About that federal deficit …

Well, the quadrennial Mock Convention unfurled in all its glory on the Washington & Lee University campus this weekend, and it sure left me thinking.

The convention opened with a (presumed) debate between Ann Coulter and James Carville, (lotta grandstanding) followed by the keynote address from Mike Huckabee (nice guy) on Thursday evening. Next morning, the colorful, clever and sometimes rowdy Mock Con parade wound through town – minus the elephant that resourceful Mock Conners had hired from an outfit in Florida. The elephant was canceled at the last minute after a PETA protest. But we digress. The parade was just fine and a ton of fun even without an elephant, and that we hope that wherever that elephant resides in Florida, it is being well treated.

The weekend really got down to business with the speakers on Friday and Saturday, and concluded with the traditional nomination, which went delegation by delegation on Saturday afternoon, with much cheering and waving of state flags (for a pictorial taste, see http://sceneoncampus.blogs.wlu.edu/.) The whole event was unbelievably professionally run, right down to the big-screen geographic graphics that accompanied each delegation’s nominating report from the podium.

But it was the speakers who gave me most pause for thought. Republicans that they (naturally) were, they mainly urged cuts in “entitlements,” especially Medicare and Social Security, and criticized the Obama administration for the size of our current federal deficit.

So I’ve looked at some stuff from the Brookings Institution and elsewhere, and this is what I can report:

1) Brookings’ panel says consolidate our bureaucracy – for instance, the number of jobs-training programs that reside in dozens of federal agencies. Seems worth thinking about, anyway. And they suggest “devolution” – putting initiatives for change in the hands of the states and cities, because (they said) our needs nationwide are so different, state to state. Denver’s development of high-speed city rail lines was cited as an example. Might work …

2) Experts favor adopting the Simpson-Bowles and/or Domenici-Rivlin committees’ plans to downsize the federal budget, reform the tax code, and tackle “entitlements.”
And I say, Right! Let’s go with former Sen. Pete Domenici on the tax code. Domenici, who with Dr. Alice Rivlin chairs the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Debt Reduction Task Force, said this in December:
“The framework for a grand bargain is already done. There’s Domenici-Rivlin, Simpson-Bowles, and the Gang of Six—each saves somewhere around $4-5 trillion over the next decade and much, much more thereafter. If you don’t like a policy from one, then you can grab a replacement from another…if you show me a plan, and your plan is missing Medicare and tax reform, then I’ll tell you, ‘you don’t have a plan.’”
I like his ecumenical approach. And the Task Force is supposed to have more to say this month. The tax plan is to lower rates overall while eliminating loopholes. Add a Warren Buffett surtax on the top 1 percent (c’mon, folks, let’s stop talking about a chilling effect on creating more jobs and get real: How much money can any one person ever spend in a lifetime?). Surtax, please!

3) Social Security: From a widely circulated set of 12 suggestions to stabilize Social Security, here’s the one I like best. It’s easy to understand, it poses no hardship on anyone, and it would COMPLETELY ELIMINATE the projected SS deficit. What’s not to like? Trust me, of the 12 suggestions, this one is the most comprehensive and also the simplest. To see the rest, go to http://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/planning-to-retire/2010/05/18/12-ways-to-fix-social-security:

Modify the Social Security tax cap. Workers paid into the Social Security system on earnings up to $106,800 in 2010. About 83 percent of worker earnings were subject to Social Security payroll taxes in 2008. If all earned income above $106,800 annually were subject to Social Security contributions but did not count toward benefits, Social Security’s projected deficit would be completely eliminated. If the higher income counted toward Social Security benefits, about 95 percent of the shortfall would be absolved. Other ideas: apply a new Social Security formula to earnings above the current cap or raise the amount of the income cap to apply to 90 percent of all worker earnings.

4) As for the size of the deficit, here’s what the track record shows: There have been alternating deficits and surpluses since the nation’s beginning. Many deficits come out of wartime spending, and that is the story of the 21st century. According to figures drawn from the U.S. Treasury’s Bureau of the Public Debt: During the G.W. Bush presidency, the gross public debt increased from $5.7 trillion in January 2001 to $10.7 trillion by December 2008, largely because of the Bush tax cuts and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Under Obama, the debt has gone from $10.7 trillion to upwards of $15 trillion, mainly because of decreased tax revenue caused by the 2000s recession. It was triggered in part by the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which occurred on Bill Clinton’s watch and which I described in a Roanoke Times commentary (http://www.roanoke.com/editorials/commentary/wb/302383).

So under Obama, the deficit has risen in almost four years by as much as it rose under Bush in eight years, but that is due without much question to a situation that Obama inherited. The bank bailouts, for example, were approved under Bush as the breadth of the disaster became apparent in late 2008. Obama wasn’t even in office at that point.

In an interview during the Mock Convention, former Ambassador, sometime Republican presidential candidate and Mock Con speaker John Huntsman recommended that Congress and the president move to adopt the Simpson-Bowles recommendations to reform taxes and “entitlements.” The experts, including Domenici and Rivlin, agree.

So all we are saying is, shelve the partisan rhetoric. Reform the tax code – it hasn’t been done across the board since 1986. Modify the Social Security tax cap. And let’s quit beefing, get bipartisan, and get on with it. Thank you.

December night

It’s a balmy night in early December. It’s been raining all day. The temperature should be in the 20s, but it’s probably in the 50s or something, warm enough to be outside in just a sweater.
I’m sitting in one of the white rocking chairs on the front porch of the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity, where I live now. It’s a mysterious night, with a bank of white rainclouds behind the house across the street, and wisps of mist everywhere. The colored Christmas lights climb the square white pillars of the frat house, little bright dots of color against the night. You wouldn’t see me if you drove by, the box bushes beside the front steps are too tall. I am nestled for this moment in mist and night and centuries of a little town at the foot of the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.
I gaze across the street at a house framed by the rainclouds. Three stories of venerable brick, a big square antebellum house with a gabled roof and a generous front porch, it belonged when we were little to the Gadsden sisters. Tonight, the windows are softly lit with electric Christmas candles, and the effect is certainly at least Dickensian. As I look across the street, half a dozen decades elide in my mind, to the time when I first knew of the Gadsdens and their house.
When we were little, the Misses Gadsden – Eleanor and Anzolette – were already timelessly old. They wore, as I recall, more or less identical faded house dresses, essentially shapeless and belted, perhaps once a light blue plaid or something like that, and they were complemented by the inevitable black lace-up old lady shoes.
Twins they were, but where Eleanor was rather dumpy, with a warm smile under her knotted silver hair, Miss Anzolette was tall, thin and severe. Though both were called “Miss Allie,” as if you couldn’t possibly tell them apart so why bother even to pretend, the fact was that they were entirely dissimilar, and anyone who’d paid a bit of attention knew who was who.
When I was sixteen, I played Desdemona in the college theater opposite Bob Allen. Bob –dead now, and at a much younger age than the Misses Allie, who lie in marble stillness up on Main Street in the Stonewall Jackson Cemetery – Bob lived at the Gadsdens’ house. That was common back then. Widows or spinsters or even families took in boarders, especially the Washington & Lee University students, upperclassmen who’d escaped the dorms. They lived all over town, in basements and attics and occasionally a real second-story bedroom the family wasn’t using.
I’ve no idea what sort of room Bob had, but in the year we did Othello, both he and Merv Clay were living there. I remember passing by one day to see them both sitting placidly, on the Gadsdens’ front porch, quite as if they owned the place. I stopped to say hello – Merv played one of the Venetian courtiers – and was fascinated to discover they were eating fresh strawberries with brown sugar and sour cream. Was it good? I asked. I barely knew what sour cream was at this point – we led a thoroughly provincial culinary life in my family’s house, though Mother did make a mean curry, product of her military family’s years in the Orient.
Very, they said cordially. They didn’t offer me any. They were, I knew quite clearly at that sixteen-year-old moment, thoroughly out of my league. College sophisticates, and I just a little girl still.

I know now that Bob was gay. Of course, on some level, I knew it then, but I didn’t know what it was I knew. A lot of the guys in the college theater were, but it wasn’t until I went to college myself that I learned what it was I knew. I think now of Bob, and of how he was neither straight nor black, and yet – in the darkest makeup his fair skin would carry and black dye in his hair – he towered over me in the murderously jealous rage that leads the Moor and his lady to their tragic end.
I wonder now, briefly, how he did it. It was a fairly sophisticated college audience that came to the play and watched the shocking interracial love story unfold. How did he do it? Then I think, He knew very well what it was to be the outsider, to keep his feelings locked away from the prying eyes of the salacious, gossipy Venetians. It was not such a far cry, the lonely charade of the man who clandestinely marries a girl half his age, from a culture light years from his own.

The night is very still. One or two cars pass, round the corner, and are gone up Jackson Avenue. Behind me in the living room, one of the frat brothers is picking out the delicate opening strains of Beethoven’s “Fur Elise.” As I gaze across the street, thinking of Bob and Merv and Eleanor and Anzolette, the house and the cloud transmute. It is summer, June 1864, and the cloud is a plume of smoke from the smoldering ruins of the Virginia Military Institute, which has been razed by the invading Union troops. The serenity of the candled house belies the havoc, as evening falls, of the day just ended.
Someone is standing on this porch where I now sit. She is gazing at the house silhouetted against the smoke. Her next-door neighbor has successfully hidden Gen. Jackson’s ceremonial sword from the invaders, and they are gone, but the soot still quietly rains down in the heat of a June evening. It will be at least a year before the men come back, if they come back at all. The air is heavy with the smell of burned wood and plaster. The cloud of smoke hangs perfectly still, and the town is silent.
She shivers, even in the hot, acrid air.

The front door slams behind me.
On the piano, someone struggles with Pachelbel’s canon. It’s two weeks before exams, and Christmas is coming. The street is silent, the mist hangs in the air, and the centuries fold back into the tall trees on the neighbors’ lawn, one story at a time.

We are the 99 percent …

Every weekend since  early October  my nephew  has driven an hour from home to be part of Occupy Roanoke.

When the group arose soon after Occupy Wall Street gained attention, I was skeptical  –for about two days, until I saw their direction.

It was on a Sunday night that a woman calling herself Mary OccupyWallStreet Croft posted something for the Roanoke area on Facebook. By Tuesday, 400 folks were in the Roanoke conversation on Facebook.  On Thursday, someone put up http://occupyroanokeva.com/, complete with actual contact information – webmaster’s email AND phone number right up there on the home page –  unlike the home pages of, say, corporations you may have tried to reach at one time or another.

The group had also found a church willing to provide indoor meeting space, and scheduled its first General Assembly for a Sunday afternoon.

Next, they were talking about occupying a park, and someone had thought of port-a-potties.

By now I was definitely impressed. Are you with me here? These people were not only motivated, they were THINKING. It took less than a week.

I sent a donation with my nephew and waited to see what would happen.

Two months later, Occupy Roanoke has abided by the law; kept demonstrations and encampments clean; set up an occasional soup kitchen/food distribution onsite; collected winter clothing for distribution; and continued demonstrating quietly. City government response has been civil.

I think we’d all wondered what would become of the movement once winter set in. Cities might, I suppose, have just waited to see, but instead a number opted for pepper spraying, handcuffing and arresting, emptying occupied parks by force.

Recent Occupy Roanoke discussions have taken note of the initiative nationwide to show up  at foreclosure sites in support of those losing their homes. On Dec. 6, occupiers in 20 cities moved to “occupy” with rallies and demonstrations and in some places – notably Oakland, CA – physically entering the foreclosed properties, accompanied in at least one case by the dispossessed former owner.

Squatting? You could say that.

But for anyone just joining the conversation who thinks the tsunami of foreclosures has been justified, organized, coherent or for that matter even legal, please see http://www.dailyreportonline.com/Editorial/News/singleEdit.asp?l=101460107261, or the Center for Responsible Lending’s site http://www.responsiblelending.org/.

Meanwhile, attorneys general in California and Nevada have launched a new investigation of mortgage-industry fraud. Coincidence? Maybe, but for those who say the Occupy movement has no focus, take note.

As I lay awake last night thinking about all of this, I also thought of the promise we inscribed on a famous statue in the New York City harbor, not far from where the original Occupy Wall Street protesters set up:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free …
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Were Emma Lazarus’s words too easy to believe when this country needed cheap labor and cannon fodder? She wrote them in 1883, near the height of the first Gilded Age. U.S. scholars consider the Crash of 1929 to have ended that Gilded Age. In its wake, legislation like the Glass-Steagall Act of 1932 was passed to make sure banking interests and other players never again had the unfettered power to bring the nation to its knees.

The Glass-Steagall Act (sponsored by, among others, Sen. Carter Glass of Lynchburg, VA) was undone by the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act of 1999, sponsored by Sen. Philip Gramm (R-Texas). It was passed by Republican-controlled houses, and signed into law by a President Bill Clinton fighting for his political life.

We are now dealing with the detritus of a second Gilded Age that started falling like the fabled dominoes sometime early in this 21^st century.

Perhaps we’ve all heard that the disparity between the wealthiest Americans and the rest of us in 2006 was the greatest it had been since 1928. In April 2007, BizNet posted the headline “Stock Market Bubble Ready to Burst?” (http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=41349). And we all know what happened to the housing market bubble in 2008. 

So check out your local Occupy group. Support them if you can. As the Occupy Roanoke site points out, “You are the 99 percent …. We are all the 99 percent … Our struggle is America’s struggle.”

Veterans Day 2011

11 – 11 – 11

Veterans Day, a k a Armistice Day: I awake at 1:30 in the morning under a waning full moon. I can’t get back to sleep, and I’m not sure why.

I’ve been reading a biography of Juliette Lowe, and I’ve just gotten to the part where she’s in England when Germany declares war and “the war to end all wars” begins.  World War I, the “Great War.”

That was in the summer of 1914, after the Archduke of Austria was assassinated. Austro-Hungarian forces invaded Serbia, Germany invaded France, Belgium and Luxembourg. The “great powers” of the time had colonies and alliances all over the world and soon the conflict was really global.

As I lie awake, I think of our grandfather Charlie, whom the outside world knew, by the end of his life, as Maj. Gen. Charles E. Kilbourne – holder of the Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Service Cross, the Distinguished Service Medal, the Croix de Guerre and Legion d’Honneur, all except the Medal of Honor garnered in the fields of France and Germany, where he led brigades of infantry and heavy artillery during 1918, losing an eye and storming a German machine gun nest in the middle of the night.

Nineteen eighteen. It is now, was in the dark hours of this morning, exactly 93 years since the guns fell silent across the war-ravaged heart of Europe. In its current museum exhibit, the Marshall Foundation in Lexington is featuring the diaries of a Bedford soldier named H.E. Simpson, who wrote of how they lay in the rat-infested trenches listening to the screams of dying men and mules – the mules that drew the caissons – and staggered out in disbelief on that winter morning to the Armistice.

The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. My grandfather said in the 1930s that no man who has experienced war would want it. He described the 30 minutes of waiting to go “over the top” to face the raking enemy artillery, and how “the underground beasts came to live with you. All night in the trenches you could hear them squeaking” – the rats that fed on bloated and frozen corpses in the smoke-filled, barbed-wire-entangled fields that Frederic Celine described as the “voyage to the bottom of the night.”

The esoteric philosophers say that the number 11 is a gate, and that multiple 11s show us the way to a new age. The Aquarian Age, some say. I lay there thinking of how this morning, under the still full moon, for the first time ever that fateful hour of that fateful day is quadrupled: 11/11/11/11, if you will. May it be a harbinger of a better world.

And I thought, finally, of all the European conflicts we have now largely forgotten. To me, our American Civil War was the precursor – in terms of weaponry – of the deadly havoc of World War I. But meanwhile, Europeans were perfecting the art on their side in the Crimean War, the Franco-Prussian War, the Boer War. Who remembers now the “charge of the light brigade,” or that Paris fell to Germany more than once, or for that matter, in World War I, Gallipoli or who the players were in the Triple Entente or the Central Powers?

There is an infinite sadness to all of this, laced with the continuing denouement of colonialism, for which an unintended consequence is most of the wars still being fought on the planet today.

With its rapid-fire weapons, trench warfare, men on horseback and mule-drawn cannons – all overflown by fledgling aircraft – World War I is worth pausing over, to remember better. It was both a beginning and an end,  horrific, messy and all too human, a major crossroads in the annals of military strategy and personal suffering.

So on this Veterans Day let us salute all of those, whatever their allegiance, who went with courage, conviction and a belief in their cause, to die in Flanders’ fields and all over the world. May they rest in peace.  And may there truly, somehow, be Armistice.

The war to end all wars … 

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Where’s Mr. Micawber when you need him?

A recent Jonathan Schell essay in The Nation, “Cruel America,” centered on the glee expressed at a Republican debate when Rick Perry bragged about his state’s record of executions.

 The article goes on to contrast the United States with other “civilized” nations regarding its record on such executions (most nations that purport to be democracies have abolished the death penalty) and imprisonment (with 2 million Americans in prison, we have the highest per capita prison population in the world – and we are dedicated to liberty and justice for all).

I thought again, as I often have recently, of Charles Dickens. I’d been thinking of how the agenda of the far right seems to include dismantling unions as well as health care – such as it is – and such safety nets as Social Security. Rick Perry’s audience that night also cheered lustily at the idea of letting a putative uninsured young man die if he were in a coma.

And perhaps that’s OK. Terry Schiavo comes to mind. But back to the unions. I know a lot of us think unions are way  over the top, and that unions in general are a bad idea, and so forth. Friends, if that’s your view, I think you might want to look again. In this country, it was unions that put an end to child labor and the seven-day work week, among other things. It was a union that gave journalists like me a living wage and health insurance and enabled me to send a child to college. Believe me, non-union newspapers did not provide any of the above.

Are those bad things, to abolish child labor and enable a working family to have health insurance and send its children to college? You tell me. As I was thinking about the unions, I thought of Dickens, and of how much of the point of his wonderful novels was to expose the social evils of his day, including child labor, abuse of women, and a total lack of any safety net for the working poor.

I wonder what he’d think today of our vastly wealthy society where the working poor can’t even find work. In his day, they’d have been sent to the “poor house” or the “work house,” where they’d have been consigned to the economic equivalent of unremitting slavery until death – or until some nice middle class Micawber showed up to bail them out.

Unfortunately, the current economic tsunami has wiped out most of the Micawbers along with the undeserving poor. Sometimes I think the destruction of the middle class was not an accident. But I digress.

In Dickens’ time, people also still gathered to cheer at public executions. I believe that, 100 years later, we thought we’d grown out of that stage. But it appears not.

In his Nation essay, Jonathan Schell dwells for a bit on the infinitely slippery slope from decency to depravity. He doesn’t call it that, depravity: He calls it cruelty. He says, and I quote: “An unjust society must reform its laws and institutions. A cruel society must reform itself.”

Schell continues, “There have been many signs recently that the United States has been traveling down a steepening path of cruelty. It’s hard to say why such a thing is occurring, but it seems to have to do with a steadily growing faith in force as a solution to almost any problem, whether at home or abroad.”

To read more of what Schell has to say about cruelty in our prisons, our economy,  our lives and our social fabric, go to www.thenation.com/article/163690/cruel-america.

 What would Charles Dickens say?

The language of 9/11

In its coverage of the 10^th anniversary of 9/11, NPR featured linguists on both Terry Gross’s FRESH AIR and TALK OF THE NATION. Linguist Gary Nunnberg  told Terry that his studies show that in fact 9/11 had very little effect on the language. In picking its top word or phrase for the decade, the American Dialect Society chose “Google” and “blog” ahead of 9/11.

This could be for a bunch of reasons. One is that, like the Vietnam War, both Iraq and Afghanistan have been controversial – witness the recent and ongoing debate on when and whether a U.S. president actually has the right to involve us in a war we haven’t formally declared.

And then there’s the fact that we blamed 9/11 on some deranged fanatics, instead of seeing it as a calculated act of provocation by revolutionaries.

But Nunn surmises that unlike World War II and Vietnam, the wars that followed 9/11 didn’t affect Americans as directly. He mentioned, for instance, how “supporting the troops” was a major preoccupation during World War II.

What he didn’t say –  and I think it deserves saying –  is that the troops who went to both World War II and Vietnam were a very different group from those who’ve gone to Iraq and Afghanistan. In WW II and ‘Nam, we had the draft. In fact, it was largely the Vietnam War that put an end to the draft.

So we have no draft, at least not a formal, military one. But in this era of globalization, the draft is economic. There are no jobs, and many – our 20-somethings – are choosing the military despite its current very evident risks. Your money, or your life? They are offering to lay their lives on the line simply in order to have the kind of job security that their parents attained in the years that followed World War II, the apotheosis of American success.

Whether you like Michael Moore or think he is a self-serving  nincompoop, his staged attempt in BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE to find a single U.S. senator or representative in Congress with a child serving in Iraq or Afghanistan is a telling moment.

At the outset, young men and women volunteered for Afghanistan and Iraq for patriotic reasons, and some still do. But there was no draft. And that’s a major reason, I think, that the vocabulary of 9/11 and all that followed it has not embedded itself in our lives. We are not, as citizens of a nation, personally and daily  invested in these wars.  Or haven’t been, up until now.  Will that change as more and more formerly middle-class young people choose the military as the only job option left to them in a country that has systematically outsourced everything from manufacturing to office work, hospital records, accounting and paralegal jobs?

Meanwhile, the provocation, as Andrew Sullivan points out in a recent Newsweek essay,  thoroughly succeeded. Its aftermath, he says, has not and will not. The “terrorists” will not defeat America.

As with the outcome of the Vietnam War, I think that remains to be seen. Victory and defeat can happen on many levels. And I think that is another reason we haven’t embraced a 9/11 vocabulary: Americans don’t like to lose. And for much of these two quasi-declared wars, it has not been at all clear from one month to the next just exactly what, if anything, we are winning.

 

9/11 is the incident we would prefer to forget, if only we could.

Flags

I am staked out at Sushi Muramoto, right across the street from the administrative building where Lexington City Council tonight will vote on whether Confederate flags may be flown from city stanchions in this town that has been called the “Shrine of the South.” Right now the building’s doors are locked, and a TV camera man from Roanoke is pacing back and forth from his truck. The event starts at 8. It’s  6:46.

Both Robert E. Lee and T.J. “Stonewall” Jackson are buried here.

I grew up here. To grow up here was to grow up knowing people who were the children of men who fought in the Civil War, on the side that lost, defending their beliefs but also their homes. 

Many of my friends’ great-grandfathers fought under them, or under “Jeb” Stuart, or A.P. Hill. They fought under the flag they call the Dixie cross, that red one with the blue X and white stars.

My grandparents’ fathers fought on the other side. They were officers in the Union army. But that, and how we got here  — and why I returned after a lifetime of work elsewhere –  is another story.

Tonight’s story is about flags. What to fly and when and where. The ordinance that’s up for a vote will forbid  flying any flag on city poles except the American, state and city flags. No longer will flags of the town’s  two universities — Washington & Lee and Virginia Military Institute — fly, nor any others, for special occasions. The flap about the Confederate flags is the reason. 

People can still carry whatever flags they like in parades, under this ordinance. They can fly the Dixie cross on their houses, cars and trucks, wear it on their bodies, run it up on their lawns. Just not on city poles.

By 6:50, the TV crew has been joined by about a dozen people. Doors open at 7:30, with a batch of city police officers standing around and half of Main Street blocked off. A Confederate flag rally earlier in the evening drew about 300 people.

By 7:55, the council chambers are packed. The cameras are poised. In the second row sits a slender middle-aged man in wire-framed specs and a Sons of Confederate Veterans T-shirt that proclaims, “The Cause for Southern Independence, 1860-1865.” The room seats 110. Another 50 or so folks are jammed out in the hall, most of them wearing or carrying the Dixie cross.

Lexington residents speak first, by Council decree. Almost to a person – black or white, old or young, man or woman – they support the ordinance. Ban the flags. Many note that their great-granddads fought and some died for the Confederacy, under the Confederate battle flag. Bury it, they say.

Next come county residents. Many speak of heritage, honor, and their own ancestors who died under that flag. They want it to fly on one particular weekend each year: the weekend of Lee-Jackson Day, a state holiday in January that infelicitously happens on the weekend preceding MLK Day. Some of them speak with voices breaking of the power a lost cause still holds, of the valor of their forebears and the losses they endured. They are white.

Also from the county are a handful of other voices, who speak of a different kind of family suffering: of  a life sentence of hard labor and sometimes cruel punishment, without any hope of parole. Of slavery, in short. They are black.

It’s testament to how far we have come that we are able to have this discussion. It’s testament to how far we have not come that we are still having this discussion. 

At one point, a young man in what looks like an Army cap, carrying a Confederate battle flag, comes to the microphone. He says 300,000 people died for this flag and he will use his allotted three minutes to honor them. He sits in silence. After about a minute, people in the room begin to murmur. 

The mayor leans forward. “Let him have his three minutes of silence, please,” she says. The room falls completely quiet. You can hear a pin drop. It stays that way.

A black man from the county says he’ll be glad to erect a flagpole on private property for anyone who wants to fly a Confederate flag at home. A white woman from Fairfield remarks that no one carrying a Confederate flag ever fired a shot at Lexington; those who did, did so under the Stars and Stripes.  A young woman from neighboring Buena Vista chokes back tears as she talks about her great-granddaddy’s death in battle. A college professor, Romanian by birth, likens Southern slavery to horrors her own people witnessed in another time and place. 

The weight of history and our common humanity lies heavy in the room, and despite our best efforts, we are largely talking past each other. Is anyone listening? 

By evening’s end, council has voted to limit flags flown on public poles to those of city, state and country. A spokesman for the Sons of Confederate Veterans has said the organization will sue.

And in just a little more than a week, this nation will remember September 11, 2001, on the tenth anniversary of the day we call 9/11.  The unity that came of that disaster now lies in tatters on the floor of our nation’s Capitol building, while out here in the hill country, we are still fighting a war from a century ago – and I am not at all sure those two facts are unrelated.

Is anyone listening, America?

July 20

JULY 20 … Yeah.

So, I’m coming out. About my age, that is. I’m 66 today, and why is it that we all want to remain younger than we actually are? I mean, after passing about 28 or 29.

For a long time, I was determined to be just 29. In spirit, at least.

These days, I find myself realizing my limits. And I’m only 66! But that means that in less than 5 years, I will be … 70. Better get my bucket list together, huh?

Actually, my list is very short. I’d like to go back to Britain and France. Some of my family once upon a time lived in Normandy, in the part where they make the Calvados. I loved the light in Provence, not to mention the lavender. I always thought I’d get to Greece. I once rode the Orient Express as far as Yugoslavia, back when there was one.

I’d like to travel this country again and see the parts I haven’t.

I wish I thought I’d teach again, but I think maybe I am getting too old to care how you choose to pluralize ox. Or sister-in-law. Or attorney general. Ya know?

With teaching, the real obstacle for me now is the Internet. Isn’t that ironic? The world’s biggest, most immediate source of information – which admittedly may need to be vetted, but then so did scholarly work back in the Dark Ages – the Web, I say, an obstacle?

It’s the chaos and the unrelenting time consumption … the fact that we need to sleep and it doesn’t … the fact that it will tell you everything-all-at-once … the fact that it’s infinite. And we are not.

So yeah, I can blog. I have a website. Several, in fact. I know how to Google. I can touch type. I love the immediacy. But it’s infinite, and I am not.

I’m mortal.

And I am wondering, so what? So maybe I have another 25 years on the planet? Or 30? And will the last 10 of those be any good? Or the last 20?

Better get my affairs in order. Try to figure out why we are here and what’s left to do. As the years pass – even dwindle – I know these things for sure: I will not be a geologist. Darn. I will not be a rock singer. Darn, but then I can skip a lot of tedious bus tours, not to mention skirting some of the potentially more hazardous drugs. I will never be worth a damn on a sewing machine, and I won’t be a distance swimmer either.

Hmm. I’ve forgotten most of the German I knew. And I probably won’t be mastering Arabic or Chinese. I won’t be a steeplechase rider.

But with luck, I may be a master naturalist. I may play the fiddle better. I may get to see all my friends at least one more time before we all shuffle off to Buffalo.

And that’s what 500 words will get you.