps, Oklahoma’s State Superintendent of Education, Ryan Walters, who on June 27, 2024 during a meeting of the State Board of Education called for the mandatory teaching of the Bible and the posting of the Ten Commandments in every fifth through twelfth grade public-school classroom in Oklahoma, was confused. The Oklahoma law that in 2012 established his position (70 O.S. 2011, §3-107) defines the powers and duties of the elected State Superintendent:
“Upon proper request, the State Superintendent shall advise school district superintendents (concerning) school laws, including court decisions, Attorney General opinions and ‘other informative matter relating to the school laws as deemed appropriate.’”
The United States of America was not founded on any religion’s dogma or doctrine and, in fact, it was specifically immunized against the dangers thereof. I thank my church and school teachers for understanding that and informing me.