A Father's Thoughts

DADT repealed but the struggle continues

It has been a difficult political year for our nation. Our dysfunctional politics have validated the concerns of columnist and author Tom Friedman who concluded a while ago that we could only adopt sub-optimal solutions for the many serious challenges we face in the 21^st century. It becomes increasingly difficult to be optimistic about the future.

But this week we observed the official end of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in the military confirming and bolstering my confidence in the ability of our political system to make constructive policy changes consistent with the core values of equality and freedom in our nation. We will no longer discharge members of our military solely because they are gay.

As Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff stated, “we are a stronger joint force, a more tolerant joint force, a force of more character and honor.”

This marks another significant step forward in our continuing national civil rights debate, but married same-sex couples are still denied benefits available to heterosexual families including spousal health care, equal financial support if a service member makes the ultimate sacrifice, and more.

The road forward will remain contentious. At the Republican Presidential Debate in Orlando a gay soldier serving in Iraq asked a question by video and was booed by members of the audience and treated with disrespect by Senator Santorum who showed his ignorance and bigotry. Live blogging the debate Andrew Sullivan comments:

10.18 pm. Santorum claims bizarrely that repealing DADT means permission for sexual activity for gays in the military. This is a lie. The same rules of sexual misconduct apply to gays and straights alike. And a gay servicemember is booed by this foul crowd. Santorum keeps saying "sex is not an issue." But that's the current policy! This has nothing to do with sex, as Santorum surely knows. And again, the crowd reveals itself as hateful - even when it comes to those serving their country in uniform. This is one core reason why I cannot be a Republican. So many are bigots - and no one - no one - stands up against them. They're a bunch of bullies congratulating themselves on rooting out the queers.

How does one understand the hateful response of so many self-professed patriots to the words of a soldier serving in a combat zone and risking all for our nation?

 We are a better people than this.

 

 

Dr. King's memorial brings out memories, emotions

The following is a recent column I wrote for our local newspaper The Spectrum.

Recently I learned about the dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington DC scheduled for Sunday August 28. Somewhat impulsively, I decided to travel to Washington to visit family and attend the dedication ceremony.

While hurricane Irene caused the postponement of the dedication to September or October the memorial was unveiled the day before I arrived in Washington. I visited the memorial twice and attended related ceremonies experiencing with others feelings of joy, reverence, appreciation, and more aroused by this memorial to the man who moved our nation towards greater racial and economic justice.

During my lifetime I have seen legalized segregation poison our national soul. I recall the deaths of civil rights workers in the sixties, the protest of Rosa Parks when she refused to go to the back of the bus, the use of police dogs by Eugene “Bull” Connor, the murder of Medgar Evers, the Ku Klux Klan marching down Main street in my home town in Georgia in the seventies, and many more events during our long struggle for civil rights.

Dr. King emerged from this chaos and gave voice to the hopes and aspirations of those engaged in the battle. In his Letter from the Birmingham Jail Dr. King addressed fellow clergymen concerned about the potential negative reactions to the peaceful civil rights marches and demonstrations. He enumerated in great detail the injustices suffered by the Negroes and argued that the time for patience had passed. Even though President Truman desegregated the military after World War II and the Supreme Court ordered the desegregation of the schools in 1954, we were still a segregated nation in 1963 when Dr. King spoke on August 28 at the Washington Mall to 250,000 people. He spoke of his dream that he would see our nation realize the goals of equality and justice spelled out in our founding documents. He dreamed of a time when his children would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Dr. King spoke about letting freedom ring from the mountaintops including Stone Mountain of Georgia. The design of the memorial has Dr. King emerging from a large granite rock that itself has emerged from a break in the stone mountain that forms the entrance to the memorial on the shore of the Tidal Basin.

On the day before his assassination in 1968 he spoke, prophetically sadly, of having been to the mountaintop and seen the Promised Land.

Standing at the foot of his 30-foot high memorial looking toward the Thomas Jefferson Memorial I was reminded of the ideals expressed by Jefferson during the birth of our nation, humbled by the awareness that our journey is not yet finished.

We each bring ourselves to the experience of art and our personal response is evoked. As with the heavily criticized Vietnam Memorial, the public response to this memorial will establish its meaning in future years. 

 

We are a better people than this

Anthony Makk is an Australian trying to become a United States citizen. He and his husband, Bradford Wells have been together for 19 years. Bradford has AIDS and his husband Anthony is his primary caregiver. Anthony who has been in this country legally is being denied consideration for permanent residency because, although he is legally married, his marriage is not recognized nationally because of the Defense of Marriage, a law that the Obama administration argues is unconstitutional. 

I have listed links to articles that provide more details about the plight of Bradford and Anthony. It is clear that if the administration chose, a way could be found to keep these married men together while we continue our political battle over their marriage status. 

http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/08/10/caregiver-of-husband-with-aids-facing-split-by-deportation-over-doma/

http://gay.americablog.com/2011/08/to-be-very-clear-obama-administration.html

http://www.hrcbackstory.org/2011/08/domas-consequences-tearing-loving-families-apart/#.TkRQ03Mz3Mk

http://articles.sfgate.com/2011-06-04/news/29619663_1_couples-defense-of-marriage-act-visa-requirements

I don't think I am alone in feeling that as an average citizen I no longer have any meaningful input into the policies of my country. I am not a corporate powerhouse nor do I have the financial resource to allow me to be heard by my elected representatives. But that reality does not deter me from continuing to try in the hopes that others will be of like mind and find the time to express their views. If the White House receives enough emails, letters, or phone calls perhaps just perhaps they will respond positively to plight of one married couple whose primary desire is to continue their lives together.

The White House web site is at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/ There is a link in the upper right hand corner Contact us that will take you to the page on which you can voice your opinion. On that page you can find an address and telephone number. 

I attended a conference in Atlanta, Georgia, a number of years ago in which the Dalia Lama spoke about the issues associated with aging. He spoke of retaining the "freshness of youth" and the ability to still experience "awe" in this world. That also implies the presence of a degree of naivety and idealism. I recognize and own my late life idealism and it motivates me to support causes that rationally seem perhaps hopeless. 

If enough of us and enough of our friends take the time to contact the White House and argue for a compassionate response to the needs of this married couple, perhaps, just perhaps, we can validate the hope that we are a better people than this. 

 

To see our economic enemy, we must look in the mirror

The following is a recent column I wrote for our local newspaper, The Spectrum. 

This is my first column as a member of the Spectrum Writers Group and I appreciate the opportunity to be able to express some thoughts on a regular basis. My wife and I have lived in Southern Utah for more than thirteen years and feel blessed to own a small piece of a wonderful desert community in which to share our lives with a diverse group of friends and neighbors.

We are in what I consider one of the protected classes. We have Social Security and Medicare along with sufficient to savings to retire comfortably when we choose. The Republicans are reassuring us that our entitlement benefits are secure and that any changes in middle class benefits will only be imposed on those younger than 55 years of age.

Somehow I feel I’m being bought off. Should I not be concerned about my children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren?

Just when the world could benefit from an example of a mature functioning democracy, we are reaching the nadir (I hope) of a three decade decline during which our national debt has increased steadily, our income and wealth disparity has grown to proportions not seen since the Great Depression, our schools have declined in comparison to other developed nations, our infrastructure is in disrepair, one percent of us fight in three wars, among other problems.

Our political leaders have just ended a several months long kabuki dance risking a catastrophic financial collapse while providing a distraction from the hard work needed to build a better future for our nation. They left town neglecting the needs of the 4000 FAA employees furloughed because of lack of funding and risking the loss of 70,000 jobs by contractors as work on our deteriorating airports grinds to a halt while losing $1 billion in aviation tax revenues.

We can do better. Our government functioned reasonably well during the five decades preceding the eighties. We recovered from the Great Depression, defeated our enemies in World War II, converted from a war time to a peace time economy educating and reemploying the returning veterans, reduced the deficit from 100 percent of GDP to about 35 percent, reduced the income disparity between the top ten percent and bottom ninety percent from 50 percent to about 33%, improved our schools and much more.

Then in the eighties we decided that government was the problem and have made it so since. I think it was President Obama who wrote that our politics are too small for the problems we face. I disagree. Our politics have become too large and factional to be effective.

We no longer respect or listen to those with differing political views. Compromise, the process by which our democracy was formed, has become a dirty word and a sign of weakness.

In the words of a great philosopher: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” 

We are a better people than this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Government in action (Not)

As a small businessman watching my sales fall off during this uncertain economic environment I find the farce being played out in Washington appalling. After all of the anguish and interminable arguments made during these many months, nothing positive of significance has been accomplished. The incompetence of the policymaking Washington elite is beyond stunning.

While the media and the public are distracted by the kabuki dance, the needs of the nation are ignored. Millions are still unemployed, millions lack access to reasonable health care, schools are failing, infrastructure is crumbling, income and wealth inequality, that is a cancer in our national soul, is growing, and so forth. China, Brazil, India and others grow their economies and strengthen their international competitive positions while we refuse to deal with reality.

At 75 years of age I have lived through many national crises, some of which were existential. I don't recall a time when we intentionally created a self-inflicted wound as hurtful and damaging to so many citizens as we have done this year.

Now the Republicans, after walking away from a potential $4 trillion package to address the deficit because it contained some revenue increases (increases that most reasonable qualified observers say are necessary), are proposing a $1 trillion cut over 10 years so they can claim a political victory and embarrass the president. It is a victory insuring the resumption of this farcical effort during the holiday season. The Republicans are in the running to become the Grinch who stole Christmas this year.

The needy and vulnerable are targeted for cuts in services and support while the “job creators” sitting on their trillions of cash, don't create jobs and are protected from the obligation to participate in healing the economy. Our legislators, most of who are millionaires, sit in their comfortable offices protected from the negative consequences of their decisions.

Their biggest risk is that they might lose an election and have to move down the street to a well-paid position with a lobbying firm.

What a country!

 

Independence Day 2011

Brent Holloway, in his Sunday column in our local paper, The Spectrum, wrote a deeply moving essay on his relationship with his son noting that on this weekend as we celebrate the birth of our nation, his son is leaving for Afghanistan. He reminds us all of  “the sacrifices of so many who have served.”

His thoughts were still in my mind as I watched Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation. He spoke of the tremendous courage of our Founding Fathers who risked all by signing the Declaration of Independence 235 years ago. He contrasted that memory with what we see in Washington today noting that at a recent CBS News Town Hall he asked Senator Tom Coburn “why the Congress can’t get anything done anymore.”

Coburn stated that the senate has had fewer votes this session than at any time in 25 years. Members are reluctant to take positions on issues because they might have to defend their position in an election thus risking damage to their political careers. “So rather than come up here and do the job and have the courage and the honor to go out and defend your votes, we just don’t vote.” This at a time when our nation faces so many challenges.

While the Washington kabuki dance continues, covered breathlessly by the TV and other media, Brent’s son and thousands of other men and women have the courage and honor to quietly risk all answering the call of our nation. 

 

New York State legalizes same-sex marriage

I sit at my computer with tears flowing down my cheeks. The New York state legislature, with a Republican majority in the Senate, voted tonight to legalize same-sex marriage. The blll was approved by a 33-to29 vote as 4 Republican state senators joined 29 Democrats in voting for the bill. New York joins five states in permitting same sex marriage.

 Hearing the news I was reminded of the following commentary I wrote in 2009 in the midst of Utah debate about gay rights: 

"Victor Frankl was a German psychiatrist who survived the holocaust and wrote powerfully about the spiritual lessons he learned while in the Nazi death camps between 1942 and 1945.  Man’s Search for Meaning, first published in 1959, is one of the classic psychiatric texts of our time. As one reviewer noted, Frankl reminds us of “the responsibility each of us owes in valuing the community of our humanity.”

Frankl asserts that a core drive for humans is our search for meaning. He wrote from the perspective of life in the death camps. My experience is that in our lives we also find meaning in the antithesis of the horrors of the death camps, in those precious moments when we experience spiritual love.

All of this comes to mind as I think about one of those spiritual moments that occurred a few days ago while hiking in a beautiful wash with my wife. We had gone deep into the wash and stopped to rest and listen to the quiet amongst huge boulders that had fallen many millennia ago. She was sitting across from me with the sun reflecting off the rocks giving her face a subtle red glow while the early afternoon sun highlighted her beautiful blond hair. In a scene that could only be described adequately by a poet, which I am not, she was, at that moment, the center of my world and my existence. The love that I feel for this woman after 25 years of marriage is deeply felt but indescribable. The moment passed and we began our walk back to the world, while I continued in the afterglow of my experience.

As we walked I recalled the letter to the editor I had written a few days earlier trying to address the sources of our sexual orientation. I asserted that sexual orientation is not a behavioral issue but it is rooted in our wonderful human encounter with love. Love, that mysterious indefinable process by which we become attracted to other humans and engage in relationships of emotional and physical intimacy, intimacy when at its best has a deep and profound spiritual quality. 

My letter drew the predictable responses online by some unable or uninterested in understanding my argument. The memory of those responses brought me back to another moment I experienced 15 years ago while working as a mental health counselor at an agency in Atlanta, Georgia. We provided services to predominantly young gay men and their families as they struggled with the prospect of premature death from complications related to AIDS. At the time there were no effective medications to counter the effects of this disease.

During an emotionally intense counseling session with a young man, we were exploring aspects of our lives and our mutual experiences of romantic love. At one point he looked at me and said: “George, can you understand that the love that I feel for my partner is not different than that that you feel for your wife?”

In that therapeutic moment, a moment of genuine human intimacy and meaning, the student became the teacher. Reflecting later, I came to understand that in that moment I was confronting the last vestiges of my own homophobia and this man who sat across from me in this quiet room facing his own death had invited me into Victor Frankl's  “community of our humanity.”

As state legislatures consider the bills extending legal protections for gay and transgender couples, can they think beyond the narrow private sexual behavioral issues that dominate the debate to the more important issues of human relationships and love?" 

And so this evening, the progress continues.

 

Income and Wealth inequality

More thoughts and evidence about income inequality.

Timothy Noah, prize winning journalist and senior writer for Slate magazine (Slate.com) explored this subject in his September 2010 ten part series titled The United States of Inequality.

He reported that we have for three decades seen a growing disparity in income and wealth not seen since just prior to the Great Depression. Then the top 10 percent of our people received nearly 50 percent of total income. During the depression and World War II (1928 to 1943) the trend reversed and inequality decreased steadily to 33 percent. It remained in that range for three decades before what Paul Krugman labels the Great Divergence began. Income inequality grew back to 50 percent in 2007. The top 10 percent captured an inordinately large share of the growing income while the middle class remained stagnant.

Noah assesses 8 possible causes for this Great Diversion. He attributes 80 percent to the decline of labor unions, excesses in executive salaries, and our underperforming educational system. He asserts that the government and by extension we the voters influence these developments.

Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winning economist, covers some of the same ground in the May issue of Vanity Fair magazine in an essay titled Of the 1%, by the 1%, and for the 1%. He identifies long-term threats to our democracy because of the increasing income inequality.

In summary Stiglitz cites the consequent decrease in opportunity, the growing inefficiency of the economy, and our inability to adequately invest in critical infrastructure and education as threatening the future for our children and grandchildren.

While there is general agreement about the evidence supporting the idea of the Great Diversion, there is a stark difference of opinion about its meaning exemplified by a recent discussion between Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs, and Bob McConnell the Republican Governor of Virginia.

Sachs pointed out the dangers of the growing inequality. The governor saw it as a positive development worth celebrating.

Further, the policy difference is clearly evident as we look at the Ryan budget, recently passed in the House, reducing spending for social programs and infrastructure while lowering the taxes on the wealthy.

As Stigliz has written, our democracy is in trouble. For the first time in my lifetime, it seems that the generations following us will have fewer opportunities than we have enjoyed.

But when I find myself slipping into pessimism I am reminded of another one percent of our population, the military forces and families who are fighting and bearing the burdens of our wars. I am humbled by the sacrifices they are making for our democracy.

Can we be inspired by their example and have an adult conversation about how to accept the financial sacrifices needed to strengthen our democracy?

 

 

 

 

We are in trouble

We are in trouble. Just when the world could benefit by our being an example of a mature functioning democracy, we are reaching the nadir of a three decade decline during which our national debt has increased steadily, our income and wealth disparity has grown to proportions not seen since the Great Depression, our schools have declined in comparison to other developed nations, our infrastructure is in disrepair, we have engaged one percent of us in three wars, among other problems.

Now our politicians are continuing the kabuki dance and risking a catastrophic financial collapse while playing political games that feed the 24/7 news’ machine providing a distraction from doing the hard work needed to build a better future for our children and grandchildren.

The government functioned reasonably well during the four decades preceding the seventies and eighties. We recovered from the Great Depression, defeated our enemies in World War II, adjusted from a war time to a peace time economy reemploying and educating the returning veterans, reduced the deficit from 100 percent of GDP to about 35 percent, reduced the income disparity between the top ten percent and bottom ninety percent from 50 percent to about 33%, improved our schools and much more.

Then in the eighties we decided that the government was the problem and have made it so. I think it was President Obama who wrote that our politics are too small for the problems we face. I would disagree. Our politics have become too large and factional to be effective.

We no longer respect or listen to those with differing political views. Compromise, the process by which our democracy was formed, has become a dirty word.

So as millions in the world are taking to the streets to try and secure freedom and hopefully develop new democracies, we are becoming a target of befuddlement and ridicule.

We have met the enemy and it is us. 

 

Mission Accomplished

Thanks to the competence, courage, and bravery of a small group of well trained dedicated warriors of Seal Team Six, the competence of our intelligence services, and the competence of the Obama administration, Osama bin Laden is dead.

Apparently the media and the ideologues are quickly reverting to their world of pettiness, incriminations, and inappropriate claims of credit for this historic accomplishment. In doing so they diminish the significance of the achievement and tarnish the honor due those who worked so hard and risked so much to succeed so brilliantly. The mission was accomplished.

Enough cannot be said about the unnamed members of our military who conducted this incredible operation. While there is some confusion about details, it is absolutely clear that the boots on the ground, at great personal self-risk, performed magnificently without undue loss of innocent lives or casualties among themselves. In a testament to the untold hours of planning and training preceding this event, split second decisions were made in an incomprehensible, to most of us, atmosphere of perceptual overload. They left the site with the body of bin Laden and a trove of potentially invaluable computer data.

The performance of our intelligence agencies and the dedicated professionals that gathered and analyzed information over a decade was also impressive. In the end, sufficiently confident in their data, the CIA made a clear recommendation to the president. Credit is due to Leon Panetta for his leadership and skill in restoring the credibility and morale of the CIA during his tenure.

President Obama, charged with the responsibility of making the final decision, displayed self-confidence and self-assurance allowing him to create an atmosphere where members of his administration voice opinions openly during meetings without fear of recrimination. After listening to the conflicting judgments and concerns of those participating in the strategy sessions he came to what others have described as a “gutsy” decision. 

The system functioned. Can we find in this process reasons to appreciate our strengths and build upon them as we confront the serious challenges our nation faces?