The State of the Nation

Without being alarming or admitting to any infirmity I have been around this magnificent country coming up on a seventh decade.

Does that give me prescience to what is going on in our country?

No!

It only gives me the experience of living in what this country has gone through for a number of decades.

The fact that I chose journalism a career path is an added advantage to singular understanding of what we are going through at the moment.

I think many people in the United States of America are experiencing a seething anger against the partisanship, the rancor, the recalcitrance of our (OUR) elected representatives who think we are as inimical against the opposition (Whatever that may be) as they are.

Congress you have a great lesson here to learn here, if you choose to do so.

You are not special. You are not entitled to serve for a lifetime. You are not above the law, both the law of the land and the moral laws of our common, modern society. You are where you are to serve the collective good of our republic.

We the people, we who you are supposed to represent, live in tolerance, community, and in compassion with our neighbors and our neighbor’s neighbors. We have to, because of the proximity of life. We understand the ache of life and the battle of family budgets with all of the worry when the means do not meet the needs and bills cannot be paid.

Congress you have no clue to what we go through on a day-to-day basis. You have formed an elitist club that does not serve the best interests of the people who elected you.

You have forgotten what you promised to remember when we elected you. You have become dispassionate beings who think that liberal or conservative ideology is the only issue of democracy.

Democracy is not stubbornness. It is compromise and courtesy.

Many of us will make sure you are not reelected.

Here’s a reason, if you need one.

Your collective rancor and subbornness over the dept limit has set the world on a course of fear. You placed partisan politics above fiscal policy and you were the catalyst for this global  economic worry.

Everyone is hurting at this moment; liberals, Conservatives, Inbetweeners, are all suffering economically because of your inability to see the whole picture of America and her place in the world  and to present a   unified image of our stability despite our over-spending and borrowing which must stop.

Enjoy your limited tenure Congress. Plan for a time very soon when your individual power is powder and your prestige is a passing of the wind.

Hiroshima

Saturday was a day to remember.

August 6^th 1945 was the first time an atomic weapon was used in war. For the Japanese military and citizenry it was a terrible day of death and destruction. For America it was a day that began the end of war.

The decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima and three days later on Nagasaki was made by President Harry S. Truman. The argument for dropping the bomb was that it would save thousands of allied lives from a land assault on the islands of Japan.

By choosing to remember this anniversary we once again acknowledge what war can do to nations and to the innocent and what misguided leadership can bring upon its people. For me it also invokes a childhood memory.

I remember growing up in the early part of World War two reciting hateful rhymes against the Japanese and in particular emperor Hirohito. We were, after all, at war and our fathers and uncles were in harms way. I guess it was a child’s way of dealing with known adult frustration, fear and anger that filtered down to us kids.

The Japs, as we called them then, were the enemy. Today they are the Japanese and we are demonstrable friends and fierce competitors.

According to author Stewart Chase, the Japanese have a word "Mokusatsu." It is comprised of two characters. Moku, meaning, "to kill" and Satsu, meaning, "with silence". Mokusatsu has two meanings depending on how it is used. It can mean to "refrain from comment" or it can mean, "to ignore". 

Toward the end of the war, after months of intensive bombing of sixty other cities, the allies issued the Potsdam ultimatum to Japan. It said, "surrender or be crushed."

The Showa regime apparently was ready to capitulate but wanted more time to discuss it internally.

The Japanese issued a policy of "mokusatsu," in response to the Potsdam ultimatum with the refrain from comment meaning. That meaning, however, was mistranslated somewhere in the sending or receiving of it and it read to the allies, "the Japanese government ignores the Potsdam ultimatum." To recall the inaccurate translation would be an unthinkable loss of face for the Japanese.

A few days later the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

One word misinterpreted.

Government History Of Poor Judgement

If the latest and continuing carnage from Congress is indicitive of their ability to govern then the axiom "Be worried when you call for help and the Government comes to the rescue," seems to be valid.


The people of New Orleans understand that better than most. The bureaucracy always bungles good intent and they do so because "the bureaucracy" by its very nature lacks compassion, empathy and a singular leadership.

Long before the Hurricane Katrina rescue and that debacle our government tried to come to the rescue of the native people of the Aleutian Islands, the Aleuts.

The Aleutians are a thousand mile long string of ragged islands that sit atop a submerged ridge that stretches from Alaska to Russia.

The Aleuts were nothing more than simple folk who enjoyed plain living harvesting seal fur. In June of 1942, bombs fell on some of the small Aleut villages. The war with the Japanese had reached these unprotected islands and Washington was worried.

American troops rushed to the rescue. Government officials ordered the Aleuts out. Their homes became barracks as villagers were taken to relocation camps on the Alaskan coast. The rescue wasn't a rescue at all. The Aleuts were no better off than Japanese-Americans locked up as security risks.

Some villagers were put in abandoned canneries, some were locked up in a gutted gold mine. Visiting doctors said the Aleuts were living like POW's. Deaths increased by 300 percent.

Bitter fighting finally defeated the Japanese, but the Aleut exile had lasted nearly three years and when they returned to their villages, nothing was the same. Their boats had long since rotted and sunk. Their possessions were gone, even their religious icons were stolen.

There was a government settlement. Ten-thousand dollars for all claims, about 12 dollars a person. Congress periodically looked into the debacle, trying to find out what went wrong when the government went to the rescue.


What Congress ought to look at is the meager settlement to the innocent citizens of the Aleutians.

The Super Rich

The reality of the common man is lost on the super rich, the United States Congress and the pampered powerful of the world.



There was a story this week of a Malaysian businessman who paid six billion dollars for a Yacht. It was gold plated and had platinum in the bathrooms. Six billion?


Not one of us will begrudge the right of anyone to spend their money anyway they choose, but sometimes common sense suggests that flaunting one’s opulence where the oppressed and poor of your nation or even the world can see it is not only over the top, it’s arrogant, conceited and out of touch with real life.

This old world has a lot of prejudice, pain and hatred harboring in the minds and hearts of so many everywhere. Disproportional wealth has something to do with it.

This old world needs fixing for the future to be sustained in a balance of honor, dignity, culture and beliefs.

This old world has children who bellies are distended as their body aches and searches for nourishment. It has millions dying daily from hunger and hunger related diseases because some believe security is having more. It has millions uprooted in regional diasporas as the ignorant and dispassionate take by force and kill with pleasure for they know not their interconnection with the dying.

Can you imagine what could happen in the world if governments spent the billions they do on arms and wasteful projects on making a cripple child walk, the blind to see, the hungry to be nourish, and the chronically ill cured.

I can!


What we imagine can happen. Let's try it together.

Senatorial Idiocy

What is wrong with our Senators?


Are they crazy? Are they collectively stupid?  Here is the New York Times email.


"Senate Fails to End Partial Shutdown at F.A.A.

After dealing with the debt crisis, Senate negotiators tried and failed Tuesday to end a stalemate over temporary funding for the Federal Aviation Administration, leaving 4,000 F.A.A. employees out of work and relying on airport safety inspectors to continue working without pay.

The partial F.A.A. shutdown, which began July 23 and is likely to continue at least through Labor Day, has also idled tens of thousands of construction workers on airport projects around the country. Dozens of airport inspectors have been asked by the F.A.A. to work without pay and to charge their government travel expenses to their personal credit cards to keep airports operating safely."


I don't want to believe the senate could be this irresponsible! You don't mess with air safety.


A recent poll by CNN and others suggested congress has acted like spoiled children. This senatorial non-action proves it and is criminal and unbelieveable. VOTE THEM ALL OUT!


I will for Schumer and Gillibrand in New York. 

Washington's Folly

Apparently nobody in Congress likes the debt ceiling bill. At least that what they will all say so that they can get reelected. Few in America like the bill so what do we have? The House passed it and the Senate votes today. Way to go Senator guys and gals. You have once again proven your inability to serve this great country.

We have a Congress that has disappointed their constituency because of the political antics that directed this agreement to be a cliff hanger down to the last second.

We have a President who played into the political mire instead of being the statesman he must be as leader of the free world. It is an asinine way to govern the country.

The rest of the world is pee-ode at our leadership's inability to compromise. An early agreement would have sparred all of us the tension and the economic fear of fiscal collapse.

There is no reason why an agreement could not have been reached weeks ago.

Sorry, yes there is. It's POLITICS!

Actually it's a bunch of "P" words.

Polemics,  pecuniary passions, pedantry, partisanship and parsimonious. 

All of Washington led us down the path of worry. Why must contention be the catylist of compromise in this Congress?  Let us see what the Senate does today.

Wishes

I know none of my wishes is possible, but it sure would be nice.

I wish a number of common sense people could move to the congressional districts of stubborn uncompromising representatives and vote them out of office.

I wish we had term limits for all elected officials.

I wish Congress would have our Social Security System and our health care and not the elitist systems they voted for themselves way back when.

I wish we each had the power to demand certain drivers retake the written and road test.

I wish there was a universal code of behavior for all parents to teach their children with a special mandatory refresher section for stores and restaurants.

I wish every graduating college student could write a simple declarative sentence.

I wish there was a flat tax for all Americans and corporations. No deductions; no loop holes.

I wish all candidates for elective office had to pass a history and a geography test and take an ethics course.

I wish all children in the world would never know hunger.

I wish golf balls would always go straight, ice cream had no calories and gas was a dollar a gallon.

OK, I'm awake. What a dream.

Have a great Monday.