When Bleep Happens

I can’t use the word I want, as this will likely be on the radio.

Anyway, when bleep does happen, the first thing we do is search for the reason, and then the blame game starts. How did Trump happen? It was the Russians. No, it was the media giving him too much free publicity. No, it was Hillary, who couldn’t connect with her “deplorables.” Or, how about the Democratic leadership, trying to tube Bernie? As for me, I blame the Electoral College. It was all of those things, maybe more.

Systemic failures usually have many causes – big things and little things that somehow sync up and expose a flaw that wasn’t thought of. With all the backup systems built into nuclear power plants, there are still Three Mile Islands, Chernobyls, and Fukushimas. The levee system designed to protect New Orleans failed in Katrina. The same media that saved our bacon in Watergate couldn’t keep us from getting into a questionable war in Iraq. The system of government our Founding Fathers created, with all its checks and balances, didn’t protect the country from Andrew Jackson, Warren G. Harding, or Donald J. Trump.

No system designed by humans is foolproof. There will always be something that gets by or around it. In some cases, there will be warnings, sometimes loud ones, that go unheeded. But in a way, we can be grateful for failures, because they expose the flaws in the equipment or institutions we depend on. We can address these flaws and build better defenses. The President’s shameful news conference performance in Helsinki hopefully will serve to wake up those of us who have been asleep, in time for November.

We have learned that we do in fact need a wall -- not the kind Mr. Trump talks about, but a cyber-wall to protect us from Russian and possibly other future intruders. Suppose the money budgeted for the next umpteen-zillion-dollar bomber were spent instead on hardening technology?

The ship of state may have a massive hole in it right now, and it has to limp into port for repairs. But I am optimistic that the ship will not sink. Our free press is far from perfect, but this time around, the much-maligned mainstream media have protected us from real catastrophe. Robert Mueller and his team, along with the intelligence community, are telling us exactly what’s been going on, and at least some justice will be done. This particular national nightmare will eventually be over.

Summertime for Hitler?

 I have no children, but like many others, I was moved by the pictures, and especially the sounds, of kids separated from their parents as part of the current administration’s zero-tolerance policy on illegal immigration. We often miss the impact of these stories until we are hit over the head with dramatic 2-by-4s. Remember the little Syrian boy with the red shirt found dead on a Turkish beach after he fled his country?

The comparisons to Nazi Germany have been made: children separated from parents; detention facilities in scattered and usually undisclosed locations; controlled tours of facilities designed to show that things weren’t so bad, and the head of state using the word “infest” to characterize the influx of immigrants. Of course, there is no real comparison to the Holocaust, just echoes, though rather loud ones.

All that said, I’m also interested in getting beyond emotions and symbols to find out what happens now. The President has rescinded the separation policy, and a federal judge has ordered that families be swiftly reunited. But how much has this ill-thought-out program cost so far, and what will it cost in the future? The question of damages and/or reparations will likely come up. Will we taxpayers have to pay that bill?

Then, will the current Congress, or the new one, finally get down to crafting a comprehensive, workable immigration law that imposes reasonable controls on who gets into our country, but is flexible enough to accommodate legitimate asylum-seekers, the Dreamers, needed seasonal workers, and the professionals we seek to fill shortages in certain sectors?

We did relatively little over the years as we watched Syria devolve, but that was an ocean away. Now we have our own little ISIS-type enclave, or violent groups of them, in Central America to deal with, motivated not by twisted religion but by power, greed, and more than a little misogyny, which women and their children understandably want to escape from. What are we, and other countries in our hemisphere, going to do about this? Can’t we see beyond putting up walls?

Too many questions and not enough answers. But I think we have to remember that most of us, as descendants of immigrants, were born here by sheer luck. We didn’t have to lift a finger to be American. If less-fortunate people born in other places want to come here, and we deem them worthy of staying here, we have to help them become the Americans we want them to be, and to make sure we have a government worthy of not only their respect, but our own.

It's Your Life, Anyway

That’s a play on the title of one of my favorite movies, 1981’s “Whose Life Is It, Anyway?” in which Richard Dreyfuss plays a successful sculptor who is left paralyzed from the neck down following a traffic accident and goes to court seeking permission to die.

I am not opposed to assisted suicide, which has now gained a level of acceptance. We allow abortions, so why shouldn’t similar allowances be made on the other end of life? And typically, it is done with friends and family made aware. But the suicide of those who can easily do it themselves is another thing, as in the recent cases of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain, and prior to them, Robin Williams and some others. Folks even get a little angry, as in, “They had everything: money, fame, lovers, and maybe even a sense of accomplishment, so what was their problem?” When it’s a celebrity, especially a beloved one, part of the sadness and anger is related to the fact that their gift-giving has ended. We won’t get anything more from them.

The basic fact is, we don’t really know people. We believe that great artists are telling us everything about themselves through their art – but we’re often wrong. We buy into the mask they present to us, which in some cases only adds to the pressure they are under to keep wearing it. And we get upset when it’s torn off.

The problem with suicide is that the perpetrator thinks that he or she is doing it in isolation. Often, the opposite is true. They have, in that moment, forgotten the positive impact they have had on the lives of others…and what awful impact killing themselves will have on those receive the news after they’re gone. There are people in my life I thought disliked me, whom I have resumed contact with on social media in recent years, Now, they’re telling me how great I was earlier on and even how much they learned from me. I sure didn’t get that impression at the time they were learning it.

I bet almost all of us have toyed with the idea of offing ourselves at fleeting moments. One of the hard parts is finding a painless and un-messy way. But there is one overarching reason that I would probably never do it. None of us knows what’s on the “other side.”  I was raised Catholic and was taught that suicide is a mortal sin. And you know where they say mortal sinners go after death. Suppose the Catholics are right? If what they say is true, whatever your situation is here on Earth, if you kill yourself, you will be in a lot deeper doo-doo than you are right now, and it will last forever. It’s not a chance I want to take.

There She Goes...

Wow. The swimsuit competition gone from Miss America? As an old person who watched the pageant as a child (yes, when Bert Parks was there) and who placed an informal bet with other members of the family on which state would win, it takes a minute to absorb this news.

One moment that stood out to me was in the 1961 pageant, when, as I recall, Miss Michigan’s high heel broke during the swimsuit portion. She simply kicked off the other shoe and walked the runway barefoot. “Who walks in high heels while wearing a bathing suit, anyway?”  she said during her personality interview -- and went on to win the Miss America crown.

Along came women’s lib, and it became much more difficult to defend the usefulness of beauty pageants. But I tried. I reasoned that many of these young women were interested in careers in modeling, the media, and public relations, or even politics, and their gift of beauty gave them a leg up, if you’ll pardon the expression, in pursuit of these goals, through the training, exposure, and scholarship money that was provided by the pageant experience and by the ensuing reign as the winner. The argument sounded more and more hollow with time, but it will always be the human experience that beauty opens doors, and it will continue to do so, unfair as it may seem.

Typical Americans, though -- we turn everything into an Olympic sport, even cupcake-baking. If Miss America remains a competition, will the participants have the opportunity to advance a cause that currently gets insufficient attention? That could be a good thing.

We are indeed in a revolutionary period, much like the French one. First it was sports figures in trouble, Then, Confederate flags and statues were toppled. Then #metoo. Many of our Hollywood and media, and even political icons have been pulled down from their pedestals, and we have to keep the baskets moving to catch all the rolling heads as cultural standards change.

But as we older people live longer, one of the side effects is seeing history dissolve in front of us. And we are all supposed to be clapping loudly. As new generations come along, it seems easy for younger people to quickly make it in leaps and bounds up to the moral high ground. Pardon us, but I hope we older folks get a little extra time to make the climb  -- and to adjust to breathing the air up there when we arrive.

The Velvet Rope

I never liked Roseanne Barr. I know she came to our attention as a working-class Everywoman, not the usual glamorous types we were used to seeing on small and big screens, but when I look at a screen, I don’t necessarily want to see Everywoman. That’s my problem, I guess. But even in the modern era, a little celebrity doesn’t give anyone the right to say just anything. I will amend that to say, they have the right, perhaps, but no immunity, as I have said many times, from consequences afterward.

What on Earth possessed Ms. Barr to fire off a racially offensive Tweet about former Obama aide Valerie Jarrett? It was mean and ugly, and while Ms. Barr later apologized and called it a joke, and even blamed Ambien use, there was nothing funny about it, which is required of a joke. ABC had absolutely no choice but to cancel her comeback.

There are some who think we are all basically racist. I go along with that, in the following sense: If all of a sudden, the world was a high school lunchroom, and we could sit with whomever we wanted, almost all of us would sit with members of our own tribe, our own color. If we are white, we might sit with an individual black or brown friend. But would we automatically think about looking for a seat at the black or brown table? We would probably not want to head for a table where we felt unwelcome. And they would reasonably feel the same way about our table.

There may be natural repulsions at work here, buried way more deeply than whatever we have absorbed from our culture. And I think allowances have to be made for them until they are naturally overcome, which takes time. Emancipation proclamations and civil rights laws do not by themselves make those feelings go away. Having said that, there are rules of the road, there are thoughts that we just don’t express, lines that we just don’t cross, in an enlightened society. On TV, I heard Sherrilyn Ifill talk about a “velvet rope,” like there used to be at movie theaters – we could easily cross it, but we just didn’t. Whatever license we think the Internet or President Trump himself may have issued to others who believe they have been freed to give voice to ugly sentiments, Barr jumped over that velvet rope. Or maybe crawled under it, is a better way to say it.

Racism has deep emotional and even sexual roots. We may have the fairest of minds, but our feelings don’t always catch up with them. I think that is eminently human.  But as individuals, the first step in the healing process is acknowledging those feelings in ourselves, making sure at the same time we are always keeping our minds open to new ways of looking at and hearing others. We are healed when our feelings catch up with our better angels, and we find out that we are all in this together.

The Missiles of April

With the missile attack on chemical weapons facilities in Syria, the U.S., along with Britain and France this time, slapped a new coat of paint on the “red line,” apparently crossed again by the Assad regime. Moved by pictures of civilians suffering in agony following the chemical attack, President Trump called Bashir al-Assad an “animal” and warned that American missiles would fly – which they did.

The only trouble with the red line, first laid down by President Obama, is that it was not only late, but painted in the wrong place. While there was a lot of talk about how the civilized world could not tolerate the use of chemical weapons, especially against civilians, it had tolerated seven years in which conventional military assaults, including shelling, attacks from the air, and the use of the less-conventional but horrendous barrel bombs, were perpetrated on Syrian civilians.

Mr. Assad, an ophthalmologist by training, was initially seen as somewhat progressive after coming to power in Syria. He had a distinctly distorted view, however, of what were mostly peaceful protests during the Arab spring. Convinced they were the work of terrorists planning to overthrow him, he unleashed his military on city populations in his country. Cable news covered all this night after night. CNN had two brave female reporters in the thick of things, while panelists like the late Fouad Ajami wondered how long the West would put up with Assad’s atrocities.

Two years later, President Obama wanted to do something about it following news of a chemical attack, drawing the red line in the sand. Along came the Russians, who said they would make their ally Assad give up his chemical weapons. But he remained in power, and conventional atrocities continued, with the assistance of the Russians, who convinced us they were also helping to fight ISIS.

But the internal civil war raged on in Syria. Hundreds of thousands died, millions more were displaced, many of them drowning as overburdened refugee boats crossed the Mediterranean. The hordes arrived in a largely unwelcoming Europe, though Germany agree to take in a million survivors, while we virtually shut our doors.

OK. After Iraq and Afghanistan, we were war-weary, and Syria was so not our problem. But “not our problem” makes it everyone’s problem. Were we complicit in this tragedy by doing nothing? We insist we are not in favor of regime change, but if any situation calls for it, it’s this one. It’s a real pipe dream on my part, but could we work with the other players in the region to help rebuild Syria after Assad is removed?

The boundaries of Syria, Iraq and a few other countries in the Middle East were drawn by two men, one English and one French, after World War I. They did it armed with a map and rulers. I hope the world can somehow do better by this region going forward, pipe-dreamy as that may sound.

Take My Data...Please

The outrage over Facebook supplying personal user data to Cambridge Analytica, when you put it all into perspective, is about nothing that new. Facebook is a media company dedicated to delivering eyeballs to other entities that seek to persuade us to buy something or believe something.

Broadcast media have long targeted demographics. When I worked in radio programmers at my station went after the cherished 25-54-year-old demo, the group said to have the biggest buying power. TV and radio stations pursued ratings to show advertisers they could deliver those eyeballs or eardrums. Advertisers use greed, fear, and of course, sex, to convert users into buyers. For years,  the target – the demo – has been the broad side of a barn. The only thing different is the accuracy of the targeting, thanks to the information at hand. As for the barn, well, the privacy horse left it long ago.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says he is not opposed to regulation, but the issue is the kind of regulation. Keeping our personal information away from advertisers or political entities is a non-starter, though, as it’s the basic media business model. Facebook doesn’t charge us as individuals for using its service. That said, these social media platforms should be required to educate users about what’s happening with their data – and that means going way beyond a fine-print user agreement that nobody reads. And Facebook does have to keep track of who gets this data and how it is used, what apps are doing with it…and by the way, keep those clients out of our Friends lists. Just as an aside: if we want our data kept from prying eyes, would we be willing to pay for belonging to Facebook?

It may be in fashion now to hate Facebook, but most of us like keeping up with friends and family, and social media have allowed us to reconnect with people long since forgotten. I work from home and have no co-workers, so Facebook allows me to maintain ties with former colleagues. True, these contacts are no substitute for actual human interaction, but I still think they’re better than nothing. At its best, Facebook offers a reminder in our low points in life that whatever the situation, we are not alone.

We users are not victims, unless we allow ourselves to be.  If we want privacy, we have control of the switch or the plug and can always turn it off or pull it out. But if we do want to use these media, we have choices, and it’s our responsibility to choose those that best serve and inform us, and for which we are willing to sacrifice some level of privacy.  We can also teach our kids how to make the best choices, and impress upon them that in the end, we are our own editors, in control of our eyeballs, eardrums…and brains.

Daylight Shifting Time

That’s what they should call it, because it really doesn’t save anything. There are the same number of hours of daylight and darkness, however you slice it. But the debate over DST’s benefits has had a long history – a century of it, in fact.

The U.S. did not invent it. Apparently, it was the Germans who did so on the grounds of conserving fuel during World War I. In this country, President Roosevelt made it a year-round thing during World War II – it was called War Time, but it didn’t last. Congress has fussed with it on and off since then. It used to run only from April to October. More recently, it was extended from March to November. Unfortunately, some of my older electronic devices did not get the message. They automatically switch under the original schedule. So, I have to reset timers four times a year instead of two.

As to the benefits, I love the long twilit evenings, but would it work as a year-long thing? Proponents, mostly business people, say year-round DST would be better for the economy because it would promote more shopping, recreation and entertainment. Would it save energy? That record is much spottier. Opponents have long argued that children would die because of accidents related to their having to get up in the dark in winter to go to school. And there are those who argue that we should just pick one time scheme and stick to it, due to the bad health effects of “instant summer and instant winter,” and traffic accidents related to it.

The federal government has largely taken control of this issue, but the dumbest thing, IMHO, is that the law still allows states to decide whether to observe DST or not. We are now down to only two states that don’t: Arizona and Hawaii.  In Arizona, by the way, the state doesn’t recognize daylight saving, but the Navajo nation does on its tribal lands. Puerto Rico and other US territories don’t. But now, here comes Florida, planning to observe it all year.

I think the time should be the time, and that we should pick one nationwide scheme and be done with it. Now, I live in a latitude where if Standard Time were in effect year-round, the 4:45 am birds that wake me up in late spring and high summer would be doing so at 3:45 a.m. At least with one scheme, though, the jarring effects of time-shifting and the inconvenience of clock-setting would go away, and we might appreciate the seasons more. My vote is to keep Standard Time all year. I’ll live with the birds if it keeps the school kids safe. However, as a fallback position, so to speak, how about DST from the first day of spring to the first day of autumn? OK, OK, it was just a thought.

Revolution by Hashtag

Genuine national movements – those that involve a major part of the population, used to be pretty rare. I am old enough to remember the last ones, which really got going some 50 years ago. The civil rights movement swept the South, and anger over injustice and assassination swept north and west, and cities burned. Then the whole country seemed to turn against the Vietnam War, forcing President Johnson to give up the idea of running for a new term. There were revolutions in sexual mores, and clothing. Men’s hair got longer and women’s skirts shorter. Culturally, we would never be the same again.

Half a century on, the #metoo movement is one of those revolutionary culture-changers. And now there is #neveragain, teens leading the charge for gun control. Though the subterranean forces of change have been at work all along, these movements have erupted like wildfires racing through dry brush, thanks to ubiquitous connectivity and that previously little-used thing on our keypads, the hashtag.

More people are hitting the streets for more reasons than ever before. Certainly, more are running for office than ever before. It seems like history is being made constantly now. We don’t have to wait for the future judgment of historians as to whether any of it was important enough to make it into their books.

As is often pointed out, one big modern challenge is dealing with the compression of events in time. Things that took decades gradually only took years, then only months, then only weeks. Today, even the so-called 24-hour news cycle seems too long. And, of course, another challenge is that the hashtag is a tool available to anyone, including those who may not have what we might think of as benign intentions. They could start their own revolutions.

For the moment, though, the most dangerous place to stand is on the wrong side of one of these hashtags. We will only get run over.

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Tell Me Why

OK, so you are the proud owner of an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. I don’t think you’re evil. I just don’t understand why this is so important in your life. So you have to help me out a little here.

Maybe you’re a collector. That I get. I was in the news business and used to listen to police scanner radios at work. It then became a hobby with me, and when the latest radio came out, I was the first to get it. I didn’t own every radio made, but I was good at picking out the classic ones, which I still have. They are not just decoration. It’s important to me that each one functions. So if you own a gun, I can see that it’s more than just something for a display case – it has to work.

Maybe you just like testing the limits of the gun, what it can do, how accurate it is. Maybe it’s target practice, hitting a bull’s eye, or maybe mowing down empty cans or bottles on a stone fence. Maybe it’s your release, your way of relaxing.

Maybe you’re a hunter. I won’t think ill of you if you’re hunting un-endangered animals, maybe to help thin out a herd or get rid of real pests. It’s not something I would do, but I’m not you. I wasn’t raised with it, maybe you were. You do have to ‘splain to me, however, why you need an AR-15 for that purpose, I don’t see the sport in it, and it doesn’t seem fair to the animal somehow.

I’m having a little more trouble with the other potential reasons. Perhaps you own the gun because it makes you feel safer and gives you the assurance that you can protect yourself and your family. Fine, but against what, exactly? Somebody breaking into your house with evil intent? Wouldn’t a simple handgun work for that? Do you envision multiple people breaking in, is that it? Or do you need it for the time after the earthquake when the ravenous hordes threaten you? So how many hordes must you hold off? 

Do you have the weapon just in case your government goes bad and it might want to disarm and enslave you? Or some other government’s army invades the country, and as a patriot, you have to defend your homeland? I like war movies too…but, really?

It’s some of the personal reasons that worry me the most. Do you secretly think of yourself as weak, and the gun makes you feel more powerful? Do you want to be respected, and perhaps even a little bit feared, like nobody better f*** with you? Or, do you just want to be noticed and remembered, make a splash, so the world will know you were here, that you counted for something?

Maybe all this is none of my damn business. OK. But if you don’t want to answer these questions for me, at least answer them honestly for yourself, and please think long and hard about why your answers make sense.

Running With the Ball

I would like to impress you with some game-changing profundity about school shootings, but I can’t. Those more eloquent than I have long since covered that ground. And we are all repeating ourselves anyway. The only thing that’s significantly different now is the timing. The Parkland, Florida tragedy has presented those concerned about guns with an opportunity.

Maybe some of us are a little tired of the idea that guns represent an insoluble problem and that the NRA has an unbreakable stranglehold on the electoral process. But it’s still only February, and the congressional election, along with the ones for many state and local offices, are months away – plenty of time to start identifying legislators who have taken campaign money from the NRA and putting up candidates against them who refuse to do so. Single-issue politics? More like football. It’s about running with the ball that’s been thrown and caught. Football is about focusing on a single objective: getting the ball across the goal line.

We also hear the refrain that mass shootings are the new normal, that the repetition of these events has forced us to numb ourselves to the pain because there is no other choice. I believe the opposite, that the cumulative effect of shooting after shooting has finally reached a tipping point. Now, it’s school kids themselves accusing their government of failing them. Can they energize a movement where no one else could?

In football, most passes are not touchdown runs. The term “rushing” is a little curious, as most drives to the goal consist not of those big forward pushes but of many little advances -- and the movement is not always forward. Why did the FBI drop the ball on warnings about the Florida shooter?  But life, like football, is about seeing opportunities, taking advantage of them, and persevering until the ball is carried into the end zone, so to speak.

How many of us can remember when it seemed that everyone smoked? I did, most of my friends did, and most everyone in movies and TV did. Now, smokers, of tobacco at least, are a dwindling number. Smoking is thought of as not only unhealthy but inconsiderate of others, and smokers find it more and more difficult to indulge their habit, as venues for it disappear and the prices for cigarettes shoot through the roof. Smoking is still legal, but it’s no longer celebrated, just tolerated. Who would have foreseen that in 1960? This is how it has to be with guns in this country, for change to happen. Will today’s teenagers – the ones who will grow up to be tomorrow’s legislators -- be our ball-carriers on this drive?

Start 'Em Young

The #metoo and #timesup movements caused a strange leap in my mind. I thought of Emily Post, the iconic American author best known for her books on manners. I know this is going to sound like gross trivialization of a very serious subject. But stay with me.

When we hear the word “manners,” we typically think of little things that apply to family mealtimes: not putting elbows on the table, passing the dinner rolls to others before we take one for ourselves, or to make it current, not texting our friends after we sit down.

At their core, manners are about respect for others. The child at the dinner table takes his smartphone out of his pocket to text. He thinks he’s entitled to use it. Maybe you are a parent who happens to have an instinctively empathetic kid who knows not to do that because of the disrespect to others at the table. More likely, though, you don’t, and you have to teach him that there is a time and a place for texting, and the dinner table isn’t one of them.

So here’s the connection. Men in positions of power may come to believe they are entitled to certain behavior when it comes to women over whom they have authority, as in the workplace. Where did they learn this? I submit that it’s more about what they didn’t learn growing up, or perhaps forgot. I heard part of a radio series last week called Beyond #metoo. One of the segments featured a program in a Northern California middle school to teach boys about respecting girls. It is run by athletic coaches, as these are the figures many boys relate to as mentors. The boys are taught not only to respect girls themselves, but to intervene if they see other boys disrespecting them.

The shaming of abusive men in power is just the beginning of what needs to happen. Males must be taught as children what respect for women is. And the other part of this is that girls must be taught to respect themselves, to learn the power of the word NO, when to use it, and the remedies available it a male in their life doesn’t hear it.

Some half a century before women were granted the right to vote in this country, a noted female religious writer weighed in on the issue women’s suffrage. She said she hoped it would be granted someday. But in the meantime, she said, society should put its efforts into raising what she called a “nobler race for legislation” with “higher aims and motives.” By “race,” I believe she meant those who would create and administer our laws. I think we can all agree that we are badly in need of noble legislators -- noble male and female leaders. Parents and mentors had better get to the business of raising them.

Scarlet Letters

While the #metoo movement is an encouraging sign of cultural and social enlightenment, it comes with a price.

Women gain support from sharing with each other, and the rest of us, stories of inappropriate sexual treatment by men, but this naming and shaming has consequences. Certainly, the world should know about those who have committed crimes, those whose abusing patterns are continuing, and the institutions that have enabled them: Weinstein, Cosby, Fox, etc. But this is a spectrum, and there is what’s happening at the other end of it that bothers me. These days, as soon as an accusation comes out, some men feel compelled to quit their jobs, if the institutions they work with haven’t already fired them, for behavior that happened in previous decades. Once a woman has put this label on a man publicly, it is indelible. There is no washing it off. Bankers and investment professionals who have taken millions from clients through theft or neglect, or even misapplied principles, largely remain in their posts. But a man accused of a sexual misdeed is toast, pure and simple.

Thanks to Nathaniel Hawthorne, I have a billion-dollar idea, if someone modern hasn’t already thought of it: a line of T-shirts for men with a big red “A” on the chest (yes, the A can be for a*hole or whatever other definition applies). Women can send these to their abusers. In the case of crimes, the men can be compelled by courts to wear them. Since we’re in the cold months now, we can add sweaters to the clothing line. The question is, do the men ever get to take them off? Is reform or redemption possible, or is it, once an a*hole, always an a*hole?

Look, I am not trying to defend bad behavior here. But there is something very French-Revolutionary these days about how easy it is to turn heroes (or the once-admired) into villains. What’s being done, at least in some cases IMHO, is creating a second set of victims where there was just one, providing little or no healing for either.

And it’s far from over. We haven’t even gotten to those at the “knew or should have known” level. We’ll leave that to the lawyers, I guess.

Us Too?

The outing by women of men behaving badly didn’t start with Harvey Weinstein, but that seems to have been the final chink in the dam to break. Now, with campaigns like #me too, women are sharing information about their unwanted sexual encounters with men. With the modern women’s movement reaching half a century old, why is this just happening now?

As with slavery, the dominoes don’t fall all at once, it takes time. And these days, women talk to each other about many things. The ability to share through social media reminds them that they are not alone, that they have power in numbers, and that even he most difficult barrier – their own shame – can be overcome.

There is something very American, though, about our reaction to sexual misconduct. Those accused of it face a lot more than simple embarrassment. It doesn’t matter how smart the men are or what they contribute to our culture. It’s like they must be erased from the Earth, stripped of jobs, honors, and even our consciousness. In some cases, the offenses happened decades ago. No matter. Sex crimes earn placement in a special circle of hell.

But the media love these stories. And with the drumbeat getting louder, it seems like all straight men are pigs. Of course we aren't. But how many of us can say we have NEVER acted like one in our encounters with the opposite gender? Maybe our sins weren’t as egregious as those of the Weinsteins or the O’Reillys – but still crossed a line. Do we have to say, us too?

That line can be a blurry one, but for many, religion makes it bright and clear. Mike Pence won’t have a meal with a single woman outside of the presence of his wife. President Jimmy Carter confessed that he had “lust in his heart.”  (The mystery is, how the current occupant of the White House got a pass).

Sexuality is part of being human. It is not evil in itself – it’s all about what we do with it. Can a man appreciate a woman’s beauty (perhaps silently, to himself) without having to own it or control it, or let it interfere with work, or allow it to become so dominant a note in their relationship that simple respect is ignored? Civility is a big word now, and this is one of those fundamental forms of it that we seem to be losing of late. 

The Big Word These Days Is Empathy

My dictionary defines empathy as the capacity to participate in another’s feelings or ideas. It’s not just the President. We are all being judged on whether we have this ability or not. Is it a gift, or a skill, or both? There’s no question that for some people – far too few – it is a gift. They can read both minds and hearts. We have all run across such people in our lives and appreciate them.

I am not an empath. I don’t always feel another’s pain, or joy. That’s simply a chip I wasn’t shipped with. But I like to think that I’ve developed some awareness of others’ feelings over time, usually the hard way, after awkwardly stepping on a toe or two. I may not have come with the chip, but I’ve been gradually downloading the software.

As a journalist, I learned that it was expected of me to be aware of and reflect the feelings and thoughts of those I was covering, even if they weren’t my own. With some issues, if I didn’t have the awareness, it was useful to be working in the newsroom with others who did.

Our President has demonstrated on many occasions that he has a tin ear. But is it solid tin? The empathy definition we started with, about participating in others’ thoughts or feelings, is only the second listed in my old Webster’s dictionary. The first is this: “the imaginative projection of a subjective state into an object so that the object appears to be infused with it.” Wow. Well, he did manage to get himself elected, didn’t he? With a little help from those who make it their business to know something about human nature.

No Magic Bullet

If you’ve been a news junkie for more than five minutes, you are used to the fact that every kind of breaking story has a cycle. Mass shootings are perfect examples. The shooting itself, the body count, the cops taking out the suspect (if the suspect doesn’t save them the trouble), the shocked survivors, the teary families, the heroes, the shooter’s bio and the search for a motive – and the inevitable brief gun control debate. And then, nothing, as our short attention spans move on to something else – until it all happens again. Why do we keep seeing this movie?

The gun control debate itself has its own cycle. “Why do people need to own semi-automatic weapons? The writers of the Second Amendment didn’t know about modern firearms.” “But most gun owners are responsible, and gun laws can’t keep up with technology. Crazies will always find a way, and if the people in the crowd were armed, they could shoot back!”  In the case of Las Vegas, there has been one new step, the general agreement that bump stocks should be banned. Did you even know what that was a month ago?

“Control” is a dirty word, but we accept it in most aspects of life. Let’s take cars. We require licenses to drive them. To be “street legal,” vehicles must meet certain standards. There are rules of the road, and though cars and trucks are capable of high speed, we are not allowed to drive them to that limit on a public highway, only a race track. We have to carry insurance for them. Why is gun regulation so different?

You’ve heard the argument that if you want to control guns, you have to change the culture, our Wild West heritage. It’s impossible, many believe, to make guns unpopular here. But we have managed to do this with smoking -- after many decades.

Gun control is NOT about banning guns. That will never work. But there are things that can be done. They are not easy, and likely expensive. First, a massive federal buy-back program. That approach worked in Australia. Next, we do what we did with tobacco, tax the hell out of it. Every gun sale. Every bullet, perhaps with the money going to shooting victims and their families. How about a database that flags individuals who try to buy multiple assault weapons?

Then there’s media’s role. Not just news coverage and talk shows – Hollywood too. How are we covering shootings or portraying the use of guns?

This stool has way more than three legs and making the changes will take many small bits of legislation over time, perhaps by new generations with new things to think about. This is another monument we have to pull down, and it’s a heavy one indeed.

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.