Skip to content

Month: December 2024

JIMMY CARTER MY HERO

Published by Richard Kimball on December 30, 2024

When former Texas governor John Connally took a private jet in 1980 to convince Iran not to release the hostages, the Carter Presidency was done. Such was the underhanded ugly, in old time politics.

Carter, the antithesis of what is to come, thought we should not only be the top military power but also “the champion of peace, champion of human rights, champion of the environment and the most generous nation on earth.”

Carter knew that knowledge was the only real source of human success and thus created the Department of Education.

Carter knew that bringing adversaries to the table and convincing them peace was a mutual advantage, might bare fruit and thus the Camp David Accords, which won for Begin and Sadat the Noble Prize.

Even out of the Presidency Carter spoke truth to power as when he was amongst the first to say, “There was no reason for us to become involved in Iraq,” or when he suggested we cannot be peacemakers if American government leaders are seen as knee-jerk supporters of every action or policy of whatever Israeli government happens to be in power at the moment. That is the essential fact that must be faced.”

But mostly I loved Jimmy Carter for his devotion to us after his Presidency, his tireless journeys all over the globe to promote peace, health and justice and his passion for the less fortunate here at home.

All former Presidents retire, comfortably cocooning in their former glories. Not Jimmy Carter, my hero!

Twice my boss, first as my boss’s boss when I worked for Walter Mondale and second as a founder of an organization called Vote Smart where I was dogged on his example for 35 years as its President.

Richard Kimball

Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org

or

Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016

Comments closed

THE CHRISTMAS GIFT

Published by Richard Kimball on December 22, 2024

Like you, if you were lucky enough to have the perfect childhood, my young years looped around that one magical day. The days leading up to it were loaded with wonder and on the very morning of Christas Day an explosion of dreams come true.

But child time is short time and the day after came with thoughts of the eternity that existed before that day would roll around again.

Yet on the Christmas morning of 1960 my view was forever altered when I saw real magic.

Everything was as my years had come to expect: the glittering tinseled tree stretched to the ceiling, the felt, sequined Mr. and Mrs. Clause our grandfather had made hanging on the wall, the fireplace already aglow, and Mom and Dad in their robes holding cups of coffee. What was different was what was under the tree. The number and size of the packages did not fit under the boughs, and instead flushed out all about.

My eyes went big and wide at the wonder of it, unknowing that the biggest, best, most valuable lifelong gift I was about to receive wasn’t under the tree at all.

As always, I tore into the packages marked for me, and those marked from Santa or Mom and Dad were their normal great.

 What blew me away and affected me more than any wrapped package was this: the most perfectly wrapped gifts, often the most expensive gifts, were all marked “From Billy,” my 16-year-old, oldest brother.

Turns out he hadn’t spent all that money from his double newspaper route on himself. He spent it on us.

I would spend the next 65 years lighting up others just the way he lit me up that one Christmas morning when I was 11 years old.

I would never again receive a gift that beat my heart as hard as my giving one.

My brother did that for me when I was very young, and his giving had no end. Later he would do it for his own kids, and much later he did it again for me, when he dragged himself out of bed in the middle of the night just to hand me a seat in my first political job as an Arizona State Senator.

Richard Kimball

Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org

or

Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016

Comments closed

Hand in Hand with Jesus

Published by Richard Kimball on December 17, 2024

I know it is an odd thing when I say Jesus talks to me. But somehow, he finds a way. 

If I do good, I am kind, thoughtful and giving, he inflates my senses of self-worth and joy.

If I do bad, he loads me with self-doubt and roils my brain in the darkness of a sleepless night.

It is because of him, I never think of harassing, bullying, abusing or grabbing a woman by the pussy.

He talks to me about supporting the poor and needy, not judging or condemning others, or seeking revenge or retribution, or promoting conflict and division. All spot on with what he said and exampled in his life.

He also talks to me of the modern-day temple profiters pointing to their new leader who warps his every example into the most grotesque deformities persuading acceptance of a smothering of all he lived for.

Richard Kimball – more historian than Christian

Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org

or

Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016

Comments closed

Tired of Fake News?

Published by Richard Kimball on December 5, 2024

Go to:

Reuter

Associated Press

BBC

Wall Street Journal

Forbes

The Hill

Newsweek

NPR

Not much left in the world of unbiased news and even some of those I’ve listed struggle mightily to hold a toe in the lane of unopinionated.

Most of us just choose news elsewhere that plays sweet music for our own ears.

Richard Kimball

Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org

or

Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016

Comments closed

THE BARBER BUTCHER

Published by Richard Kimball on December 3, 2024

 The announcement was casually made in front of our living room mirror as Mom stroked my two-year-old hair, “We are going to get this cut.” The shock was instant. I was going to be “cut.” Cutting hurt and I had no reason to believe cutting my hair would be any less painful than cutting off fingers or toes.

 My protests, apparently laughable, were ignored, and I was unjustly packed into the family’s Packard and off we went.

 Entering the shop there he stood, as sinister a sight as any little boy had ever seen. He just stood motionless looking down at me. Recognizing my fear, that grim-faced, slick-haired, spectacled little man with the tiny mustache and stiff white shirt grimaced and looked up at my mom. I was doomed.

 My terror was splayed open for all to see as I took in the various fluid-filled jars containing combs and cutting devices, along with assorted objects plugged into electrical sockets behind him. And the chair, OH GOD that chair, what was it?  Huge with various handles and levers and a long leather strap swaying at its side. I lost it!

 Dismissing a child’s fears as simple childishness is so convenient to an adult who has long forgotten the traumas of their own first-time childhood horrors: the time you first got the needle at the doctor’s office, wobbled and crashed that first two-wheeler attempt, the dark that came at night, when you first rode The Hammer at the State Fair, or just the creaking noises in the closet when all were asleep. . . and a hundred other childhood traumas. 

 Most adults could easily revisit those fears by trying a bungee jump or first sky dive, taking a quick dip into a frozen lake or maybe a bit of harmless water boarding – all would likely do the trick and give a taste of what we have forgotten about first-time events. And you will never have so many first-time events as you did as a child.

 Anyway, I stood in front of the barber butcher, and he was going to cut me. For some incomprehensible reason the person I trusted most in life, picked up a box, placed it on the torture device and stuck me to it – then let the butcher have his way with his sharp pointy objects.  My fear was intense and real.  My mother, like all mothers, knew such fears absurd, but mine also had the presence of mind to see an opportunity for posterity and documented the event.

Richard Kimball

Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org

or

Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016

Comments closed

A MOMENT OF CLARITY FOR LIBERALS

Published by Richard Kimball on December 1, 2024

Biden pardons his own of crimes that deserved the due process all the rest of us agreed to live by and do whether we like it or not. 

As fortune would have it you do not have, I don’t have, none of us has a private President with the power to give you a “Get Out of Jail” free card.

If you are a liberal supporting this pardon and feel not at all responsible for the soils that grew a Trump and what is to come, Trump is the seed that you sowed.

Richard Kimball

Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org

or

Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016

Comments closed