Category: Social Commentary

A Grey November Afternoon

A Grey November Afternoon

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.

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

 

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.

The ugly reality of American education

The ugly reality of American education

 

If you’ve been following the news since the barbarous attack Hamas launched against innocent Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, you’ve seen the ugly reality of American education laid bare. One has to wonder what kind of education these kids are getting that they can openly support the butchering, burning, raping, and kidnapping of defenseless infants, children, women, and men. This goes well beyond one’s political views, which of course allow for policy disagreements over the seemingly endless and intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and goes to a profound darkness implanted in their young minds and souls.

Things we thought were laid to rest decades ago, such as Anti-Semitism — hatred of Jews for being Jews — have been on full display on college campuses and on public streets in cities across the nation. These same young mush brains — joined by some not so young — who cringe at mis-pronouning someone and demand safe spaces from so-called “micro-aggressions,” apparently have no problem with beheading babies, burning children alive, or raping, kidnapping, and murdering women, all in the name of the cause célèbre they have been brainwashed to believe is the One Twue Answer.

As awful and terrifying as it has been to observe this display of hatred, it is indicative of an even more dangerous tendency that begins not just at the university level, but long prior, in elementary and high schools across the nation. As we’re seeing in not just so-called blue states, but in red and purple ones as well, increasingly the emphasis by those who purport to be educators is on social issues and not the basics of education, actually teaching the skills needed to function effectively in society and (heaven forbid!) reasoning and analytical skills. I’ve been bitching about the latter ever since I was in high school some six decades ago, so that is not new, though I think it has reached new levels of mindless conformity. The other part, however, is relatively new, just a few decades old, and also is now reaching ever higher levels of incompetence.

Does anyone wonder why it is so easy to indoctrinate a generation among which many can’t read or write in cursive, if at all, can name the most obscure celebrity but can’t name their congressperson, senator, or even the vice president, have absolutely zero knowledge of history or American constitutional values, and get what passes for news (again, if at all) from social media?

Roots of the Problem

See those two tearing down posters with photos of kidnapped children and women and laughing as they do it? They’re students (along with a third not shown in the photo) at New York University, one of the nation’s preeminent institutions of “higher education.” The one on the left is Yazmeen Deyhimi, a junior and — frighteningly — pre-law student. She once worked for the Anti-Defamation League but now apparently has lost her way. This is her feeble excuse for doing what she did:

“I have found it increasingly difficult to know my place as a biracial brown woman, especially during these highly volatile times,” she wrote. “I have felt more and more frustrated about the time we currently find ourselves in, and that misplaced anger into actions that are not an accurate representation of who I am as a person.”

“In this age of social media and digital footprint,” she babbled on, “these moments of anger are selfish and self-absorbed, and not reflective of who I am as a person or who my family had raised me to be.”

Buried in the verbiage are all one needs to know about how these students’ minds and spirits have been hijacked:

“as a biracial brown woman” — read racial and sexual politics foisted on students from before kindergarten.

“highly volatile times” — read a lack of knowledge of world history and events.

“I have felt more and more frustrated . . . and that misplaced anger . . . these moments of anger are selfish and self-absorbed” — read as an unhealthy focus on the self, leading to free-form anger and rage, and the kind of mindless behavior she was caught engaging in.

In this age of social media and digital footprint” — read where much of the biased and misguided “information” Gen Z gets originates.

“not reflective of who I am as a person or who my family raised me to be” — read as a failure to accept responsibility and acknowledgment of who she really is, who she has become. Her family may or may not have had anything to do with that, but it’s on her now and she need not deny that reality.

Blatant Hatred and Anti-Semitism

See the girl holding the racist pink sign that reads “Please Keep the World Clean” with a garbage can holding a Star of David and into which the Jews are to be placed? She is Fahima Karim, a 19-year-old high school student at the Urban Assembly Institute of Math and Science for Young Women in Brooklyn. She was not alone in carrying that sign, and unlike Deyhimi, she makes no attempt at concealing her blatant racism.

“I really don’t give a fuck about white lives,” she said in a previous street interview. “I don’t like white people . . . I just don’t . . . for no reason.”

In response, her school put out a mealy-mouthed statement about how it had always supported “the voice and power of our young women.”

“Unfortunately today,” the statement said, “one of our community members made a serious error in judgment. She exercised that voice and power to spread hate and anti-semetism” — misspelling anti-Semitism. It went on to promise “a thorough investigation” (as if the visual and Karim’s former statements weren’t sufficient evidence of where her sentiments lie, and the “error in judgment” apparently was in allowing herself to be photographed displaying them) “and using our restorative justice tools to heal the harm in our community and outside our school.”

And there you see the other element of the problem. School administrators and teachers who tolerate and condone certain kinds of behavior, for which there are no real consequences, but have no tolerance for speech or behavior that is contrary to their own views. Call for racial cleansing of Jews — “investigate and use restorative justice (whatever that is) tools.” Mis-pronoun someone or say biological males shouldn’t be allowed to compete in sports against women or use school rest rooms of their choosing — grounds for the most serious sanctions.

The bigger problem

It’s not just a truism to say that the future of the nation lies with its young people and their education. Prejudice, hatred, repression of free speech and ideas don’t just exist on college campuses or within the walls of schools. Those same students graduate, get jobs, enter into professions, and their misguided notions spread throughout society. We see the evidence and results of that in virtually every walk of life: In the legal profession, among judges, among academics, in politics, in Big Tech, in journalism, in the military, in sports, in entertainment, and in the further propagation to new teachers.

If you have any doubt about where the sentiments of many school administrators lie, just ask Riley Gaines, whose photo is above. Riley Gaines was denied the honors she had earned on the University of Kentucky swim team, for which she had worked all her life, when being forced to compete against a transgender biological male, Lia Thomas, in intercollegiate competition. Gaines has taken it upon herself to speak out against allowing biological males to compete in women’s sports, in an effort to preserve their integrity. But after working for decades to further and protect the rights of women, the current generation on many college campuses — with the support of their schools’ administrators, the Biden administration, and many sports and other organizations — are now more than willing to gut those rights.

Gaines was physically attacked, maligned, and forced to barricade herself in a campus room for hours until police arrived to escort her out after giving a speech at San Francisco State University in April of this year. She was accused of transphobia — which she explicitly denies — and instead of listening to her position a group of student bigots chose to assault her. Bad enough, but the reaction of university administrators was far worse. Instead of condemning the violence and attempt at shutting down free speech, they came out in support of those things.

“Last Thursday, Turning Point USA hosted an event on campus that advocated for the exclusion of trans people and athletics. The event was deeply traumatic for many in our trans and LGBTQ+ communities, and the speaker’s message outraged many members of the SF State community,” SFSU President Lynn Mahoney wrote to the campus community. She called the attack on Gaines an “unfortunate disturbance . . . that delayed the speaker’s departure.” Nowhere was there any apology to Gaines for the attack nor any recognition of her position on preserving women’s sports. For their part, the police made no arrests.

Further doubts? Ask federal judge Kyle Duncan, who was heckled during a speech to — I’m not making this up — law students at Stanford University, supposedly one of the country’s preeminent schools of “higher learning.” His crime? Refusing to use an accused sex offender’s preferred pronouns during a 2020 opinion. And when Duncan turned to the dean officiating the event to bring order to the room, instead she sided with the hecklers, saying Duncan causes “harm” through his work as a federal judge and she was “uncomfortable” with the anger that Duncan’s presence on campus led to.

Perhaps no surprise, this was Tierien Steinbach, the law school’s Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. One might well interpret those words, which are spreading like a plague across the landscape, as Conformity, Selective Inequality, and Exclusion. In this case, unlike in the SFSU one, at least Stanford’s administration took some action and Stanford Law Dean Jenny Martinez and Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne eventually apologized to Duncan. Steinbach was reported to be “on leave.”

For his part, Judge Duncan was criticized for being argumentative and calling the students “appalling idiots.” Watching their behavior, I’m inclined to agree with that description, and given how conservative speakers have been treated on college campuses in recent years one might better understand why speakers like Duncan have their guard up.

“They are forcing you to think the way they want you to think”

That’s Yeonmi Park, who at age 13 escaped North Korea with her mother, in the photo. After being held by traffickers in China the pair made it to South Korea and then, finally, to the U.S., where Park is now a citizen. She came here expecting the country to be the beacon of freedom that had attracted her. And then she went to Columbia University.

“I expected that I was paying this fortune, all this time and energy, to learn how to think. But they are forcing you to think the way they want you to think,” Park told Fox News in a 2021 interview. “I realized, wow, this is insane. I thought America was different but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North Korea that I started worrying.”

The warning signs came during orientation. Park had the temerity, thinking it was a good thing, to tell a university staff member that she loved classical literature, such as novels by Jane Austen.

“Then she [the staff member] said, ‘Did you know those writers had a colonial mindset? They were racists and bigots and are subconsciously brainwashing you.’”

Things only got worse from there, and in every class students were asked to express their preferred pronouns.

“English is my third language,” she said. “I learned it as an adult. I sometimes still say ‘he’ or ‘she’ by mistake and now they are going to ask me to call them ‘they’? How the heck do I incorporate that into my sentences?”

“It was chaos,” she told the interviewer. “It felt like the regression in civilization . . . Even North Korea is not this nuts. North Korea was pretty crazy, but not this crazy.”

Park’s experience at Columbia led to her second book, While Time Remains, published earlier this year. Her first book, published in 2016, In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom, detailed her escape from North Korea and the journey that led her to America.

Watching the outpouring of support for the barbarity of Hamas coming from 31 student groups at Harvard, one need not wonder why what is supposed to be America’s preeminent university ranked dead last — 248th out of 248 schools — in FIRE’s annual rating of free speech on campus. The school, whose ironic motto is “Veritas” (“Truth”), officially scored zero, but FIRE — the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression — said Harvard’s actual score was -10.69, “…more than six standard deviations below the average and more than two standard deviations below the second-to-last school in the rankings, its Ivy League counterpart, the University of Pennsylvania. (Penn obtained an overall score of 11.13.)”

Michigan Technological University, with a score of 78.01, ranked first.

There is a huge amount more than can be said about all of this, including comparisons with my own experiences in college and grad school in earlier decades that illustrate the stark differences then — even in times of major student protest and upheaval — with now, but I think this initial installment sets the scene and provides the background for an overview of the issue. I’m sure more will follow, and this problem is one that is going to be with us for a very long time.

Featured Image: Anti-Israel students protest at Columbia University, Jeenah Moon, Reuters, via Aljazeera. Used under Fair Use.

NYU students tear down hostage posters, New York Post. Used under Fair Use.

Hate on Display, Daily Mail. Used under Fair Use.

Riley Gaines, Outkick. Used under Fair Use.

Yeonmi Park, Fox News, via Insider.com. Used under Fair Use.

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

Lessons unlearned

Lessons unlearned

By now the world knows what happened on October 7 in Israel. The gruesome details and the jarring, terrible images have been broadcast on television and across the Internet worldwide. It is not my purpose to repeat those here. Rather, my intent is to focus on the human toll and to look at what brought us to this catastrophic place.

To trace the roots of what led to the events of the 7th we need to look back to the Obama administration and its appeasement of Iran and the forces in the Middle East that are supported, trained, and funded by Iran. For anyone who has been tracking things over the years what is happening now is, at best, only mildly surprising.

It’s important to understand that the current crowd in the White House are, for the most part, Obama administration recycles. No one with even minimal powers of observation believes Jell-O Joe Biden is in charge or calling the shots. It is the ideological bent of the people on the President’s security team that leads them to believe that appeasement of Iran and downgrading of relations with Israel results in peace in the Middle East when, in fact, the exact opposite is the case. What is currently under way is visible proof of the error of this belief system, but their ideology and misguided understanding of Middle East dynamics prevents them from choosing another course. And now they’ve led us into the very mouth of the beast and how things will shake out, not ruling out a globally catastrophic result and one that almost certainly will come to do damage at home both in America and Europe, is very much unknown at this point.

I warned of the dangers of this approach of appeasement going back years before I started this blog. On Sept. 12, 2012, during Obama’s first term, I published The Trap Into Which We’ve Been Led. The dangers of appeasement were evident even then, in the aftermath of the so-called Arab Spring, though they’re obvious to anyone who has studied or is conversant with the history of appeasement in world affairs. And then on Aug. 14, 2014, in the middle of Obama’s second term, I published Let Them Eat Hamburgers, describing the aloof and uncaring attitude Obama and his team displayed at that time in the face of the cruelty being inflicted on the Yazidis. Most of that piece could be written today, simply substituting Biden for Obama. In the face of the barbaric attack inflicted on Israel, the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, Biden waited Saturday until it already was late night and the end of a day of terror in Israel, to make a pathetic three-minute statement. And then Sunday he was silent, hosting a barbecue — at which they certainly ate hamburgers — on the White House lawn, and on Monday he took a holiday as the carnage continued both in Israel and in Gaza. It took him until Tuesday, three days after the barbarity had commenced and more than two hours later than scheduled, to stumble his way through a speech ostensibly supportive of Israel but without a single mention of the power behind Hamas’s attacks on Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

I know most people don’t click on the links in my pieces, but I strongly urge you to click on those and the ones that follow and read the linked pieces. You will gain greater understanding of how all these things tie together.

Funding Iran’s Support of Terrorism

Much has been made, as it should be, of the $6 billion in Iranian assets that the Biden administration has unfrozen, part of a deal to exchange five Americans held by the Iranians for five Iranians in U.S. custody. Given that this is just the latest in a string of disproportionate concessions this administration made in exchange for Americans held by other countries, so much for the long-standing principle that we don’t pay ransoms to free people held hostage. The most predictable result, of course, is that such payments just encourage more hostage taking. But the other result, in this case, is that it frees up funds for Iran, the world’s biggest state sponsor of terrorism, to support more terrorism. Such as what is going on in Israel right now. Never mind the blather coming out of the administration that Iran isn’t allowed to use the funds for other than humanitarian purposes. It frees up $6 billion for the Tehran regime to spend on its extraterritorial adventurism.

Regardless the argument over the $6 billion, it’s chump change compared with the other funds this administration and the Obama administration handed to the Iranians, no strings attached. In my piece Dancing With the Devil posted in March of last year, I noted this as an adjunct to Biden taking America’s energy independence, as fostered by Donald Trump, to going hat-in-hand to some of the worst actors on earth to once more meet our energy needs after restraining domestic oil production:

“But, you see, the Biden administration already has been releasing billions to the world’s biggest state sponsor of terrorism. Faced with rising social discontent in Iran, which was at least one of the intended affects of U.S. sanctions, last summer the administration unfroze $29 billion in Iranian assets. With conclusion of a new nuclear deal with U.S. participation, another $100 billion in Iranian assets are likely to be unfrozen.

“All this is on top of the $1.7 billion that the Obama administration — of which, let’s not forget, Joe Biden was part of — paid to the Iranians, all in cash to circumvent U.S. sanctions, in 2016. This included $400 million delivered by cargo plane direct to Tehran. Ostensibly these payments were in exchange for the release of four Americans being held prisoner by the Iranians, and Iran entering the nuclear deal. So much for the idea that the U.S. does not negotiate with terrorists or pay ransoms. You see, it’s not just gangsters who pay protection money, and yet oddly we heard no calls to impeach Obama for a clear violation of properly imposed sanctions or long-standing U.S. policy.”

In the intervening time, the Biden administration’s decision to ignore the sanctions Trump imposed on Iran allowed the terrorist state to sell its oil to the Chinese and elsewhere, yielding at least another $60 billion to Tehran. The country’s foreign currency reserves, which the Trump sanctions had dropped to just $4 billion in 2020 from $122.5 billion in 2018, had recovered to $41 billion in 2022 and could be as high as $100 billion now. Good work, Joe.

Proving the Naysayers Wrong

While Biden and Obama courted the mullahs of Tehran in the misguided belief that they could be dissuaded in their quest for a nuclear bomb and somehow act as a responsible nation among nations, Trump understood the reality and pulled the U.S. out of the nuclear deal with Iran. He understood well how peace is achieved through strength, not shows of weakness, and when he took out Iran’s chief architect of terrorism, Qasam Soleimani, in January 2020, the naysayers and handwringers predicting dire consequences were definitively proven wrong. That was then and this is now, and Tehran, like the Russians and Chinese, sees the weakness in Washington, drawing a direct line from our shameful surrender from Afghanistan under Biden’s hand, and the three feel free to exert the bellicose power they had restrained during the Trump years, whether in Ukraine, Israel, or — holding our collective breath — Taiwan.

Commenting on what precipitated the carnage in Israel, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who served under Trump during the Soleimani affair, succinctly stated the reality: “What has created war here is American weakness, American appeasement.” To prove Pompeo’s point, we now have a State Department that called for restraint on the part of Israel, whose citizens were being slaughtered on a scale, proportionately, mutliple times greater than 9-11, before being forced to retract the statement.

Instead of the clarity that came of projecting American strength in the interest of world peace and stability, we have an administration that, for all intents and purposes, has lost its mind. We have an open border policy that — by design — has allowed something like 7 million illegal immigrants into the country with little to no idea who they are. Agents so far, in the three years of the Biden debacle, have identified 264 individuals on the terrorist watch list — by far a new record — but have no idea how many terrorists were among the 1.5 million “gotaways” — the ones who just snuck across the border without apprehension. It would be beyond Pollyannish to believe hard-core terrorists were not among them, intent on setting up sleeper cells in the country, waiting for instructions to strike. Even with its tighter border controls, the same is true in Europe, and elsewhere. Terrorism doesn’t just exist in some far-off land, something we watch on television. It exists among us, too.

Hearing representatives of this administration one can be excused for thinking one is watching an episode of Saturday Night Live rather than the performance of serious public servants. Tracking the moronic statements of their boss, we have once honorable people like Admiral John Kirby, NSA spokesperson, saying with obvious seriousness that global warming and a 1.5-degree gain in global temperature would be a worse outcome for the human race than nuclear war, or that white supremacy is a greater danger to the country than terrorism. Baghdad Bob has metastasized across Washington and we all have to fear for our very survival in the face of such institutional delusion.

Before I entered the Foreign Service in 1988 I made an agreement with myself. I decided that I’d stay in the Service as long as it felt right. But if it stopped feeling right, or if I was asked to do something I had serious qualms of conscience about, I’d resign. I pretty much followed that compact with myself when, in 1999, I drafted my resignation letter to then SecState Madeleine Albright. One wonders how much their pay check or title means to people like Kirby to so debase themselves before the public they are charged with serving that they prattle such nonsense and not tender their resignation. Whatever their motivation, it is clear that no lessons have been learned by this administration and the future, not just of Israel or the Middle East, but America and, indeed, all the world, lies in serious jeopardy.

Featured Image: Women kidnapped by Hamas, Israel War Room via NDTV. Used under Fair Use.

Noa Argamani kidnapped by Hamas terrorists, screen shot of Hamas video captured by Reuters. Used under Fair Use.

Avi Nathan, boyfriend of Noa Argamani, kidnapped by Hamas terrorists, screen shot of Hamas video captured by Reuters. Used under Fair Use.

Bodies of 260-some people murdered by Hamas terrorists at music festival, source unknown. Used under Fair Use.

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

Don’t believe your lying eyes

Don’t believe your lying eyes

 

Don’t believe your lying eyes. That’s the message from this bungling and utterly dishonest administration. And from the lying and corrupt State Media that allow them to try to pull the wool over the country’s eyes.

Bidenomics — the misguided but unintentionally descriptive term for Biden’s disastrous economic policies — are working just fine. Don’t believe your lying eyes that tell you something rather different whenever you check out at the grocery store or gas station.

The border is secure. Never mind that new records of illegal border crossers are broken on a nearly daily basis now and illegals are creating true crises for blue cities, from New York and Boston to Chicago and L.A. Pay no attention to hordes of illegals walking across our alleged border and camping out on a sidewalk near you. Or those 100,000+ Americans killed by Fentanyl carried across the Southwest Border or the 82,000 children “lost” by this administration. Don’t believe your lying eyes! The border is secure and everything is just fine!

Crime isn’t on the rise. The statistics say otherwise, as do the experiences of ordinary people in virtually every city of any size. But don’t believe your lying eyes. If there is more crime it’s undoubtedly the Republicans’ fault and, besides, those criminals are probably just hungry.

The president is fit as a fiddle, right on top of his game. Ignore that his stumbles, verbal, mental, and physical, have been happening with such alarming regularity that White House staffers are charged with overriding his impromptu policy statements and keeping him from falling since his competency to serve as President is seen as just one fall away from serious challenge. Don’t believe your lying eyes (or ears, either, in this case).

The “Big Guy” didn’t profit from his son Hunter’s overseas business imbroglios. All that money didn’t get to him in any way and didn’t influence his actions as an alleged “public servant.” Don’t believe your lying eyes! Or what your brain tells you (oh, you have a brain? Turn it off immediately! No logic or thinking is allowed!)

Biden didn’t retain pallets of classified documents from when he was a senator and vice president and had no right to them. No! Look away! It’s Trump who is your culprit, not Biden! Those papers were all safe there in that unlocked garage with his Corvette and Hunter. Don’t believe your lying eyes!

Of course we have a system of equal justice. The administration would never think to skew things its way nor persecute the president’s main opposition candidate. The horror of the very thought! We rend our garments! Don’t believe your lying eyes!

Our respect on the international stage has returned. Don’t for a moment believe that other heads of state, friend and foe alike, have noticed the bungling senile fool that serves as our head of state and haven’t taken note of his mental and physical debasement. Don’t believe your lying eyes!

And perhaps the most glaring and critically important thing of all: Clearly the president is in charge of everything and it’s not true that he is just a figurehead for a ruling junta, where the real power resides and is exercised. No, no! Don’t believe your lying eyes!

The term for this process is gaslighting, one of the Left’s pet terms they like to level against the Right. It’s hard to imagine more blatant examples of the process, defined by Merriam-Webster as “psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one’s emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator.”

In other words, don’t believe your lying eyes!

The Emperor has no clothes

Yes, yes, I know. It’s a cliche to compare the current state of affairs in modern-day America to Hans Christian Andersen’s Nineteenth Century folktale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” But these are cliche times in which we live and few comparisons apply as well to them as Andersen’s 1837 parable. Sadly, we lack that astute child who noticed that the emperor had, not a resplendent new suit, but no clothes on at all.

I don’t know if it’s unique to America to have political charlatans masquerading as medical or psychological doctors, but the other day I heard one such charlatan wax enthusiastic about Joe Biden’s great condition and how fit he has kept himself. This about the guy who falls off his bike, repeatedly falls up stairs going on Air Force One, and can barely move his flimsy little lawn chair on the beach where he goes to fill the 40% of his term that he’s spent on vacation. Meanwhile, this same Dr. Charlatan had the temerity to call Donald Trump “a heart attack waiting to happen.” Now I’m not prepared to predict who might or might not have a heart attack — it’s a pretty imprecise science, as far as I can tell. But I do have a set of still fairly good eyes and a functioning brain that tells me, were I to put my money on who was more physically and mentally capable and astute, Biden or Trump, I wouldn’t move my chips to Biden’s spot on the board. Sorry, but I will believe my lying eyes!

On the border, I recently saw a leading member of the State Media try to shut down a guest who had been to the Southwest Border and saw with his own eyes how it’s wide open by insisting — in verbatim lockstep with the liar at the White House’s podium — “the border is secure.” The smirk on the face of the interviewee was priceless. Like me, he was willing to believe his lying eyes, even in the face of derision from the State Media spouting the official and 100% false administration line. And then I heard another minion of the State Media explaining how your dollar is going further now than it was a year or two ago. Whether she is a shameless liar or a total moron lacking in any knowledge of basic economics with no understanding of inflation, how does such a person get through J-school, let alone get hired by a major media company? And how many of her viewers buy into the nonsense she peddles? Hopefully they’re believing their lying eyes.

A little bit of background is called for. While the examples cited here don’t arise directly from members of the White House Press Corps, that’s where the official party line from the administration begins and then propagates through the system. When I was a practicing journalist my colleagues and I largely saw the White House Press Corps as a band of journalistic whores (actual word we used). That was nearly four decades ago, and compared to the current White House Press Corps, its members in those days would be nuns or monks in relation to today’s travesties. Daily White House Press Babler KJP stands before the corps and tells the most bald-faced and easily disproven lies and, with a couple of exceptions, the whores in the corps of alleged journalists nod their heads, take their notes, and go forth, with their colleagues, to lie to the American public. This is what passes for journalism in contemporary America. And you’re not supposed to believe your lying eyes?

Twisted up in their own petards

I’m not sure what a petard is, but I have to admit it’s becoming increasingly amusing to watch as those in the State Media who, for the past three years, carried water for the Biden fabrication machine and crime family suddenly to become unsure of what their mandate is. This confusion has arisen as Dem power brokers, to whom the State Media are largely beholden, begin to express their doubts about whether Jell-O Joe is capable of a second term. Never mind that most of us didn’t think he was capable of a first term, the issue now has become the potential second term and whether he’ll finish his first term.

One recent poll showed that 72% of Americans, including 79% of independents and 48% of Democrats, don’t want him to run again. Some polls have shown as many as 75% of Democratic and Dem-leaning voters don’t want Jell-O Joe to run again. Apparently more people are believing their lying eyes and the State Media is in a quandary how to deal with that inconvenient fact.

As I’ve opined before, and will continue to since it’s the absolute 1,000% truth, the real threat to American democracy lies not within the government nor any given administration nor even within any insidious social or political movements, but with the lack of a free, fair, and unbiased news media. As I recently said, repeating sentiments frequently expressed over the years, “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.”

So now that the cat is out of the bag, anyone with two functioning eyes, or two functioning ears, combined with one functioning brain and the willingness to look beyond the official party line, can see that Joe Biden is incapable of being president. The quandary now for Dem power brokers, deep-state actors, and their media client sycophants, has become who will replace him on the ticket. This is largely an existential question for them since they are looking down the barrel of a deeply embittered Donald Trump, currently beating Biden in the polls by as much as 9 points, who is determined to finally and definitely clean out that swamp that Washington and the federal establishment has become. And even in the highly unlikely event that Trump isn’t the Republican nominee, the other leading candidates on that side of the divide also have strong inducement to do the same.

Faced with an opposition party with a deep bench of qualified candidates, the Dems have a dearth of possibilities that could effectively fill the seat. They also have to deal with the Kamala Problem, what to do about the vice president who was put in as a poison pill to keep Biden from being removed from office and who has proven to be even more unpopular than her boss. Can she be bypassed without raising a storm among the Democratic Party’s various constituencies in its divide-and-rule strategy based on racial and sexual politics?

The party, I’m quite sure, would have no issue with another figurehead candidate while pulling the strings of power behind the scenes. But are voters willing to accept another such sham and insult to democracy? Already the Dems are rolling out their dirty tricks to make another go at stealing the 2024 election if they can’t win it through fair and legal means, and their hope is that voters won’t believe their lying eyes for another 12 or so months, when early voting begins.

Don’t be one of those gaslit voters. No matter what anyone tells you, believe your lying eyes. There is plenty there to see. All you have to do is open your eyes and look.

Featured Image: Eyes, Noelle Otto, via Pexels. Used with permission.

Retina: Basila Vlad, via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Iris: v2osk, via Unsplash. Used with permission.

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