Saint John the Divine

As tributes continue to flow for the late Sen. John McCain, the praise may seem a little excessive to some. But there’s a simple reason for it. He was an old-school Republican who very easily could have been President, in a time when candidates for that office were actually Presidential.

McCain, as we all know, would have been the first to tell us that while he would have made a good President, he wasn’t sainthood material. He made more than one serious mistake in judgment, including going along with those who gave him bad political advice. As one who thought of myself as a Republican, I had to draw the line in 2008, when Sarah Palin was on the ticket with him. I likely would have voted for him, were it not for the prospect that if something happened to him while in office, she would become President. In my view, we dodged a bullet then, but in 2016, a similar bullet found us.

What do we admire about McCain? We know about his heroism as a prisoner of war in in Vietnam, his fight for campaign-finance and immigration reform, and most recently his vote against the repeal of Obamacare, much to the chagrin of the President and most other Republican legislators. We also know about those mistakes, that he had the honesty and authenticity to admit he had made.

He was clearly flawed and didn’t always live up to his own values. But the difference between McCain and what we have now, is that he HAD values and set goals that were beyond what were expedient for him. And he appreciated the critical value of relationships in accomplishing what he thought, and what quite a number of his colleagues in both parties agreed, was best for the country.

The elevation of John McCain seems over the top right now because it’s not just about him. It’s a rebuke to our current President and to his supporters in Congress. Being Republican used to stand for something besides just being in power. I first was a little sad that McCain didn’t stay alive long enough to witness the coming downfall of the current occupant of the White House. That would have been nice karma. But Sen. McCain’s death is the 2-by-4 hitting the Republican Party over the head with the message: Wake up, and clean up your act, or be added, to borrow a phrase from one of the senator’s speeches,  to the ash heap of history.

Getting Used to It

Right-wing talk show host Laura Ingraham raised more than a few eyebrows with her recent comments on immigration – both illegal and legal – that has foisted “massive demographic changes” on this country, so that in some areas at least, “the America we know and love doesn’t seem to exist anymore.” Is she right? As Bill Maher pointed out on his show last week, Fareed Zakaria – certainly no right-wing ideologue – seems to agree in one sense.

“The scale and speed of immigration over the past few decades represent a real issue,” Zakaria has written. “Since 1990, the share of foreign-born people in America has gone from 9 to 15 percent. Most of the new immigrants come from cultures tha are distant and different, and societies can only take so much change in a generation.”

Is this racism? It’s actually about something much deeper: evolution, a process we get more familiar with the longer we live on this planet. It seems folks either resist it or accept it. But as with most life issues, there is a spectrum here. At one end of the scale are those who fight change tooth and nail, and at the other end, those who embrace it with enthusiasm. In the middle, though, there are those who are still on the fence. I submit that it’s OK, even natural, to be a little conflicted about it.

I have noticed a few subtle things. I live in a techie area these days, and in certain movie theaters, among the condiments offered to put on popcorn is curry, reflecting the taste of many of the East Indian tech folks in my area. Curry on popcorn? Another one: I turned on the TV to get updates on an impending disaster in a town where I once lived in the South. Almost all of the people being interviewed there did not have Southern accents. They had moved there from someplace else. For a second, I was a little sad about that. I missed how the locals talked when I lived there.

But clocks do not run backwards. Things will never be the same again, but they aren’t supposed to be. And evolution includes competition. I don’t think it has to be a negative. I like to think that when cultures, religions, even political views are allowed to rub up against each other, the way they do in this country, there is always friction, but  the best ideas seem to survive as the harmful ones fall away. It just takes time.

Those of us who say we embrace change would do well not to look too far down our noses at those who resist it. They may seem to be motivated by hate, but it’s really fear. There are people whose minds will never be changed. But there are many more in the who are unsettled and just not sure. They are the ones who need to be cut some slack and given a little  time to process it all.

Choice and Compromise

Am I pro-life or pro-choice? Can I be both?

It’s a little tougher than walking and chewing gum at the same time. First, I recognize that I shouldn’t be discussing this at all for two big reasons: I am not a woman, and I have no children. But to be brutally honest, I have a hard time shaking some internal conviction that life begins at conception. Another human will potentially be joining us on Earth.

I say this because one of the justifications for abortion is that fetuses don’t quite count until they reach a certain stage, what is called viability. That’s a comforting construction. It relieves us of the thought that abortion might actually involve killing something.

OK, at this point, I can hear the blood in some of you boiling at me. But let me finish. Roe v. Wade is less about defining life than it is about allowing a woman a choice, up to a point in the fetus’s development. I support that choice.

Laws have always been about compromise, about threading needles, turning lofty principles into  workable rules for living down here on this planet. We permit the taking of life under certain circumstances, such as self-defense. And physician-assisted suicide is increasingly allowed. We are starting to accept the notion of choice at the end of life as well as at the beginning.

The determination of the beginning of life is by no means a settled issue in the law. Someone who kills a pregnant woman can be charged with two crimes in many states. And in a few, pregnant women who drink or take drugs are committing child abuse or neglect. Frequently, these are low-income women who have difficulty accessing legal abortion and/or giving up a bad habit.

We make moral compromises all the time. Before we bite into the hamburger, do we think about the fellow being it came from? We didn’t have to look the cow in the eye before it was slaughtered. We comfort ourselves with the thought that the animal was bred for this fate or that protein is good for us. I have not stopped eating meat, though, and probably won’t, as long as it’s legal.

As for the courts, they will always be raising or lowering bars. Since this country’s founding, Supreme Court decisions have sometimes been shockingly unfair, on either side of many issues. What were those justices thinking? we ask. But it seems that even jurists gradually learn to adjust their decisions to accommodate clear moral shifts, or at least to admit reality. That said, I don’t see a nice clean ending to the debate over abortion anytime soon. But I’m not a big fan of euphemisms, either.