The 2x4 Message

Once in a great while, we find that the time for talk is over, and the time for action arrives. As ineffective as it was from a military standpoint, the attack on the Syrian air base in retaliation for the use of chemical weapons, apparently by the Assad regime, was necessary.

Over the years, I have become tired of all the arguments why we couldn’t do anything about Syria. Here are just a few:

1.    It’s too complicated.

2.    It’s none of our business.

3.    It’s too expensive.

4.    It’s just Iraq all over again.

5.    It’s unconstitutional.

6.    We did nothing in Rwanda while hundreds of thousands died.

7.    It’s supposed to be about ISIS.

8.    Assad’s awful, but it would be worse without him.

9.    We’ll piss off Russia and Iran…and the latest,

10. Trump did it to appear decisive and un-Obama-ish.

But we have been living with the price of non-involvement for six years now, and the Assad regime has only become stronger, with a little help from its friends.  Meanwhile, we have the worst refugee crisis since World War II. I can’t tell you how many nights on CNN were consumed years ago with reports about Assad’s army shelling civilian populations, with the world saying, “Ain’t that a shame?”

Sometimes, the military “messages” we send accomplish little on the ground, but the fact that we send them shows that we’re paying attention. Maybe it’s the 2x4 blow on the noggin that the stakeholders in the region need and even expect from us. It’s often the only language they understand. Syria is a terrible, complicated, bloody mess, but the world will sort it out eventually, simply because we will realize there is no other choice.

Stop Calling It Obamacare

That’s the name we have all given to the admittedly flawed health care law, more officially known as the Affordable Care Act (not much better!). We don’t call Social Security “Roosecurity” or the Emancipation Proclamation “LincolnProc.” Why this insistence on giving important laws or orders people’s names, anyway? Like, “Megan’s Law.” It doesn’t add or detract from their legal effectiveness, or ineffectiveness, as the case may be.

In their failed attempt to get new legislation on the books, the Republicans in the House were undoubtedly motivated, at least in part, by a desire to erase a law that bore Obama’s name, to blot it out of history. But at what point does this issue stop being his or theirs, and become ours?

It’s true that President Obama put the first points on the board, to use a March Madness term, for the team seeking an inclusive national health care system. It’s not pretty, but it’s there, and the game is far from over. Let’s remember that he and other supporters tried to build this complicated and arcane law using the current private structure as much as possible. It will be hard to fix, but at least we have to try. There’s a lot of mourning or gloating about broken campaign promises today. So what else is new?

I am no policy wonk, but first we have to decide whether health care is a right or a privilege. I think in the end, it’s a mixture of both.

Another thing we have to work out is whether people should be required to buy health insurance. Well, in most cases, the law requires you to carry insurance before you get into a car and drive it on the highway. Sure, you have a choice, you can decide not to drive. But if you’re alive in this country, you have a body – a vehicle on the highway, so to speak – and it may be OK now, but you could wake up one day with a life-threatening illness. Then you get to go to the emergency room. In principle, you should do the rest of us a favor and just die – but that’s not how things work.

I am a senior now with no children. Why do I have to pay property tax to support public schools? Well, the theory is that an educated citizenry is something we all have an investment in. Whether our schools accomplish that goal is a separate issue, something we have to try to fix.

Some say we should leave heath care to the free market as much as possible. Then, we would be left to the tender mercies of the insurance industry. How do we think that’s going to work for us? Should we leave health care to the states to regulate? Should employers be required to offer health insurance at all? We have to find the answers. I think we can.

Our current president, as a CNN commentator pointed out, seemed to be acting like a fire chief watching a building burn down, preferring to let it burn because he didn’t start the fire, and the charred remains will make his arguments for him. But he likes to put his name on things. Perhaps that will move him to put it on something that really works, or at least works better, regardless of whose name was on it before.

Donald, Bar the Door?

 As expected, feared or cheered, President Trump has signed an executive order imposing a four-month moratorium on refugees coming into the United States, with Syrian refugees in particular banned indefinitely. General entry from seven Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East is banned for 90 days until an enhanced screening program is put in place. The goal is to keep radical Islamic terrorists from entering and gaining a foothold here to carry out attacks.

Let me be clear: I do not have a problem with the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” or even enhancing the vetting process where needed. For Syrians in particular, however, the process was already daunting. Sadly, those in the final stages of this process now have the door slammed in their faces. And the discriminatory nature of the President’s order is right out there, as other Muslim nations in the Middle East, like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, are conveniently not on the “banned” list. Plus, an exception is to be made for Christian refugees.

I well understand that we can’t let in just everybody. But we never have. More often than not, we have discriminated. Many Jews fleeing the Nazis were not admitted during World War II, as an example. And it works in reverse: those with special skills considered necessary to our economy have always been welcomed. Adult male Irish immigrants who came during the Civil War were paid a nice bounty to join the Union Army almost as soon as they got off the boat. Lady Liberty may welcome the tired and poor, but is that what we really do?

As I have said many times, the U.S. and the West are almost complicit in the Syrian crisis. We shook our heads and said, “Ain’t that a shame?” when the Assad regime began murdering civilians using its own military. Even after President Obama’s infamous “red line” declaration when the regime was said to be using chemical weapons, we let Russia take charge – and take advantage of the situation to expand its influence. As wistful as many of us have been over the end of the Obama administration, our non-involvement in Syria remains a policy failure of cataclysmic proportions. The very existence of ISIS is a symptom.

Many of those who stand in crowds shouting “USA” and call for the building of walls conveniently forget that their American citizenship is a total accident of nature. Most of us just happened to be born here. We didn’t have to flee anything. Our ancestors were the ones who did the hard work. Not that living here is a picnic for everyone, but if we were born here, we all got free passes that we didn’t earn, and the oceans on either side of us have provided a convenient bubble for non-involvement in the rest of the world’s troubles.

What it boils down to, though, is that we each have to decide as Americans if President Trump is speaking for us with this executive order. He isn’t for me.

When Fail-Safe Fails

So how DID we get here, and where are we going now?

It’s almost impossible to absorb, in this age of instant communication and information abundance, that a confluence of events could have produced one of the most unpopular US presidents in 200 years. To me, it’s almost like what happens in a meltdown at a nuclear power plant. These facilities are fitted with layers of redundant fail-safe technologies to prevent such things from happening. But then, a collection of circumstances comes along which causes all of them to fail. We might call it an accident. But is it really? When we go back and review those circumstances, we find the culprit, or culprits.

The big one, in my view, is the whole system of elections. In the case of a presidential race, the process takes two years, and involves raising, and spending, billions of dollars. Because we allow every state to choose party nominees in their own ways, the rules are almost impossible to comprehend. Some have primaries, some have caucuses. In some the primaries are so-called beauty contests that don’t count, in others they do. In some, candidates have to win by congressional district. The process of even registering to vote varies by state. At the end of the process, after the national vote on the real Election Day, there is the Electoral College, which ensures that your vote and mine do not really count equally after all. Why do we tolerate this mess? A lot of it has to do with tradition. We’ve done it this way because it seems like we always have. Is that a good enough reason not to change it? Our Founding Fathers accepted the need for change. Even our sacred Constitution can be amended.

Of course, that’s not the whole story of what produced Donald Trump. What was the media’s role? It’s clear he got a disproportionate amount of attention. But did we have to have so many debates? And what about us media consumers? Was it just more reality TV for us, a different kind of American Idol? Come on, I saw some of you eating popcorn.

How did Hillary Clinton lose? Was it all down to FBI director James Comey? Was it the Russians? I wasn’t necessarily a Bernie Sanders fan, but the Democratic Party leadership did what it could to sabotage his campaign in favor of Hillary. The party got what it deserved.

Was it the elites versus the little guys? The 1 percent versus the 99? Immigrants versus native-born? Christians against Muslims? The coastals versus the flyovers? Or are many American voters just plain stupid? I submit that they are not. Most of us were blessed with a relatively equal number of brain cells. In too many cases, though, they go unused out of fear of letting in too much disruptive information. We have the technology to communicate, but we have clearly lost the art of it. And unless we find it again, there will be another Civil War, this time, a social one.

As to protests, I am all for them, but amassing a crowd, listening to speeches and wearing pink hats are only the beginning steps. There are a lot of things that need fixing now, and we have to save some energy for the long term, because many of the repairs are going to require courage, stamina, savvy – and open minds.

SEX! Now That I Have Your Attention...

Elections can be boring. We’ve been listening to and reading the same blah-blah for more than two years. Wake me when they stop talking about trade policy. But ah, throw sex into the mix, and we sit bolt upright, straining to hear the next shoe dropping.

There’s no doubt that Mr. Trump is a vile human being on many levels, but his attitude toward women will be what sinks his candidacy for President. We’ve learned a little bit about the electoral system that elevated him. What about the cultural environment that helped shape him? This is an effort to explain, not excuse.

I am about the same age as he, so grew up in a time when gender roles were much more rigid. What defined masculinity in the media, in terms of relations with women, especially for very young men with little experience? There were two influences that seemed to stand out in my era: James Bond and Playboy. Sean Connery was a classic modern male in the movies, and Playboy gave us directions for how to do it, implying that the prize for doing so was a centerfold companion. If you were a man with money and a little celebrity status, you’d be entitled to these prizes if you just followed the rules. This is a gross oversimplification, of course, and gives you more information about me (TMI), perhaps, than it does about Mr. Trump.

The bottom line, though, is that men were offered quick and easy directions for “scoring” with women. And in Mr. Trump’s case, it seemed they worked much of the time, which only likely increased his sense of entitlement, power, and control. And the women, most of whom had no power, had to go along, fearing the consequences if they didn’t.

But there are no shortcuts to meaningful relationships. Following the same pattern and being rewarded for it is like a child learning to play Chopsticks on the piano and being disproportionately praised. He loves the praise so much, he plays the same tune over and over, maybe adding a few variations, but it’s still Chopsticks, and the control is comforting to him and adds to his confidence. And he misses out on all the other music the piano could produce – but for that, he would have to learn new pieces, which is challenging, and takes time, patience, and most of all, humility.

Emancipation takes time. Gloria Steinem is the Rosa Parks of the women’s movement, and taught us a lot, but absorbing it is a slow process. The media culture, even in Anno Domini 2016, doesn’t help, with misogyny, objectification, and body-shaming remaining prominent features. The constant stream of revelations about Mr. Trump’s escapades make us feel like taking three showers a day – but he is just one of the reasons why this discussion is needed so sorely.

It's Just Lunch

When it comes to race relations, I’ve often said that it seems like perpetual lunch hour at high school. Whom will we choose to sit with? If it’s our choice, it’s probably going to be people most like ourselves – those who look like us and think like us. This is our free time in an otherwise stressful day, so we want to do what’s most comfortable. Do we really want to sit with the “others”? Will we even be welcome?

For many of us, our default position in life is not to have our assumptions challenged, or learn anything new that might force us to think differently. We cling to our world view because, well, it’s there. Rocked boats and upset apple carts cause anxiety. It’s easy to maintain order in a closed mind – the furniture stays where we put it, and where we put it eventually gets to be where it belongs.

Often, when we encounter “others,” those encounters reinforce, rather than break, the stereotypes. White police officers tend to encounter black people only in the context of law enforcement situations, meaning, when there’s real, or perceived, trouble. And it works in reverse. When the encounter is over, the participants go back to where they were before, except with their stereotypical views of each other solidified. And once a gun is involved, they are rock-hard.

Our race is something we have no control over, and what people see of us is only what our particular collection of genes puts out front. I’ve also often said that if we all took one of those increasingly popular DNA tests, we’d find all kinds of flies in the ointment we weren’t expecting. We may think we’re white or black or yellow, but then we find other races in our backgrounds – genes which could only have gotten there one way. A man and a woman of different races had to have intimate contact – something that either happened in recent history or many generations back. But clearly, as is often pointed out, we are much more alike than we are different.

If we’re all going to just get along, as Rodney King once said, we have to learn to walk and chew gum at the same time: celebrate our diversity while also celebrating our sameness. It’s lunchtime, and maybe just once, we can try to sit with those “others” at their table. We will be uncomfortable, and we’re likely not going to feel welcome. But we have to start someplace.

Bathroom Break

I’m still trying to get my head around this transgender bathroom thing. I don’t know which side of the fence I’m on, or supposed to be on, or if there needs to be a fence.

I was raised, as most of us were, with the idea that there were male and female bathrooms. That seems perfectly normal. We were all likely raised with the bathrooms in our homes being unisex, because they had doors. I do remember when I was in radio interviewing a male celebrity in his hotel room. He excused himself after we were finished, to use the bathroom. He peed, but did not close the door. OK, maybe that’s what went on in his house. I’ll just say that whenever there is a door of any kind, I take advantage of it (a little TMI there for you).

Anyway, so now we have a state that is in trouble for a new law saying transgender people have to use the bathroom according to the gender on their birth certificate. And a decree from the Obama administration saying transgenders have to be allowed to use the bathroom of their self-identity in schools. I know this is an issue for transgenders, but does it really require a decree? Can’t the schools figure out the logistics?

I must confess I have never gone into a general-use male bathroom in a public place and found myself saying, “That’s a transgender, what is SHE doing here?” Maybe I was just never in a bathroom with a transgender. More likely, if there was one, she, or should I say he, was just good at gender-appropriate dress and stuff, and I didn’t notice. I was busy with other things.

What is the core fear here? Could it be that a woman will self-identity as a man, or vice-versa, in order to go into the opposite sex’s bathroom to stare at them? How often does THAT happen? How do we know that gay men or women don’t do that right now? Well, usually that is not their priority either, in the bathroom.

All that said, does this whole thing need to be taken down to the school level? Do children have those self-identification skills? Will they be honest? How are the cisgender, or gender-of-birth kids, supposed to react to it, or are we just trying to raise them not to care?

I will say this, though. If you are happy with the gender you were born into, you are fortunate. This is something you don’t have to sort out for yourself. You can concentrate on other things. If you are attracted to the opposite sex, that is also something you don’t have to spend too much time figuring out, you are also lucky. You’re in with the in crowd.

As I get older I find myself trying not to judge others for self–identity or sexual preference. There, but for the grace of God, genetics, or wiring, go I. But do we need all this legislation, or just a dose of awareness and understanding?

Dead or Alive

When I worked in radio, the air personalities at my station had a little game called Dead or Alive. They would throw out the name of a former celebrity and take calls from listeners as to whether the individual in question still walked the Earth. After a while, they would reveal the answer, with information about what that person was doing now, if, of course, he or she was still in a position to do anything except decompose. A fun game for its time, now rendered obsolete by Google and sites like Wikipedia.

The game itself is still very much alive, though, where our Constitution is involved, and has a lot of players these days, thanks largely to the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. It is now widely known that he believed the Constitution to be a “dead” document. Meaning, this is what the Founding Fathers and their successors wrote, and they knew what they were doing, so the job of a Supreme Court justice is to interpret the law, not add to it. But is it really dead?

Well, one obvious question that arises is, if the Constitution is dead, why has it been amended so many times? These were things that were added to the document, which means that from the get-go, it has been clear that it must not have been perfect or specific enough, and the courts and the Congress, and even the Founding Fathers themselves, felt the need to fuss with it. And those very amendments had to be undone in some cases. Like Prohibition, for instance.

There really is no such thing as a dead document, even if it’s revered. Moses came down from the mountain with those stone tablets with 10 commandments on them. But human beings just can’t leave things alone – the Jews over time came up with something like 600 other sacred rules that had to be followed. Moses had enough trouble bringing down the Commandments. He’d still be up there if he had to schlep down all the other stuff too.

Most of us agree that our Constitution is brilliant, and we admire the prescience of our Founding Fathers for creating it, with all those checks and balances. But trying to get into their heads doesn’t always work. When we try to get into someone else’s head, most of the time we are still running around in our own. The Founding Fathers, of course, couldn’t possibly have foreseen all the situations their document would have to be applied to.

The problem with sacred documents is that they need interpretation. So we have arguments over whether corporations are people or whether we all have the right to bear arms. The courts are there to settle these arguments. But the settlements themselves are no more sacred than the original texts. They get fussed with. The Founding Fathers, in their wisdom, knew that was going to happen, and made provision for it.

Maybe their greatest legacy was the knowledge that it’s dangerous to let words become too sacred. Through all the tinkering that goes on, we eventually arrive at principles that stand out as universally valuable. That love doesn’t have anything to do with gender, or that equal does not mean separate. But are corporations really people? I have a feeling someone’s going to be getting back to us on that one.

No Love Lost

My basic problem with 2016 is that I just don’t like any of the Presidential candidates much. I mean on a personal level, let alone a philosophical one. On the Republican side, you know how I feel about Trump, I think, but surprisingly, if it were between him and Ted Cruz, I prefer Trump. He makes me angry, but he also makes me laugh or smile. For Cruz, I have this deep visceral dislike, and from what I’ve heard, I am far from alone in that.  I can’t really warm up to any of the others on the GOP side. Rubio I don’t quite trust. Carly is good, but she makes too much stuff up. Kasich can be a whiner. Bush may be the best qualified of the group but still comes off as a wimp. God deliver me, but I almost like Chris Christie. He’s got the Trump anger in him, but whether you agree with him or not, he has a brain too.

On the Democratic side, Bernie is a little too doctrinaire for me. Interesting that with all that white hair up there, nobody is playing the age card against him. Hillary is clearly the most qualified of any candidate running on either side to hold the office. But I just don’t like her. No, don’t go there, it’s not that. I LOVE strong women, that isn’t it. I find myself almost warming up to O’Malley for some reason.

But OK, do we have to like or admire our candidates? That’s a tough one. Don’t you wish we had Presidents like Martin Sheen from the West Wing?  Or Michael Douglas from The American President? Or Harrison Ford? Morgan Freeman? But it’s not that way.

The problem is we are electing human beings, and they just don’t rise to the level of the people we see on the big or the small screen or whose faces we see on our money.  We revere Abraham Lincoln, for example, but when he was alive, many didn’t, and it wasn’t just Southerners. The whole nation seemed to weep when FDR died, but in my family, even after his death, Roosevelt, meaning Franklin, was still a dirty word. And Teddy was great, but he was a hunter, and how would that sit with folks these days?

Even so, wouldn’t it be nice if we had at least someone to choose from that we genuinely had a good feeling for? Is it the system that produces the wrong people, or do we, or I, to be clear, simply have unrealistic expectations? Why does it always seem as if we have to pick through the battered merchandise left on the shelf at 11:59 on Christmas Eve?

Well, it’s all far from done, and as time goes on, and there’s still time, maybe somebody will finally win me over.

It's Only Money

I’m looking forward to Wednesday night, when it’s very more than likely the “What Would You Do with It?” Powerball stories will end, or it will be the concern of just one or more lucky people. If you’re asking me what I’d do with one and a half billion, well, I just don’t know, and I think I probably don’t deserve to win unless I have more concrete plans.

Look, I probably need $100,000 for various reasons, mostly to fix things that need fixing. I could maybe use about $5 or $10 million, but beyond that, it takes mental energy and creativity, which sounds like work.

I don’t need a bigger house, or a nicer car. Traveling sounds good, but I’d be the sort who wants to stay in one place too long. I love destinations, but I hate the getting-there-and-back part, though it would be nice in my own plane. A place to stay in a few favorite spots would be good, though there’s no need to own them. Space travel? That’s OK, I can stay home and watch the DVD. Run for office? I don’t think so. Then there’s the issue of seeing relationships altered because of everyone knowing I had money, and the need for security. Almost like an expensive witness protection lifestyle.

I sort of admire people like William Randolph Hearst, believe it or not, who had a vision of what to do with his money. It wasn’t just a bigger house. It was San Simeon, for heaven’s sake.

No, if I won the Powerball, I would give most of it away, but as selfishly as possible. By that I mean placing it directly in the hands of someone who needs it and seeing the face light up. For example, I know several young people now who have fantastic gifts of talent and vision, but who are struggling with day-to-day life because of illnesses that medical insurance just won’t cover, or they can’t afford the insurance. Money likely wouldn’t cure their diseases, but at least they wouldn’t have to sweat the small stuff anymore.

But could I give money away to people I don’t know and I don’t see in faraway places, or create a foundation that could deal with some world problem? I don’t know. Other people have already been there and done that, or are there and doing that, so I’d likely give money to their causes. Which means I don’t really need the money in the first place. What would be nice to have is their passion. That’s really where the wealth is, and if I haven’t taken the trouble to create my own dreams, I would try to find people who have them. Again, I would want to give it to them directly to see those faces light up.

Now to the nuts and bolts part. I actually think this Powerball Fever stuff is kind of a good thing. It’s one of those events that almost everyone seems to be involved in. People are buying tickets who don’t ordinarily buy them. If I were you, I would buy just one. You can spare the two bucks, and just having one chance is infinitely better than not playing at all -- but mathematically speaking, a second or third ticket just isn’t worth it. I’m not good at math, but that much I know. And as the clerk says at the convenience market, good luck!

The T Word Again

It was the worst mass shooting since Newtown. Fourteen dead, 17 injured as of this posting. Naturally, the news media, including the major networks and cable outlets, jumped into wall-to-wall coverage, as they were obliged to do. The only problem was that afterwards, the information about what was happening came out in sparse bursts. Some cable anchors even sounded a little whiny about why more information wasn’t being released. So, those anchors had time to fill.

Much of that time was spent discussing whether the shooting was an act of terrorism. Terrorism has been defined generally as a violent act to create fear, I think we can safely say, that was the broad motive involved, though revenge is a good one, too. The only problem with the “T” word is that it’s politically toxic. Listeners hear “terrorism” and many of them mentally fill in a word before it: “Islamic,” just because that phrase has been drummed into our heads.

Later in the evening, the news anchors were telling us that it was more likely a disgruntled employee of San Bernardino County, which would account for why a county agency holiday party was the target of the shooting.. Complicating the issue, though, is that the disgruntled one is of Middle Eastern extraction. Anyway, if it wasn’t Islamic terrorism after all, what are we supposed to feel? Relief? Of course not – so now we go back to the gun control/mental health debate. When is it all going to stop?

Some of us may be upset with the frenetic wall-to-wall coverage these things get, and the inane and sometimes inflammatory comments made while the anchors fill time. I used to think that. But now we have social media. If we didn’t have this intense coverage by the major media institutions, we would be left to the mercy of Tweeters. Do you think we’d be better off with an untempered rumor mill?

Whatever you want to call this incident, 14 people are just as dead – the definition doesn’t really matter, does it. Perhaps this is the new normal in our lives. The only thing that occurred to me was that if it takes 18 months for a Syrian refugee to be admitted to this country, why can’t we make it take that long to get a gun? Just wondering.

Two Minds

It’s painful to see what happens to people when they get hung up on what they believe to be absolutely right and can’t abide conflicting ideas. The Colorado Springs shooter apparently targeted the Planned Parenthood clinic because he believes the organization is actively harvesting fetal body parts, perhaps even encouraging abortions for that purpose. It’s likely he believes abortion is murder -- but he was willing to commit some himself to get his point across.

Look, I will be honest. I’m pretty well convinced that human life begins with conception. The ball is rolling, so in broad concept, I’m not a fan of abortion. But do I think a woman who has been raped or subject to incest should be forced to bear a child? Or that one who simply can’t afford to raise a baby be forced to give birth? No. But it all doesn’t affect my core belief. That said, I’m not interested in changing the law of the land. It’s a situation where I just have to hold two conflicting positions at once. How do I live with myself? Well, for the moment, I do.

Maybe you’re against abortion because of what you feel is the sanctity of human life. But are you also in favor of the death penalty for those who commit especially heinous crimes?

More examples: Many of us believe that we have to kill suffering animals to release them from their misery. But we have an awful problem with human beings getting similar help to be released from theirs.

You may be against humanity’s contribution to climate change. And you may love animals. But have you considered that your enjoyment of red meat not only requires slaughtering animals, but contributes to global warming? Will you really re-think dinner tonight?

Are you a nice person who abhors violence but likes to watch a little football or boxing on weekends?

Are you a social drinker, but troubled by the prospect of legalizing marijuana?

For centuries, otherwise good people tolerated bad things, like slavery. It was a given that women weren’t allowed to vote. These were once absolutes. But what needs to change for the better usually does, when it’s time. The right ideas survive, and eventually, we sort things out – but it doesn’t happen with guns. In practice, we watch the tares grow with the wheat – and it’s not always easy to tell the difference when we’re standing in the middle of the field.  

When we find ourselves of two minds once in a while, maybe we need to cut ourselves a little slack. If you hear more than one voice, maybe it’s not such a bad thing. At least it means you’re listening.

The Garden of Good and Evil

By now, we know what the acronym PC means. To start with, it’s the thing I’m typing this post on – but you know what I’m talking about: Political Correctness. Inoffensive ways of saying, doing, or demonstrating things. Disabilities being renamed “challenges,” you know the drill. But then there is the revision, or more precisely, the suppression, of history. Removing the statues of former heroes who turned out to be bad guys. The late Penn State football coach Joe Paterno is one of the best examples, for his perceived cover-up of child sex abuse. The number of winning football seasons, and the prestige and money he brought to the university, became secondary. As for the living, Bill Cosby is being stripped of an honorary degree because of the numerous drug-date-rapes he is accused of. The comedy albums that made millions laugh will stay in the back of the record cabinet (do you even have a “record cabinet”?).

This week, though, it hit closer to home for me. An organization of students wants Princeton University to make the name Woodrow Wilson go away. Wilson was the 28^th president of the United States, but before that, he was governor of New Jersey and the president of Princeton, where I went in the last century. But he was a racist. He supported segregation. His favorite movie was “Birth of a Nation.”  But President Wilson also supported women’s suffrage. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for his sponsorship of the League of Nations, a precursor to the U.N. One of the most prestigious schools of international affairs at Princeton bears his name, so far, anyway. Oops, but then there’s the income tax.

OK, so what are we to conclude here? He wasn’t the greatest president we’ve ever had, but nor was he the worst. He was a human being, full of contradictions. Thomas Jefferson fathered children with a black slave. Andrew Jackson signed the legislation forcing Indian tribes off their land. But I'm not ready to teer up my $20 bills just yet.

I partly went along with the Confederate flag thing. I agree that it had no business being on state flag designs or on the flagpoles of state buildings. But is it only about slavery? Or is the symbolism a little broader than that in the South? Is it quite the same as the Nazi flag? I’m supposed to be sure about the answers – but sorry, I’m not.

The Civil War was an awful thing.  Hundreds of thousands of young men died. Yet, Fort Sumter in South Carolina, where the first shot was fired, is a national monument. A friend who visited there recently told us that the bricks at the fort were created by black slaves. Civil War battlefields are historic sites all over the East. Every year, many slightly overweight men try to squeeze into Union or Confederate uniforms for Civil War reenactments. Almost like it’s a great big game.

Human history is always about contradictions, because it’s all about us. Why can’t we get used to that, live with them, and more importantly, learn from them, instead of fussing quite so much over symbolism? A black-and-white world is a lot easier to understand and navigate. But it’s just not the world we live in.

Compassion and Caution

ISIS must be pretty proud of itself. An attack perpetrated by only a few people with relatively low-tech weapons on a Friday night in Paris, and the rest of us are quaking in our boots. And now, what to do with Syrian refugees? Let them in, and there might be bad guys among them. Gasp!

First, let’s be realistic about a couple of things. We don’t let very much into this country without checking it first. Food items might have Old World pests in them. Toys may be toxic. Exotic pets may be cute, but they could multiply and kill off our native species. Imports carry a risk. What about human beings? Remember all the jumping up and down we did because somebody carrying Ebola landed in a couple of our cities?

Yes, all that give-me-your-tired-and-your-poor stuff sounds great, but we have always been a little picky about who we let in. Those arriving at Ellis Island, right under Liberty’s torch in the early 20^th century, were checked for disease, and that was just the beginning.

So what to do with the Syrians? A majority of governors don’t want them until they’re checked out – and a majority of Americans agree. President Obama chastised critics as being afraid of “widows and orphans,” while many of the Syrians showing up in Europe now are young, single males. Having a concern about terrorists being among them doesn’t automatically make us inhumane. But we do have to figure out a way to humanely process those who would come here.

Three or four years ago, I remember watching CNN night after night and seeing how the Assad regime turned a mechanized army on its own people. I still remember the brave reporters – mostly women – who risked their lives covering it. What was our response? We shook our heads and said, isn’t that a shame.

The Middle East refugee crisis didn’t start in 2015. It’s been going on for years. The U.N. and other agencies have been talking about it a long time. The Western world didn’t wake up to it until people started getting on boats and heading for Europe. There could have been some kind of a system in place in the EU for vetting them. Too late now.

But what do we do here? As I’ve said, we have it easy; we have two oceans to protect us, so we have a little more time to figure out a response. I just can’t believe we can’t throw together some databases (seems like we have lots of those) to check these people against in a reasonable amount of time. Does it really have to take 18 months plus to admit one of these refugees? Ebola was by no means new, and was ignored by Big Pharma for a long time – but a few researchers got their acts together and came up with a vaccine in a hurry when it was needed.

Can we keep out everyone who would do us harm? No, but we can keep out some. The fact is, however, that those who would do us harm are likely already here – and some may not even be Muslim! (Gasp again). The New Normal isn’t pretty. But we can’t pretend we didn’t have a role in creating the Middle Eastern mess, through a mistaken war and simple neglect.

Blame is about history; responsibility is about the present. I don’t know what the solutions to the current problem are, but I do know we’re pretty good at finding them when we have to.

Taking It to Isis

I really hesitate to reveal myself as a hawk, but beaks and talons are kind of difficult to hide. There are just a few common arguments I’m having trouble with as we consider what to do about ISIS.

“We (the U.S.) can’t be the policemen of the world.” No, we can’t. It certainly isn’t our job to deal with every group of bad guys by ourselves. But often we have to take a leadership role and exercise moral authority. We have to demonstrate what effective policing is, bring “recruits” along, and teach them how to do it with us. Messages have to be sent about terrorism not being tolerated. And no, it isn’t fair! We may not be able to deal with every situation equally. But we have to start somewhere.

“They hate us because we’re over there.” No, they hate us because we EXIST. Those who embrace this twisted version of Islam won’t be satisfied with a caliphate confined to Iraq and Syria. They want an end to decadence, and that is what we are about in their book. We don’t have to allow this barbarous philosophy, religion, or whatever it is, to have its own country.

“If we attack them in Syria and Iraq, they will just go somewhere else.” The terrorists are all over the place, brainwashed by whom they’ve been listening to or what they read on the Internet. But this snake has a head in a particular place. And not cutting it off will just allow those establishing themselves in other locations to feel that much more secure.

“What about Russia and Iran?” What about them? Will battling ISIS mean we might shoot down a Russian plane accidentally, or vice-versa? Has any war not had “friendly fire” incidents? You may even question the use of the word “friendly” here.

“The real solution is education, assimilation, and negotiation.” ISIS isn’t interested in any of that, and right now, we don’t have the time for it. That’s for later.

“If we strike them, they will come after us.” Is this really a reason for inaction? They will come after us anyway. And BTW, they don’t need WMD to do it – they are scaring us just fine with low-level, conventional weapons.

“We will have to become a police state to protect ourselves.” Truth be told, we have been reasonably good at thwarting plots without paranoid security measures. But will sleeper cells and others succeed occasionally? Yes, that is the new reality. We have a false sense of safety given to us by two oceans. Israel is surrounded by several potentially hostile states, and yet has always managed to defend itself.

“If we get involved over there, it will never end.” That’s partly because of the WAY we get involved. We fight wars without declaring them and without well-defined missions, and don’t allocate the resources to get the job done. I said the other day that our Middle East policy has been like starting a fire, letting it grow to a thousand acres, and then throwing a couple glasses of water on it and wondering why it doesn’t go out. No, a fire has to be drowned or smothered. ISIS numbers only about 30,000 at the most. Doable, IMHO.

The second part is that we might have to be there for a while, even after we “win.” After World War II, the Allies occupied Germany and Japan, and basically stayed there until we could help those countries get back on their feet. That takes a lot longer than our short attention spans and impatience permit these days, and it’s a messy process.

“We can’t afford it; it’s not our problem, let all the factions there blow each other up!”  Can we really believe we didn’t have a role in creating the present situation? And what happens if they all do blow themselves up? Then what?

We are usually late to these “parties,” but at some point we have to knock on the door.

Answer the Question!

So now the tables are turned, it’s open season on the media types running Presidential debates. When I was in the media, I sat on panels and frequently moderated these kinds of things myself. With all due respect to Dr. Carson, it’s not brain surgery.

The first, and simplest thing, is making candidates stick to the time limits. Now there’s discussion about buzzers, gongs, etc., to signal time is up. My favorite low-tech solution is a gavel. Everyone knows what that means, and repeated whacking when someone doesn’t shut up makes the speaker look bad.

The second important principle is forcing candidates to answer the questions -- which means interrupting the speaker if they evade or try to bring up a new topic. And if it means repeatedly asking the question to get an actual answer, it must be done. The panelist must be a bulldog.

If one candidate mentions another in a negative light, certainly the “victim” should be given the opportunity to respond – but it’s nobody else’s business.

Do media people ask stupid questions sometimes? To quote Sarah P., you betcha. Questions that goad one candidate into attacking another, for instance, should be absolutely off limits. Maybe this is a point where you need an impartial moderator who can knock a bad question down.

But are candidates’ past lives and statements fair game?  Absolutely! If there’s a “gotcha,” well, the audience needs to know two things – not just the quality of the explanation by the candidate, but also how the candidate reacts to the question. Calm? Defensive? Truthful? Evasive? We are electing human beings with personal qualities, which are sometimes more important than whether we agree with them on particular issues.

This is the big one, and it’s our job as audience members, not the media folks’. A candidate may be entertaining up there on the debate stage. But we have to mentally put that individual in front of the podium during a White House news conference, perhaps after an emergency. As President, every word that comes out of his or her mouth will be dissected and interpreted, and could have major national or international impact. Which of the people we are looking at now would we feel comfortable seeing in that situation?

The quality of these debates, or forums or whatever name we give them, may vary depending on the format or the questioners. But we learn something new every time. Even a little sunshine goes a long way,

Squeezing the Trigger

Is it shock and horror, or is it weariness? Are we finally done with tolerating gun violence? And when will we stop going around this same tragic circle? It’s assault weapons and gun shows. No, it’s mental health. Arm teachers, etc.

Tackling this problem won’t be a one-shot deal, and needs approach from all sides. Yes, we have to tighten gun laws, close the gun-show loophole and insist on a gun-purchase waiting period. Yes, we have to do something about mental health, especially that of isolated young males. Yes, the media have to re-invent the coverage of mass-shooting incidents. We even have to change how guns work: owner-recognition technology, etc. And we may have to spend big bucks buying back guns and destroying them.

The experts seem to agree that more guns, more armed Americans, will make the problem worse, not better. Many people still don’t accept that, notably Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson. But one professor of sociology, interviewed on NPR, likened this debate to the one on climate change. How can there be less violence with more guns?

We do have to recognize that guns are part of our culture. This country was born amid gun violence. There was a good reason for the Second Amendment. The Wild West was preceded by the Wild East. But that was then. Guns have been a time-tested means of resolving conflicts here. Does it always have to be that way?

Guns are almost a fashion accessory. American men of a certain age all had cowboy outfits as kids, complete with two silver toy guns. The cigarette was also a fashion accessory for decades, but now it’s fading, as the forces of disapproval are winning the battle. The tobacco lobby was once as powerful as the NRA, but we have evolved.

Evolution is the time-consuming part. Prohibition seemed like a good idea to many in the 1920s, but the general population wasn’t ready to accept it. The abolition of slavery, the arrival of women’s suffrage, and the acceptance of gay marriage all took time, and a shifting of cultural tectonic plates is sometimes violent. But the inevitability finally becomes clear.

So what do we do about guns now? The first thing, IMHO, an obvious one, is for those of us who want tougher laws to elect people to Congress who support the legislation desired and replace those who won’t. But it goes way beyond that. What attitudes about guns do we have in our own families? How are children being raised to view this issue? What kinds of movies, TV and video games do we all-too-casually consume? There’s pornography -- and then there’s pornography.

The good news is, sea changes do happen. Those of us who’ve been around a little bit have seen them in our lives many times over now, and they don’t take nearly as long as they once did. But we’re the ones who have to make the waves.

The Mule and tte 2x4

The world is now getting the message about the Syrian refugee crisis, but the mule needed a few blows to the head with that large piece of wood to hear it. Those blows have included story after story about the loss of “boat people,” and, of course, the heart-wrenching photo of the dead toddler in the red shirt washed up on a beach.

But this is not exactly a new problem, and it’s more than just about Syria. The UN has been reporting on the enormous scale of the Middle East refugee situation for years, perhaps one of the worst in our memories. Millions have been prompted to leave their homes. What’s different now is that local “coyotes” have been selling seats in substandard boats. Some have sunk. Others have made it to various European shores, with the refugees receiving varying degrees of welcome.

In Syria, it started in 2011, when the ultra-thin-skinned Bashir al-Assad decided he couldn’t put up with a relatively small number of demonstrators protesting conditions in his country. For the most part, they weren’t even interested in removing him from power. Years before that, in fact, there were news stories about what a progressive leader he was. But his response to the unrest was to turn the country’s army against his own people. I still remember the two brave CNN reporters, both women, who were on TV night after night reporting from the shelled cities, and the late Stanford fellow Fouad Ajami providing his comments about the dire situation to Anderson Cooper. The West did very little more than shake its head.

Then there were the reports that Assad’s army was using chemical weapons, and President Obama drew a “line in the sand,” which sounded very good – but did it sort of say that the use of conventional weapons before that to kill hundreds of thousands was OK? You be the judge. And then the Russians said, back off, we’ll handle this. BTW, I wonder how many refugees the Russians are taking in these days.

Some of the EU countries are less than happy about having to deal with this. By contrast, Germany welcomed tens of thousands just last weekend – more asylum-seekers than the country accepted during all of 2007. Germany may accept as many as 800,000 before all is said and done. So far, the U.S. has taken in about 1,500, but pressure is mounting for us to do more.

No, we aren’t to blame for this problem, but we do have some responsibility to help. We did virtually nothing in Syria, and maybe way too much in Iraq, and haven’t really followed through in Libya. But there are lots of people needing help, just as there are after a natural disaster like an earthquake. And it’s time we stepped up to do our share – not assume the entire burden, just our share.

While I’m not into animal abuse, the mule has to wake up sometime.

Thank You, Mr. Trump

Donald Trump is right. His comments about Mexican “rapists” and impregnable border fences, outrageous though they may be, have forced his fellow Republicans, and the rest of us, to talk about immigration. It’s truly the “elephant in the room” on many levels.

It’s very easy for us to have a theoretical discussion about immigration. True, we have problems: millions of people here illegally or semi-legally, who many of the rest of us think are draining our resources. But what would we do if our country were in Europe right now instead of being conveniently isolated by two oceans? What would we do if all these desperate people were washing up on our shores – if their boats even made it that far? Would they be a drain on our resources? Very likely – but some European countries, like Greece, don’t have any resources left to drain. We do have an easy life here!

Let’s roll back the tape a little bit. A few Arab Spring demonstrators several years ago in Syria inexplicably prompted their government to turn a mechanized army on its own people, killing hundreds of thousands. Nothing we can do about it, we said, not our problem, and the other Western powers largely agreed. Let them fight it out for themselves, we said. The country descended into total chaos, and now there is ISIS. Millions have been displaced, and not just from Syria. Did neglect come back to bite us? We haven’t really been bitten yet in this situation, just the Europeans. Some countries are still trying to say, not our problem. But the desperate thousands arrive anyway – their problem whether they like it or not.

There are no easy solutions to our own immigration issues, parochial as they may seem by comparison. Certainly, we have to come up with a fair system that allows for people living here and contributing to our economy as well as for those seeking asylum or those just seeking a better life. But as a friend of mine pointed out recently, most of our ancestors were immigrants – not always nice ones – who displaced the native population. We forced others to “migrate” here as personal property. You can keep rolling back the tape, and you’ll find that the hard distinctions between good guys and bad guys just get blurrier and blurrier.

But at some point we are going to have to set aside demagogic talk about anchor babies and fences and understand that we are all in this boat --- on this planet – together, and the hard distinctions between “our problems” and “their problems” are also a lot blurrier than they used to be.

The Morning of Living Dangerously

Another shooting in America. A crazy person with a gun. So what else is new?

Well, THIS was. It wasn’t Ferguson or Baltimore or a movie theater in Colorado. It was at a rural lake resort area in Central Virginia. A female TV reporter was interviewing a Chamber of Commerce representative about tourism, when shots were fired. The reporter and the videographer were killed, the Chamber lady was hurt – and it was all caught on live TV. The shooter got away, but according to the story, filmed (generic term) the whole thing while he was shooting and posted it on social media. Police closed in at a location in northern Virginia, and several hours later, he shot himself and eventually died.

Certainly this isn’t the first time journalists have been crime victims. But we have all these new issues. How dangerous is routine journalism, even for those doing the morning-coffee beat? Do they now have to carry guns, or have a security guard tag along? And how do other journalists cover this story? What do they show of the incident? How can they tell the story without giving the shooter what he wants: publicity? Will there be copycats? How do social media platforms keep a lid on graphic video?

Think of the challenge for news anchors all over the country, even the national stars. Most of them started off at small-market stations, likely interviewing Chamber officials at scenic locations for a morning show. How can they not be pierced to their core, as CNN’s Brooke Baldwin was, while reporting on this? It wasn’t all that long ago that she was a reporter at a TV station in Charlottesville, only a few hours’ drive from the shooting scene. You can’t quite blame her if she came close to “losing it” as she paid tribute to her fallen journalism colleagues. And what about the dead reporter’s own fiancé, who works at the Roanoke station as an anchor?

I was asked today how I felt about anchors “losing it” on the air in such situations. Well, Ms. Baldwin held it together, she didn’t lose it, but she was obviously deeply moved, as I’m sure all her viewers were. Some of us remember Walter Cronkite’s simple gesture of taking off his glasses and looking at the clock to tell us when President Kennedy died. That was how we knew he was moved. But anchors are human, too, and we know that part of them when we see it.

The fact is, general daily journalism isn’t safe. It’s not unlike being a cop. When you report to work in the morning, you don’t know for certain what you might be covering. An Easter egg hunt or a fire with a toxic waste cloud? An Apple store ribbon-cutting or an earthquake? A school spelling bee or an angry mob? The schedule can go to hell in an instant. You have to make judgments on the fly about where to put your equipment and vehicles, and yes, even your own body. That is, if you’re even given that chance.

And at some point, we are going to have to figure out how to cover these things – the balance between factual reporting – telling us what we need to know -- and drama, and how to keep from glorifying the wrong people. And, of course, how to keep crazy people away from guns. We don’t quite have those acts down yet.