MAJORITY RULES - MINORITY RIGHTS

MAJORITY RULES: COLLECTIVE WISDOM or COLLECTIVE DELUSION? 

I am saddened to learn that George McGovern is close to death: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/10/17-10

After I turned 18 years old (shortly after 18 year old people got the right to vote) I had the honor of casting my first vote for George McGovern. I was in the college in Ohio at the time. With all the anti-war activity on campus I felt sure that McGovern was a shoo in. I couldn't have been more wrong. When I found out Nixon had won, I felt betrayed and like I had physically been punched in the gut and kicked in the nuts. 

We had the right to vote and the right to die in Vietnam but no right to have a say in ending the Vietnam war. 

 I heard George McGovern interviewed and he said that the American Electorate had made a mistake; that we had not elected the better of the two candidates . History proved him to be right on the money.  

Nixon resigned in disgrace. 

IT ALL ABOUT WINNING AND LOSING:  Gary Hart writes today about McGovern as a humanitarian winner: 

it is all about winning and losing. From this perspective, George McGovern goes down as an epic loser: 49 States went against him and for Richard Nixon in 1972.

But what if we judged political figures and candidates by more intelligent standards? The "winner" Richard Nixon, abdicated the presidency in disgrace. And the "loser" George McGovern continued on to become one of his generation's greatest humanitarians.

Throughout his public and private life, Senator McGovern was at the forefront of the struggle against hunger both in the United States and throughout the world. Though a decorated military hero, he led the opposition to the war in Vietnam. He has still to be recognized for his leadership in democratizing the Democratic Party and opening up its doors to women, minorities, and young people, thus avoiding a repeat of the chaos at the Chicago Democratic convention in 1968 and bringing his party into the cultural mainstream emerging from the social revolutions of the 1960s and 70s.

It was then that I learned a valuable lesson: Majority doesn't necessarily mean collective wisdom. It can also mean collective delusion. 

MY FIRST ABORTION

It really wasn't my abortion because I was in Sixth Grade and couldn't fully understand what an abortion is or was.  I didn't even know anything about parts.
Memory is a funny thing.  Events that happen to us years ago re-surface when we have the capacity to process them or examine them.  This was my first exposure to abortion while I was in sixth grade.

We always played on the street and my parents deliberately bought a house that abutted the playground of our elementary school. We had a wide open place to run around and bike around. We were always outside, winter or summer. This was on the shores of Lake Erie, East of Cleveland.

The housing development was plopped down on a former golf course where my Dad used to play golf when he was single.  Now, he was raising his family on the land where he used to divot.  All the streets were named after golfing terms.  We lived on Fairway Blvd. The next street over was "High Tee". And, yes, there was a "Divot Drive".

Although High Tee was the next street over, there was no through access to Fairway Blvd. so we never went over there to play with kids on that block.  There were plenty of kids on our block so we didn't really have to venture that far off to find com-padres in crime.

So, it was quite unusual one day when Eddie Melbasa came over from High Tee. He seemed upset & I couldn't figure why he came over.  I was distracted. My younger brother was horsing around with his friends & my charge was to keep an eye on him & them, participate, but keep all of us out of trouble.

I knew Eddie from school but he never hung with us at home. He began to tell me how his grandmother had scraped a baby out of his mother. He told me that his mother was in a great deal of pain. He told me there was a lot of blood.  I did not know what Eddie was talking about. I didn't yet know women bled from there.  It was just the week before that the girls were taken out of class for some mysterious reason and all the boys got to go outside.

Eddie told me his grandmother put the baby in a Tupperware container and put it on the curb with the garbage.  For the life of me, I could not fathom what Eddie came over to tell me or why. Now I know.

Eddie had witnessed his mother having an abortion at home.

Now, in the era of Facebook, my sixth grade classmates are posting our class pictures and re-surfacing in my life. Maybe this is why this memory from sixth grade has come back.

Churches Don't Have Helicopters

Have you ever heard of a church that owns a helicopter? I haven't and I've been to a number of churches in various places in the United States.  Governments, (local, state, federal) own helicopters, not churches. Some private entities own helicopters. Some businesses own helicopters. 

Yet, as we approach the seven year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, we need to remember people perched on rooftops waiting for rescues that never got to them.  The response of the Bush administration was that the government wasn't really tasked with doing this type of work, the faith based community was supposed to take care of it.  And they did.  In the aftermath of the hurricane, churches marshaled resources to provide relief in New Orleans. 

Also, FEMA, The Federal Emergency Management Agency, worked admirably during the Clinton Administration. Under Bush, FEMA was "administered" by Brownie, some horse guy that W said was doing a heck of a job.  What is it with Republicans and horses? 

However, good church work, does not let government off the hook. Taxpayers paid for helicopters of the coast guard, national guard and other components of government.  We expect government to appropriately use our resources that we paid for with our tax dollars to assist us our citizens. The same concept applies to all levels of government, like automobiles owned by the City of Schenectady. Paid for by taxpayers, we expect our resources to be used to serve the public, the people that paid for them. 

The Picture below was taken in Garret County Maryland, Western Maryland, McHenry at the August County Fair 2008.  I was staffing the Democratic Exhibit Booth on the Fairgrounds.

Roma Tomatoes and Russian Kale from my 2012 garden in Niskayuna New York.

I lived in Massachusetts for many years.  This is one spot I returned to time and again.  I never tired of the visual variations of light, weather and time of year that make this scene totally different every time I saw it.
Rockport, Massachusetts "Motif #1"

Peaches picked from my 3 year old Peach Tree grown in my backyard in Grantsville, Maryland.  No pesticides were used, flawless peaches, ripe off the tree.

Ohio's Electorate Problem

" I Know I got Snookered (at the Polls)". "That Weren't Nice"....."Oh, well".......disenfranchised Ohio voter

I was raised in Ohio, in the suburbs on the East side of Cleveland. I went to college in Athens and Columbus and have traveled through the south west area and western areas of Ohio extensively.  I still have family in Cleveland, Akron and Canton, and Cincinnati.  I know this state and I know its people.  When reports come in that voters were disenfranchised, I know the neighborhoods, I lived there. When Mitt Romney has a photo opportunity with coal miners, I know the place and the people.  They were my classmates in school.  I visited their small towns and the mines, even though I was a city boy. When voters were disenfranchised in Ohio back in 2004, I visited Cleveland to spend some time with family. When I told my father about the voting problems downstate, he replied: "We didn't have any problem here" (in the affluent suburbs east of Cleveland).  Sigh. I didn't even try to explain it.  Honest "plain dealers" [Plain Dealer is the Cleveland newspaper] are not wired to believe that dirty tricks can disenfranchise people, especially since they did not have a problem where they live.  They choose to believe smooth sailing prevailed everywhere.  This is the complacency of the Ohio citizen:  "Don't confront with me any truths."

What was even more amazing was that there was absolutely no coverage of the downstate problems in the Cleveland media market.
NONE!

I LOVE TRAINS - Who is John Galt? Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged

Its Sat.evening, 7:30 & I hear a train going by my home.This gives me hope that goods are being transported & there IS an economy.I sleep better when I hear them throughout the night. It calms me. It tells me there is an economy despite the naysayers and there is at least one guy working.Who is John Galt? (Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand) 

It angers me too that other countries have better trains than we do.

As a boy of 5 years old, I rode the train from Cleveland,Ohio to Detroit, Michigan by myself. My parents put me on in Cleveland & my grandparents met me at the station in Detroit and vice versa. 

The conductor kept an eye on me en route. I usually slept on the large bench lying down. It was a whole lot better than the back seat of my Dad's Pontiac Starchief because I didn't get carsick.

The Lake Shore Limited Amtrak Train making its way along the Hudson River in New York

 


 Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur of Ohio near Toledo often talks about a resurgence of trains rolling through her congressional district laden with rolled steel headed for a revived auto industry in Detroit, my birthplace.  With all the negatives of air travel, Amtrak from Schenectady to Cleveland on "The Lake Shore Limited" is the way to travel now that gasoline is pushing $4 a gallon again. 

 John Galt is a fictional character in Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged (1957). Although he is not identified by name until the last third of the novel, he is the object of its often-repeated question "Who is John Galt?" and of the quest to discover the answer. Trains, powerful, swift, innovative also are central to this nove.  Its funny the Republicans embrace this book while at the same time refuse to support Amtrak or improve train travel in America. 


 If you haven't read "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand, "Who is John Galt"? you need to read it to learn why it is so pivotal to the ideologues in this current Presidential election. The movie  Planes Trains and Automobiles with John Candy and Steve Martin, and some great Train Scenes in the movie "Only the Lonely" with John Candy.  I love trains