The · useless · Fish · of · God, · Affected · by · the · skepticism · of · a · skeptical · age

Representative Boehner,

As one of your constituents who voted last election and will be voting against on Saturday, I want to ask you to take George W. Bush's hand out of your ass and actually think about the Bailout package that you couldn't lead your party to pass earlier this week and vote against it's passage when it comes up again.

Yes, something needs to be done, but this package has no oversight and little value, though it has a great price tag.

Have the FDIC work on buying out $700 billion dollars worth of loans from banks. That would restore confidence and fix the underlying mortgage crisis that precipitated this mess.

I don't expect you to do this. You have so consistently been George W. Bush's man that you are little more than a puppet who cannot speak for yourself and will pass the plan because the man pulling your strings tells you to. Regardless of the facts. Regardless of your constituents.

Because you, sir, are proof the problems inherent in a representative democracy.

Sincerely,

One outraged constituent

[T]here are some people who wish us to enact laws which would seriously damage the right of free speech and which could be used not only against subversive groups but against other groups engaged in political or other activities which were not generally popular. Such measures would not only infringe on the Bill of Rights and the basic liberties of our people; they would also undermine the very internal security they seek to protect.

Laws forbidding dissent do not prevent subversive activities; they merely drive them into more secret and more dangerous channels. Police states are not secure; their history is marked by successive purges, and growing concentration camps, as their governments strike out blindly in fear of violent revolt. Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.
Harry S. Truman, 2/16/1948

I stumbled across this quote today. It is disturbingly prescient of the world we hear about in the news, only 6 decades later. And I fear that, whoever takes the reigns of government in the US next year, it won't change much our direction.

Perhaps more on this later in the week. But, until then, it is something to think about, for I know I shall be..

As politicians talk about No Child Learning AnythingLeft Behind, as they argue whether the intiative has been helpful or harmful, it was left to Education Secretary Margaret Spellings to provide the scariest quote in the whole story:

Remember, what we're asking for is grade-level reading and math ability by 2014. Is that too much to ask of our schools? I don't think so.
'No Child' Law Picked Apart as Renewal Fight Looms

What does that really mean? As anyone in a buearacracy can tell you, that translates into "if we can't improve the test scores by making the students do well, modify the test so it gets passed." Which gives me the following vision of a reading and math proficiency test for 12th graders in 2014:

Teacher	Now, look at this sequence of letters. ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ Please pick the letter that starts the superhero represented by this symbol:
Student	<Points to the letter S directly above the symbol1
Teacher	That answered the whole test in one question!

I could do a math test but it'd be something like showing a number line and having the child point to any number. <sighs> Is it over yet?

-J

---

¹I'm too lazybusy this morning to actually line up the symbol under the S, I'll leave that as an exercise for the readers.

After you, Paul Watson. ( Though he does get one thing right. )

Need to clean up the wording a bit but it's from today's Dilbert.

So says George Jean Nathan. And I think that's an appropriate comment for today in our country.

I am personally amused by our King Dictator wanna-be President every time he talks about "politicizing" the war with reference to the bill authorizing more money for the war having a date to pull our troops out. Even more amusing is his comment about "arbitrary timetables for withdrawal that would tie the hands of our commanders on the ground".

Let's get something straight. War is political. Armies don't just up and attack someone, somebody has to command them to do so. In a well-ordered society (which is what America purports to be), that person is our leader. We call our President the Commander-in-Chief because he has that role, he orders our military forces as an extension of our policy. By dint of that, he can tie the hands of commanders on the ground by giving them unrealistic objectives, or by getting them into a situation that we are not properly prepared for (such as the military winning the war in Iraq only to have the politicians lose the peace).

But, in a world where loyalty rules beyond reality, where our King Dictator wanna-be President creates reality to feed to us, where we have an administration that caused Patrick Leahy to say

"You can only say 'I meant to say' three, four, five or more times before people stop believing you."¹

in such a world we should not be surprised that the politics of war is accused of being political.

Peace, gentle readers, because it's gonna be a long, rocky for the forseeable future

---

¹I heard this on NPR this morning but am not sure I have the quote exactly correct. Will wait for it to hit another news site where I can correctly quote and cite.

I hate it when I have a blog idea and it's incorrect. I could have sworn that one of the lines from the 1932 Democratic Convention (think FDR) was:

Old things now are new again,
Happy Days are here again!

But I was wrong; or, if I am correct, I'm not finding that version of the lyrcis anywhere so I'll have to go with that old chestnut of, "Those who do not study history, are doomed to repeat it's lessons."

And, as tempting as it is to take a cheap shot at Bush and reference his time in the Texas Air National Guard and the irony of his going to Vietnam now to get away from Washington, that's not rich enough in irony for today.

Nope, for today's recommended dose of irony, we turn our eyes back to 1948 and the man running for President of the United States on the Dixiecrat ticket, Strom Thurmond. Strom was known for stating, on the campaign trail, that Dixiecrats "want that federal government to keep their filthy hands off the rights of the states." Now, I've talked about States' Rights before, but for those of you too young (or whose history is on another continent or north of the St. Lawrence River) States' Rights was a codeword for segregation. But this post is not about Strom Thurmond. It is, rather, about a Senator who was excoriated for saying, at Strom's 100th birthday party:

"I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years."

And that man was Trent Lott. The fallout from his birthday statements was that he resigned the post of Senate Republican Leader.

And, yesterday? Yesterday he was elected Minority Whip, number two position in the party.

It's good to see the elephant dance, even if the steps are embarassing. After all, folks don't go to watch an elephant dance (or a donkey or a bear) because it will ever attain the grace of the Bolshoi. They go because it's amazing that the elephant can dance at all.

But it would be better if it learned some new moves.

Let's look at some rough numbers. In our country we recently celebrated reaching a population of the 300 million. Of those, it is estimated that 205 million meet the criteria of being over 2118 and not convicted of a felony and thus able to participate in the democratic process.

It's estimated that this election year, 83 million of hthose 205 million voted. 40.4 percent. In Iraq, 70 percent voted. In Italy, 92.5 percent. Taiwan, 70.1 percent.

Unfortunately, the folks who are going to get upset over this are all of my readers who vote.

Ah well, time to start the week

-J

In other words, man is naturally obstinate; and this quality in him is attended with certain results
Arthur Schopenhauer Art of controversy

I downloaded some of Schopenhauer's works from Gutenberg a few weeks ago and have been reading The Art of Controversy. In it, Schopenhauer is discussing the art of debating, which he sums up as follows:

Aristotle divides all conclusions into logical and dialectical, in the manner described, and then into eristical. Eristic is the method by which the form of the conclusion is correct, but the premisses, the materials from which it is drawn, are not true, but only appear to be true. Finally Sophistic is the method in which the form of the conclusion is false, although it seems correct. These three last properly belong to the art of Controversial Dialectic, as they have no objective truth in view, but only the appearance of it, and pay no regard to truth itself; that is to say, they aim at victory.

If human nature were not base, but thoroughly honourable, we should in every debate have no other aim than the discovery of truth; we should not in the least care whether the truth proved to be in favour of the opinion which we had begun by expressing, or of the opinion of our adversary. That we should regard as a matter of no moment, or, at any rate, of very secondary consequence; but, as things are, it is the main concern. Our innate vanity, which is particularly sensitive in reference to our intellectual powers, will not suffer us to allow that our first position was wrong and our adversary's right. The way out of this difficulty would be simply to take the trouble always to form a correct judgment. For this a man would have to think before he spoke. But, with most men, innate vanity is accompanied by loquacity and innate dishonesty. They speak before they think; and even though they may afterwards perceive that they are wrong, and that what they assert is false, they want it to seem the contrary. The interest in truth, which may be presumed to have been their only motive when they stated the proposition alleged to be true, now gives way to the interests of vanity: and so, for the sake of vanity, what is true must seem false, and what is false must seem true.

Actually, he does also state that sometimes we must defend our position even when we believe we are wrong in order to verify that what our opponent wants us to believe really is true. All too often, unfortunately, we allow our innate vanity to keep us going long after the truth of the matter has come out.

One thing about living in a country which espouses freedom of speech is that we do have the freedom to debate, to hold our beliefs strongly. And, for most of us, this is not an issue. If I believe that it is wrong to say the word doppleganger and you believe it is right, it is of little matter. We may debate the issue and, at the end of the day (or year or lifetime) we may still hold those views. The problem with society today is that we live in a society where we either do not have or do not wish to take the time to understand issues, a problem exacerbated by those who have some power to push the issue who reduce it to almost ad absurdum levels in an attempt to get voters to put them in a position of more power to enable them to put their agenda through.

As I read this particular work, I was struck by how competent our current administration seems at Sophistry. As Schopenhauer detailed the tricks one uses to win a debate, I could frequently draw parallels with administration policy. Take our war on terror. If you look back at the history of our country (and it is a most appropriate time of year to do so), you can see the wars we have fought. From our Revolution to World War II (or, as future historians will say, the end of the Great World War which just took a twenty year hiatus), you can see that we had a well-defined enemy and well-defined goals. Both Lincoln and Roosevelt suspended the habeus corpus. Both presidents have been judged adversely for doing so in the eyes of history, but both had a war that was defined. Lincoln knew he could restore it once the Union was restored, Roosevelt knew he would restore it when the war was over.

But what war do we fight now? The sophists in power would not say we fight one in Iraq. Search the web site of our executive and you'll not find one reference to the "Iraq War", excepting maybe when quoting a reporter asking a question. Nor do we fight a war in Afghanistan.

Rather, we fight a war on terror. Who is the enemy? Whoever the administration decides it is. Don't believe me, look to the WMD that were never found. I honestly think that the elder Bush must have been shaking his head that his son didn't even think to plant WMDs in Iraq to be found. We went into Afghanistan for much better reasons:

Al Qaeda is to terror what the mafia is to crime. But its goal is not making money; its goal is remaking the world -- and imposing its radical beliefs on people everywhere.

The terrorists practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism that has been rejected by Muslim scholars and the vast majority of Muslim clerics -- a fringe movement that perverts the peaceful teachings of Islam. The terrorists' directive commands them to kill Christians and Jews, to kill all Americans, and make no distinction among military and civilians, including women and children.

This group and its leader -- a person named Osama bin Laden -- are linked to many other organizations in different countries, including the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. There are thousands of these terrorists in more than 60 countries. They are recruited from their own nations and neighborhoods and brought to camps in places like Afghanistan, where they are trained in the tactics of terror. They are sent back to their homes or sent to hide in countries around the world to plot evil and destruction.

The leadership of al Qaeda has great influence in Afghanistan and supports the Taliban regime in controlling most of that country. In Afghanistan, we see al Qaeda's vision for the world.

Afghanistan's people have been brutalized -- many are starving and many have fled. Women are not allowed to attend school. You can be jailed for owning a television. Religion can be practiced only as their leaders dictate. A man can be jailed in Afghanistan if his beard is not long enough.

The United States respects the people of Afghanistan -- after all, we are currently its largest source of humanitarian aid -- but we condemn the Taliban regime. (Applause.) It is not only repressing its own people, it is threatening people everywhere by sponsoring and sheltering and supplying terrorists. By aiding and abetting murder, the Taliban regime is committing murder.
President Declares "Freedom at War With Fear"

And that murder included a lot of people on our soil on September 11^th. The problem with the war in Afghanistan is that we never did capture Osama bin Laden. And yet we turned our attention to Iraq, where more American soldiers have died than stars shine in our night sky, more than the number of soldiers killed in the first 3 years of fighting in Vietnam.

Don't get me wrong. I support our troops. I fully recognize the blood they shed to water the Tree of Liberty and the fact that I can sleep more safely at night for their vigilance. But our democratically elected leaders are failing our troops. Our commander-in-chief is as busy spinning the media with sophistry as he is trying to reconstruct Iraq, busier perhaps. After all is said and done, the only link that Iraq has to the War on Terror comes from the White House. Colin Powell, before leaving the cabinet, admitted that Hussein had nothing to do with the September 11th attack. There were no WMDs found. And our boys are being killed in what was called a civil war, before the administration's trained lap dog US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad was privately spanked retracted his statement and said he misspoke.

Peace? Tis to be hoped for, prayed for, worked for, gentle readers

As you may be aware, yesterday, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales showed up before the US Senate Judiciary Committee to talk about Wartime Executive Power and the NSA's Surveillance Authority. You can read the entire transcript here or you can read a translation of Gonzale's answers (though it comes with a drink warning).

I wonder, though, if the attorney general was quoting his boss directly at one point. The part in question is as follows:

There may be some in America -- I suspect there are some in America who are saying, "Well, why aren't you -- you know, if you've got reason to believe that you've got two members of Al Qaida talking to each in America, my God, why aren't you listening to their conversations?"

I wonder if that "some in America" was really W?

Something has been bugging me since my birthday. But I couldn't put my finger on it until just recently. You see, it starts with a document a couple of centuries old, predicated by the document it is attached to. That document would be the Bill of Rights and it is attached to the Constitution. More specifically, it would be the Fifth Amendment that I am having trouble with. Here, let me read it to you:

Amendment V

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Now, what has this to do with my birthday a couple of weeks ago? Well, that was the day Saddam was captured and President Bush said:

[Saddam] will face the justice he denied to millions.

Ok. And in America that justice includes a presumption of innocence. Actually, so does international law and the various war crimes tribunals. Except that President Bush said, in an interview with Dianne Sawyer on December 16th:

He is a torturer, a murderer, and they had rape rooms, and this is a disgusting tyrant who deserves justice, the ultimate justice. But that will be decided not by the president of the United States, but by the citizens of Iraq in one form or another.

Had Bush been a prosecutor he would have been taken to task for prejudicing the jury pool. But he's not.

So the real question about all this is whether the Democrats will actually have the guts to call him on this. Of course, that will depend greatly on what happens to Saddam between now and then. So I suppose I shall wait and watch.

Peace, gentle readers

To begin with, let me address the term, the Fourth Estate. The nineteenth century historian Carlyle coined the term while pointing back to the three estates defined by Burke:

Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important than they all. It is not a figure of speech, or a witty saying; it is a literal fact, .... Printing, which comes necessarily out of Writing, I say often, is equivalent to Democracy: invent Writing, Democracy is inevitable. ..... Whoever can speak, speaking now to the whole nation, becomes a power, a branch of government, with inalienable weight in law-making, in all acts of authority. It matters not what rank he has, what revenues or garnitures: the requisite thing is that he have a tongue which others will listen to; this and nothing more is requisite.

And the fourth estate has expanded to include multi-media, even the web. Why, you and I, my fellow bloggers, are part of the fourth estate. Or are we?

Let me borrow from Ani's poem: self evident (pointed out to me by the always well written hermionesviolin):

and we hold these truths to be self evident:
#1 george w. bush is not president
#2 america is not a true democracy
#3 the media is not fooling me

I'm not going to argue the first two, though I could and at length. But the comment about the media is an intriguing one and, more importantly, relevant to this post. Mass Media has always been a means of getting out a viewpoint. In fact, it is not too hard a case to make to say that mass media formed the United States. What, you disagree? Let me give you a major f'rinstance... Have you ever heard of the Federalist Papers? Let me quote from the government web site:

The Federalist, commonly referred to as the Federalist Papers, is a series of 85 essays written by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison between October 1787 and May 1788. The essays were published anonymously, under the pen name "Publius," in various New York state newspapers of the time.

The Federalist Papers were written and published to urge New Yorkers to ratify the proposed United States Constitution, which was drafted in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787. In lobbying for adoption of the Constitution over the existing Articles of Confederation, the essays explain particular provisions of the Constitution in detail. For this reason, and because Hamilton and Madison were each members of the Constitutional Convention, the Federalist Papers are often used today to help interpret the intentions of those drafting the Constitution.

The Federalist Papers were published primarily in two New York state newspapers: The New York Packet and The Independent Journal. They were reprinted in other newspapers in New York state and in several cities in other states. A bound edition, with revisions and corrections by Hamilton, was published in 1788 by printers J. and A. McLean. An edition published by printer Jacob Gideon in 1818, with revisions and corrections by Madison, was the first to identify each essay by its author's name. Because of its publishing history, the assignment of authorship, numbering, and exact wording may vary with different editions of The Federalist.
About the Federalist Papers
(Emphasis mine)

Or who can forget William Randolph Hearst's famous line to Frederic Remington when Remington couldn't find evidence of a war:

You provide the pictures and I'll provide the war.

But is there a difference between those two examples? That's hard to say. They both seek to influence popular opinion, though for vastly different reasons. But step further into the present and look at the codified Fourth Estate of journalism. While papers are still motivated to sell, they are also motivated to be responsible journalists. Even the alternative papers know they must keep to a certain level of professionalism.

Every member of the Fourth Estate has an agenda. Newspapers will print a list of candidates they endorse precisely because they believe those candidates can do a certain thing. What doesn't matter and can vary from paper to paper but they use their position to say, Here, this is how we would recommend you vote so the world will turn out as you, are readers who are sympathetic to our views, would like it to.

But there is a new and growing grass roots section to the Fourth Estate, the bloggers. Espeically with folks like Robert Scoble who preaches the ten rules for getting your message out to customers in an interactive way (All 10 read: BLOG!). I won't deny that it needs done. And on a corporate level it is a good thing. But when folks rush to publish their opinion without checking facts you encounter the biggest benefit and problem that blogging represents.

You see, back when Ben Franklin was slipping Silence Dogood letters under the door of the print shop where his brother employed him, it took money to create a published work. And money implied that you had the means to be someone of consequence or that you had convinced someone of the validity of your news.

As printing become less expensive, we turned out the yellow journalism that led to the Spanish American War.

And now there are blogs.

Blogs are cheap. And anyone who has a blog can post a "fact" and it gains weight. You can post your opinon and make up facts from the whole cloth and most folks aren't willing to take the time to research the truth but will simply accept it. Perhaps because we live in a world made up of 30 second soundbites. I don't know.

In fact, it would not surprise me that a number of folks who have been pointed to this site don't read the whole thing because it is so long. Nonetheless, I shall not hide it behind a cut tag <chuckles>.

What do you think? Am I right or wrong?

-J

It was quiet. People were moving about and the day was beginning much like any other day that had gone before. Men and women were going about their business, families were sleeping late. A typical day that reflected life in America as though we were looking into a large mirror. But it was a false mirror and it was shattered with brutal determination by a ruthless enemy.

And the president responded. Here, listen to what he had to say.

( More... )

George Santayana, a notable philosopher, coined the phrase, "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it." Mark Twain, on the other hand, said "History doesn't repeat itself; it rhymes." And how true this seems. Let's step back a little over four decades to the early 60s for this history lesson, though I hope you were paying attention to years prior to that. WWI was a classic demonstration of the domino effect where a tripwire caused alliances and treaties to start the "War to end all wars" and the end of that war simply planted and fertilized the seeds for the next war. And so American policy wonks understood dominoes. Even more so given that the Soviet Union and Red China were attempting to spread their brand of how the world works in direct opposition to our brand.

It is within this geopolitcal framework of keeping our allies and wooing our enemies allies that we find ourselves working. The French have left Vietnam and the communists are moving in, but there are rebels, folks who do not want to be in a Communist nation. And so, President Kennedy put up to 16,000 "military advisors" in Vietnam. These were soldiers whose job was not to fight but to teach the rebels how to fight. to help lead them in the cause. Then, on November 22, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed Kennedy. And, on November 24, 1963, Jack Ruby tried Oswald, found him guilty and executed him, giving conspiracy theorists fodder for their grist mill, especially since Ruby was never properly tried and died of brain cancer before his retrial.

Crease: Now what are you saying, the NSA killed Kennedy?
Mother: No, they shot him but they didn't kill him. He's still alive.
Sneakers

This sets the stage for a Texan, Lyndon Baines Johnson, to become President. Ok, actually it was simply Kennedy's assasination that did that but don't get picky on me. He was also re-elected with the largest popular vote margin of any president, 15,000,000 votes. As President (and a firm believer in the domino theory), he escalated American troops in Vietnam. He wanted to beat the Communists. But he also had another vision, "to build a great society, a place where the meaning of man's life matches the marvels of man's labor." Some of the pieces of this great society included:

• aid to education
• attack on disease
• Medicare
• urban renewal
• beautification
• conservation
• development of depressed regions
• a wide-scale fight against poverty
• control and prevention of crime and delinquency
• removal of obstacles to the right to vote.

It was a good dream. It led to many cornerstone pieces of legislation being passed, including the Medicare act of 1965.

Unfortunately for Johnson, "that bitch of a war" on the other side of the world was hurting him. It costs money to run a war and money to support internal reforms. And, in the end, it was the war that LBJ is most remembered for, a war considered a failure by many.

And so we come to the present. We have another Texan in the White House, though his popular support in the election wasn't so great. And he, too, has an agenda of social issues including

• "No Child Left Behind"
• Medicare Prescription Drug Benefits
• Strengthening Social Security

And the parallels are eerily similar.

Make no mistake, Iraq is not Vietnam. The comparisons that get drawn between the two have little basis. But we are involved in a war on the other side of the world. We have far more troops committed to Iraq than we had to Vietnam and far fewer casualties so far but the fact remains, this is a large item in the budget that takes away from other reforms.

Today it is expected that the Medicare reform bill will pass, Johnson passed the original.

You see, rhymes, not repeats.

No, gentle readers, I really have no conclusions to draw today. You may do that and list them in the comments. I'm just pointing out the rhymes and pondering them.

Peace

Stand by Ready.
Ready.
Fire!

Seven rifles fire into the pristine blue sky, shattering the silence with their roar.

Fire!

Again these tubes of destruction ring out, not to kill but to honor.

Fire!

One last time the seven rifles, handled by seven men paying honor to a fallen comrade ring out. As the men lower their rifles on command, a bugler steps forward and starts to play Taps.

---

---

As the notes reverently drift from the bugle's bell, a casket is lowered and the flag that draped it is given to the family members of the person for whom this ceremony is being held. It could be any one of 1700 veterans who die every day. It could be Sgt. Nicholas A. Tomko, 24, of Pittsburgh, PA, who was killed on Nov. 9 2003 in Baghdad, Iraq. Sgt. Tomko was the door gunner in a convoy vehicle when his team came under small arms attack. It may be someone you know, someone you grew up with, or one of the many folks who have died so you can live your life today in a world unimagined when they were fighting.

Thomas Jefferson acknowledged that what we enjoy has a cost. Though frequently taken out of context, he did say:

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is it's natural manure.

And we have refreshed our tree with the blood of our sons and daughters, aunts and uncles, fathers and mothers. When Germany threatened in 1914, it took us three years, but we entered the fray and helped preserve democracy. When Germany and Italy and Japan threatened again, 30 years later, we went. In the last 100 years the blood of our country has been shed in two world wars, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and many other places. And today we take time to celebrate and honor those whose blood has been shed and those who have risked their life and survived.

It's been many a year since I've been to a Veteran's Day celebration. Work tends to interfere. But I can remember marching in the parades as a Scout. I can remember standing at attention while the rifles roared and the bugle's clarion call haunted through the air as if all the veterans who had ever fought so that I could march freely to honor them were wafting through the sky with it.

I've been to Arlington and seen the stark white monuments stretching out in orderly rows like the formation of an army at the ready.

I've witnessed the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknowns, a tomb unlikely to have any more occupants interred thanks to genetic fingerprinting enabling us to identify remains better.

And I've known men and women who have risked their lives for me and you, even though we weren't born yet, because they wanted us to be able to live in a free world.

And so, to all the veterans of this fine country, those who died in battle, those who survived to live and die a natural death, those who are living full lives and those who are still in the line of fire for us, I salute you.

Fading light dims the sight,
And a star gems the sky, gleaming bright.
From afar drawing nigh -- Falls the night.

Day is done, gone the sun,
From the lake, from the hills, from the sky.
All is well, safely rest, God is nigh.

Then good night, peaceful night,
Till the light of the dawn shineth bright,
God is near, do not fear -- Friend, good night.

Peace, gentle readers

Today we step into our wayback machine and set the dial for 40 years ago, in the great state of Alabama and it's newly elected governor, George Wallace. The title for this entry comes from his inaugural speech where he said:

Today I have stood, where once Jefferson Davis stood, and took an oath to my people. It is very appropriate then that from this Cradle of the Confederacy, this very Heart of the Great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generations of forebears before us done, time and time again through history. Let us rise to the call of freedom-loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South. In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny . . . and I say . . . segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever.

Yes, it's a hot button topic. Always has been and always will be. Segregation still exists and sometimes it's not as blatant as the color of our skin, but more on that later.

Ironically enough, the pargraph before the one I just quoted, Wallace said, "I want to assure every child that this State government is not afraid to invest in their future through education, so that they will not be handicapped on every threshold of their lives." You can read the whole speech here.

Fast forward a couple of months, from January 14, 1963 to June 11, 1963.

On June 11, 1963, Wallace kept a campaign pledge to stand in the schoolhouse door to block integration of Alabama public schools. He stood in the door-way to block the attempt of two black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, to register at the University of Alabama. While he was there, he had the following to say:

The unwelcomed, unwanted, unwarranted and force-induced intrusion upon the campus of the University of Alabama today of the might of the Central Government offers frightful example of the oppression of the rights, privileges and sovereignty of this State by officers of the Federal Government. This intrusion results solely from force, or threat of force, undignified by any reasonable application of the principle of law, reason and justice. It is important that the people of this State and nation understand that this action is in violation of rights reserved to the State by the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of Alabama. While some few may applaud these acts, millions of Americans will gaze in sorrow upon the situation existing at this great institution of learning.

He was, of course, basing this upon the 10th amendment to the Constitution of the United States:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

. . .

Among those powers so reserved and claimed is the right of state authority in the operation of the public schools, colleges and Universities. My action does not constitute disobedience to legislative and constitutional provisions. It is not defiance – for defiance sake, but for the purpose of raising basic and fundamental constitutional questions. My action is raising a call for strict adherence to the Constitution of the United States as it was written – for a cessation of usurpation and abuses. My action seeks to avoid having state sovereignty sacrificed on the altar of political expediency.
(Again, you can read the whole speech here.

The short ending to the historical part of this is that President John F. Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard, and ordered its units to the university campus. Wallace then stepped aside and returned to Montgomery allowing the students to enter.

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I feel that it is necessary, at this point, to stop and make my own personal opinions clear. I don't believe in segregation. I'm not sure that state's rights apply in deference to national needs. But I am hoping to raise some thoughtful questions in what comes after this little disclaimer.

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Let's begin by looking at segragation. It's been 40 years since this incident. Segregation has had many walls broken down. Some have subtly shifted. But what is segregation? I mean, we can turn to the dictionary and see what Merriam Webster has to say:

Main Entry:seg·re·ga·tion
Pronunciation: "se-gri-'gA-sh&n
Function: noun
Date: 1555
1 : the act or process of segregating : the state of being segregated
2 a : the separation or isolation of a race, class, or ethnic group by enforced or voluntary residence in a restricted area, by barriers to social intercourse, by separate educational facilities, or by other discriminatory means b : the separation for special treatment or observation of individuals or items from a larger group <segregation of gifted children into accelerated classes>
3 : the separation of allelic genes that occurs typically during meiosis

Segregation by class... Well, that still exists, no? Either by how much you earn or what your sexual preference is or... well, there's segregation here, you, reading this post. After all, not everyone can afford to read online such as you are. That's a form of segregation.

<sigh> Segregation cannot be eradicated. There will always be something that separates people in to groups. Some segregation (economic, for instance) may never be overcome until we reach a Marxian utopia.

I have a friend who bemoans the fact that she was born white and thus has privileges. I've told her, on more than one occasion to stop bemoaning and use those privileges to make changes in the world.

Can one person do such a thing? <shrug> Both George Wallace and John F Kennedy seemed to think so. That's why they had a clash. And here I'm going to say something that may make me very unpopular with a lot of folks but I hope they'll read the whole paragraph before judging me.

I have some admiration for George Wallace. No, not for what he believed in, for I would fit in to the group of "millions of Americans [gazing] in sorrow upon the situation" that Wallace was attempting to block. But for the fact that he took a stand. The Bible, in the book of Revelations, has God telling the church at Laodicea:

I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were either cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spit you out of my mouth. (Revelations 3:15,16)

And that is what I'm going to encourage you to do today. I don't care when you are actually reading this, but do something today that takes a stand on something you believe in. I honestly don't care if you are right or wrong, whether you are standing with me on something or against me, but find some passion in your life today that can change someone's life.

Peace (and thanks for reading my long-windedness)

-J

The joy and wonder as I head out there,
And I know I can have it, if I only dare.
Tom Smith