Billionaire Elon Musk is not to blame for the firings of thousands of federal workers, including veterans (without bone spur excuses) he privately tells Republicans. It is the heads of federal agencies who are to blame, he claims.
HUH?
Richard Kimball
Comments closed
Putin is “A thug and murderer,” said John McCain.
Why? Well because Putin’s opponents are murdered, opposition is arrested and frozen in Siberia, minority rights squashed, foreign territory forcefully annexed, brutal dictators slaughtering thousands of their own citizens are enabled…
In 2023, when American’s still fought for the free, 64% thought this newfound “friend” an enemy, now only 34% do, while 50% want Ukraine to stop fighting and let Russia have the territory, they’ve massacred tens-of-thousands to obtain.
When those betraying that 249-year-old, uniquely American cause of freedom are asked, why? They simply mimic their leader who said, “Well, I think that our country does plenty of killing, too.”
Richard Kimball
Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org
or
Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016
Comments closedA legion of inexperienced juvenile toadies now locked in place at the head of your Defense, Homeland Security, Education, Trade, Office of Management and Budget, Energy, Labor, Veterans Affairs, Transportation, FBI, Health and Human Services, Secretary of State, CIA, Agriculture, Housing and Urban Development, and Environmental Protection Agency.
All parasites suckling on the poisonous tit of a megalomaniac.
All happening, while your protection from Inspector Generals, whistle-blowers and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are deceased.
You are on your own. Caveat Emptor, in all things – good luck!
Richard Kimball
Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org
or
Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016
Comments closed
Wake me up in 20 years when it is all over, the wicked are dead and I can know that somehow democracy pulled through.
List all the human advances you can, for all human time up to 1776.
It was 229 years ago that Thomas Jefferson wrote “All men are created equal…” and enterprise by the free was unleashed on a global scale. With little thought, there is not a one of us that would not marvel at what came of it.
Compare your list of what came under every imaginable despot those first 250,000 years of human existence, with what you can list the last 000.01% of it. Any comparative list would make those first 250,000 years seem devoid of advance in either human comfort, health, convenience, or nourishment. Almost regardless of your circumstance, your life today is with benefits and comforts beyond the imaginations of any ruler in history claiming to be above the law. This relationship between freedom and despotism is no coincidence.
Pride in our forebearers should ooze from every American pore while the return of a despotism boil everyone’s blood.
I’m going to doze off now, but with a hacksaw, on the chance I wake up in a prison.
Richard Kimball
Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org
or
Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016
Comments closed
America represented stability in the world, because our institutions were stable, our rule of law was stable, and our separation of powers was able to mute extremists. I believe that is how America provided the safest haven for secure investment and fertile ground for prosperity.
Now with our institutions, the rule of law, the separation of powers being dismantled and a tariff wars kicker, I wonder if the coming pain will root in time for a sleepy self-governing people, charged with running this show, to wake up and save their primacy?
Richard Kimball
Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org
or
Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016
Comments closedNO LONGER A CHILD’S GAME
We were all put on notice by those that knew him best:
His Vice President, Mike Pence: “Anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be president of the United States.”
His Attorney General, Bill Barr: He “shouldn’t be anywhere near the Oval Office.”Enter your email to sign up for CNN’s “What Matters” Newsletter.
.
Bottom of Form
His Secretary of Defense, James Mattis: “He tries to divide us.”
His Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper: “I think he’s unfit for office.”
His Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Mark Milley, “We don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator.”
His Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson: “His understanding of global events, his understanding of global history, his understanding of US history was really limited.”.
His Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley: “A terrible thing happened on January 6 and he called it a beautiful day.”
His National Security Adviser, HR McMaster: “We saw the absence of leadership, really anti-leadership, and what that can do to our country.”
His National Security Adviser, John Bolton: “I believe (foreign leaders) think he is a laughing fool.”
His Chief of Staff, John Kelly: “A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law… God help us.”
His Acting Chief of Staff, Mick Mulvaney, “I quit because I think he failed at being the president when we needed him to be that.”
His Communications Director, Anthony Scaramucci: “He is the domestic terrorist of the 21st century.”
His Communications Director, Stephanie Grisham: “I am terrified of him running in 2024.”
His Homeland Security Adviser, Tom Bossert: .He “is an utter disgrace.”
His White House lawyer, Ty Cobb: “Trump relentlessly puts forth claims that are not true.”
His top aide in charge of his outreach to African Americans, Omarosa Manigault Newman: ” I could no longer be a part of this madness.”
Every thinking American: “THERE ARE NONE SO BLIND AS THOSE WHO WILL NOT SEE!”
Richard Kimball
Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org
or
Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016
Comments closed
LIKE TITANIC WE CALMLY SET SAIL WITHOUT BINOCULARS
Good people with thoughtful hearts seldom recognize how horrible an event can be and when they do, most sit frozen, drop jawed, as their heart is slowly eaten.
Titanic, The Gulf war, Deep Water Horizon, Pearl Harbor, Challenger, Chernobyl are amongst the many sufferings that could have been avoided if our better angels were heeded.
Now the most odious flight of all is about to take wing. As it has slimmed its way above to lord over us all, those saddened, thoughtful hearts hide in the cracks dreaming that lucidity and sanity will magically reappear.
No massive demonstrations planned, no public outrage evident, “Brownshirts” have won the day and there will be Hell to pay.
Richard Kimball
Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org
or
Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016
Comments closed
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 closedSold $6.24 million at Sotheby’s
Ya, it sold. Trump sold. My God how could we have let our families, neighbors, and fellow citizens go so bananas??
As my wife said, “what world do you live on?”
Richard Kimball
Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org
or
Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016
Comments closedSELFISH: concerned excessively or exclusively with oneself
Long, long ago in a world now far, far away, I was reading of an eighteenth-century Scottish historian who suggested democracy would always eat itself. A people starting in bondage would develop great courage, he said. That would lead to liberty, in turn liberty would lead to abundance, abundance to selfishness, selfishness to complacency, complacency to apathy, apathy to dependence and thus back to bondage.
I had thought him wrong then and gave much of my life to prove him so, but I would not now. Age has given me clarity; a clarity I wish I did not have. Selfishness takes primacy in all beings and is particularly evident amongst human beings. How else could it be that we have ended the existence of so many other species and now stand on the precipice of ending our own.
Or as H. L Mencken, a devout conservative wrote, “As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and complete narcissist moron.”
Richard Kimball
Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org
or
Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016
Comments closed
Beating both CNN and FOX NEWS, Kimball projects that Harris has won the 2024 Presidential race.
“With an impressive ground game to get out the vote, Harris overcame her ‘just another standard politician’ history, sweeping in gains in both the House and the Senate,” said Kimball.
A remarkably, premature projection, from a gifted researcher that has not accurately forecasted any Presidential race since his hero Jimmy Carter’s a half-century ago.
“I ‘am due, I ‘am due, this time I ‘am due,” insisted Kimball. “It cannot be that so many won’t fight for the righteous Grand Old Party by expunging this pretentious conservative pustule.”
Richard Kimball
Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org
or
Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016
Comments closedToday, no one is a greater danger to Americans than Americans.
American’s worry each other, don’t trust each other, blame each other, condemn each other because there is no common ground for truth.
We are fully capable and with immense ease able to turn this around. “Everyone has a right to their own opinion but not their own facts,” an old, dead boss of mine once said. All it takes is a place for facts, one untainted source, one unopinionated source simply a factual accounting of what was, or precisely what Vote Smart once attempted.
Great changes, important movements that change civic culture and destiny almost always take place when people are in pain, either physical or fiscal pain. They do not happen when people are clothed, housed and fed or at least not until now, when the people’s slightest misgivings are kneaded into anger amongst their greatest good fortunes.
Long ago when I was a State Senator, I opened a letter, and a .44 caliber slug dropped out. Without a note, return address, or any sense of what I was condemned for, it seemed such a silly threat I saw no need to report it.
Today, fear sells. Fear-peddling politicians, Hollywood producers, the media, all get paid if we pay attention. And nothing gets our attention like screaming FIRE in the theater of anywhere.
Vote Smart’s worries were consumed with what was happening to us from within, most acutely by the changing character of the politicians trashing truth we had to select from. It has been an inferior crop of candidates, less distinguished, less principled, less devoted to the nation than to themselves.
Every generation of Americans has had some battle to sustain freedom.
Know it is this slowly chewing cancer dinning on truth and reality, where every fact is twisted and tortured for selfish gain that is our generation’s challenge. It was why we were building Vote Smart.
All politicians today, rant about our horrible world, and how much worse it’s going to be if their opponent wins. All while we wallow in lives that would be the envy of our grandparents and every generation of beings going back through all millennia.
How is it that we can be so whiny, holding this year’s long party of grievance. A party that has harvested most of the fruit grown by past American generations along with the buds that would have belonged to future generations. What the Hell, if we are going to do it, don’t we have some moral obligation to enjoy and party instead of complain?
Or, OR, we could do a simple thing, create a trusted source of just facts, facts without interpretation, in the dream that most, both conservative and liberal, will again find footing in truth and extend this glorious “experiment” that has brought so much advance to the world.
Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder 1988
Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org
Comments closed
Some weeks ago, following Waltz’s performance at the Democratic Convention I unfortunately wrote this:
“It is that precious thing, the real thing, that I finally saw tonight in politics when Tim Walz spoke. There is no mistaking the real thing. If you see it, you know it. It is a thing no human can counterfeit. So thrilled with finally seeing it in my life it dampened my eyes just as it did with his teary-eyed son. Something else you just can’t counterfeit.”
Then as so often, disappointment and embarrassment set in. My endless need to find purity in someone, anyone in politics found my shoulders adjusted and now slung low:
WALTZ: “As the events were unfolding, several of us went in (to Tiananmen).”
WALTZ: “Donald Trump’s asking for a nationwide abortion ban.”
WALTZ: “When (Trump) left office, we had more people unemployed, percentage-wise, than the Great Depression.”
Waltz did not “misspeak,” he was not taken out of context or confused. He had simply been swallowed by the whale that has become the accepted, even required deportment in the politics of our day.
Kimball, Vote Smart Founder
Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org
or
Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016
Comments closed
OK! I have given myself something to do with this writing about my life. It has entertained me most, but also been a kind of therapy that works about as well as the “lobotomy pills” I now take each day.
I have enjoyed my life. It’s adventures always exciting to me, at least in hindsight. I haven’t written about my two stepsons because they think so little of me, much the same as that wonderful love of my life has recently revealed about her feelings.
But those things as disappointing as they would be, should I write about them, would simply give evidence and I guess rightful cause to all about their ending of my life’s passion, Vote Smart.
I began seeking applicants to replace me but the difference between the salary our board approved for me so long ago, that I never took and my insistence that we were all essentially volunteers caused many candidates with substantial fundraising experience to turn away. So, I recused myself from any involvement in the Executive Board’s selection of my replacement. Then my full-blown liberal, giving, trusting, dreamy La La Land I wanted for everyone and Vote Smart came into full bloom. I decided to announce I would drop off the Board for one year to help build confidence in whomever replaced me. After all, I would be remaining on staff for that year to train and advise.
I then let the board know I would not withdraw the $1.7 million owed me in back wages but instead donate it to Vote Smart. I only requested $30,000 annually for my retirement, that could be easily paid from returns on a small endowment a foundation had created, decades earlier that could not be used for operations thus holding Vote Smart’s funds and my contribution unaffected. They all said that my proposal was much too generous, but agreed since that was the only way I would take it.
Then one of our Board members who was leaving his academic position suddenly announced that he was interested in taking over for me. He was a good guy, someone I had selected earlier to serve on the Board, someone who had done good work for me in one of our research departments two decades earlier before entering academia. I was excited about the possibility and strongly supported it.
But then, over some days it became known that he had no intention of moving to Vote Smart’s offices but instead would operate it from his home in Pennsylvania. He also wanted twice the actual salary that I had been taking.
I was certain that the Board would not accept either condition. It had taken me 30 years of living at Vote Smart’s offices, leading staff, implementing programs, guiding, course correcting, hiring and settling and raising some $50 million to learn all that I knew. Turning Vote Smart over to someone managing from afar would be like hiring a brain surgeon to operate on cancer without ever taking the trouble to attend medical school. His fellow Board members, knowing him, liking him, as I had hired him anyway.
I remained hopeful, but knew that such distancing and that salary increase for a single administrative position would place administrative costs at well over a fourth of Vote Smart’s entire budget. Without some plan to make those cost up could be lethal to major givers, while also killing one of Vote Smart’s key legs (no one is here for the money).
To alleviate the issue, that liberal, trusting, goodie two shoes of my nature chose not to complain but simply go off salary for my last year and donate my time instead.
THE LOCK OUT
The day my staff position changed to teacher/advisor I was gone in every way my replacement and Board could make me gone.
I was kept from participating in every important decision. At first, I was just fuddled, but soon panicked. New budgets were being created with plans to spend but not to raise. The fundraising plan so successfully tested was retired in exchange for one created on a whim that I knew was certain to fail and they would have zero experience to tell them why.
I wrote long emails to the Board, reminding them of how we had accomplished what we had, particularly with fundraising in step-by-step, how to’s, in hopes of getting through. Not my replacement or any board member would respond, nor a thanks for my having donated my final year’s salary.
I never had the chance to introduce my replacement to some members of the full Board (who weren’t members of the Executive Committee), a few of which contacted me with concerns about decisions the Executive Committee was making which they were no longer party to, causing some, since I was gone to simply drop away.
With the new leader’s decisions to ignore the past, I was certain that what I and my wife had created would simply bleed out the money I left them and die. So, I did what I do. I EXPLODED!
My anger was blistering, particularly against the Alpha on the Executive Committee, a Viet Nam war pilot and longtime personal friend who I called a coward for his unwillingness to respond to any of my concerns.
Over the days ahead they cut me off from any contacts with staff, all current financial information, and they refused to approve the tiny retirement package I requested, deciding to keep all the money for themselves. I threatened to sue–my legal counsel was sure it would force them to accept my modest terms of retirement, but I had no stomach for suing what I had created. In the end they offered me a pittance if I signed this:
You will not at any time discuss or disclose … the substance and/or nature of any dispute between Vote Smart and any employee or former employee, including you.
You will not at any time directly or indirectly make, or induce any other person to make, derogatory or disparaging statements (whether or not you believe the statements to be true) of any kind, in any manner or by any method – whether oral, written, electronic (including but not limited to social media), or otherwise.
They all knew me, I had selected each to serve on the board, I would never sign away my rights in return for money, no matter how deserved.
In the year that followed, I would get zero information. When the year I agreed to stay off the Board to support my replacement was up, the Board refused to let me back on the organization I had created. After two years of pleading with them to let me know their condition and their refusal to give me any information the organization I birthed and loved, and had continued to support, lost my support, which I informed each Board member in a personal message.
The only response from the Board was from the Alpha who wished me well with one word: “Hooray!”
So, it ended. The organization I bet a life on withered, I never existed and was a nobody after all.
THE END
Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder 1988
Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org
Comments closed
The headlines tomorrow will NOT use the words intelligent, thoughtful or useful.
Political slapstick has NOTHING to do with leadership. The debate may generate great interest as its promotion has saturated the news coverage day after day after day, but you will only get a picture of what each candidate’s directors, producers, editors and even costume designers have labored over many weeks.
If you want the best vessel to deliver a product, whether it be Cambell’s soup, Kellogg’s cereal or a President, this is the show for you.
I may just watch some Abbott and Costello!
Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder
Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org
or
Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016
Comments closedAs American lives experience the best in all human time and citizens find time to turn and eat themselves, I find time for the little stories that speak to our basic natures.
This week I ran into these morsels:
Bags of poop are being ballooned from North Korea into South Korea, triggering air raid warnings to our troops.
Murdoch The Magnificent, the most rewarded sculpturist of fecal messaging, finally purchases his master peace of love with a fifth “Hail Mary” buy.
Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder
Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org
or
Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016
Comments closed
Two hundred sixty-nine thousand five hundred and twenty hours had passed since that first hour in my palapa in Yelapa overlooking the Sea of Cortez. I had been grilling fresh grouper and swilling down some cheap tequila I had sweetened with limes plucked from a bow hanging over my porch when the IDEA came to me. The thought that had me stuffing my backpack early the next morning, hopping a rickety old train and bouncing back home to an existence I hoped would finally make my life worth the living of it.
The IDEA rooted and passed through Oregon State University, Northeastern University, University of Texas, University of Arizona, University of Southern California, and finally anchored in those last 18 years at The Great Divide Ranch Research Retreat in Montana.
Losing the Ranch ended me on the spot, but I hoped not the Idea. Was I dispirited? You bet! But an “itsy bitsy, teenie weenie” bit of me was relieved.
I was no hotel developer, restaurant manager. I was no wrangler, no recreation park planner and certainly not a house mother to a few thousand young students and first jobbers that flowed through the gates of our remote research ranch. All those things I would never have to be again. What had consumed my time and responsibilities would end. What was left was the IDEA, one pristine, unopinionated, protected source of facts any voter could turn to with absolute confidence – Vote Smart.
The IDEA protected in concrete: No funds from corporations, unions or any organization that supported or opposed political candidates. All political board members had to join with a political enemy. No pay for most staff and those that were paid had to sign on for two years at minimum subsistence wages, with all the organization’s finances instantly open to anyone that cared. All to assure voters that anyone and everyone working on the idea had no political agenda and the effort they worked on had nothing to hide.
A sign I had hung on every office entrance.
The IDEA was something those few still surviving from the “Greatest Generation” were as certain of as I and the reason they became Vote Smart’s greatest supporters.
It was 2017, with the “Greatest Generation” vanishing and as Vote Smart moved and struggled to grow financially, a source of Sludge so noxious with deceit it would asphyxiate the nation with its stench, burst out of its adolescent silly-putty attracting absorbent, infantile, manipulable minds with no knowledge of what had been fought for since 1776.
Some loathsome media and officials seeking selfish advantage waded into the sewage attacking America in its best of times. They jumped into the fact-less slime encrusting every city, town, and hamlet, intoxicating the very worst in human nature.
The Sludge, earlier a Democrat, backer of Democrats, abortion supporter and gun control advocate, would become a gigantic record-setting deficit spender, the very antithesis of every conservative ever known.
It was as if he jumped into a phone booth, flashed out in a different suit and said: “There go the oblivious. I will lead them!”
Simplistic, crude and vindictive, it was leadership most foul, but leadership none-the-less. Politicians had so lowered the bar on integrity, they never saw it coming – someone who could see where the bar was going and simply dumped it into the dirt.
For me, this might be the chance for the return of civics education on an all-inclusive national scale.
We opened our new office at Drake University in Des Moines with as much fanfare as a small liberal arts school could muster, and I plastered its façade with quotes from those responsible for our being.
Most importantly, after three decades of effort, trying to do and be everything, living in or at the offices, I turned over the day-to-day staff management to Walker McKusick, who had been with us for some years and was one of the most amiable, capable managers of people you could ever know.
For me, well, I would become obsessed with the vulgar, narcissistic, shameless sham leading millions of my countrymen, neighbors, even members of my own family. My disappointment with the Ranch, my desire to step back toward retirement would have to wait until I could re-root Vote Smart in granite for the coming fight to save democracy—or in Vote Smart’s vernacular, The Facts. The honorable world of compromise, negotiating disagreements, conservative vs. liberal or otherwise, was dead. Now it was simply truth vs. lies, fact vs. fable.
Like the last flicker of a light bulb that burns at its brightest, I would strain to deliver only to become a nobody after all.
(New chapters will be added roughly once a week)
Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder 1988
Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org
Comments closed
WE GOTTA GO
On one of my many winter trips East I stopped in Chicago to meet with some supportive foundations, members, and do a few media interviews. The local weather report said the temperature would quickly dip below zero that night. Being an Arizona desert boy, I looked forward to feeling what that was like, and did a few hours after returning to my hotel. The desk clerk kindly called me to say, “Mr. Kimball it is now one degree below.” I bundled up in my Target turtleneck tee and zipped up my polyester fleece to walk around the block.
The wind was fierce and as I turned the corner, back to my hotel, I was on the run: I could no longer feel my face.
That experience came to mind one winter evening in Montana, when I heard that the students, many from the Sunbelt, had just left the Ranch to drive the 26 miles to a party in town for a departing staff member. The forecast: blizzard, heavy winds, snow and 16 degrees below zero.
Snow had been accumulating for a couple of hours by the time I caught up with them about ten miles out, with the lead car impossibly submerged in a drift. With temperatures plummeting and darkness falling I told them they had to turn around to the safety of the Ranch before the road back became snow blocked.
The vote was unanimous. NO! They wanted to party! Then the ex-con I had hired as a maintenance man insisting, he was a real Montanan, and this weather was nothing to worry about, began kneading one student into a slog through the drifting deepening snow by foot to see if he could find some help along the 16 remote miles still to go to town. I jerked around and ordered the student to go back to his car and the idiot ex-con to his truck. Neither would. I had a full-blown revolt on my hands and the kid nagged on by the idiot to go on a blizzard hike began high stepping it through two-foot drifts, on a road you could no longer see where it was or wasn’t, any more than the car driver who submerged his vehicle in front of everyone.
Screaming at him, I begged the kid to stop, but emboldened by his party loving friends snuggled in their cars stomped off into the blizzard. Thankfully, maybe 100 yards into his trek, with visions of snowplows dancing in his head, nature called to him: “You’re going to freeze and die.”
The kid returned, embarrassed and angry, he too, snuggled into a warm car with a gas gage just above empty, while the rest of the partiers waited for some magician’s way forward. I kept demanding car to car that they turn around back to the Ranch and safety. No one moved, so I waited and prayed reality would sink in, which eventually did.
When I pulled into our parking lot at the end of that long line of cars it was clear, I was no savior, I was the villain that killed the party. I was relieved anyway, or at least until the soon-to-be-gone Montana ex-con insisted he was taking an intern back out on our snow mobiles to tug the snow-smothered car out. I simply told him that if he wanted to go die, that was mighty fine with me, but if he took a student with him on one of my snowmobiles, I’d have him back in prison as soon as the sheriff could pick him up.
It took most of the next day for the State Highway Department’s plows to clear the state route, then the business routes, rural school roads, and finally way out to us.
A dark thought came to me as I finally got to bed that horrid night: How big a news story would it have been had a few dozen students been found frozen to death. It would have been big, REALLY BIG and everyone in the country would have heard about it and finally discovered Vote Smart. OK, OK, as I said it was a dark thought.
I would never recover. Things quickly degenerated into what Dr. Brent Steel, our wisest, most experienced board member, called an “isolated culture.” The students and some staff members, never having seen any of our Board Members, decided they didn’t exist and wanted to take over Vote Smart.
One member of the board wanted me to simply fire them all and start with a new crew. But it was only a few young party loving pups with Alpha personalities, I had to let go.
I was done. The effect of all this was that I was spent, and what had been a wonderful, beautiful dream over three decades was done.
The Grail was as far away as ever.
GONE
A dozen universities competed to be Vote Smart’s new home. And when the president of one came for a visit and tour, I chose. We would sell the Great Divide Ranch where we had been building and operating for 18 years, and a dozen before that had to move to a small liberal arts school in Iowa, Drake University.
I started to think of retirement, but then the greatest educator in a century burst onto the scene.
(New chapters will be added roughly once a week)
Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder 1988
Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org
Comments closed
For 18 years I would get up long before the sun, walk out the back door, pick up an armful of small logs, kick open the crude board door to a tiny ramshackle 1920s trapper’s cabin, toss the wood into a rusty old cook stove, fire it up and hoped it would be above freezing by the time I returned with a cup of coffee.
The Duck Inn, my office, was so miserable, member guests likened me to some early Christian involved in self-mortification. Not so. I loved it, enjoyed it in my warm fleece, with a cup warmer and the little space heater between my legs as I began early morning calls to those just getting up and out on the East Coast.
The most delightful moments were rare evenings sitting on the porch with Adelaide, when we weren’t entertaining any of the 7,200 newcomers or guests who slept and ate in our home over those 18 years. We just sat and watched all the young people heading out after another days agonizing, monotonous defense of the facts to play basketball, tennis, ride horses, go boating, fish or hike through that extraordinary property with its gazebo, teepee, tree house, rope bridge, and endless beaver ponds – maybe on their way to the old homestead or grave yard beyond, where we had put a dozen pets, including Hopsalot, a favorite bunny done in by a fox, and Teddy, everyone’s favorite horse who was done in by lightning and then eaten by a bear.
From that porch we witnessed a great many sights one does not normally see:
The huge bull moose with a deep, blackened scare where some heroic hunter did his best on this dossal King of the forest. He would often frequent the lake between our buildings foraging for his dinner on the bottom aquatics.
Once, after joining my after-work flyfishing lessons, a half dozen interns were trying their luck when the King arrived and waded in for his supper. Not getting any trout strikes, the students blamed the moose for disturbing the waters. They got in a rowboat to chase the master away. Not a half dozen strokes out the King looked up from his meal to find a curious sight: a boat coming toward him stern first (never having rowed before, they had gotten in the boat backwards). The King turned his enormous rack toward them and began swimming as if to greet the newcomers. The effect was instantaneous. Hunters no more, with Olympic effort they made it back to shore just as the King got bored and finished up his purely vegan meal.
“A bear, it’s a bear!” some student called out. Bears were infrequent visitors because we kept our leftovers secured, but when they did come, we had Fish and Game come out, trap them, and take them elsewhere. But on this evening’s occasion, a particularly cuddly-looking one relaxed on the lodge lawn as dozens of interns ran for their cameras. Seeing them rushing back towards him from various directions, the bear panicked and scampered high up into a Douglas Fir.
The students quickly and completely encircled the tree, cameras clicking. It was then that I thought I should get involved. So, I leaned forward in my porch chair and called out the most effective line I ever uttered: “It’s OK, just make damn sure you are not the closest one when that terrified animal busts out for freedom.”
Over the first ten years at the Ranch, we continued to slowly grow. But just at the point I began construction of a large addition to our office, to house more staff and students who would begin efforts on local county and city elections, our membership numbers took a dip.
Our biggest supporters, the “Greatest Generation,” was dying out. And the younger generations, so stripped of civics education in our schools, that less than a third knew of their right to choose a religion, express themselves, or assemble. Protections they were unaware that the “Greatest Generation” and every generation before them had fought and died to make certain they would have. These younger generations were becoming vulnerable. Exposed to manipulation and an AI future that without VoteSmart.org or something very much like it, would first confound, and eventually bring everyone to heel.
I did not see any of this until everyone went out in a blizzard to party.
(New chapters will be added roughly once a week)
Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder 1988
Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org
Comments closed
When last did any of us have an intelligent thoughtful conversation on a political issue?
I once lived on politics. At parties, dinners, or gatherings of any sort I so enjoyed the give and take of anyone foaming forth with political opinion. I enjoyed it most when secretly agreeing, I would take an opposing view and put the greatest value when my view of things had been changed. Nothing engages more than that moment in an argument when you realize you are wrong.
My wife referred to it as my “party games.”
It is such no more. Most have simply become what they choose to listen to and what they listen to is what they want to hear.
Political discussion has devolved into angry, simplistic argument, regurgitating this self-serving media source or that. Who speaks loudest, most fervently often feels victorious but only hardens what might be a less demagogic, respectful opposition. Views are never changed.
You can look back over the past decades and witness how thoughtful conversation evaporated into slogans, or in today’s vernacular “narratives” successfully punching their way into the public mind, like easy to grasp, quickly satisfying Big Macks.
Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder
Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org
or
Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016
Comments closed