i am going to vote after i finish typing this. i am going to vote with
a heavy heart.
my mother is in ICU after a stroke on thursday. she most likely will
not live to see the results of today’s election in florida. yet, i am
making time to leave her side and vote. because it matters. to me and
to her. she would want all of her family to be at her bedside with
those little stickers “i voted”. i remember going with her to vote
when i was still a child and being so excited to be a part of the
process with her.
as of yesterday, i really didn’t know who i was voting for, i had
looked at each angle, evaluated each person the best way that i could,
but there wasn’t one that stuck out to me as “THIS IS IT” until today
(despite the THOUSANDS of phone calls in the past three days, really
people STOP CALLING ME, i am not listening to your recorded phone
spiel).
i am voting for the man most like my father. the man who i think would
stand by his wife’s side and hold her hand while she lay in that
hospital bed. a man who wouldn’t want to cry in front of his children,
but does sometimes. a man who has worked every day of his life to make
this world better for his children and others around him. a business
man who never put making a living ahead of making a life. i hope the
man i vote for is half the man that my father is. this country would
be better off if he was and if he wins the election.
my mother is an excellent american, she is a strong southern gal with
half my size and twice my spirit. she leaves this country of great
freedom for a place that is better. she leaves us for the One Who
truly made her Free. voting to me today is a matter of life and
death… today i tend to the dying and i care for the living. and i
vote because that is part of caring for the living.
For the purpose of argument, I’m going to say that the democratic process, at some level, is about who gets candy and who gets cod liver oil. When one group gets their way, they’ve almost never asked for fish oil.
Although it may elude children, adults know in the long run who the winner will be on the health front, and it’s not the recipient of the candy.
While you won’t actually see “candy and cod liver oil” on the ballot, I’ve learned through three conversations on property taxes sponsored by The Village Square this year, that’s partly what Florida’s January 29th vote will be about.
We invited politically diverse speakers who are knowledgeable on the property tax issue to educate us. Then rather than arguing, we listened.
While there was substantial disagreement on just how many teaspoons of cod liver oil (in the form of budget cuts) government should take, there was wide agreement on some fundamentals.
It seems that Florida is having a bit of a chow down lately courtesy of “Save Our Homes” and we’re starting to pay the price.
Before “Save Our Homes” passed in 1992, capping the property tax increase for homesteaded property owners at 3%, we all paid our fair share. After “Save Our Homes” we have kept taxes low for the majority on the backs of the minority. Blessed with the sunshine people want, Florida has until recently been able to make ends meet because new residents, first-time homebuyers, snowbirds, renters and those wanting to do business in this great state remained willing to foot the bills.
But now these people are carrying pitchforks over the taxes they are paying; there just aren’t enough of them numerically to prevail at the ballot box. Sooner or later though, and it may be sooner in the form of decreased tourism and a slowed real estate market, these villagers are going to poke us with their pitchforks.
As if that weren’t enough, “Save Our Homes” has had another unintended consequence.
When local governments make spending decisions, it is fundamental to representative democracy that they have to run the gauntlet with citizens to raise taxes. But because the burden of increases has been borne by the minority, most of us never felt it in our pocketbooks so we never showed up at “city hall”. Spending, as a result, tended to creep up.
Like most legislative results of the democratic process, Amendment 1 imperfectly attempts to tackle the problem. Non-homesteaded property owners will have a 10% cap on tax increases, businesses get tangible personal property exemptions, and the 3% annual homestead tax increase cap will be portable to a new home (if it passes constitutional muster). Making the amendment attractive to more voters is a doubling of the homestead exemption (less the percentage dedicated to schools).
Many feel what will ultimately be required to restore tax fairness to Florida, along with cuts in spending, is to either abandon the wildly popular “Save Our Homes” or make it more equitable. But with Amendment 1 giving most of us our dessert now – in the form of portability and doubling the homestead exemption – it might become impossible for 60% of Floridians to vote to take the prescribed medicine later.
One of the forum’s speakers, Florida TaxWatch President and CEO Dominic Calabro evoked Walt Kelly’s long-running comic strip Pogo: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
There has been a time or two in history (think Rome) when the people’s demand for “candy” has gotten the better of them and the whole civilization came crashing down. I, for one, think this particular democracy is capable of better.
You know, now they make cod liver oil in pills that don’t give you fish-burp.
Did you know that while there are regulations on the veracity of advertising regarding the cereal you eat or the juice you drink, there is absolutely nothing regulating truth in political advertising?
Brooks Jackson, from the organization Facts.org offers us a bottom line: “If all you know about candidates in an election is what you see in their ads, you are going to cast a very poorly informed vote.”
The first amendment gives the press in this country and that includes broadcast outlet terrific freedom which is used to make a lot of money. But it’s there because the voters need information to base a sound decision on. And I think In too many cases broadcasters and cable outlets are making huge amounts of money from running these political ads which in many cases are false and misleading and they’re putting very little of that money back into some reporting that would inform their viewers about when they’re being scammed…
…If you think commercial advertising is misleading, you’ve got to realize it’s the wild wild west when it comes to political advertising.
So as campaign 2008 ramps up, remember “let the buyer beware.”
I just caught this rerun of ABC’s “Brothers and Sisters,” a drama about a diverse family politically. Kitty (Calista Flockheart), the conservative daughter of a liberal mom (Sally Fields), is about to marry a Republican candidate for president (Rob Lowe) and the campaign is heading into Iowa.
Liz’s blog was the like adding dessert to some reading I had been
doing over the long weekend. If only it had actually come WITH a
dessert, perhaps something chocolate… oh, i digress already.
I have been reading the book Good to Great by Jim Collins about why
some companies become great and others don’t seem to make that leap.
And I found so many useful life lessons in this book and so many
applications to who might or might not be a good president that it
almost makes my head spin.
Collins makes the point that the great companies all had CEO with this
one thing in common… they were humble & willful, modest & fearless.
He compares them to President Lincoln, personal humility & willful
strength to get it done. Now if only I could find a candidate with
that fabulous combination of seemingly opposite characteristics. But
it does make me evaluate candidates with a different set of criteria.
Do I see them as an either OR personality, or do they posses that
elusive & within their soul…
Another great story he tells is of Admiral Jim Stockdale, who was
imprisoned for 8 years in the “Hanoi Hilton” prison of war camp.
Stockdale managed to survive because he believed 2 seemingly
contradictory things at the same time (again with the contradictory
&). He retained faith that he would prevail in the end, regardless of
the difficulties & he confronted the most brutal facts of his current
reality, whatever they were.
Businesses that do this become great. They know what is wrong and see
clearly what they need to correct & they know that they can overcome
it and become great at some undetermined point in the future. I think
countries and political parties and ordinary people can use this
“Stockdale paradox” to motivate them to make the necessary changes to
become great.
The power of &…
So many times we think things are __________ OR __________, when in
reality we need the &. We don’t need a country that is Republican OR
Democrat, we need both Republican & Democrat to make a great county.
I mean Liz is great on her own, but put Liz & Lea together blogging
and all I can say is WOW.
Diet & exercise, good & plenty, peanut butter & jelly, freedom &
responsibility, give & take, tastes great & less filling, saving &
spending wisely, helping others & taking some time for yourself, cream
& sugar. So many things are better with the & in the middle instead of
the OR.
We need to stop focusing so much on the OR these days and embrace the
& whenever we can. We have a good country, but let’s be totally
honest, it has flaws. And there are some big ones that need hard work
and someone tough enough to take on that job.
Let’s take an honest look at our challenges without the blame game
(which takes a lot of humility) and see what lies before us & let’s
unwaveringly believe that we can do it, that we will prevail, that we
will take our lives and the lives of other Americans into the
GREATness that is in our future.
OK, got to go off to the gym to face the brutal facts & the harness
the power of hope for a smaller jean size tomorrow. Now that is the
power of the & at work….
This week brought us a typical brain-dead political discussion about who did what in the civil rights movement. King! Johnson! King! Johnson!
Politics played to our lizard brains, replayed endlessly in incomplete soundbites on the 24-hour cable news do-loop station of your choice, repeatedly asks us to pick “either/or”.
As this day ends, the day we set aside to honor Dr. King, if I don’t miss my bet, he would have been all about sharing credit with President Johnson… possibly with one or two others…
Here’s to what real leadership is all about.
Moyers on the signing of the 1965 Civil Right Act:
Martin Luther King had marched and preached and witnessed for this day. Countless ordinary people had put their bodies on the line for it; been berated, bullied and beaten, only to rise and organize and struggle on against the dogs, the guns, the bias and burning crosses. Take nothing from them. Their courage is their legacy.
But take nothing from the President who once had seen the light, but dimly, as through a dark glass and now did the right thing. Lyndon Johnson threw the full weight of his office on the side of justice.
Of course the movement had come first, watered by the blood of so many championed bravely now by the preacher-turned-prophet who would himself soon be martyred. But there is no inevitability to history. Someone has to seize and turn it. With these words, at the right moment - “We shall overcome” - Lyndon Johnson transcended race and color - and history too - reminding us that a president matters.
Oh my gosh, it is really here…. the primary in FLORIDA? ugh, I am
not good at voting and I finally figured out why. It has to do with my
test taking competencies (or my lack of those skills)…
You see, the election (the big one next november) is like a true false
test. You only pick one side out of two sides. TRUE or FALSE. I was
never good at true/false tests…. yes, there is that sense that you
have a 50% chance of getting it right, but I always lingered on some
questions like “is this really really true all of the time or only in
months that have a ‘R’ in them?” and “isn’t that just a tiny bit false
with some truth on the sides to decorate it?”
And the primaries are like a multiple choice test. and again… not my
strongest test taking skill area. “Umm, I like A but only if you mix
in a bit of B, take C totally out of the equation, and use D as your
back up in case of power failure” or “None of the above, but I will
pick a bit from each answer and make a brand new E”. And if I settled
on one answer, I always looked back over all the choices and thought
about how it might have really been one of those and what was I
missing out on. Yeah, you did not want to be sitting next to me during
the S.A.T. Saturday.
The election should be one long essay (bloggers must have been the
kids in school that LOVED essay tests). You can even give me a word
limit (and really, you should give me a word limit because without
it… I shudder to think…) I should get to write all the things I
want and all the things I don’t want in a president and then suddenly
that perfect person would appear and I could pencil in the little oval
thing next to his name. Now that would be some election reform.
Local governments and boards tend to be good at some things - fixing potholes, putting police officers on the streets, naming parks or schools for beloved village elders.
They tend to be less good at others, like, say, saving the world.
So it’s hard to make too much of the 60 or so people who turned out on a snowy, non-global-warming Thursday night for an event held by the Westport Green Energy Task Force. But it also might be a mistake to make too little.
It seems those folks in Westport are trying to do small, relatively painless things like replacing three light bulbs with compact fluorescents, dropping the thermostat a smidge, and turning off stuff they don’t use. Their goal is to reduce their calculated average 18 ton a year carbon footprint one ton a year for the next 3 years.
Said Kimberly Lake, vice chairwoman of the Westport task force “…trickle up isn’t enough. You need trickle down if you want to make massive changes.”
Sounds a little Village Square-ish up there in Westport.
Last spin through South Carolina for the Senator, pro-Bush groups conducted push-polls asking voters how they would feel if they knew McCain had fathered a black child out of wedlock. Truth? The Senator and his wife adopted an Indian ORPHAN from MOTHER THERESA’S ORPHANAGE, no less.
Then there is this smear against Mitt Romney a “mailer in heavily evangelical South Carolina, purporting to be a holiday card paid for by the Mormon Temple in Boston, wishing fond holiday wishes from the Romney family,” beginning with this sentence: “We have now clearly shown that God the father had a plurality of wives…” The FBI is investigating, though a lot of good it will do candidate Romney as a postscript months down the road.
“Help me sound the alarm that one day the Mormon Church plans to replace the Constitution with a Mormon theocracy. Mitt Romney’s political success indicates this may be sooner than most have thought…”
Then there is email, this breathless Obama as undercover radical Muslim screed that’s been arriving in in-boxes for months. One version even mentions that email fact-checker www.snopes.com had verified the story when it had, in fact, done the exact opposite.
And, now, a Village Square pop-quiz. Referencing our last post, do you suppose these tactics target our:
1. Human brain
2. Lizard brain
3. Our inner second-grader?
Hint: My apologies to second graders for impugning their intelligence.
Early on, when The Village Square was just a glimmer in our eyes, I learned a little something about human nature - and something about reptiles - from my priest Father Melvin Gray of St. John’s Episcopal Church.
It seems that, no matter how evolved we humans might be, there’s a bit of reptile in all of us.
That comes from neuroscientist Dr. Paul McLean’s Triune Brain Theory which posits, more or less, that our complex human brain capable of rational thought is built on the chassis of a lizard brain.
According to McLean, it is the instinctual and reactive part of our brains (the brain stem and cerebellum), simply capable of reacting, not of thought. The second level of our triune brain is the mammalian brain (the hypothalamus, hippocampus and amygdale) which is capable of caring, playfulness, communication, relationships. Think your cat and dog.
And then there is the cortex and neo-cortex, our human brain, which gives us the capability of problem-solving, philosophical thought, leadership, etc.
McLean’s theory views the connection of the human and reptile brains as similar to a driver training car with two sets of controls. Normally, it’s the human brain at the wheel, but when anxiety gets high, the lizard brain jumps on in, all the while the driver thinking their rational brain is still in control.
Lizard brains can be a good thing when used at the right time. Good reads like Blink by Malcolm Gladwell and The Gift of Fear by Gavin De Becker argue effectively why our snap reptilian judgments can be very accurate in certain circumstances, for instance in assessing danger.
Other times, our human brain should be up to bat, say, when we vote?
Stay tuned for “Of Lizards and Humans, Part Deux” where I’ll develop this idea a bit to ’splain where we find ourselves right about now.
