It was America’s longest private meeting. With the windows and doors closed they argued for months in the gluey heat of a Philadelphia summer. Then on September 17th the doors and window were finally opened.
When a Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia asked Benjamin Franklin, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy,” Franklin responded, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
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Perhaps more clearly than ever, every single American adult will be asked to respond to Dr. Franklin when they stand alone in that voting booth this November 8th.
Dr. Franklin feared what all the founders feared, and what every thinking American now fears. Are the institutions the Founders and a dozen other successive American generations made possible and built these past 244 years all to be swept away? Is every citizen to be allowed to vote? Is all future opposition journalism to be oppressed? Is every fact to be cloaked and skewered?
Your knowing what you are doing on that first Tuesday in November is what Dr. Franklin and all who have championed freedom for over two centuries bet on. It will be time for you to stand and answer.
Please use VoteSmart.org to get the facts, the truth and defend yourself and your fellow citizens.
“What do you do?” I asked. Answer: “I raise moms. I let only the females live. They are expected to get pregnant every year. If they do not get pregnant themselves, I impregnate them. If they still do not, I butcher them or sell them off to someone who can make good use of them.”
It is an odd world, where one male will do, and that most Americans, including me and much of the world, lives by.
I think the world of compassionate people, often value their judgment more than my own, even as I disagree. The other day one let me know that saying bad things about evil people would not help heal.
Where is that point of departure, when a lovely person, smart, kind and gentle, decides, “OK, I gotta fight.”?
If it is not when they bludgeon YOUR capitol, YOUR institutions, YOUR schools, YOUR books, science and the facts, can that point ever come? Does it even come when they come for you?
We are all products of the sources of information we choose to absorb, and those sources have latched on to what every other species on earth has always known — fear sells.
The basic difference is that no other species would ever think of screaming fire in a theater if there were not an actual fire.
Pick your source for information, doesn’t much matter which one, watch for a bit and see if they do not tell you to be worried about stuff, often with who to blame or even hate. That is what sells. That is what builds audience and cash. We are all simply wired to pay attention, to tune in when someone says, “WATCH OUT!”
Hell, information sources have become so fear mongering that Americans can no longer agree on what is right and what is wrong.
Institutions that could only have been created by a free people for protection and justice, like the Congress, the FBI and Justice Department, are now seen as enemies by millions of Americans. If abandoned, replaced by what, by whom?
A leader of the French revolution famously said, “There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.” In today’s vernacular it might be put: “I cultivated a mob and will follow no matter where they go.”
No, there is not much fun in it, but as in all past American epochs, and I believe with this one, someone in the mob will eventually stop, then someone else, then others and a sense of common commitment to each other will win the day. It is then that sensible leaders both conservative and liberal will be exposed and politically survive, stand on solid common ground, and turn us back to reason.
My work was my passion and I always had too much of both. It was about the 25-year mark of my life’s work when a spectacular left hook, I did not know I had, smashed into the face of my University of Arizona Director.
I worked all the time, all the time. It is when I finally decided to take a break and go on a holiday that she called. She was our National Director in the main office who also oversaw a director of one of our satellites in Arizona. A string of lies forced her to fire him but he would not leave the office, apparently unwilling to take directions from a “girl” and certainly not going to be fired by one.
My vacation abruptly ended, and I had a four-hour drive to load up a bit of steam. I walked into our satellite Arizona office and told a snickering nut case to pack up and go. He did not, suggesting he would leave at the end of the day and that was all there was to it.
The next few moments are a little foggy in my memory as they always are when anger holds sway. Although I do remember getting in his face and splattering out a slop pail of unkind words. As it turned out my slop was unkind enough to get him to take a swing that glanced off the side of my head. That is when to my total surprise I discovered I have a spectacular left hook. My spot-on accuracy changed his expression and the color dripping down his pasty white face.
As I headed for home, I was pretty upset about what happened and how I had handled it. It was not the first-time I let my anger rule my actions.
As I pulled into my driveway, perhaps the most interesting, accomplished person I knew was standing outside in his yard. At 93 years, he still had youthful good looks, was one of my closest friends and my next-door neighbor. As a poor kid growing up in the Depression with nothing much for parents, Jack used to shag balls for Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, once hitched a ride into D. C. and was picked up by Eleanor Roosevelt as he worked his way through school. After earning a Yale law degree, he found himself ducking enemy fire as a Marine gunner in the South Pacific. The only time I ever heard him say he was scared and ran away, was when he turned 18 and Jean Harlow asked him up to her bedroom.
As the years rolled by Chief Justice Earl Warren asked him if he couldn’t clean up what had become some very seedy operations at the U. S. Supreme Court. His portrait still hangs there in thanks to this day. He became the President of two major universities, chairman of MetLife, as well as a couple other major international corporations. Two U. S. Presidents would be included in his circle of friends and when he relaxed a bit, he might be found having a picnic lunch with actress Jean Simmons on the hillside of the site they had chosen to build the Getty Center. To me he was Forest Gump with a brain.
Anyway, there he was, standing outside as I pulled into my driveway, and I was about to hear one of the most jaw dropping, life awakening responses to a question I would ever ask.
Visibly unsettled, I walked up to him, told him all that had happened and then asked, “Jack, you have led so many efforts, been so successful in life, struggled and achieved so much on so many fronts. How did you managed it when you were forced to fight on your way up all those hills?
He just looked at me for a moment in silence, and then softly said, “Richard, I never fought with anyone.”
This piece will take almost 1 minute to read, or in other words, roughly 7 times longer than your attention span.
Franklin, the Founder I would most like to have over for dinner, said something to the effect that the older he got the less certain he was of anything.
Richard Kimball, the person I most trust, has been confused about almost everything around me and all within it, as long as I can remember. As result: I have always been a listener, sitting quietly, soaking in the monologues of those I once knew certain, knew more than me.
But now I am old and have heard an awful lot and must say, I don’t care what you think or what you have to say.
Like all my age, I am done. As with almost everyone else I have ever known, I am only interested in what age and experience have left ME to prattle about.
Few things make one more miserable than that moment in an argument when you realize you’re wrong!
For that reason, two words have never been heard in debate, “I am wrong.”
Once you invest in a point of view, you’re done. In fact, research has shown that exposing people to contradictory facts only intensified their existing beliefs, making them more inflexible. You see this reality with participants on January 6th, opposing sides on the Supreme Court’s abortion decision, at your job and in your personal life.
If you want to be persuasive and impact someone’s misguided beliefs, you’d better start by agreeing with them. Only that approach can expose any unfrozen receptors and open potential for adjustment.
Millions being spent by Democrats to support election fraud, pro-life and Uzi-supporting Republican candidates?
W T F !
Of course, they do it in the hopes of getting unelectables as Republican nominees in the general election, or at least get more viable Republican challengers to burn through their cash defending themselves before facing a Democrat.
They are having so much fun with voters it gives them the giggles. You know, the same giggles Trump gets when surrounded by evangelicals he privately says are full of shit, scammers, and hustlers.
These Democrat 2.0 versions of Trump deserve an equal amount of your derision. If you do not think so, just imagine if this idea gets legs. Democrats funding extremist Republicans and Republicans funding extremist Democrats. That is a world you DO NOT want to see or in the end, live in.
Wasn’t sure what it meant until someone steeped in this new language explained. It was then that I
LOL.
It made me think of those I had worked with, those Republicans I most respected in politics both in the Congress and state legislature.
I am not sure why I always got along better with Republican colleagues than my fellow Democratic ones, but it was always so. None were or ever would have been Trump-pets, and those that have passed on are certainly smoldering in their graves over that despicable, traitorous ass.
They were simply conservative, came to their judgements by experience and thinking often different than my own, and most notably, always fun, challenging, and educational to talk with. The result: contentions could be, if not resolved, at least adjusted, and advance toward a common goal.
