A Father's Thoughts

Will we finally act on gun violence?

This is my column published in the Spectrum on 12/24/12:

“As I look at the photos of those who died, I wonder how many more must die before we come to our senses and begin to converse with each other while searching together for a way to reduce gun deaths in our nation?”

I concluded an earlier column in August after the Aurora Colorado tragedy with those words. Sadly the conversation never happened.

Now here I am again with horrific images floating through my mind of a Connecticut grade school and the unimaginable carnage that leaves the families and friends of twenty innocent 6 and 7-year-old children in unbearable pain and grief. In the midst of the chaos the loving dedicated professionals, who went to work on that Friday committed to doing their job of enriching the minds of these precious children, acted heroically, six at the cost of their own lives.

Many of the first responders rushed onto the scene to help and were confronted with overwhelming horror and helplessness. 

My thoughts return to my own experience with guns. I lived in the Northeast for nearly half of my life where gun ownership was not encouraged. My family included adopted children some of whom came from deeply troubled early childhood experiences. At no time did I consider it desirable to have guns in the home.

Then I moved to the South and the culture was more accepting of guns. With my children gone I purchased two revolvers. Trying to develop and maintain a reasonable level of proficiency I visited a local shooting range periodically and did some target shooting at the bulls eye type targets.

One day in the stall next to me there was a young man with some type of a weapon that was larger than a pistol but smaller than an assault weapon. His cardboard target was the silhouette of a person. As he fired rapidly he was becoming more excited verging on what at the time I thought to be ecstasy. I left the range feeling stunned, went home and locked up my guns and eventually sold them.

“Guns don’t kill, people do” has become a cliché. It is an expression intended to limit thought. But is it true?

What is the attraction of semiautomatic instruments of death? As you approach Las Vegas on I-15 there is a large billboard with the photo of a military style weapon, large clip and all, along with an invitation to visit the gun store and to shoot it. With all of the pleasures available in Las Vegas, what is the visceral feeling evoked by shooting an instrument of death?

Do mentally disturbed killers who engage in these senseless slaughters find power in the gun, power that is promised by our advertising, films, and other violent cultural symbols? Is it the availability of guns that empowers the powerless with tragic consequences?

In the coming weeks we will learn more details about why these precious people lost their lives in Newtown.

Will we do anything this time? 

The Missing Link Between Anger and Blame

This is my Column published in the Spectrum on 11/27/12:

Many years ago my wife and I were sitting with friends in an ice cream parlor. I recall expressing anger about a letter to the editor in the local paper. My friend, a psychotherapist, asked me a simple question: “George, what is the source of your anger?” I responded with a superficial explanation, but the question lingered in my mind. Obviously the content of the troubling letter didn’t justify the intensity of my emotions.

Anger is an essential ingredient of our being. From an evolutionary perspective it along with fear is important for our survival, helping marshal biological resources in the face of threats or danger.

When expressed appropriately anger can be an effective communication tool. On the other hand out of control or misdirected anger can be harmful or worse brutally destructive.

A classic example of misdirected anger is being unable to argue with an employer because of the risks to one’s livelihood; then getting home from work and kicking the dog or picking a fight with your spouse.

Honoring, understanding, and accepting responsibility for our feelings is essential for personal growth and development.

When we channel feelings and emotions into blame we concede control to others or to external events. We omit an essential step of introspection. Our thinking shuts down and is not available to evaluate or modulate our feelings. In relationships rather than constructively expressing our anger, we attack the other thus provoking defensiveness and a dynamic that is potentially injurious and nonproductive.

A current example of the negative consequences of merging anger and blaming is the response of Mr. Romney to his election defeat. Reportedly he is angry about the loss. That is understandable given the commitment he and others made to his campaign and the deep disappointment he must feel. But he also seems to be in denial about the reasons for his loss.

The LA Times reported that during a recent conference call to high-level donors he attributed his loss to, among other events, the following:

“The Obama campaign was following the old playbook of giving a lot of stuff to groups that they hoped they could get to vote for them and be motivated to go to the polls, specifically the African American community, the Hispanic community and young people,” (LA Times 11/15/12). Mr. Romney characterized extended health insurance benefits to young people as “a big gift”.

This demeaning attitude and these divisive post-election remarks reinforced my belief that this man lacks empathy or sensitivity for the real life experiences of those he previously characterized as the 47 percent or the “takers” in our society.

Thanks to the collective wisdom of the American people, we now have hope that, among other moves forward, those earning $20,000 to $35,000 may gain access to reasonable health care just as have the many young people already covered by the Affordable Care Act.

I readily admit that Mr. Romney’s recent remarks provoked my own anger.

And so I write. 

Risks of inequality

One of the reasons I am a fan of Jon Stewart’s Daily Show is the quality of his interviews with serious people. Recently J. K. Rowling the British novelist and creator of the Harry Potter fantasy series was a guest. Before she became wealthy and famous, she acknowledges she struggled financially and for a short period of time received benefits from the government. Now she has the ability to live anywhere in the world but has decided to stay in England and pay her taxes because she feels grateful for the support she received earlier in her life.

What a refreshing attitude. Gratitude.

Contrast that with what we too often hear in this country. Some members of the upper one percent of the income earners and wealth holders are feeling besieged. They criticize the president because his antiwealth “rhetoric is so poisonous.” We are told the real problem is not inequality but that “40 or 50 percent of the of the country are on the dole and support him [Obama].” A hedge fund executive was offended by the president’s proposal to reform a provision of the tax code and treat carried interest as ordinary income instead of a capital gain. He likened it to “when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.” How to understand their plight when, for example, they received ninety-three per cent of the gains during the 2009-10 recovery?

In her recent book Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else Chrystia Freeland explores the issue of growing income and wealth inequality in our nation and the world. Freeland acknowledges the sensitivity of the subject. Any serious discussion triggers defensiveness and is squelched by labeling it “class warfare.” However, we should not ignore the evidence. One can be concerned about the future of our economy and political system, not out of envy of the affluent, but of concern about economic and political stability. We celebrate success in our nation, but when a small number of people are accruing increasing power while opportunities for upward mobility are shrinking the future is troubling.

We can look back to the thirty years following World War II and long for days of shared prosperity during which time “the gap between the one percent and everyone else shrank; the income share of the top one percent fell from nearly 16 percent... to under 7 percent...” During this period average annual economic growth was 3.7 percent. This was during a time of a growing middle class and relatively high taxes. Average CEO pay in the eighties was forty-two times that of the average worker a ratio that increased to 380 in 2012.

Freeland intelligently examines this very complex and controversial issue recognizing that the economic forces unleashed by globalization and technological innovation are driving the growing inequality. She helps us understand the world of the elite without demonizing or explicitly identifying good guys and bad guys. Her goal is to inform and educate.

The slogan “a rising tide lifts all boats” has not been true for decades.

System needs more dialogue

This is my column in the Spectrum on October 2. 

Thirty-five or more years ago I served in an elected position as a school board member in my New Jersey community. Then as now budgets were always a challenging issue. There is never enough money to meet identified needs. Each year at budget time I would meet with a neighbor and friend who was a businessman and conservative. We would sit together and review the budget submitted by the school administration. I remember the intensity our deliberations.

My friend and I had two distinctly different worldviews. He was at heart a numbers man and a conservative. When he viewed the budget and the potential costs it would place on the residents he could make judgments based on the total tax burden. I, on the other hand given my liberal bias, was concerned about the meaning of the programs and the impact that budget constraints would have on their effectiveness in the classroom. He found it easy to just cut all categories by a fixed percentage in order to meet the overall number while I fretted about what that meant for the students. We would sit together for hours arguing back and forth and eventually we would come to an agreement or compromise.

The importance of this process was that we respected each other in spite of our differences. Our dialogue caused us each to challenge our own worldviews and in reality neither of us had all of the correct answers. However, together we could arrive at a reasonable solution to the budget problem, one that best met the educational needs of the students without breaking the bank. Regrettably that kind of respectful public dialogue is fading and the nation is paying a terrible price.

The obvious increasing polarization because of sophisticated gerrymandering, the availability of selective news (I use that term advisedly) sources including the internet that confirm our biases, and other factors is sapping the life from our democracy.

It doesn’t take a genius to recognize that a rational path for our economic future rests on a three-legged stool. We have to have serious reforms of our entitlements, military budget, and our health care non-system; we have to stimulate economic growth; we have to increase government revenues or to use a tainted term, raise taxes.

That solution requires that the public and our politicians rekindle the essence of democracy. Scott F. Atkins and Robert B. Talisse (www.3quarksdaily.com) argue that “part of what accounts for the legitimacy of democratic government and the bindingness of its laws is democracy’s commitment to public deliberation.” If our democracy is to be a beacon to the world in these troubled times, we each have a duty to respect our fellow citizens even while we differ passionately about issues.

I am encouraged that this year we have more Democratic party candidates running in local and statewide elections in Utah. The ideas and commitment they bring to the deliberations add a sorely needed vibrancy and dimension to our local politics.

 

Enjoying art can be expression in itself

This is my Spectrum column for Sept. 4, 2012

This month my wife, Cherie, and I celebrate the fifth anniversary of the opening of Gallery 873 in the Coyote Gulch Art Village in Kayenta/Ivins. The gallery is her brainchild and project but we are both inspired by the words of Roy Adzak; “Good art is not what it looks like, but what it does to us.”

Cherie finds the more than eighty artists that we represent; organizes and arranges their work in our gallery guided be her innate artist’s sensibility. One artist we represent is Edward Hlavka, a nationally known bronze sculptor, who created “The Mustangs” in the roundabout on Snow Canyon Parkway. While we generally represent artists from the Southwest we also have artwork from other regions of the country.

We have scheduled a reception for Saturday, September 22 from 5:30 to 9:00 PM so the public can meet two of our featured artists, April Bower and Lynette Thompson, while enjoying live music and light refreshments.

April, an established artist, has been with us since we opened and has been working with copper and silver jewelry for more than 18 years. Also, using chemical patinas, she makes “Patina Paintings” on thin copper sheets supported by wood backings or “boxes”.

Lynette is an emerging acrylic artist. Her favorite material is gesso that she blends with sand, metal, copper, twigs, and other materials creating organic, multi-layered, richly textured images of shaman, horses, quail, and many other natural inhabitants found in the desert southwest.

Trying to find the words to express the importance of my own late life immersion in the world of art in all of its dimensions is challenging. But acting as an intermediary between artists and the public can be exciting and life affirming. Being in an artistic environment with others of the same mind is energizing be it at Tuacahn, the Shakespeare Festival, or in Gallery 873. Just the opportunity to interact with those who are open to exploring the mysteries of the creative process inevitably broadens our perspective of the complexity of our world.

Just now, as I write, a young woman is approaching the gallery and a smile broadens on her face when she sees the outdoor art in front of our building. Entering, her growing enthusiasm is obvious even before I hear  “It’s so beautiful” as she spontaneously responds to a Giclée of a horse embellished with copper feathers and leather by artist Lynn Bean. She leaves with a few cards containing smaller images of the work that caught her attention.

Customers sometimes express feelings of disappointment about the lack of creativity in their own lives. I remind them that artists need those of us whose role it is to appreciate and be inspired by their work and that we are each artists in some sense.

As Houston Llew, one of our artists, reminds us: “In art you can find your own spirit. This very simple act is art in itself”.  That opportunity is open to all. 

Paul Ryan's mendacious acceptance speech

Well, the Republican Convention is history and we await the Democrats later this week. The campaign season officially begins post-convention. I wonder how many have lost interest, if they ever had any, after months and months of never ending political rhetoric and factually questionable advertising? 

It is easy to become apathetic and bored with the repetitive slogans that never seem to change. I wonder how the viewer ratings on the Sunday political talk shows are trending. Is there anything different being said now that we haven't heard for months? Why listen?

Is it unreasonable to wish that perhaps now that we are entering the last two months that some substance emerge? Probably. But, as I have been conditioned to feel after more than six decades as a Boston Red Sox fan; hope springs eternal. 

One disappointment for me watching the Republican convention was Paul Ryan. Until now I had seen him as an intelligent articulate idea guy. Here is the man who has been instrumental and forceful in developing budgets in the House of Representitives and then displaying the strength of his convictions by persuading his fellow Republican legislators to pass the bills.  

Instead he chose to attack the president with assertions that were at best wild distortions or at worst outright lies. He blamed Obama for the closure of an automobile plant that failed during the last year of the Bush administration. He mocked the president for walking away from recommendations of the Simpson/Bowles commission, neglecting to mention that as a member of that commission, Ryan voted against the recommendations. He attacked the president for raiding Medicare while neglecting to mention that his own budget took the same amount of money from the program. He blamed the president for the downgrading of American debt that happened after the Republicans threatened to default on goverment debt. 

I could go on but isn't it obvious that this man is either is suffering from severe memory loss or he has a serious problem with fundamental honesty. Now I am not naive enough to be disturbed by lies and distortions in our political discourse, but give me a break. This speech at this critical time during this important election exceeds all previous standards for political mendacity. 

Last week as he stood before a large national TV audience he had the opportunity to speak about his budget and how it paved the way for the future he envisioned. Did he do it? Regretably no.

As Mr. Romney asserted during his acceptance speech the next day: "It's what Americans deserved." 

I wonder how Vice President Biden will do this week? 

Middle ground possible gun control debate

This is my column for the Spectrum Writers Group published on August 8, 2012

The nation grieves for the loss of the innocent people who fatefully chose to attend the new Batman movie in Aurora Colorado last month. The stories of the lives of those killed or injured are now well known.

There is no way to make sense of this deeply sad event but as time passes and healing begins the facts of what happened that night will be clarified. We have an obligation to rationally examine more fully the circumstances leading to this heartbreaking tragedy.

The victims in Aurora had the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They had a reasonable expectation that our government’s policies and laws would protect those rights while promoting the general welfare. Our system failed.

It is not enough to fantasize about another armed person in the dark and smoky theater being able, in the midst of the sudden hellish chaos, to shoot and disable a well armed killer dressed in body protecting armor with multiple high capacity weapons.

One need only recall the 2011 shooting in Tucson Arizona in which Gabrielle Giffords and eighteen other people were shot during the day in a supermarket parking lot leaving six dead. Joe Zamudio, an armed civilian, approached the scene with his weapon in his pocket ready to fire and he came within an instant of shooting an innocent man.

It is beyond crazy to advocate arming everyone so we can protect ourselves, but gun sales are spiking again in spite of the fact that, as reported in the Washington Post, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that “Guns kept in the home for self protection are 43 times more likely to kill a family member, friend or acquaintance than to kill an intruder.”

Neither is it rational to advocate or fear the confiscation of all weapons. The right to bear arms is too deeply imbedded in our culture.

A recent editorial commenting on the tragedy in Aurora suggested that either “we remain a free nation with risks” or “a protected nation in a police state.” Certainly these are not our only choices.

People of good will can surely find some common ground between these two extremes. For example, is a semi-automatic weapon with a large capacity magazine capable of shooting more than 10 rounds needed for self defense?

President Dan Gross of the Brady Campaign strongly advocates the “starting of a meaningful, national conversation around how to prevent gun violence.” He notes that President Obama, Fox Commentator Bill O’Reilly and Founder Rupert Murdoch are all beginning to speak out about the need to reduce gun violence.

As I look at the photos of those who died, I wonder how many more must die before we come to our senses and begin to dialogue with each other while searching together for a way to reduce the number of gun deaths in our nation?

Party needs to articulate need for reform

This is my column for the Spectrum Writers Group published on July 10, 2012

On July 28 I awaited the Supreme Court’s historic decision on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), hopefully but with low expectations. I felt a surprisingly strong upwelling of emotion as the Court affirmed the constitutionality of the law. The decision was obviously a legal victory in our century long struggle to expand reasonable access to health care to all citizens.

But my personal question remained: Why did I feel so strongly about this issue?  

Although born during the depths of the Great Depression into a family in abject poverty I have been blessed in this great nation with a long productive life including many opportunities for learning, some more painful than others. My large family reflects the diversity of our nation filling my heart with gratitude.

My life experiences and the needs of my family have driven my commitment to the expansion of universal health care. More than twenty years ago my 28-year career ended prematurely when my company went into bankruptcy. Among the more serious losses was health care insurance for my wife and myself. We joined the ranks of the uninsured for a period of time. The prices we paid for healthcare services greatly exceeded those charged to insurance companies. We had little bargaining power in the health care “free market.”

At the time one colleague didn’t have a choice. His wife was fighting for her life against cancer. They had to pay the exorbitant premiums demanded by the insurance company.

Another member of my family has had a preexisting condition since adolescence and he is uninsurable in the private market. The need to work for a large company with a group policy that would accept him influenced his career choices thus foreclosing more life enriching and creative opportunities.

I cringe when opponents of health care reform deny that the 30 million uninsured who will be covered when the ACA is fully implemented are not our concern, or insist that after the election they will repeal the law and pull the reforms up by their roots returning us to the status quo. To them the uninsured are an abstract group lacking human feelings and needs. To me the 30 million include vulnerable individuals, members of families who will pay a potentially tragic price for our nation’s unwillingness to provide a basic human right, reasonable health care.

The well-financed opponents of reform misinform the public with claims about death panels, the addition of 16,500 IRS enforcement agents, that ours is the best health care system in the world, and much more. Public polling then validates the opinions propagated by the misinformation.

The ball is in the Democratic Party’s court. The Party needs to find its voice and demonstrate political courage by effectively articulating the reasons for continuing the reform of our heath care non-system.

We the people have an opportunity in November to affirm that we are an exceptional nation that cares for its citizens. 

Student becomes the teacher on love

This was my column for The Spectrum on 6/12/12.

Victor Frankl, a German psychiatrist who survived the World War II Nazi death camps, wrote powerfully in “Man’s Search for Meaning” about the spiritual lessons he learned. As one reviewer noted, Frankl reminded us of “the responsibility each of us owes in valuing the community of our humanity.”

Frankl asserted that a core drive for humans is our search for meaning. He wrote from the perspective of life in the death camps. 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 came to mind as I thought about one of those spiritual moments that occurred three years ago while hiking in a beautiful Kayenta 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. Cherie 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 felt for this woman after 25 years of marriage was 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 human experience of love. 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 in 1994 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 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 the “community of our humanity.” 

Health care issue lacks real discourse

This is my column published in the Spectrum on 5/15/1

The Affordable Care Act has been the target of political attack since its adoption in 2010. The early Republican mantra was “repeal and replace.” That quickly faded into “repeal” because of the inability of Republicans to propose any serious alternative legislation.

 T. R. Reid articulated the fundamental moral reasons for reform of our extraordinarily complex health care “non-system” in his 2010 book “The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care.” Surveying health care systems in other developed nations he found that we are the only industrialized nation that has not found a way to implement universal health care at an affordable cost.

 Currently we lead other developed nations in per capita cost and spending as a percentage of GDP ($7960 and 17.4% here versus $3978 and 11.8% in France for example) and with poorer outcomes measured by objective standards.

David Frum, conservative columnist and writer, argued that Republicans missed an opportunity to shape the law in 2009-2010 by their unwillingness to seriously engage in the months long Senate committee process that produced the legislation. In an October column in This Week Magazine Frum argued that repeal of the Affordable Care Act is unlikely to be successful and a more constructive approach for Republicans would be to attempt to modify those provisions found most objectionable to conservatives. He made specific policy proposals. 

Ironies abound in our current political climate. Many of the most objectionable features of the Affordable Care Act were originally proposals put forth by conservatives. Governor Romney’s Massachusetts’ health care reform, including the individual mandate, was a model for the national plan. Some of the loudest opponents of government run health care are on Medicare, in the VA system, or covered by the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan.

There are no easy reforms. Whatever we do will involve decades of hard work and compromise by many stakeholders. Let us not return to the status quo. The Affordable Care Act for all of its flaws is a start. Implementation of many of the early provisions has begun. Coverage can no longer be denied young children because of preexisting conditions. Insurance companies cannot dictate lifetime coverage limits. Young adults between 19 and 25 can remain on their family’s policies. A total of 52 reform provisions are already in effect.

Details of the implementation timeline for the many provisions of the ACA can be found on the Kaiser Family Foundation Health Reform Source web site at: http://healthreform.kff.org/timeline.aspx

Does an “exceptional nation” allow thousands of our citizens to die each year because of limited access to reasonable health care while tens of thousands are forced into bankruptcy because of excessive health care costs? Is it enough that 83% of us have access to reasonable health care? Can we ignore the remaining more than 50 million who are uninsured?

The moral challenge of our health care non-system is largely ignored in what passes for political discourse in our hyper partisan political environment.