View from the Mountain

The Last Good Men

Character matters more than opinion.

Me, “Goose, One of the advantages to getting old is that you have some perspective and can pull yourself out of the weeds to speak the truth without caring who you upset.”

Goose, “The weeds are very high today,  and they are full of snakes.”

Me, “We the people used to vote for people of good character, ‘someone who is honest, respectful, and has strong moral principles. He is also someone who is dependable, responsible, and has integrity.’  Someone of good character does not immediately go on the defensive when someone disagrees. The response is to explain, give credible reasons, and try to persuade. People of good character welcome people who disagree with them because they realize the danger of getting trapped in a bubble of their own opinions. No it seem voters and I hesitate to call them ‘we the people’ are very much into micro-managing their representatives. They want a not vote on abortion and a yes on lower taxes but care little about the big picture or the future.”

Goose, “That seems very small-minded. I would guess that would lead to the inability to address any of the big challenges facing the country and the world. Electing a representative and trusting him or her to make the right decision is too much for those who care only about things like guns, abortion, and immigration.”

Me, “Unfortunately, religion has decided to become a different kind player in politics. It used to be that relgious people were focused on the good character for those who wanted to be leader.s That has flipped on its head with religious people being willing to accept any and every character flaw just because they trust their idol will force others to conform to their religious beliefs. It is the worst possible outcome.”

Goose, “Yes, that looks like a road to hell paved with supposed good intentions.”

Me, “One of things you learn over the years is that humans are very complex, imperfect creatures. Some of the people you admire the most have fatal flaws.  You have to weigh the good they have done against the evil that sometimes hides in their souls.”

Goose, “How do political parties play into good and evil?”

Me, “Over the years there have been great men and women from both political parties. However,  I would argue that the last really good man to be a Republican and President was Dwight Eisenhower.”

On the eve of the invasion, he (Eisenhower) moved among the American soldiers and sailors, asking where they came from.

They had the “light of battle” in their eyes, said Eisenhower, recalling Shakespeare’s King Henry V visiting his men’s camp (in disguise) before leading the charge against Agincourt — in France.

This is the crux of his character: That night, Eisenhower wrote a note to history. If his audacious plan for D-Day should fail in high seas or lashing rain, the fault is “mine alone.”

The successful landing turned the tide of World War II.

Even more a testament to Eisenhower’s humanity shone when American soldiers first liberated a Nazi concentration camp in April 1945. The cruelty he encountered was so brutal that he felt he had to be history’s messenger.

Once again, he wrote a clear, crisp message, to Army Chief of Staff George Marshall, to bear witness:

“The things I saw beggar description. … The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick.”

Minot Daily News

Goose, “Eisenhower, the farm boy, had character that our current don’t-blame-me-for-anything president could never understand.”

Me, “Eisenhower was about solutions not excuses. He wasn’t courting racists as every Republican president has been since and that includes their beloved Ronald Regan who was an expert dog-whistler.”

Goose, “Are there any racists that have done good things?”

Me, “Well, probably the one that comes to mind most easily is Senator Sam Ervin.  While he accomplished great things in helping end the McCarthy witchhunt era and holding Richard Nixon accountable, he was an old time Southerner who believed in states rights and stopping change which included integration. Like I said humans are complex.”

Goose, “Are there other presidents that you admire?”

Me, “There are many actions that presidents have taken that I admire.  I certainly admire the courage of Barak Obama and am proud of how he brought healthcare to millions. I admire Joe Biden for defeating the troglodyte but I think he should have passed the torch to Kamala earlier in the electoin cycle. I also admire Liz Cheney for standing up to a party that has lost its backbone.”

Goose, “Where does the country go from here?”

Me, “I grew up a Boy Scout, went to a military school then Harvard and became a farmer. Long after I was off the farm,  ‘Honor, Truth, and Duty’ has served me throughout my long career.  As long as we have people who are more focused on controlling others than they are making sure they treat everyone as they want to be treated, we will have dysfunctional government. We need to trust our leaders to have everyone’s best interests in mind, not just the ones your warped religion has decided should be blessed.”

Goose, “We might not live to see it.”

Me,  “Agreed.”

Covid-19 Has Brought Changes We Did Not Seek

Raymond's Gut, Crystal Coast, NC

We live in one of the most beautiful corners of the US, North Carolina's Crystal Coast and if you look at the numbers, so far we have done very well during this pandemic. Our county of almost sixty-nine thousand has counted thirty-five cases of the virus and three deaths according the North Carolina May 19, COVID-19 dashboard.

Still, the COVID-19 crisis has undermined my optimism, broken some of my connections with others, and altered my view of our country. All that has happened and the crisis is far from over. In spite of the advice to stay home, the last couple of weekends we have seen the first significant wave of beach people with license plates from New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Georgia, and even Florida. We also know that we have plenty of North Carolina visitors and likely most of them come from some of our state's own hot spots. Things could get much worse in our coastal paradise.

I feel like the pandemic is peeling away layers of my psyche like the layers of an onion. My family's life has been defined by seeing the possibilities of a better future and taking the calculated risks to get there. Optimism has been part of my being for as long as I can remember. That spirit is in danger. I no longer can make sense of the calculations needed to be safe much less to get to the next stage of our life which for us is to move closer to our grandchildren.

The seriousness of this event is reinforced by our family history. My mother lost her mother in the influenza pandemic of 1918. She started cooking for her six siblings at the age of nine. I heard my mother's stories, including how she met those challenges and went on to a better life. As a single mother she worked to give me the opportunity to be the first of her family to graduate from college. She died in 2004 at the age of ninety-three and six months. She never forgot how to overcome adversity and to trust in a better future. She went to her grave believing that hard work, education and determination are always rewarded. I am not so sure any more.

Living on the coast, the threat of disaster sometimes hangs over our heads for weeks at a time. COVID-19 is different. We have faced many storms and like always, even today in the midst of the coronavirus crisis, remain prepared for the next one. However, maps that help us understand, prepare, and sometimes even escape hurricanes do not work for COVID-19. They show us only that there is little chance of escape because the virus is virtually everywhere.

The inland metro areas that so often have welcomed us with open arms during a fierce storm are hotbeds of the pandemic. Areas even more rural than us like the mountains do not want anyone from the outside. Some rural areas with agricultural processing plants have seen explosive virus numbers.

Those of us who have lived on the coast through the likes of Irene, Sandy, and Florence know how to calculate the odds of whether we should stay or flee. Those skills are useless when trying to figure out when is it safe to go to the grocery or drug stores.

Beyond shaking my optimism, COVID-19 because of its highly infectious nature has broken our connection with others. While it is unlikely those who welcomed us when we evacuated for Florence would turn us away if we needed to run from the virus, I would not ask them to shoulder the risk of taking us into their homes. Some of them have more underlying conditions than we do.

This pandemic has also broken some of the strong bonds we have with neighbors. We are in our early seventies but one of our longstanding habits is to invite our widowed neighbor for dinner once or twice a week. He will turn eighty-nine this summer. The stories of his amazing life, his songs, his passion for life and his company are greatly missed during these times. We see him but it is different than spending three or four hours a week with him and a bottle of wine. Just as we miss him, we also miss our grandchildren. This is the first spring in eleven years that they have missed their spring beach trip. This epidemic has stolen precious memories that we could have made and which will likely never be replaced.

Finally and even more troubling than everything else, I miss my country which during much of my life has been a consistent leader for the world in time of crisis. Not only are we absent from the world's stage, our leadership is actively trying to disrupt a coordinated response by defunding the WHO and trying to blame others for our failures.

I struggle to understand how the country that was the leader of the free world has become the object of pity from much of the world. That such a significant portion of country has become accustomed to denying science and facts is heartbreaking. That the oval office, the place where the buck always stopped in past times of crisis, has become a farce and sideshow in an attempt to stay in power and destroy our republic with the knowing support of a significant portion of our population is an embarrassment.

Many people will survive COVID19, but I am not sure that our form of government will. Those that do not survive will more likely fall in easily defined categories that our government has abandoned. The poor or older people trapped in assisted living homes have little hope of rescue. Those working in minimum wage jobs, both white and people of color are really on their own. No one will be testing their co-workers every day like in the White House. Those workers on the front lines of this pandemic risk their lives so people with more money can stay safe in their cocoons.

It is a dark time and the only brightness for us and many of my social media followers are the adventures of four feral kittens that we rescued from the marsh a couple of weeks ago. Their progress in learning how to socialize with humans has been much more uplifting than watching armed protesters demand that we ignore scientific advice and put their lives and the lives of others at risk. It appears it is easier to teach two different species to live together than it is for those of us who believe in science to change the minds of those who want to ignore it and put all our lives at risk.

A Loss of Innocence

Raymond's Gut behind our NC home

When an event sears your soul and strips away a layer of your innocence, you never forget. Early on I remember standing in line for polio vaccinations but somehow we knew the scientists would save us. During those early elementary years, we gathered in hallways or hid under desks in drills for the atomic age, but we had real leaders that cared about the country in those days and they kept the atomic threat under control.  Then the assassinations of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King took away the last vestiges of my childhood. I had already been pulled from my home and shipped off to military school in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which seemed to be on the far side of the world though it was just on the other side of the Appalachian Mountains.

To see our president gunned down fundamentally changed my view of the world. I will never forget taking a taxi to the Chattanooga airport to see LBJ speak from the steps of an airplane. Over the years my innocence got peeled away like onion layers by war and other crises but then I fell in love with Canada's Maritimes.

I fell hard because it was so much like my childhood in rural North Carolina. Life in the fifties was built on trust. We came home from school, played football, baseball or even put shotguns on our shoulders and went hunting. We camped with our scout troop or fished on the weekends. My mother, my only parent during those years, was involved in my life but no one was always watching us. For the most part, we were on our own.  We ranged far and wide and no one seemed to care as long as we showed up for dinner and didn't break any bones. Even if we got sick, doctors still made house calls in those days.

Military school was very different.  Everything had boundaries imposed by someone else. College was the exact opposite. The only boundaries were the ones that I gave myself.  Eight years' absence from a rural life made me grow weary of cities, their strange night light, and the never-ending crowds. So when I met Nova Scotia, it was close to love at first sight just like with my wife.

I still remember my first night in a tent by myself on the shore of the Bay of Fundy. I grilled steak over driftwood and listened to the waves crash on the rocky shore not far from my tent. It was magical and it was as close to paradise as you could get unless you drove through the actual town of Paradise which was halfway between Bridgetown and Lawrencetown where we often shopped at the Beaver Fruit Cooperative. You could get a bag of grain for the cattle along with your groceries.

On those drives, through the Annapolis Valley, we would stop at produce stands operating on the honor system with just boxes for your money. Life on the North Mountain of the Annapolis Valley was not perfect but it brought you close to the land and the sea. You had to let other people in your life or you would not survive.

Nova Scotia, New Brunswick where we farmed for ten years, and Halifax where we lived for a few years after farming became anchors of my psyche.  While I might have idealized the places in my memories, my stories about the closeness of the Tay Creek community where we had our farm were all true.  People were always willing to lend a hand even to the point of digging a neighbor's grave. The keys remained in the switch of our unlocked farm pickup for seven or eight years. Halifax was as friendly a city as I could ever imagine. There was no gun violence.

I never felt unsafe anywhere in Nova Scotia or New Brunswick even walking a half a mile to the barn through the woods in the middle of the night.

Fast forward to the spring of 2020.  In the last few months, even grocery stores have become unsafe.  We wash our hands all the time.  We have stopped having our neighbor over for our weekly dinners with him.  We stand farther from friends when we meet them while walking.  It is a strange existence staying at home and rarely venturing beyond the neighborhood. It might well be our future for a long time.

While I knew that the Maritimes were also under many of the same restrictions because of the coronavirus, in my mind like a childhood friend who remains frozen at ten years old because you have not seen them for sixty years, the Maritimes was still the same safe place.  Now with the mass shooting in Nova Scotia, I am forced to admit that even the tiny villages of Nova Scotia are no longer safe from the peculiar modern disease of mass shootings. I knew that even before this the government was allowing asbestos waste to be stored on the North Mountain behind our old home but there was always the hope that they might come to their senses and stop.

With the Nova Scotia mass shooting and COVID19 crisis, I am forced to admit that as an adult there is really nowhere to run. There are no safe places left for those of us with modest means. We have to stand and join the fight against this disease and the mass shootings with the only tools left, science, political will, patience, and intelligence. There are people out there who care only for their strange ideologies that scorn truth while valuing power and wealth over human life.  We cannot let them win or we are all finished.  This might be the last great opportunity to take our government and lives back so there can still be safe places in the world for the rest of us that haven't been given over to viruses and the powerful.

I am just sorry that the children of today might never have the chance to build a fort in the woods, go to school without worrying about being shot, or wander after school without a care in the world.

Survival is Future Focused

Great Egrets seem to spend all their time focused on catching a meal, grooming, or enjoying a sunny or perhaps at least a sheltered perch. They don't seem to mind wading around in cold water. They typically avoid confrontation but they can be very territorial and I have seen one or two stand up to the much more aggressive Great Blue Herons.  I don't know that Great Egrets think about the past, but I do know that they have a good memory for places. Our Great Egret buddy, Frank 29X, from Canada has flown down from his northern marshes to the Crystal Coast for eight straight years.

We, humans, live a much different life than Great Egrets but the ones of us who maintain relative mental balance have a streak of hopefulness in us.  It is easy to get weighed down by the news.  Climate change could bring the end of the world and a massive sea-level rise.  Our spineless GOP senate has just given the menace that is our leader a green light for whatever behavior he feels like between now and the next election. Far too many people are killed by far too many guns. The suicide rate among veterans and farmers is appalling.  Many people are just one medical incident away from bankruptcy. Corporations seemed to have rigged the tax system in their favor.  Birds are dying and our corporate-friendly government seems bent on doing away with all environmental regulations while attempting to dismantle protections for federal lands.

It would be easy to have a vision of the future that is flaming rivers, toxic drinking water, firestorms like Australia and an authoritarian government with miles of wall attempting to stave off the future.

The reality will likely be different. The demographics of our country are changing. The demographics are not changing in favor of the white nationalists and the party that sees them as "some very good people."  We know what a nearly scandal-free government looks like. We had eight years of it under our first black president.  The children growing up today are growing up in a much more diverse world much like Halifax, Nova Scotia where we lived for a few years.

I have told the story many times about moving to Columbia, Maryland where our young son heard someone refer to a lady as black and turned to ask us what did "black" mean?  We might not get there in America in my lifetime but I wouldn't write off the possibility.  I have grandchildren that will need guidance and help to succeed. I plan to be around for them.  I fully expect to help them develop their critical thinking skills.

I also hope to teach them to be unafraid to take the heat for their beliefs. We have far too many people who are unwilling to admit their mistakes much less shoulder the responsibility of what they did. Certainly, we should hold responsible those senators who refused to honor their oath of office and stuck their heads in the sand during the sham impeachment trial of our foul-mouthed leader.

I grew up during a time when we could debate opinions without getting personal. I sent a list of questions to a no-one-could-be-right-but-me opinion writer. I hoped to understand why he believed things that do not pass the test as facts. His comment was that I lived in a different reality. Certainly, I do not live in the fever-induced-conspiracy swamp of Fox News. I think this quote from Forbes about covers it.

There's a lot that goes on in the world that doesn't easily fit the Fox template. There are important stories that don't make anyone angry, prove liberals are evil or otherwise carry an emotional punch. Fox viewers get less of them. Fox News is like an all-you-can-eat buffet, serving up red meat. A more balanced diet might be healthier in the long run.

I try to eat a balanced diet of healthy food but I do fall off the wagon especially for bacon and potato chips.  Enjoying a balanced news diet is much easier and I never fall off that wagon and listen to the junk news that comes out of Fox.

Not all government is bad. That pretty much disqualifies me as a Fox viewer.  Not all taxes are bad and the government helping people who are less fortunate is a good thing that will benefit us all.  Those are the second and third strikes that make me an unlikely Fox News viewer.

The government is a giant pendulum. Likely our current difficulties are a result of the great progress we made under Barack Obama. There are people to whom the thought of a black president or a woman as president are as threatening as flaming rivers are to me. 

We have to hope that our current mess will energize people to vote.  Those of us who believe our future depends on a fair country that continues to build on the strength and intelligence of current and past immigrants instead of walling ourselves off from the world and the future cannot let fear, hatred, and xenophobia driven by the policies of the current administration define our future.

We have to build a world where everyone counts no matter how humble their backgrounds are. Each person, not just the rich and well-connected, deserves a chance to succeed and thrive. That has been the imperfect promise of America for hundreds of years.  We will continue to strive to get closer to that promise and we will never let it die.

We can still have a country that respects borders and the law without making life miserable for so many. We just need better people running our country.

 

A Fourth of July Message for 2019

I posted this yesterday to my friends. The message resonated well with many people so it has now made it to my soapbox for all.

I love my country of birth, but having lived in two countries, I also feel great pride when I hear "Oh Canada." Having visited many countries, I feel great respect for a number of them and understand that there are other paths to happiness besides just ours.

Today the Fourth of July, I salute the vision of our country's founders and hope that we can live up to their thoughts and ideals which have helped us evolve to a better but far from perfect place. We will eventually emerge from this nightmare of children caged along our borders.

Any student of our battle for independence will attest to our founding fathers great fear of standing armies. Changing times have resulted in the need for a professional US military.  There is little doubt that we have the best armed forces in the world but why brag about it?

Our founding fathers would be appalled at a Four of July celebration of military power. There is a big difference between honoring those who have served in the defense of freedom and celebrating military power.

Celebrating military power is no more a part of the American tradition than separating children from their parents and holding them in intolerable conditions. We will overcome this at the ballot box.

Happy Fourth of July!