Category: Historical Commentary
A Grey November Afternoon

A Grey November Afternoon

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This piece is a short story that initially appeared on my fiction blog, Stoned Cherry. It is part of my Growing Up New Jersey collection. I am posting it now since today is the 60th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, with which the story opens. That was November 22, 1963. A day to remember.

The afternoon was grey in that penetrating, depressive sort of way that November afternoons in New Jersey can be, and if you’ve ever been in New Jersey on one of those November afternoons you know the kind of grey I’m talking about.

Well, that’s the kind of grey that November afternoon was, and we were let out of school early that particular Friday since that night was our school’s Military Ball, the big social event of the year. You got to understand that my high school wasn’t in New Jersey. It was in New York City on 15th Street and I commuted into the City every day, riding the PATH trains or the Erie-Lackawanna, which we called the Weary-Erie or the Weary-Lackatrains, wearing my uniform since it was a military school.

Anyway, we can talk about my high school later. The only important thing to know now was the afternoon was grey in that New Jersey November sort of way and I was home from school early. And I was locked out of my house because my parents were still at work and I didn’t have a key to the house. So here I was, locked out of my own house in my school military uniform, hanging out in the front yard on this November afternoon, when some of the local kids starting coming home from school. And they were coming home early, too, even though they didn’t have any Military Balls or anything to go to that night.

They were coming in groups of twos and threes, walking through the shortcut across the Laceys’ backyard, their school bags in hand, trooping along like kids let out of school do.

“What are you guys doing home so early?”

“Didn’ja hear about the President?”

“What about the President?”

“He’s been shot. They shot the President, and the Governor of Texas. The President’s dead. They told us about it at school and then they sent us home.”

“C’mon, really, what’s going on?”

“No, really. No kidding, President Kennedy was shot, and so was the Governor of Texas. No kidding. Kennedy’s dead.”

They say it’s one of those moments you always remember, like where you were when you heard about Pearl Harbor being attacked. Or where you were when Germany surrendered. Or, now, where you were and what you were doing when you learned that JFK had been assassinated. And I guess that’s true since I still remember it after all these years. And that’s where I was, in my front yard in Kearny, New Jersey, on a grey November afternoon, home early from school and locked out of my own house.

“Wow, man, I can’t believe it. That’s terrible. Do they know who did it?”

Little did I know that would be a question people would be asking for years after that grey November afternoon. But for the moment, I was in shock.

When John Kennedy ran for President, it was the first political campaign I took any interest in or probably was even aware of. Sure I knew we had a President, Ike and all. And Nixon was Vice President, Nixon who was running against Kennedy. But that was about it. Later on I learned my mother liked Adlai Stevenson, at least I think she did, but she never had any use for Truman after he dropped the Bomb on the Japanese. My Dad, who was a life-long Republican, didn’t adhere to that opinion, though, since he said it ended the war sooner and saved a lot of American lives.

Now even at the age of 10 I knew I wanted Kennedy to win. Part of it was that he was Catholic, the first Catholic to run for President, and of course the nuns in grade school all wanted him to win and told us why we should want him to win, which in the end came down to his being Catholic.

But for me it was more than that. He was young and appealing, and he had some good ideas, though I would have been hard-pressed to tell you exactly what they were. I even started wearing my hair like him, kind of puffy and combed over in front, in what was called “the Kennedy cut.”

And I actually got to see him, too. The March before the election I happened to be with my family in New York City when John Kennedy the candidate came out of Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and waved at the crowd gathered across the street from the enormous, staid, grey Cathedral, and got into a black Cadillac limousine waiting by the curb. I actually got to see him, even snapped some pictures with a little black box camera I had, and for a 10-year-old Catholic boy from New Jersey, that was like the biggest thing that ever could have happened. And of course he was “my candidate” – I called him that, “my candidate” – and he just had to win.

Now I had a kind of bad track record with famous people. I got to see Pope Pius XII at the Vatican in Rome when I was 8, and then he upped and died a few months later. So much for that claim to fame. And in later years I killed off more than one Pope, got to see them at the Vatican or out at Castel Gandolfo and, bang, they’d die shortly afterwards. And now John Kennedy, my candidate who became my President, was dead, too, and I had seen him that March day at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

So here I was out on the lawn on that grey November New Jersey afternoon as kid after kid trooped by, telling the same terrible story. The President, my President, was dead, and the Governor of Texas, Governor Connally, was wounded, and the Governor’s wife, too. Jackie wasn’t shot, though.

I was still in shock, and still locked out of my house, when Mrs. Allen came home. Mrs. Allen was our neighbor and her husband, Don, was our town clerk, which seemed like a very important office to me. And Mrs. Allen, Helen Allen, saw me out there and invited me into their house which was next door just up the hill from ours.

Mrs. Allen knew the gravity of the situation and must have thought how it was affecting me, and she turned on the TV in their living room and we both stood there and watched the news, both watched in silent disbelief, as Walter Cronkite related the details as they were known, in minute detail and in dribs and drabs as the reports came in from far-away Dallas.

Names that would become part of the history of that day began to filter in. Lee Harvey Oswald was believed to be the assassin. Officer Tippit was killed as he tried to apprehend Oswald outside some movie theater. Jackie Kennedy, alive but silenced, trying to flee the motorcade limousine as her husband was hit and slumped over. Lyndon Johnson, LBJ, who would become the next President to succeed JFK. There was little that Mrs. Allen and I said to one another or could say to one another as the reality came across the TV in black-and-white and tones of grey and sank into our consciousness.

And then suddenly my parents came home, late in the afternoon, while it was still light out. Both school teachers, they knew the news, had gotten out of school, and then went grocery shopping. Grocery shopping!

We heard the car arrive in our driveway, or they came to get me at the Allens’, I can’t really remember, but I was outside and in shock as much that they went grocery shopping as at what had just happened that afternoon in Dallas, Texas.

“Did’ja hear what happened? The President is dead and the Governor of Texas has been shot! Did’ja hear about it?”

I sounded like the kids who first broke the news to me, and I repeated the same unreal words.

“Grab a bag and help with the groceries!”

It was my father speaking, barking out an order in the annoyed, impatient way he had.

The groceries? The darned groceries? Is that what is important at this moment? More shock set it.

“Of course we heard about it. Now help get the groceries in the house.”

I don’t think I ever saw my father and mother the same way again after that, and a little later, the groceries in the house and the car trunk shut, that’s all I could think of as I stood there watching the news, this time in our living room, was how the groceries were more important to my father and my mother than that the President of the United States had just been shot and killed in Dallas. How could this be?

The big question now was whether the Military Ball would still be held tonight or canceled. And the decision, relayed through phone calls from the school and then from parent to parent, was made to go ahead with it since it was being held at the Waldorf-Astoria and the room and the entertainment had been reserved and paid for and it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to change everything now.

So now it was time to tear ourselves away from the somber news coming across the TV screen and to put on my dress uniform and get ready to pick up my date for the evening, my second cousin Patty Lynn.

I wasn’t much into girls yet, even at 13 and all, and as a freshman in an all-boys military commuter school I didn’t have anyone to ask to the Military Ball. So my parents came up with the idea of asking Patty Lynn to go with me to the Ball.

I actually hardly knew Patty Lynn, even though we lived in the same town, and it seemed a little odd to me to go out with my cousin, even a second cousin. She was okay, cute and nice enough and all that, but the real issue was that I was in the ninth grade, in high school, and Patty Lynn was still in the eighth grade, still in grade school. Or so my parents thought. As it turned out, Patty Lynn wasn’t in the eighth grade, which would have been bad enough. Oh, no. Patty Lynn, as I came to learn, was still in the seventh grade. I was going to my first high school Military Ball with a girl who wasn’t just my second cousin, but who was in the seventh grade!

And so we went, me in my dress blue uniform, Patty Lynn in her nice white dress-up gown, my parents and me in our car, Patty Lynn and her parents in their car, and we drove over to New York, through the long fluorescent tube of the Lincoln Tunnel, to Mid-Town Manhattan and the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and the Military Ball which was, as one might expect, all a-twitter with talk of what had happened that day in Dallas.

I don’t remember how or why it got out, but it did get out that Patty Lynn was in the seventh grade, and from then on all I heard from my classmates was, “Eh-heh, Yacenda went to the Military Ball with a seventh grader! Eh-heh!” Again and again and again, for weeks if not months afterward. Oh, the ignominy! Oh, the humanity!

Patty Lynn and I actually had a kinda nice time at the Military Ball, and we even got away from our parents, all of whom sat around the big round white table cloth-covered tables talking about what had happened in Dallas, who was behind the assassination, who this Lee Harvey Oswald was, did he act alone, how this could happen, what would happen to the country, and I got to put to use the dance lessons I had to take at the Cotillion, mostly the fox trot, and Patty Lynn and I got to hang out some and enjoy each other’s company. But overhanging everything, besides the shooting of the President, was the thought that I was at the Military Ball with a seventh grader who also happened to be my cousin. And that and the taunting of my classmates for weeks afterward meant that I would never ask Patty Lynn out again.

Patty Lynn eventually grew from a slightly reticent and okay seventh grader into something of a very cute and attractive young woman. But by then it was too late, and years later when I happened to be back visiting home and we went to see Patty Lynn and her parents she was still living in that same town, was married to a fireman, had kids of her own, and was living what to me was this totally boring, uninspired fixed life. And I felt bad that I had let the fact that she was a seventh grader stop me from asking her out again and, ultimately, saving her from this dull, boring life, married to a fireman and living in some cramped little place in her folks’ house in that dull, boring town. But by then Jimmy Carter or somebody was President and it all came too late.

Sorry, Patty Lynn. And sorry, JFK.

Featured Image: JFK shot, one-sixth of a second after. Mary Ann Moorman/Wikimedia Commons. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Read, share, and subscribe here and there.
That was then, this is now

That was then, this is now

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AUTHOR’S NOTE: This is largely a personal account tracing my experience with events and dissent over the past 54 years, beginning with opposition to the Vietnam War and culminating with today’s anti-Israel and anti-Semitic demonstrations sweeping the country. I don’t pretend that it is a comprehensive view or account, which could easily take multiple book-length volumes. But it does give my perspective of the transition of attitudes and beliefs and ways of expressing dissent over those years until now.

I don’t think I’m in that photo above, but I could be. That was the line of protestors marching by the Executive Office Building in Washington on the night of Friday, November 14, 1969, in what was called the Death March, the prelude to the largest anti-war protest in U.S. history. Holding signs bearing the names of U.S. servicemen killed in Vietnam, it was a somber but dramatic demonstration of the reality of the war going on on the other side of the globe.

It was a cold and windy night, and we struggled to keep the candles we also bore, in little paper protective cones, from being blown out in the persistent breeze. The march began across the Potomac, near Arlington National Cemetery, and wound its way in single file across Memorial Bridge, past the Lincoln Memorial, along the National Mall, up 17th St. NW, past the Executive Office Building to Pennsylvania Ave., and then along the fence past the White House. We wondered whether President Richard Nixon was watching from an upstairs window in the White House as FBI or Secret Service agents made no effort to hide themselves as they shot photos of the demonstrators filing by.

It wasn’t our first brush with the FBI. Earlier that day, on the charter bus down from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, people — young people, not unlike us, claiming to be with the march organizers — came aboard at the toll booth on the Delaware Turnpike and told us there was no room in D.C. and we should turn back. We had a quick consultation and decided these were government agents trying to dissuade protestors from making their way to the capital and we should go on. And we did. And they were.

People had come from all over the country to make their voices heard. That was the night, waiting in the dark across the Potomac for the march to start, that I met Sally, still a friend today, and Anne, to become one of the loves of my life, and later their friend Norman, who with some other classmates had come from St. Louis to participate. The next day, filling the National Mall and spreading out beyond it, a mass of humanity — officially set at a half million people, but by our count closer to a million — protested the war. Peacefully. With decorum. With hope and determination. With a presence that could not be ignored. Though Nixon said he watched sports on television as the demonstration unfolded.

Later in the day, when the crowd had broken up and people began fading back into the fabric of the country from which they had come, there were a relative few demonstrators who resorted to violent protest and drew tear gas from the police. But as The New York Times reported, “The predominant event of the day was that of a great and peaceful army of dissent moving through the city.”

Non-violence in protection of an ROTC building

In March of the following year I drove out to St. Louis with a friend to visit Anne and Sally. Arriving late at night with a wounded car, we were greeted by scores of people running over a hill at Washington University shouting, “They’re beating heads! They’re beating heads!” It was a tense time, the anti-war sentiment running high, and in the coming days we got caught up in the swirling events that seized the campus. Along with listening to open-air speeches by leftist professors — to dispel any idea that leftism on college campuses is just a recent development, it was alive and spreading even in 1970 — we also found ourselves in nighttime demonstrations.

Anne and Sally were committed to non-violence, which coincided with my own beliefs while further reinforcing them. One night during our visit I found myself with my friends in a line of non-violent people standing between other demonstrators of a violent persuasion and the Air Force ROTC building they were intent on burning down. We succeeded in holding our line and saving the building, but all the time I wondered why I was putting my life at risk to save an ROTC building. Violence just seemed to me, as it still does, the wrong way to go about things.

The result of our efforts were short-lived and the building was burned a couple of months later, on May 5, 1970. Earlier, on the preceding Dec. 9, an attempt had been made to burn down the Army ROTC building on my own campus. And a more successful attempt at burning it down occurred a year after my graduation from Rutgers, on April 25, 1972.

I’m not going to pretend that all was peace and light at that time. Those were, indeed, exciting and dramatic times, even at my own college. And across the nation, there was the Weather Underground, with its Marxist orientation and goal of the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, and other radical groups committed to violence and domestic terrorism. Years later, Weather Underground leaders Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn — indicted, and in Dohrn’s case convicted, for inciting riot and bombing government buildings, including the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol — intersected with Barack Obama, who in 1995 launched his first Illinois state senatorial race at the Ayers-Dohrn home. Obama’s association with Ayers stretched over several years, and should tell you a lot of what you need to know about Obama.

“I don’t regret setting bombs,” an unrepentant Ayers told The New York Times in 2001, “I feel we didn’t do enough.”

“The traitor is dead!”

In the early 1980s I was in graduate school at the University of Florida. In my second year I was selected for a federal grant to study Africa, especially North Africa, and the Middle East, and also to study Arabic. Our Arabic instructor, whose name was Ilham, was Palestinian. On the day following the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, as we settled into our seats in the classroom, we saw what Ilham had written in big chalk letters on the board: “Great news! The traitor is dead!”

I recall very well how shocked most of us were to see this on the board. Many of us exchanged uneasy glances around the room, unsure of how we should respond. If there was any enthusiasm for that shocking display of her views it was among the few Iranian students in the room. At the time I was mainly sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, but I also knew that assassination of Sadat, who had made peace with Israel and agreed to a framework both for peace in the region and resolution of the Palestinian issue, was not going to be positive for anyone. It also seemed outrageous that Ilham, a guest in our country, could make such a statement, with no attempt at discussion or persuasion. It was a pure statement of her hostility, even hatred, and prejudice, and in no way pedagogical.

I contrast our measured, and probably better informed, response then to the kind of mindless support for Hamas and hatred for Israel and Jews on campuses today, and I can see how both the realities and the nuances of one of history’s most complex conflicts have been lost on much of a generation that has simply lost both historical knowledge and perspective, as well as a moral compass.

Rejecting terrorism

Fast forward from 1981 to Sept. 11, 2001. The nation awoke to the biggest terrorist attack ever mounted on U.S. soil. It took just 19 terrorists to kill nearly 3,000 people in a few hours, bring down two of the country’s most iconic buildings and seriously damage a third, and reveal to the country both its vulnerability to terrorism and the ruthless and inhuman nature of those who choose terrorism as the means to making their point, whatever that point might be.

I was living in Greece at the time and word of the attacks came to me by way of a phone call from an Irish friend. My Algerian girlfriend at the time, later to become my wife, and I rushed upstairs to turn on the tube and watch, in horror, as the events of the day unfolded thousands of miles away. One thing that stuck in my mind was how Farida was as horrified as I was, and how she said, standing there staring at the screen, “If these are Muslims, I am no longer a Muslim.”

At the time I think most Americans, and probably most Muslims, shared a common abhorrence of terrorism and what it wreaked on Sept. 11. Probably more than we should have, as a country we were collectively willing to give up rights in a shared will to prevent further terrorist attacks. And as Spain and France and the U.K. and Jordan and Indonesia and other countries suffered attacks, we remained relatively unscathed in the decades that followed 9-11. But time, apparently, has a way of eroding memory, along with resolve.

On a personal note, with 9-11 receding into the rear view mirror, Farida — still a Muslim — later would ask me if I thought she was a terrorist since she would express support for the terrorist acts committed by Palestinians, of whose cause she was a huge supporter.

“No, I don’t think you’re a terrorist,” I’d tell her. “But you support what terrorists do.”

I think the same can be said for many of today’s demonstrators and others who openly express support for Hamas, one of the most ruthless terrorist organizations in the world, whose brutality is inflicted not just on Israelis but on its own people.

And this is now

I don’t claim that all college professors are as blatant in their anti-Semitic hatred and advocacy of violence as UC Davis’s Jemma Decristo is, but as recent events demonstrate, they’re more prevalent than one wants to think. And those professors, and in many cases administrators, have a major influence on the vulnerable and ill-informed young minds in their tutelage. And rather than adhering to the precepts of what education is supposed to be about — to “lead forth,” not to “cram down” — they exploit their positions of influence and trust to indoctrinate, not educate, their students.

I could excuse those students, but I don’t, and neither should you. Just as we, many of us, questioned the indoctrination that professors of earlier eras attempted on us, these students also can question that indoctrination today. As much as we might have been fond of Ilham and others like her, our values and knowledge transcended that affection to question when she attempted to cram down her particular view on us. This issue goes well beyond the instant issue of Israelis v. Palestinians, but reaches to the kinds of values these kids are taught at home, what they get from social media, the peer pressure they’re subject to, and a general lack of instruction in basic civic and social values. As I presented in my last piece, The ugly reality of American education, there is a pervasive crisis throughout the entire American educational system.

I’m sure growing up, as I did, imbued with the horrors of Nazism and the Holocaust, with half my extended family Jews who had experienced those horrors themselves, living in the New York Metropolitan Area and absorbing Jewish culture, I have a different view of anti-Semitism than many of these kids. But does one really have to have grown up with experiences such as mine to not know that prejudice and hatred of any sort is simply not acceptable? And what of adults who express the same kind of hatred? What can one say of them?

It was just 22 years ago that we recognized, on our own soil, the barbarity of terrorism and its infliction on innocent people. But somehow those sensibilities have been lost by many — even members of Congress — who now condone the murder and beheading of infants, the rape of girls and women, burning people alive, and kidnapping men, women, children, and even babies. What has short-circuited in these peoples’ brains? In their value systems? Is this the same process that took place in 1930s Germany, leading to the concentration camps and wholesale murder of millions, or in countless other societies, resulting in the most horrible barbarisms? Are we really at that point in contemporary America, or in numerous other countries formerly thought of as civilized around the globe?

In closing, let me say I am not unaware of various policy choices and implications that have shaped events and life on the ground in the Middle East. These are things I’ve lived with for most of half a century. There are legitimate arguments that can be made for different courses of action. Injustices have been committed, by both sides. And indeed, resolving the differences — as implausible as it seems at this moment — that have divided the Palestinians and the Jews for centuries is a matter of critical concern, if peace is ever to come to the region. But as long as hate and prejudice and violence are allowed to exist and to perpetrate themselves, no policy will ever succeed.

Featured image: Death Marchers pass Executive Office Building, Nov. 14, 1969, from Flickr, source unknown. Used under Fair Use.

National Moratorium, Washington, Nov. 15, 1969, from Flickr, source unknown. Used under Fair Use.

Assassination of Anwar Sadat, 1981, from rarehistoricalphotos.com, source unknown. Used under Fair Use.

Twin Towers Attacked, from the Los Angeles Times, Chao Soi Cheong, Associated Press. Used under Fair Use.

Hateful Tweet, from X, SRS-One. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Read, share, and subscribe here and there.
Back Posting: The Myth of the Independent Voter

Back Posting: The Myth of the Independent Voter

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In this early lead up to the 2024 presidential election we hear a lot about the role that independent voters will play in the outcome. According to some analysis, independents — voters who are not adherents of either of the two major parties — will likely determine the outcome of the election. There also could be a major impact that results from a determined third-party movement, itself formed by candidates and voters disaffected with the two-party system. But the question I ask is the same one I raised 13 years ago, in the second year of Barack Obama’s first term: Is there really such a thing as a truly independent voter?

I am putting up now the piece I wrote then to look into this question. While there have been some significant shifts on the national electoral scene — substitute, for instance, “Maga Republicans,” Joe Biden’s derisive and divisive term of artifice for adherents to Donald Trump’s version of electoral independence, for the Tea Party movement of 2010 — I think the overall question remains a legitimate one. I offered a possible way forward in my original piece. I still think the approach presented then might still be a viable one, though I’m somewhat more skeptical today that a sufficient number of voters could coalesce around the tenets I posit as the “LCD” principles that could bring most independents together.

While actual party registrations, in states that allow voter registration by party, don’t necessarily reflect it, surveys of voters show an ever greater trend toward those who see themselves as independent — 49% versus roughly 25% who identify either as Democratic or Republican — and so that key element of my initial piece remains valid, if only more so.

Read the piece and draw your own conclusions. I’d be interested in knowing readers’ views on the question.

Originally published on May 3, 2010

In America today the largest group of registered voters is neither Democratic nor Republican. It is independent – no party affiliation. It is how I have been registered my entire voting life.

Independents form the plurality – plurality, not majority – of voters in this country today. That would appear to give independents huge political power and a force in their own right to be reckoned with.

To some extent, that is what we have seen, whether in the power of independents to elect Barack Obama President, or their power to defeat Obama candidates in Virginia, New Jersey, and most recently, Massachusetts. They have held the “swing” power, and are likely to hold it in the mid-term elections in November and very possibly in the next presidential election in 2012.

Some of the biggest proponents and promoters of this trend, such as economic and political commentator Lou Dobbs, author of the book “Independents Day,” see it as the future wave in American politics. And to some extent, Dobbs and others of like mind are right. But there are serious flaws and limitations to this theory and to the real long-term effect of the independent force in America.

The main flaw and limitation has to do with the source and driving motivation of these non-aligned voters. Many – perhaps most – are just disenchanted with and disabused of both the major political parties. Some are fed up with the state of American politics in general. Some just have not decided to pick a party (and in some states this allows them to pick which party primary in which to vote), some just want to keep their options open while still being mostly inclined to vote for one of the major parties. Or, as in my case, remaining unrecorded with any party enables us to maintain an appearance of being truly independent and unaligned, as much as the reality of our actual voting patterns might indicate otherwise.

Now this is where the theory of the independent movement is flawed and ultimately breaks down, and why I call it a myth. It is because the motivation of the independent voter is so varied and, in fact, is neither monolithic nor ideologically driven. Some have come out of the Left, believing the Democratic Party has not gone far enough in pursuing a leftist-liberal agenda, as well as others who believe it has become too liberal. Others have come out of the Republican Party, believing the G.O.P. has lost its way, has become too liberal or, for others, too conservative. And there are others – perhaps the truest of independents – who despair of both parties and the very political process and system and who want to see an overhaul of the process.

Given this diversity of origin and opinion and, ultimately, objective, this is where the theory of the power of the independent all comes unglued. Independent voters may help vote in an Obama or vote out a Corzine, but they are like an unruly herd of buffalo galloping back and forth between the fence lines of the political pasture. On closer examination, there is no given trend or makeup, whether political or ideological, to this vast herd of independents. And this is a key reason why there is no, nor can there be, any viable “Independent Party.” If we consider the two major parties fractured, so much more so would be this mythical “Independent Party.”

What we have seen are movements – or more precisely, one movement in particular – emerge from this larger movement (trend would be more accurate), and that is the Tea Party movement. While Tea Party adherents clearly derive from a range of more mainstream political views, the bulk one can say are from the right-of-center persuasion, primarily the Republican Party. And this is the issue, that there is no one center of political thought around which independents might gravitate.

Were the Tea Party movement, for instance, to congeal into a Tea Party Party, it almost certainly would be doomed to fail and, in effect, would in most cases likely serve to elect those liberal left-of-center candidates the Tea Party people would most like to unseat. No, with all due respect to Lou Dobbs and his persuasion, the independent trend as it currently stands is not a viable political force and, as such, is a myth.

That said, there may be one way and one way only to move this independent trend (I resist calling it a movement) forward into a viable and cohesive political force. And that is to distill and draw upon the points of the LCD – Least Common Denominator. Not in the pejorative sense of that term, but in the sense of getting to the very basics upon which most independents either already base their independence or to which they can be drawn.

Admittedly this is open to some argument, discussion, even disagreement, but the two that I would propose as most basic core values and to which the greatest number of independents of all origins might be drawn are adherence to Constitutional principles and fiscal responsibility. I believe that for a majority of those who now consider themselves independent, these two values are those they can most likely get behind. There might be some wiggle room in how these principles are interpreted, or how strictly they might be adhered to, but I think these are the LCD core values that would form the basis of any viable independent movement that might lead to significant electoral victories.

This would not be a third party, which I think the facts still indicate would not be viable in America, but rather would represent a shift in voting patterns that would elect candidates, regardless of party affiliation or ideology, who at least adhere to the two LCD core values.

Eventually this would result in profound and ostensibly lasting changes in the two major parties. Though what is truly needed, in the words of educational philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, is a state of continual revolt and not revolution which, in the end, just returns things to where they started. With this pressure of the independents and their insistence on adherence to the two core principles, we might then expect to see a real paradigm shift in the politics of this country and perhaps – though it is a lot to expect – a diminution of the political polarization we now see.

Ideally the two core principles might be expanded on with two additional principles – those of individual responsibility and limited government – but then one risks losing some of the adherents who can agree on the two most basic core values. These added values, however, might draw in those independents who, like me, are of a more libertarian bent. It is when things are pushed into the realm of social legislation – a range of issues that include anything from lifestyle choices to abortion – that cohesion again begins to break down. But here adherence to Constitutional principles might limit the push for such social legislation and hold things together.

In other words, you might not approve of some of my lifestyle choices any more than I might approve of yours, but the Constitution, notably the First Amendment, gives us both the right to believe and act as we wish provided we do no harm to anyone else. My desire to reach out my hand ends at the tip of your nose. Even such a recognition would mark a major step forward from where we are now with polarization of the political dialogue and everyone trying to run everyone else’s life.

Featured Image: Cutting an Independent Path, Stephen Leonardi, via Pexels. Used with permission.

Different Folks, Different Votes: Cotton Bro Studio, via Pexels. Used with permission.

Read my other essays and commentaries on this site.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Read, share, and subscribe here and there.

 
Nothing to see here, folks

Nothing to see here, folks

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That’s become the not-so-hidden message coming from what is supposed to be our government: Move along, folks, go on home, nothing to see here.

The most recent example of this is how the discovery of a baggie of cocaine in the White House has been handled (or mishandled) and information related to it squelched. Never mind that the White House is supposed to be “the People’s House.” You’re just expected to pay your taxes and shut up. You have no right to know whose coke it was, why supposedly no culprit has been found, and likely won’t be, or even where it was found. Right from the beginning we were told no fingerprints or DNA swabs were taken of the baggie — which, if that is true, is nothing short of investigatory malpractice — and then that part of the story quietly disappeared from the news.

First, we were told it was found in the White House Library. No, it was near the West Wing Lobby. No, no, it was found near the  Situation Room (described as “the most sensitive single location in the US government”). Wait, stop the presses! It was found near the West Wing Executive Entrance, an area described by the evil elf, Karine Jean-Pierre, who pretends to be the President’s Press Secretary, as “a heavily traveled area” (translation: Gee, it could be anyone. Maybe a little old lady from Wichita. Who knows?) We also were told, as if we’re a bunch of rubes who believe the world is flat, that there are no cameras in that area that might have captured the act of placing the coke baggie, wherever it was found.

The Secret Service, charged with guarding the safety of the President and the White House and once a highly regarding organization, is leading what passes for an investigation. And in true “nothing to see here, folks” style, the Service has announced it will wrap up its investigation this week. When you don’t want to find something, you don’t find it.

Now I’m not going to say that the coke belongs to Hunter Biden, the President’s once crack-addicted son supposedly now in recovery. That’s supposed to be the point of an investigation, to find evidence of who the guilty party is. But applying Occam’s Razor, which says the most obvious explanation usually is the correct one, that might make him at minimum a prime suspect. Fingerprints, DNA, security cameras could easily either rule him in or rule him out. But if it is him, there goes that sweetheart deal he negotiated with his father’s Justice Department, and it be prison, not diversion, in his future. So, nothing to see here.

Nothing to see at the Justice Department either

It’s not just in the White House where we’re told there is nothing to see. The FBI, another once respected organization, has been in possession of Hunter’s now famous, or infamous, laptop since 2019, a year before we were supposed to believe that it “had all the signs of Russian disinformation,” and it confirmed the laptop’s authenticity in very short order. Hunter documented his own crimes — cocaine usage, influence peddling for his dad, lying about his drug usage on a gun application, possession of child pornography — and his many non-chargeable sexual peccadillos on the laptop.

Further, the IRS uncovered evidence of his tax evasion on income of multiple millions of dollars going back as far as 2014, and his gun was found in a trash bin across from a school after his former sister-in-law, his deceased brother’s widow, whom Hunter had been boffing, along with her sister, disposed of it there.

Let’s face it. It doesn’t take more than three years to investigate crimes when the evidence is right in front of you. That is, if your last name isn’t Biden. But if it is Biden, it’s another case of move along, nothing to see here, folks, and offenses that would have landed (and routinely do) mere mortals, lowly citizens, many years behind bars, resulted in a couple of misdemeanor charges and a divergence program that will result in no jail time at all for Hunter. Well, unless of course the coke in the White House belongs to the first son, which would be a violation of the terms of the agreement before it is even accepted by the court. So is it any wonder, given the depth of corruption of this administration, that the Secret Service investigation is likely to come up empty-handed?

Keep in mind — when the beast wants to find someone, it does. Consider, in contrast, how the FBI and DOJ have gone after every single person who pranced through the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, rooting them out nationwide. And the kinds of judicial abuse, pretrial detention, and excessive sentencing imposed on those people. And then we have pro-life activists raided and bullied and arrested by the FBI when the lame Attorney General, Merrick Garland, claims the people who have firebombed and vandalized pro-life care centers can’t be found since, gee whizz, they did those things at night and it was dark. I wonder if it was “dark” in the White House, too, when that coke was left.

Nothing to see at the Supreme Court

This “nothing to see thing” is getting to be a habit. More than a year ago the Dobbs decision, which overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide, was leaked from the Supreme Court weeks before its planned release. Something like that had never happened before, and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth among High Court watchers and pundits. Chief Justice John Roberts vowed the guilty party would be found and and he launched an investigation. Unlike the two-week wonder of the Secret Service’s investigation, that one is supposed to still be under way. And what is the result of that investigation? If you guessed nada de nada, go to the head of your class.

A tradition of nothing to see

As discouraging as all these recent “nothing to see here” situations are, this is not the first time our government pulled this kind of gaslighting. For instance, for 60 years we’ve been waiting to find out the facts behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. For 60 years the real truth has been kept classified and hidden from the American public, even though all the facts were supposed to be released, but weren’t, by 2017. Many of us suspected all along that the CIA was behind the assassination, which explains why the facts have been kept secret so long, by administrations of both parties. And earlier this year someone who knows what those documents say told then-Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson that it was, indeed, the CIA who masterminded the assassination. According to Carlson’s source, when asked if the CIA was involved with the assassination, replied, “The answer is yes. I believe they were involved. It’s a whole different country from what we thought it was. It’s all fake.”

Then, a year after the Kennedy assassination, we had the Tonkin Gulf incident which was used as a pretext for amping up our involvement in Vietnam. And when Defense Secretary Robert McNamara told the country how the North Vietnamese had attacked our naval vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin, he knew the story was bogus. As did President Lyndon Johnson when he announced new troops to be sent to Vietnam and a bombing campaign against North Vietnam.

We wouldn’t know the truth about the Tonkin Gulf incident or the many other lies we were told during the Vietnam War were it not for the Pentagon Papers, leaked by now deceased former Marine and military analyst Daniel Ellsberg. And we wouldn’t know what those papers — 7,000 pages, photocopied page-by-page by Ellsberg on an old-style copy machine — had The New York Times and Washington Post and close to two-dozen other newspapers not defied the government’s attempt to squelch the information they contained and published the papers. And that is the essence of the dilemma we are facing today.

The real problem

Instead of calling truth to power and defying the power structure, most of today’s mainstream media and Big Tech are doing what they can to protect this administration, this corrupt president, and are blindsiding the American public about these stories that, in more normal times, would be considered major scandals. It’s bad that the government and politicians try to deceive the citizenry. But worse, is when the news media covers up official misdeeds and doesn’t call the government out on them. And that is where we are today. What we have is a government-media complex — akin to the military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower warned the country about and arguably even more dangerous — that functions largely as a state media. And with that democracy simply cannot survive.

Featured image, cocaine and a rolled hundred, New York Post. Used under Fair Use.

Hunter Biden in the bath, from Hunter Biden’s laptop, via Daily Mail. Used under Fair Use.

U.S. Supreme Court, David Dibert, from Pexels. Used with permission.

JFK shot, one-sixth of a second after, Mary Ann Moorman/Wikimedia Commons. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Share the piece and subscribe, here and there.

Summer Solstice
Back at That Time of Year Again: Thoughts on “the Longest Day in the World”

Back at That Time of Year Again: Thoughts on “the Longest Day in the World”

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It has become an annual ritual, on the Summer Solstice, that I repost this piece. It initially appeared six years ago, on June 21, 2017, the Summer Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere. I originally posted the piece on this blog, and subsequently it became an annual event to post it each year on June 21. Three years ago I began posting it on my fiction blog, Stoned Cherry. It now appears on both blogs and on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Today, June 21, 2023, it is once more the Summer Solstice, and the actual solstice officially occurs at 10:58 a.m. EDT/02:58 p.m. UTC. The time and other references and weather comments in the piece are as they were six years ago, when the post first appeared. It’s been five years since I lived on the boat, and there have been other changes. This year it has been 54 years, well more than half a century, since my father’s death, and Sunday was Father’s Day here in the U.S. I hope you enjoy the piece. And play the music at the end.

It’s June 21, the day of the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, the winter solstice in the Southern Hemisphere. It’s a day that holds various meanings for different peoples, and its significance goes back millennia. The solstice, whether summer or winter, officially took place at 12:24 a.m. U.S. Eastern Daylight Time this morning, or 04:24 UTC.

Just to set the record straight and dispel any questions about my scientific knowledge, I know it’s not the longest day in the world. It’s the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, the shortest day in the Southern Hemisphere. But we’ll get to this a bit later.

It’s been a mixed bag today here on the West Coast of Florida. We’ve been having a lot of rain, something we didn’t have much of over the winter, and the rainy times are interspersed with sunny breaks. Right now, as I look out the window of my boat, the sun is mostly out but I’m looking at the light through rain-drop spattered glass. At least we’re not getting the effects of Tropical Storm Cindy, which is much further west and at this moment dumping lots of water on the upper Gulf Coast.

In this country, the summer solstice marks the official beginning of summer, though in other places and other cultures it marks the middle of summer, as indicated by the name Midsummer Night, which can occur anywhere from the 20th to the 24th of June. And really it is midsummer, since the days, which have been lengthening since the equinox three months ago, now will start to grow shorter, the nights longer.

The sun has reached its apogee in this hemisphere, as it stands today directly over the Tropic of Cancer. I feel summer ending, we already are on the downhill side, the side that will take us through the hot coming months but already on the slide back into winter, the cold time of year. Just as in the Southern Hemisphere the days will begin to grow longer as the seasons move back to summer.

A year ago on this day I was in Alaska, where there never really was a night. Where I was, well below the Arctic Circle, the sun went down sometime around midnight, but there was a kind of twilight that lasted until the sun rose again a few hours later. Above the Arctic Circle on this day, the sun never sets, and it truly is the Land of the Midnight Sun.

My thoughts turn to other things on this day. Someone asked me the other day, which was Father’s Day in the U.S., what thoughts I had of my father on that Sunday. But really, I think of Father’s Day as a commercial holiday. I also remember the last Father’s Day I had with my father, and how my mother did her unwitting best to create conflict between me and my father. While I may wish a happy day to the fathers I know on Father’s Day, it is today, the day of the solstice, that I think of my father. June 21 was his birthday, which in most years coincides with the solstice. I was told as a child that it was the longest day of the year, which I translated in my own way into it being the longest day in the world, and I would go around telling everyone who would listen that it was.

“It’s the longest day in the world!” I’d exclaim each year on his birthday, from morning until night.

I think today of my father on this day, the 21st of June. Gone now, for nearly 48 years. And I think back to the day of his birth, June 21, 1913. One hundred and four years ago. Even had he not died young as he did, just 56 years old, it is hard to imagine that he would still be alive today had he not died when he did. A prolongation of the inevitable.

A factoid I learned earlier is that today is not the longest day in the history of the world, as one might imagine it to be given that the earth’s rotation on its axis generally was slowing. Rather, the longest day in the history of the world is believed to be June 21, 1912, and things like the earth’s tides and recession of the glaciers have caused a slight increase in the rate of the planet’s rotation since then. My father was born a year later, which arguably could have been the second or third longest day in the history of the world, if not the actual longest day in the world.

I wonder what it was like on that June day, the day of the solstice, the longest day of the year, the day my father was born, in Jersey City, New Jersey. Did his father and mother, his Italian parents, my grandparents that I never knew, know it was the solstice? Did they even know of the solstice? Regardless, I’m inclined to think they did not think of it, if for no other reason than that they had something else on their mind that day. And then I think of the things people from then knew and were taught and how many of those things have been lost today, in these encroaching new Dark Ages in which we find ourselves, and I have to wonder. Perhaps they knew, better than most people today know. Or care to know. And they did note the auspicious day on which their son was born.

I’ll think of my father again on July 27, the anniversary of his death, and by then even our summer, the summer as we define it, will be half over.

The solstices, like the equinoxes, serve as a kind of punctuation for me. I watch the ebb and the flow of the days, the seasons, the years, and they mark the passage of time, time that increasingly slips by way too quickly. All of life is punctuation, I think. Slowing. Stopping. Breaking things, even waves on the water, into different parts, different pieces, different rhythms and fugues and movements and phrases and sentences. It is through such punctuation that we mark our lives, mark our transit through summer and back into winter, from day into night, from life into death. Watching, as a reader of a story does, while the time of our lives flows past. When we lose that punctuation, everything blends into one big mass, and we feel lost in the current, flailing and drowning as we’re pulled inexorably along. At least I do.

Enjoy this song, which I found today amid my files, and with which I end this post, and enjoy the time that nature and life give us.

 

Click here if song doesn’t play.