In all the debate and analysis and angst over what those behind Project 2025 are doing and why, it is easy to get lost in the bog of details and motivations. A better question is why do so many people who would suffer under these proposals support them. When you look at the list of things they want to end, it boggles the mind that anyone who has to work for a living, who is dependent on a weekly paycheck, many whose expenses outstrip their income, and those who otherwise would wish to give their children an edge for the future would want any of this.…
Category: Community
Take A Breath
The Debate. Capital D. Everyone is undergoing meltdowns about it. Too many people are reacting as if this is the death knell of, well, Everything.
Chill. Firstly, read the transcripts. Right here. Then, for one interpretation, here’s an analysis from The Hill. And just to round out some of this, here’s some Fact Checking from AP.
(Back in the 1960 presidential campaign—some of you may remember this—Nixon and Kennedy had a debate. At that time, a large segment of the population got most of their information from the radio, but this was the dawn of television, so the debate was both broadcast and televised.…
Freedom and Its Contingencies, Part Two: Liberty
Abraham Lincoln pointed out in a speech that we have never had a good definition of Liberty. That most people used the word to mean different things. At base, we can perhaps agree that two meanings offering potential conflict are (1) Liberty from and (2) Liberty to. The war of independence was a major demonstration of the driving force of the first—separation from England—while once established the subsequent political struggle from then till now has been of the latter. Because we use the terms alternately—Freedom and Liberty—here perhaps more intently, it behooves us to come to grips with what they mean.…
Freedom and Its Contingencies, Part One
Many words get thrown around with too little regard for their actual meaning and intent. Love, friend, truth…a long list. There are two languages, it seems, operating most of the time. One we could call Colloquial Usage, which basically is the common application of a blanket term to cover all possible manifestations of a subject. Friend is a case in point. we blithely label everyone with whom we have more than casual acquaintance of a positive nature a friend. We do this without thought, mainly because it’s easier than teasing apart the various components of what A Friend may really be.…
Note The Date
May 30th, Donald Jay Trump is found guilty of 34 counts of felony fraud for covering up moneys spent to affect the election. People (some) will think this was for sleeping with a porn star, but it was not. It was for the crime of defrauding an election by way of illegal payments to muzzle someone.
Conspiracy is very difficult to prove because one must demonstrate intent. New York state prosecutors managed to do just that and 12 jurors came back after 9 and 1/2 hours with unanimous guilty verdicts.
This is historic, certainly. The first time a former president has been so convicted.…
Hope Projected
An idea occurred to me recently while reading a history of the early christian church (a very good one, I might add). I have little patience with the absolutes advocated by religious sentiment, the whole idea that one must, above all, believe. That to “have faith” is the most important thing. The materialist in me always come back to the same question: in what? That is the shoal upon which any ship of faith I might board runs aground. And without a clear What, the rest splinters and sinks.
But while I have a firm distrust of calls to faith—likewise demands for belief, for loyalty, for boundless commitment to causes for which I may be sympathetic even if unwilling to suspend all critical analysis of them—I cannot deny at least a set of habits that draw me to it.…
Chicago
The first week of April, we boarded a train and headed to Chicago. The train ended up behind a freight train, which slowed us down a bit, so we arrived later than intended. Still, after navigating the construction blocks around Union Station, we summoned a cab and got to our hotel. Famished, we asked what was open this late and were directed to an Italian place three blocks away, which served good pizza.
It was raining when we arrived and continued most of the week to be one degree of wet or another, but it did not deter us.
We met up with friends, ate great good, wandered around the central district around Michigan Avenue, toured some smaller museums, and had a great time.…
The Unrealized Dream
I’ve gotten to the point where I nearly tune out when someone in the public eye starts going on about the Founders and what they intended. Pro or con, it’s a surmise, and cherrypicking is rampant, though some pick bigger cherries than others. A few don’t even bother, they just make up whatever feels right and layer it over a 10th grade understanding of history. They can do this because we Americans in general couldn’t care less about history. That has always been the case, just as we, who have freedom to do so, read very little on average.
Some things have emerged from what I’ve read over the years pertaining to what the good folks in 1787 intended, not so much what they wrote down (though many of them did) as to what a reasonable assessment of the history of the times tells us.…
Standing On Principle
Now that it’s clear who the contenders are, I thought I’d make a few statements about the upcoming election. I doubt anyone who has read these pieces over the years will be surprised at who I’ll be voting for. But I want to address a problem that plagues us in aggregate and I see it raising its problematic head again. Let me start though with something that may strike you as curious.
My mother is frightened.
My 89-year-old mother is terrified that Trump will win. She was mightily disturbed back in 2016 when he did. Today she has reached a point of near-despair.…
Between Who and Who
Nikki Haley stumbled when addressing the Alabama Supreme Court decision about in vitro fertilization. In an interview with NPR, she said that people do not need government getting in the way when it comes to this difficult decision and “that’s between the patients and their doctor.” I heard echoes. Everyone should hear echoes. That is exactly the stance prochoice advocates have been taking for decades. The phrasing is half a step removed from support for personal choice across the board.
In one way, this is a perfect example of tone deafness. Because it is something of which Haley approves—IVF, which she herself used—then the rules are one way, to the benefit of wanna-be mothers who have difficulty conceiving.…