Archive for November, 2008
BILL MOYERS: We were abroad these past two weeks trying to cleanse our journalistic pipes, so to speak. We thought we could put American politics out of sight and out of mind for a spell. We were wrong.
Everywhere we went people wanted to talk about America. The Greeks, Sicilians, Sardinians, Tunisians, Algerians, and Spaniards we met, were euphoric – cab drivers, guides, waiters, hotel clerks, bank tellers. They expect miracles from America. Their own economies are imploding: layoffs, budget shortfalls, failing banks, fear spreading among the populace. They want to believe that somehow the long arm of America will pull them back. I tried but I didn’t have the heart to tell them just how much trouble their rich Uncle Sam is in.
Maybe I was wrong not to dispel their illusions about America; after all, they live on top of the ruins of long-gone empires, whose rise and fall is a far more familiar and consistent theme of history than democracy’s success. I did my best, to say that America is trying very hard right now to put our own house in order.
That self-correcting faculty, even in the darkest hours, is the best thing we have going for us. That and the knowledge that nothing we face in the months ahead is more than was asked of our parents and grand parents in war and depression.
This giant of a country is bleeding badly from savage self inflicted wounds, but what happens next is still our story to write. We can be thankful for that.
November 30th, 2008
A Black Friday tragedy that should have each and every one of us thinking really hard about ourselves.
The throng of Wal-Mart shoppers had been building all night, filling sidewalks and stretching across a vast parking lot…
Suddenly, witnesses and the police said, the doors shattered, and the shrieking mob surged through in a blind rush for holiday bargains. One worker, Jdimytai Damour, 34, was thrown back onto the black linoleum tiles and trampled in the stampede that streamed over and around him… Emergency workers tried to revive Mr. Damour, a temporary worker hired for the holiday season, at the scene, but he was pronounced dead an hour later…
“When they were saying they had to leave, that an employee got killed, people were yelling, ‘I’ve been on line since yesterday morning,’ ” Ms. Cribbs told The Associated Press. “They kept shopping.”
November 29th, 2008
“It’s important as I said on election night that we enter into the new administration with a sense of humility and a recognition wisdom is not the monopoly of any one party. In order for us to be effective given the scope and the scale of the challenges that we face, Republicans and Democrats are going to have to work together. I think what the American people want more than anything is just common sense smart government. They don’t want ideology, they don’t want bickering, they don’t want sniping. They want action and they want effectiveness.”
– President-elect Barack Obama in a news conference this week on the economy
November 28th, 2008
If Abraham Lincoln could find cause for thanks as the nation split in two, surely we too can find cause now. From his 1863 Proclamation of Thanksgiving (on October 3):
In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict…
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November 28th, 2008
Thomas Friedman, from yesterday’s New York Times:
“So many people were in on it: People who had no business buying a home, with nothing down and nothing to pay for two years; people who had no business pushing such mortgages, but made fortunes doing so; people who had no business bundling those loans into securities and selling them to third parties, as if they were AAA bonds, but made fortunes doing so; people who had no business rating those loans as AAA, but made a fortunes doing so; and people who had no business buying those bonds and putting them on their balance sheets so they could earn a little better yield, but made fortunes doing so.”
November 26th, 2008
Neither of my kids spent much time on the seesaw at the park in their younger days. If I had to guess why, it would be that it was a little too much work for a day at the park. It was rare when they got a seesaw partner who didn’t require serious weight and momentum adjustment—sliding forward or backward, pushing hard at the bottom to get your end back up in the air, or, as was more often the case with my slender little girls, perched suspended three feet up, pretty much unable to control a thing.
As my sixteen-year-old has grown into a young woman, she’s been exposed to many a political dinner table conversation from the perspective of my side of the political seesaw. But as much as she’s heard me yammer, I’ve only now just noticed that she’s suspended in mid air with her feet dangling, no where near solid ground. I’m afraid I’ve been responsible for providing her only half the argument in a country that requires citizens to understand the whole one.
Trying to give her a shove back down to terra firma, I’ve had a series of conversations with her about—ultimately—what I deeply believe. There’s been a bit of personal political archeology involved here, as, in the daily shuffle, there are times when I’m too immersed in the veneer to reach for the foundation. Here’s where I found my foundation: What lasts, what matters from all of our daily political struggles is what keeps America who we are. What matters is the two-party system that creates a tension of opposites, the left keeping the right from marching into fascism, the right keeping the left from slipping into communism. What lasts is the best ideas that rise to the top, the product of our endless, sometimes painfully difficult dialog. Were it not for the tension, the struggle, we wouldn’t be America.
When power concentrates on one side of this non-stop American seesaw, it’s time for the grown-ups to give it a firm shove on one side. I sense the American public is ready to give a firm parental shove right about now too. But there is risk in this weight adjustment when we’ve been so used to pushing hard and having nothing happen… we risk that we’ll send the other guy miles into the air. Okay, so I’ll admit it, right now that may not seem so bad, but pause for a moment to consider what happens after the other guy’s fanny lands back on the seesaw. I never took physics but I’m fairly sure that all that energy has to go someplace and it may not be pretty when it does.
So, here’s to keeping the big picture in mind as each “side” shoves to get more momentum… hoping there are enough grownups to keep the traffic on the seesaw well-behaved.
**This post represents the genesis of the thinking that would ultimately become The Village Square. I first wrote “The Seesaw” in March of 2006, when the Democrats had no political power. Now they control both Congress and the presidency.
The seesaw works both ways, folks.
November 25th, 2008
From one of The Village Square’s “Faith Politics & Neighbors” reading list books, The Battle for God, Karen Armstrong writes:
“This will be a constant theme in our story. Fundamentalism exists in a symbiotic relationship with an aggressive liberalism or secularism, and, under atttack, invariably becomes more extreme, bitter, and excessive.”
Makes me think of PHYSICS and my late-great “Seesaw”… coming in the next blog post. Know you can’t wait.
November 24th, 2008
From my distinctly unscientific assessment of the conversations about the automobile bailout, I believe there seems to be a loose consensus emerging around the idea that these companies have not been well-managed. Perhaps there’s also agreement that they shouldn’t have flown private planes to D.C., if only for the “well, duh” factor. Lastly, I think most of us want an auto industry in the U.S.
Were I the CEO of GM, I’d cut my pay to $1.00 next year to demonstrate my commitment to the company, to America, and as a show of good faith. Then I’d ask my employees what they’re willing to do. I suspect that might begin a race to the top, to our higher angels, rather than the standard race to the gimme-what-I-can-get bottom.
This sounds like just the time to re-run “There’s Baby, Then There’s Bathwater.”
November 23rd, 2008
An interesting conversation last night between liberal talk show host Rachel Maddow and conservative former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee relevant to our upcoming January 13 “Faith in the Public Square” Dinner at the Square (they were discussing GOP loyalists currently suggesting that the party needed to move away from the religious right):
MADDOW: Governor I don’t think the argument is that people who are religious shouldn’t be part of the party or shouldn’t even be activists. I think the reaction is in part some of what you’ve articulated about how to explain your values. You got a lot of heat and a lot of controversy for saying that you hope the Constitution could be altered to be more like the Word of God and that the Constitution was more easily alterable than the Word of God and so that’s the one we should want to change. Making an overtly religious argument for how the country should be governed is I think what some of the reaction is against. Not that you shouldn’t have your heartfelt religious beliefs but that you want to make the country more like your theological vision.
HUCKABEE: Well I don’t have any intention that we would force people to pray, or force them to go to church or tithe their income. That’s not a government function. What I do think people want is to know that there is a connection between the economy of our nation and the morality of our nation. Let me give you an example. Why is Wall Street melting down? Is it just because we have some bad decisions? It’s because greed and avarice and unbridled intention to profit at the top without any regard to how it’s going to affect workers at the bottom has driven the market. We really don’t have a market that’s based on investing in products and services. We have people investing in what the products and services may be worth. In other words, they’re really just gambling. Wall Street has become Las Vegas East. But the difference is when you lose in Las Vegas you pay your own debt or you get your own legs broken. On Wall Street you don’t pay your debt, you just ask the taxpayers to stand in line and bail you out with a big ole tax burden that’s gonna be passed onto your grandkids. I think this is what makes Americans crazy. It has nothing to do with faith, but people of faith ought to still be responsible and they ought to show that they have issues that they care about but they ought to deal with them in a way that doesn’t threaten people and make them feel they’re going to have to join somebody’s church in order to be affected by the positive outcomes.
MADDOW: See I think where we end up on common ground if we both agree that nobody should be that greedy but that government ought to stop people who are that greedy from getting their way.
You might want to look at this post in assessing their points.
November 21st, 2008
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