“We Did What We Could”: With Suffering All Around Us, Some Lessons Are Learned Too Late
In December 2001, my father sent his first-ever Christmas card to me.
He even signed it, “Love, Dad.” Unprecedented. Throw some tinsel on my head and watch me sparkle like a snow globe; that’s how happy I was.
Dad came from the “show, don’t tell” school of parenting. He supported his family and shoveled the snow from the walkway before any of us were out of bed. His love was to be understood.
His postscript on that 2001 card made clear that despite the arrival of his one-time-only Christmas greeting, nothing had changed.
“I got a card from the wife of a man I used to work with,” he wrote. “She was at the church when you spoke, and she said you were the best they ever had. Don’t get the big head.”
What he didn’t mention was that he had attended my speech, too, delivered in the church of my childhood. He also skipped the part about how he had grinned through the whole darn thing.
Each December, I pull out Dad’s Christmas card and prop it up on my desk. He’s been gone for six years now, and the sight of his cramped handwriting makes him feel a little less far away. His admonishment about this head of mine is a reminder that in his own way, he loved me very much.
I spent way too much energy wishing my father would just come out and say it. Well into my version of adulthood, I’d end every phone call with, “I love you, Dad.” His response: “Yep.” Sometimes he’d mix it up by saying, “OK.”
Click.
Once in a while, I’d push back. “A-a-a-a-nd you love me, too?” His response every time: “Well, if you already know it, there’s no need for me to say it.”
Click.
When he finally wrote “Love, Dad” on that card, there was no victory. It was his second Christmas without my mother, and his heart was broken. How I longed for the days when Mom was still around and Dad’s “yep” was code for what he meant to say. Some things we learn too late.
This has been a long year for many Americans. Even if our own lives bobbed along without incident, it was hard to ignore the suffering of those around us. We did what we could. We attended funerals and hospital rooms, wrote checks and volunteered, worried ourselves sick and bowed our heads in prayer. Some of us smiled for no reason, and strangers felt a little less alone.
This Christmas season, the tragedy in Newtown, CT, altered the holiday for all but the most hardhearted among us. One minute we were shopping for stocking stuffers; the next minute we were trying to remember to breathe. Twenty young children and six adults who risked their lives to save them were dead. What? What? It was that horrible, that unbelievable. We never will be the same.
And yet, Christmas came.
Now the new year barrels toward us, a force of promise and uncertainty. May we welcome it with gratitude that we are here to greet it.
As I write this, snow is threatening to bury our house here in Ohio. My youngest daughter and her boyfriend spent the morning on cellphones, trying to reschedule canceled flights home. Halfheartedly, I try to hide my joy.
They are in a hurry, but I’m old enough to be on the other side of that impatience. All of our family was happy and healthy this Christmas. I know that kind of luck runs out.
I also know that my daughter’s heavy sighs mean only that she is young, with plans that did not include two more nights with her mother. I will not misread her signals, nor will I complain. Her love is understood.
For that, we can thank her grandfather for a lesson once learned too late.
By: Connie Schultz, The National Memo, December 26, 2012
“Unjustified And Wrong”: The Poor Should Not Bear The Burden Of A Deficit They Didn’t Cause
GOP leaders in Congress who can’t stop talking about family values are proposing an array of deep cuts to food stamps, child tax credits, healthcare for the poor, and even block grants that help states with daycare and adoption assistance. Left untouched are military spending that has ballooned over the last decade and tax breaks for the richest Americans. This isn’t courageous or pragmatic. It’s fiscally irresponsible and morally wrong.
Religious leaders are not letting Rep. Paul Ryan—architect of the GOP budget proposal—get away with the fiction that this budget reflects the values of his Catholic faith. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has sent a series of letters to GOP-controlled House committees arguing that these cuts are “unjustified and wrong.” Bishops wrote this week that “a just framework for future budgets cannot rely on disproportionate cuts in essential services to poor persons” and bluntly conclude that “the proposed cuts to programs in the budget reconciliation fail this basic moral test.” Catholic leaders have called for “shared sacrifice,” putting “unnecessary military spending” on the table and—in a pointed critique of Republicans’ fiscal fantasy that we can balance the budget by cuts alone—reference the need for “raising adequate revenues.” When Representative Ryan recently spoke at Georgetown University, almost 90 professors and priests at the Catholic university urged him to stop distorting Catholic social teaching to advance his radical ideological agenda. Expect faith leaders to keep challenging budget proposals and economic policies that undermine bedrock principles of justice, compassion, and the common good.
We should not pit national security against economic security. An effective military and a responsive government that doesn’t turn its back on vulnerable families are both achievable if we move beyond false choices. The working poor struggling in minimum-wage jobs, the elderly, and a squeezed middle class did not cause our deficits. They should not be asked to bear the greatest burden.
By: John Gehring, Washington Whispers Debate Club, U. S. News and World Report, May 10, 2012
“Poo Fighter”: A History Of Mitt Romney And Diapers
Most people do not look forward to changing their baby’s diapers. Not everyone. But most people. Which is understandable — it’s not a pleasant experience. You never know what kind of noxious, exotic things you’re going to find in there.
But Mitt Romney, in particular, really despises diapers.
We were reminded of this yesterday when Romney, at a town hall in Ohio, went off on a tangent about his family:
“Grandkids are fabulous!” he said. “You don’t have to change their diapers and, and they love you.”
This is telling. When describing the benefits of grandchildren, Romney places the absence of diaper-changing responsibilities — a seemingly minor factor — on par with unconditional love. It’s like saying, “Being president is incredible: There’s a bowling alley right in your basement, and also, you get to shape the future of the world.” It’s also unclear whether Romney would still find grandkids fabulous if they offered him love and required diaper-changing. Grandkids, under that scenario, might be “just okay.”
The funny thing is, Ann Romney has praised her husband for teaching her how to change diapers when they first had a baby. According to a December 2007 AP report:
Ann Romney traveled with her husband Saturday, testifying to the little-known qualities she believes make him the preferred Republican presidential contender.
She said … that her husband taught her how to both change a diaper and feed a baby, experience she lacked when she had the first of their five boys.
It turns out that before he had children of his own, Romney was wiping and powdering on a regular basis, as Ann testified:
“I did not grow up in these big Mormon families and all these kids and everything; I really grew up in the country in Michigan, and I never held a baby until I had my own.”
Romney had experience in holding, feeding and cleaning babies from taking care of his nieces and nephews.
“So, he comes in handy,” his wife said.
Well, not that handy, actually. After teaching his wife how to change a diaper, Romney — apparently scarred by years of changing diapers for his entire extended Mormon family — stopped doing it himself, save for the most tolerable cases:
I was willing to change the urine-soaked diapers, but the messier types gave me dry heaves,” he told GQ magazine in 2007. “So my wife allowed me to escape that.”
Dry heaves? A bit dramatic, no? The man who promises to get tough on China and do whatever it takes to stop Iran from going nuclear also cowers in the face of baby poo?
By: Dan Amira, Daily Intel, March 1, 2012
Are Republicans Hypocrites By Nature?
The fire-and-brimstone Christian Right bible-thumper who gets busted buying crack cocaine from a male prostitute, or the “family values” conservative who turns out to be a serial philanderer. These are now stock characters out of GOP central casting.
But other than the rather tedious accumulation of examples of self-righteous Republicans who want us to do as they say and not as they do, is there something about Republicanism itself that produces these double standards? Is hypocrisy, in short, endemic to conservatism?
That is what Washington Post liberal E.J. Dionne wants to know. In his column this week, Dionne says that hypocrisy – “the gap between ideology and practice” — has now reached a “crisis point” in American conservatism.
“This Republican presidential campaign is demonstrating conclusively that there is an unbridgeable divide between the philosophical commitments conservative candidates make before they are elected and what they will have to do when faced with the day-to-day demands of practical governance,” writes Dionne. “Conservatives in power have never been — and can never be — as anti-government as they are in a campaign.”
In an oft-quoted 2006 essay in Washington Monthly, “Why Conservatives Can’t Govern,” Boston College professor Alan Wolfe called contemporary conservatism “a walking contradiction” since conservatives were unable to shrink government but also unwilling to improve government and so ended up splitting the difference in ways that resulted in “not just bigger government, but more incompetent government.”
The problem begins, says Wolfe, when conservatives promise to shrink the size and reach of the federal government but find once in office they are “under constant pressure from constituents to use government to improve their lives.” And this, says Wolfe, “puts conservatives in the awkward position of managing government agencies whose missions — indeed, whose very existence — they believe to be illegitimate.”
To Dionne, this pulling in opposite directions is what inevitably makes conservatives hypocrites.
Why, for example, are so many conservatives anti-government while spending long careers drawing paychecks from the taxpayers? asks Dionne. Why also do conservatives “bash government largesse while seeking as much of it as they can get for their constituents and friendly interest groups?”
Why do conservatives criticize entitlements and big government yet promise their older, conservative base they will “never, ever to cut their Medicare or Social Security?”
And what about defense? Why do Republicans support the free market yet refuse to consider any cuts at all in the bloated Military Industrial Complex that takes taxpayer dollars and transforms them into private profits.
The list goes on. The reason our political system is so “broken,” says Dionne, is that conservatives are hypocrites who keep making “anti-government promises that they know perfectly well they are destined to break.”
Dionne’s criticisms are well taken. But he needs to dig deeper. It’s not just small-government conservatives who are hypocrites about the size and cost of government they are willing to support. It’s that conservatism itself, as a collection of ideas about organizing society, inevitably breeds hypocrisy.
Conservatives are sure to cry foul and will no doubt respond by producing a mountain of examples where liberals have behaved hypocritically. I am sure they can. But that’s beside the point. The real point is that liberals care about hypocrisy and conservatives don’t.
Here’s why: liberals want to build a larger community by weaving together the different threads in our society into a fuller and more varied tapestry. This multi-culturalism and promotion of diversity, in fact, is what conservatives hate most about liberals since conservatives want to defend the community they already have by keeping others out, and by using politics to do it.
Hypocrisy matters to liberals because the only way to build a larger community is by first building trust. And the only way to build trust is by treating everyone equally — by consistently and impartially applying the same universal principles to like individuals in like situations.
Hypocrisy is the unequal application of principle, producing an arbitrariness that eats like a cancer at the connective tissue of the ethnically, religiously, and demographically diverse communities liberal societies hope to create.
Hypocrisy matters to liberals like Rachel Maddow — a lot — as her long-time listeners well know. Nothing makes Maddow madder than when people say one thing and do another. The best parts of her show, in fact, are when she takes apart right wing hypocrites with prosecutorial precision, exposing Republicans who attack Obama’s “job-killing” stimulus program on Fox News while taking credit for the jobs actually created in their local newspapers back home.
When Republicans accused Democrats of destroying the American Republic by using budget “reconciliation” to pass the Affordable Health Care Act, you could see the glee (and contempt) in Maddow’s eye as Republican duplicity was exposed as she quietly sat there while example after example of Republicans using reconciliation when they were in charge scrolled endlessly across the screen.
I watch Maddow’s surgical dissection of Republicans and think they’ve got to be devastated. But then I listen afterward, dumbfounded, as their only takeaway from this embarrassing unmasking is that Maddow is a partisan hack.
But after all, why should a right wing conservative care if he’s ridiculed for applying one standard to one group and a different standard to his? Why should he care if he is called a hypocrite considering that his ultimate objective is to guarantee the supremacy of white, Christian, affluent males?
Or take a charlatan preacher like Franklin Graham, whose sole objective isn’t saving souls but electing other Republicans. Why should Graham care if his duplicity is called out on national TV when he insists it’s impossible for him to vouch for the authenticity of President Obama’s Christian devotion while Graham eagerly does just that for Rick Santorum or even the three-timing Newt Gingrich?
Man is moral but society is not, the liberal theologian Reinhold Niebuhr reminds us. Telling the truth and being true to our stated principles may be sovereign in our personal lives but can easily give way to the demands of our political commitments, as right wing conservatives know all too well.
Hypocrisy matters to liberals because the principles of equality and fair-dealing upon which our liberal way of life depends matter to liberals — and when those principles are impartially applied bridge the differences that creates a society greater than the sum of its parts.
Right wing conservatives do not share this vision of the Great Society and so are untroubled by hypocrisy because their first and only commitment is to their group.
We are a nation not of blood and soil but of ideas, President George W. Bush told us in his second inaugural. Liberals accept that belief implicitly. Right wing conservatives do not. To this new generation of radical conservatives, societies are still based on soil and blood. With the emphasis on blood.
By: Ted Frier, Open Salon, February 23, 2012
One “Thin Mint” At A Time: Anti-Girl Scout State Rep Faces Pushback, Ridicule
We talked yesterday about the latest conservative activism against the Girl Scouts: Indiana state Rep. Bob Morris’ (R) strident opposition to the group, which he believes has been “radicalized” to promote abortion and homosexuality. Morris added that he believes the Girl Scouts have been “subverted in the name of liberal progressive politics and the destruction of traditional American family values.”
The story generated national attention, and in an amusing twist, Morris was even mocked yesterday by his own Republican colleagues.
After controversial remarks by one Republican lawmaker attacking Girl Scouts as a radical group that supports abortion, House Speaker Brian Bosma made his feelings clear Tuesday, one Thin Mint cookie at a time.
Bosma, R-Indianapolis, pointedly offered Girl Scout cookies throughout the day and munched them as he presided over the House. [...]
Bosma … clearly wanted people to know he didn’t share Morris’ views. At one point Tuesday, he told House colleagues he had “purchased 278 cases of Girl Scout cookies in the last 48 hours.”
And when time came for the House to adjourn, he asked all lawmakers who had been Girl Scouts — and seemingly every female legislator stood — to give the daily motion to adjourn.
When a conservative Republican state House Speaker is making fun one of his own caucus’ members, it’s clear even the GOP in a reliably-red state was embarrassed by Morris’ antics.
For his part, Morris was asked for proof yesterday to support his claim that the Girl Scouts support abortion rights. “They’re not against it,” he said. “If you’re not against it, you’re for it.”
Deana Potterf, director of communications for Girl Scouts of Central Indiana, told the Indianapolis Star that the organization does not address issues regarding homosexuality, abortion and sex. “Any kind of those issues are best left to the girls to talk with their families about,” Potterf said.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 22, 2012
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