Wishing for a Renaissance!

         Perfectly on cue, poppies are popping and we hit the road, a colorful journey.

        Looking for a change of mind, we found California spring as we sliced the central state over the Santa Lucia mountains, through the lower end of the central valley, past the San Gabriel and San Bernardino mountains into the Mojave desert, through the Antelope valley to rest at the base of the San Jacinto mountains in Palm Springs. 

    California is terrific when it is green and the mountains are snow capped and

the people come to play.

    California may be a state of mind, but spring certainly is and we needed the charge. 

    Some of the reality has been simply nuts. Measles are making a comeback!

Ignorance and social media can do a lot of harm. There was a time when a parent who would not get their children the safest and best medical care would have been considered coo coo. Ditto for those who wear red hats and march locked step in support of a Dodo. There is an epidemic of dumb. 

    My WWII veteran parents could not understand why the republican party wants to throw away democracy as it embraces the very fascism Dad and his generation fought. Don't the fools read history? Can there be a bigger jerk than Mitch McConnell who endorsed the very man he condemned, and who sucked out what ever molecule of integrity that may have tried to invade the old Kentuckian. 

    To make it worse Google AI started creating Black Popes and Vikings and Asian American founding fathers. Oops said Sundar Pichai a very bright man surprised by his own genius computers. Hit pause and correct.

    That's what we did. 

    Some of us may be old and increasingly irrelevant but we can still manage a lucid thought and one of those surmises-- there is entirely too much intelligence, too many skills, and an unlimited amount of creativity, imagination and real knowledge, kindness, and genuinely good people to look and act the like the America we see today. The smart people, the thinkers, the doers, problem solvers, helpers, people of love and visionaries need to start getting more face time in our melodrama. The "professional politician," influencers, body celebrities, brainless blowhards, snark trolls, overly sensitive and self appointed aggrieved, need to hit the road and get out of our faces. 

    If you have not read the constitution, shut up. If you don't know what the Beer Hall Putsch was, take off your red hat and shut up, then go read a history book. If you want to ban a book, crawl under a rock. If you don't believe peace is the better way to live go for a personality transplant. 

    We need a Renaissance. You Dark Age droolers need to start learning the facts,  and paying attention to the life that appears just beyond your screen. Reality is what we make it, not a hateful attitude manipulated by an algorithm that takes you deeper into darkness, ignorance and insensitivity.

   Spring is going to start breaking out everywhere, soon. Breathe it in, take it into that part of you that that motivates and recharges your battery. There is a reason this is the time that tribes, and societies, and civilizations, and faiths celebrate new life, new energy. There's also more light. 

    The Renaissance started in a place where the light, and the color ignited thought and imagination, enough so to throw out the old, stalled thought and superstitions. It was a springtime of the mind and soul.

    About time for that here, wouldn't you say?

    See you down the trail. 

A Nation Endowed...

              As the United States seeks to repair a sense of nation, bridging division, and return to living into our aspirations we must examine what has happened to our Creator?

        From the first bloom of the republic we've walked with our progenitor, our parent. 

        What has this nation done to God? Where have we put her/him/them? This is a question for those of you with a faith or spiritual life and for those of you who choose to think otherwise. 

            “We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”  Preamble to the Declaration of Independence.

            An observation-the men who signed the declaration were certainly not feminists and some of them were lukewarm to God, personally, though there She/He is, in the first sentence of the first act to declare a free nation.

            From the beginning this nation has abided people of faith and those who eschew it. Isn't that how it should be? Tolerant. Though in our more enlightened self, we've come to recognize the sins of our founding. 

            We would be more free, more just, and better in all ways if we would have started differently with native citizens and their beliefs, and if we had not permitted Africans to be made slaves. 

            At a time, and in a world that was cruel and classist, imperfect though we were, we sought a more perfect union.

     

  birth of a notion

    

            No one is required to practice a faith, but the freedom to exercise a belief is essential to a free society. It is a principle this nation was built upon. 

            A droll and dear friend, a retired Judge, who presided over the process of American justice and who is a student of philosophy, tells people he is a Frisbeterian. He says when a Frisbeterian passes, their soul goes into a frisbee stuck on a roof some place.  

            From the beginning we've had divisions but despite the differences, our Providential parent was put at the foundation.

            The constitution, the very bones of our republic,  is signed under the sentence 

            “...the 17^th of September in the year of our Lord, one thousand seven hundred eighty seven….”

            This is not an exposition on belief, faith or religion. This is to serve as an understanding that an active allegiance to a Divine power is a keystone to our system of government and it has implications as to how we are as a nation. 

        My use of the word God in this post is code for the sacred beliefs of all, however it is said or left unspoken, imagined, known, practiced or worshipped. It is the human equivalence of an understanding of the Divine intelligence to which humans have fidelity and devotion. 

There is, nor ever was, a unanimity. While Europeans came to these shores for religious freedom, they had different ideas. 

Puritans who made Massachusetts Bay their home set up religious communities based on their view of the Bible. They were, however, not friendly to anyone who had a different view.

At the same time Rhode Island was established for the very purpose of religious freedom. In fact Rhode Island welcomed everyone, faith or no faith and it didn’t matter. Quakers and Jews, who had a hard time elsewhere, were free to practice faith as they wished. People with my judge friend's sense of whimsey would not have burned at a stake in Rhode Island. 

Coexistence, cooperation, and mutual respect, work.

 Just to make sure there was no doubt that our Divine parent was in the midst of everything, the first amendment to the new constitution came just four years later and established that congress could “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” it also gurantees freedom of speech, the press, the right of the people to assemble and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances-that is to protest peacefully.

            Bringing this back to the premise, the nation has been built by diversity of people and beliefs, indeed! But always there was a central principle; what we do, how we live, how we treat each other is based on the idea we live in accordance with how God would expect. “…one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” We swear to tell the truth, “so help us God.” The oath of office is sworn on a Bible. 

a kind of secular sacredness

          Over the centuries, the common center of our experiment in democratic republic has been the power we know by many names, according to varied faiths and beliefs. 

          We have become more diverse, multi-cultural and our understanding has more flavor and a diversity of accents.

        While people have been free not to practice a faith, we all have lived according to our constitutional belief in the source of faith, and the even more ancient texts that are at the core of the belief of the major religious groups. 

        Jews, Christians and Muslims share the Ten Commandments that are the foundation of law and principles of behavior. Freedom, justice, equality, divinely ordained if you will, for believers and those who are not. Everyone is to be treated the same.

            So how are we doing? What happened to our Divine guardian in the last four years or so?  Or in the last 50 years? Did someone mug him/her? Did God get fed up with us? 

            Or, have we abandoned the nexus of our nation? Do we merely purport the faith? Do we walk the talk or merely talk it?

            Even those who are agnostic or who claim to be atheist are free to think as such, thanks to our faith in government and the founding document that propounds the importance of living a good life by the measure of a higher standard than merely the doings of we human bipeds.

            As a nation do we put those values first? Or have we turned "God" into an ideological or political tool? 

            I heard a good preacher say, "God is not swayed by our rhetoric or political speechifying?" The principle of strength upon which we premise our right to be a nation, and the guide for the manner in which we will live, has to do with a higher order of things, a power that is just and that knows our intentions. 

        This is not an exercise in esoterica. The last four years have been brutal. The minority president used every opportunity to divide and to destabilize. That most who voted for him believe his lies of election fraud not only marks that we are tribes who draw our succor and knowledge from different places, it demonstrates we have lost our ability to draw to the center. It is evidence of different standards for fact, truth and reality.

        We've always had differences of opinion, but until recently we were able to agree on fact. Donald Trump has spent his life using deception about almost everything. Today millions, most victimized by the distortions of his and their favorite network, believe those lies. That presents a dangerous problem.

        In the early days of the republic James Madison had an idea of public support of churches so a government under the sway of a populist or a mass movement would not be able to restrict or control religious practices and churches. George Washington, a president vastly different from Donald Trump wrote:

“No man’s sentiments are more opposed to any kind of restraint upon religious principles than mine are; yet I must confess, that I am not amongst the number of those who are so much alarmed at the thoughts of making people pay towards the support of that which they profess, if of the denominations of Christians; or declare themselves Jews, Mahomitans or otherwise, & thereby obtain proper relief.” 1784

        We have been able to work it out, to compromise, to act with honor and most of all in the interest of everyone, even with those who hold different personal beliefs. 

    The last 4 years have fanned division, disputed fact, distorted or ignored truth, seen an attempt to discredit the press, despite the provisions of the first amendment. Families, friends, even religions have been victimized, disunited and set at odds. It was intentional, deliberate and unAmerican.

implications 

       The competence and mature assurance of the Biden transition has begun to restore and polish our democratic republic, but sabotage, landmines, and carnage left by the irrational and demented Trump years present implications. This is especially so for those who take seriously the bedrock fealty to Divine Providence found in our constitution and governance.

•       What is a nation with a Divine heritage to make of people who do not believe the Covid virus is real?
•        Or who flaunt precautions that protect others, including those most at risk?
•         Or who do not believe the election results?
•         What does a Godly people think of children pulled away from parents, and forced to sleep on aluminum blankets in cages?
•         Or of those who approve of political behavior that causes harm, fosters division and hate?
•        How can a government vested in a Holy Creator fail to legislate assistance to millions who are unemployed, or the 1 in 4 American children who are food insecure, or people who must decide between food, or rent, or medicine?
•         How is a nation under God to react to a man who desecrates honor, tradition, peaceful transfer of power, undermines belief in our system, perpetuates credibility destroying mass lies? And what are to do about those adore him and believe those lies?

a nation endowed

       A people who call down a God of the ages, who invoke that divine claim, who swear allegiance, and who promise to navigate by virtues of a holy benefaction must answer true- how are we going to rehabilitate? How are we going to bridge the divide? How do we find a truth or settle on fact?

        Abraham Lincoln's Thanksgiving Proclamation is a start.

 He suggested Americans do "humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience...and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and union."

      Healing the wounds of the nation will be hard and challenging, but it is noble and honorable work. It is something every citizen can and should do. 

      In future posts we'll take a closer look.

        In our previous age of division, Lincoln drew strength from the hymn Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory. There are lines in the second verse that push us to be honest about our commitment to truth and justice

       "God has sounded for the trumpet that shall never call retreat and is sifting out all human hearts before the judgement seat..."

        Truth matters. Justice will prevail. It is in the nations DNA.We are the agents.  

      Stay well. See you down the trail.

            

        

 

INSPIRED II

A DOSE OF GOOD MEDICINE

   This is a new top to a post that drew much interest. It has been revised. We gathered these images on a visit with dear friends. It was a tonic.
   Now this focus is brought to our current political rumble, which includes a fight with the media. We'll revisit that below. 

INSPIRED

   Frequent readers remember I'm a First Amendment fanatic. I'm the kind of goof who reads the Declaration of Independence each Fourth of July, and who is adamant about protecting our liberties and who holds dear the extraordinary set of bones upon which this republic hangs-the Constitution.

  All of us are entitled the full extension of  rights, privileges and responsibilities laid out for us by the founders, protected by sacrifices through generations and increased by our perpetually growing enlightenment. 

   So Washington DC is the touchstone, in so many ways.

   Ingrained in the raison d'être of these monuments and memorials are intellects, sacrifices, leadership, vision and a devotion to an ideal-a nation where all live in equality. 
   Personalities who have risen to lead are honored, beyond their days, as a challenge to us in our time.  These stone reminders are a tonic. We are humbled and inspired by what we see and remember.

Memorial to journalists killed in the line of duty.

Newseum, Washington DC

     Service personnel and journalists have given much, including their all so that we may know and live free. They inspire me.
   Politicians who rise above petty politics to move the arc of history as statesmen inspire me.

    Temples that celebrate the best of our creative dreams,  reaching and artistic output, inspire and offer a healing balm.

    And so our divided and dysfunctional Congress, beleaguered Presidency and questionable Supreme Court do not detract from the wide and long sweep of the true greatness that can and has emerged in and from this Capitol of human longings and achievement. It is not perfect.  None of the heroes who are memorialized were perfect. Like all of us, they had feet of clay and were made of the same star matter. 
   We have eras of which to be proud and periods of shame and embarrassment but it is always on a human scale, moving toward an ideal, an inch, a day, a moment at a time.

    So I take from all of it an inspiration and renewed zeal to stay stalwart in my belief that all of us, regardless of birthright, are children under the same heaven, brothers and sisters of planet earth. I may not like you, I may not agree with you, but neither that, nor how and who you were born should stand between you and full equality, even in a church.

    Your color, your gender, your ethnic heritage, your sexual orientation, your physical or mental challenges simply make you a human being, entitled to the full privileges of life.

    I thank the good Lord for a vision that it is so, and for a nation where we get better at making it so and for a place where we build monuments and temples to remind us to make sure it is always so and to recall those who have said so.
   
    Afterthoughts in this political season. Reporters and other journalists have been barred by the Trump campaign. That is stupid and it is wrong. It is also critical to note.
   If there is anything our generation should take from the history of 1933 forward is the rise of Hitler, his coopting of workers and his use of power. We witness warning signs and similar behavior. Trying to manipulate the press is troubling.
    Recourse? Some have suggested a fight back-refuse to cover his candidacy. If one outlet is barred, no coverage from everyone else. That may "vent," but it's not right nor effective.
My friend Frank, who hosted our Washington visit observes it keenly.
      "The media is always stuck between principles (protesting this kind of treatment) and responsibility (continuing to report on craziness.)
     This election offers American voters an opportunity to do a reality check and to think in view of US history and all that implies.
     

    See you down the trail.

NO WET PAWS & WHY BOEHNER IS A BONE HEAD

NO WET PAWS, PLEASE

Neither Hemingway nor Joy like wet paws.

But Hemingway is especially reluctant. Our recent light rains gave him plenty of reason to stay on the chair.

EMERGING SPRING

BOEHNER IS A BONE HEAD

    Some of our founders must be spinning over the jack ass moves of John Boehner.

     The constitution gives exclusive powers to the President to receive ambassadors and public ministers of foreign governments. Boehner violated that historic and important principal by inviting Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu to address congress. His vindictive winner take all style of opposition politics might earn him applause from the far right and anti Obama forces, but it is dead wrong. It could be a disastrous precedent in an increasingly dangerous and complex world.

    The US Congress is an independent body of course, but historically partisan politics end at the shore. In foreign policy and diplomacy, the US has and must speak with a single voice. The reasons are obvious and borne out by history.  

   The US cannot deal with other nations with more than a single voice and intent. That is not to say we cannot have robust internal debate, but in bilateral relationships, only the Chief Executive has the power to engage foreign officials and especially heads of state. 

    Boehner is an inept Speaker and now he becomes an historic blunderer.  Even if you are a conservative, Republican, or not a fan of Barack Obama, you must still respect the institution and history of the Presidency and its exclusive role in bilateral relationships. Boehner is a fool and a mean spirited one at that.  His move on Netanyahu, meant to embarrass the President and to boost Netanyahu in his own political race, is wrong and indicative of how low the Republican party is stooping. As a matter of fact I suspect Ev Dirksen, John Foster Dulles, Teddy Roosevelt, William McKinley, Henry Clay, Robert Lafollete, Robert Taft and many other Republicans are spinning as well.

    Boehner should spend the remainder of this term of congress with a bright yellow A emblazoned on his forehead.

    See you down the trail.   

A DUMB JUSTICE & EVENING LIGHT

EXCUSE ME MR. JUSTICE KENNEDY
GO BACK UNDER YOUR ROCK

     There are good arguments to be had over the Supreme Court decision allowing jailers to make more invasive searches.  It resolves what has been conflict in other courts about the balance of privacy and security. 

     As a journalist I've been in prisons, jails, detention centers and lock ups.  Those places are populated by some who indeed are dangerous. But I've also encountered people in control of those situations who are A)not the most elite of their corp and B)who seem to "enjoy" having people under their control.  In fact I've met some jailers who are simply brutal and sadistic.  Allowing them to operate without control is not a good idea. I doubt if they've read the Constitution or the Bill of Rights.

      What is heinous, offensive and, to my way of thinking dangerously ignorant behavior for a Supreme, is the position of Justice Kennedy that the circumstances of the arrest (in the case being heard) were of little importance.  Read that again, the circumstances of the arrest were of little importance! I'm sorry Mr. Justice, but the circumstance of every arrest, regardless of whether petty or a major crime is important.  Yes, the Supremes make high altitude decisions about principles and interpretations, as in this ruling, but they should never overlook, forsake or take for granted the circumstances of an arrest. 

     The power to arrest, or the act of being arrested, is a pivot point in the very Constitutional relationship of individuals to a government.  Our rights as people are affected by our granting of power to governments.  The individual good submits to the greater good of the commonweal.  This is the stuff of political science, philosophy and theory and the debates cross history.

     In this particular case, it was a bad arrest, not called for and simply one more example of inefficiency, poor record keeping, bad police work and perhaps even racial profiling.

      For Justice Kennedy to overlook such "circumstances" so he can sink his teeth into what is truly an important matter to decide is wrong.  For him to say circumstances don't matter is stupid.

     I'm sure some students of the law or the Supreme Court will find my logic to be that of a rube, but right is right regardless of whether you are wearing a black robe, or being falsely arrested.  Circumstances matter.  They are real.

      Theory is born of real experiences.

DAY BOOK

EVENING LIGHT

      Shooters-photographers, videographers, cinematographers-call it "the golden hour," that evening light, saturated with color. It is as though the light is playful and magical. It's one of my favorite times to shoot.

      The sun acts as spot light, or sets up interesting shadows.

See you down the trail.