Limbaugh's Legacy

I just read that Rush Limbaugh is going to be one of six judges at this year’s Miss America Pageant. When asked about it, Limbaugh said, “ I feel comfortable judging people.”

Even if you ignore all the poppycock he espouses on his radio program, that statement tells you something about his ultra-conservative demeanor and megalomania posture.

My problem is that Limbaugh and O'Reilly and Beck are publicly sustaining the worst of noble conservative causes only because it increases their ratings and their pocketbook. Your choice in watching their programs puts millions and millions of dollars in their pocket. You may agree with their pontifications and that’s fine, but it does not validate what is true or truth. They have what is called a bully pulpit and as long as we all understand that, their protestations can be accepted or rejected by their listeners. I know they claim not to be a news program, but their actions and statements say otherwise.

I spent over 50 years as a practicing journalist embedded in the tradition of fairness and impartiality. Just the facts, as we knew them, were presented in a story so that you as a responsible citizen might evaluate, assimilate and accept or not. No opinion was proclaimed, portrayed or purveyed.

Every time I read or hear or see these purveyors of opinion portraying themselves as paragons of patriotic truth I am dismayed and disappointed in the American public’s ability to distinguish between opinion and fact. Unfortunately it is still true that people only hear what they want to hear. The cartoon adage is valid: "Don't confuse me with the facts, my mind is made up."

Back to Rush and his judgments. I wonder if he too wants to save the world from hunger as so many of the contestants proclaim. It may also be time to let this contest go by way of the Ford Edsel.

It’s interesting, you won’t find this year’s pageant on NBC or ABC, you’ll find it on The Learning Channel. Let us hope so.

Is Winter Over Yet?

What is it about the end of January in the northeast that brings a spark of expectation that it might get warm again?

Just in that last few days the sustaining white of snow on my lower meadow has melted in patches and the pond ice is thinking about it. Meadows are clear forecasters.

When it’s white it’s cold enough to hold the snow. When it’s warmish there are patches of matted brown grass. When the pond freezes it’s very cold. How simple is that?

There is a portion of a poem I wrote many years ago that seems to fit this post. I will title it, “Season’s Change.”

Winter’s clime and its crispy breath of cold
Bring shivers to a pond to freeze to ice
With strength, so skaters’ strides it will uphold,
Gliding on the slippery paradise.

Soon comes the warmth of springtime’s longer light
To melt the winter’s hold into a sheen
Of glass, erasing skaters’ grooves of white —
Engravings on the ice when frozen clean.

Throughout the spring the pond becomes alive
With harmonies of life who make it home.
The dragonflies and fish in swarms arrive
To nest beside the tadpoles’ bubbled foam.

Young April nights hear movements to abide,
As whistling peepers pipe their mating call
And turtles roust from out their winter hide.
The rustles in the dark — a creature’s crawl.

When summer’s sun rests easy on the pond,
The buzzing of communities abound.
Cicadas and the crickets call beyond
The water’s edge, astounding with their sound.

Then comes the fall and paintings by the frost
Cast colors on the water near the shore,
Festooning red and yellow tints till lost
Beneath the shine where eyes cannot explore.

Then comes winter again and we’re back to where we started. Life is kind of like that, isn’t it?

Trillions plus...

The Congressional Budget Office reported yesterday that this year's federal budget deficit will be lower than expected. They thought we'd be 1.4 trillion overdrawn, but instead it was only 1.35 trillion dollars.

Wow!  Uncle Sam sure can manage money. My budget is balanced. Common sense requires it. Maybe someday I'll learn how to do some deficit spending like my esteemed representatives in the House and Senate.

Frankly I don't think they understand what a trillion is.

For most of us it's difficult to fathom what a trillion dollars really is.

It's a million millions, or a thousand billions, but beyond that it is hard to understand what a trillion is except to spend it like it was taxpayer money.

If we look at it another way the understanding of the amount becomes mind boggling.

If someone started counting seconds, like one...two....three, the moment that Jesus was born that person would be up to just over sixty five billion seconds now.

That's 6.5% of a trillion.

It takes thirty one thousand seven hundred years to count to a trillion seconds.

That is three hundred and seventeen centuries and we are only in the very beginning of the 21st century. Somebody, maybe Congress, ought to count a lot faster for as of yesterday we are 12.3 trillion dollars in debt.

Fleeting Thoughts

I’m sitting here at my computer thinking about a thought for the morning that you might choose to read. First of all, my appreciation is that you occasionally take the time to check these wandering words and free-floating thoughts. Thank you.

I often read the wandering constructions of others and have for most of my life. Today I find the eclectic missives of thoughtful and thoughtless people plastered all over the Internet universe.

Long before the Internet, however, I dug into a collection of printed thinking in a college dorm room reading a book by Cyril Connolly. He was a British writer who died in 1974. The book was called the Unquiet Grave. I loved that book. It became my mantra, my friend, and my go to reading to escape or to embrace a thought for discussion or debate.

Though not from that book, one of my favorite quotes from Connolly is: “Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism is what will be read once.” I suppose that’s why I chose journalism as a career.

I used to say things like that when I would speak to service organizations or at a college journalism class. I would say, “Broadcast information journalism is fleeting. You get to say it once for people who half hear and half listen and misinterpret quickly.” My concluding logic to my students or audience was that is why it is so important to say it clearly, cleanly and concisely the first time.

There was one passage from the book that I have never forgotten. Connolly was talking about a bow and arrow in some context. As I remember it, he said, “Who is to say whether a bow tightens the string or the string bends a bow?”

Even as a young student I found that to be the ultimate life dichotomy. It was a beautiful contradiction that could be extrapolated into understandable every day experiences.

Thank you for sharing my meanderings on this dry-out morning in the east.

Be well.

Teenagers

If you ever get a chance to spend some quality time with teenagers I would recommend that you do so. Most of us elders forget what it was like when we were teens. We think we remember, but when it comes right down to it, we don’t. We remember the essence of being teens, but not the specifics and the practicality. Our imaginations remember better than what was in reality.

I was a teenager in the 50’s. The time of James Dean, the actor not the singer. The time of Elvis, hotrods, fallout shelters, Yankees dominating the American League pennant race, Black Jack gum, Howdy Dowdy, Glass soda pop bottles, fifty-cent movies.  Captain Video, I love Lucy and cigarette ads all over the television, magazines and newspapers, Ed Sullivan on Sunday night TV and Edward R. Murrow on CBS.

We had our wars too. Korea was prominent, but the death and dying of American troops was not. It was just as tragic as today and numerous, but we didn’t know about it for weeks or months. The media’s technology had not yet developed enough to share instantaneous information.

Today’s teens know who their entertainment and social heroes are, and they are environmentally aware and diligently recycle. Their cognitive powers are far more advanced than mine was as a teenager.
They are conscious of their sugar intake and they have oodles of information from computers and iPods available to them to augment their interests, amplify their studies and their hopes and wishes.

I often write about my encounters with my teenage granddaughters. One time recently, aunts, uncles, and grandparents sat around the dinner table trying to remember different words for the same thing. The adults did fairly well, until the kids with their hand-held Internet connections kept coming up with new words we couldn’t recall.

This weekend I posed questions that were subjective, not objective, like; “if you suddenly had a million dollars” what would you do with it?

I was blown away by the altruistic answers that came from such young, but aware minds. Granted, readers have the right to say, “ They are your grandchildren, of course, you are going to praise and prattle about their intellect and grace.”

I would certainly compliment their manners, their interaction and courtesy with adults and their limited, yet youthful sophistication, but not about the profundity of their choices and their genuine concern for the well being of family and of humankind.

The specifics of what these youngsters would do with a million are not important. What is important is that they embraced an unselfish vision and are concerned for the world and they tell me that their friends think the same way.

Bravo! Long live the Indigo children.

OK, Now It's Just Ice Cream

Yesterday I wrote about my session with some ice cream and some serious thoughts about the Haiti earthquake. Today some less profound thoughts on the product we call ice cream.

We’ve all had some at one time or another. I go back to the days when it was a nickel a scoop, but that's for another missive.


Let’s take vanilla. The natural version gets its flavor from the bean of a tropical orchid. And there’s the artifical version that gets its flavor by treating wood pulp with sulfuric acid. Some manufacturers use the real stuff and others use the wood pulp. It’s a matter of cost. Look at the label.

Ice Cream is apparently an American concoction dating back to colonial times, but it wasn’t produced commercially until 1851.

Much of our ice cream is a frozen mishmash of simple chemistry and government regulations. The rules ensure that your ice cream is not more than 50% air and that it contains milk fat. I used to think "air" was free.

Ice cream sales soar in the summer months, but it should be the other way around. Ice cream is loaded with calories, a unit of measurement of potential heat. You may think ice cream cools you down, when, in fact, the effect is to make you hotter. Go figure.

No wonder I like it year around.

Have a great weekend.

Ice Cream and Haiti and Shame

Have you ever done anything you didn’t want to do, but did it anyway?

I just did. I had vanilla bean ice cream smothered in chocolate sauce. I didn’t really want to do it, but I did. It was delicious. It had the frou frou of ambrosia and the unctuousness of a melted pearl. Damn it was good.

I point this out because it is so easy for each of us to forget the pain and anguish so far away and so close too. Little comfort things like ice cream or daily tasks take our attention and intention away from what we share as a global community.

Ice Cream did it for me for just a moment and part of me as I let my heart and want wander from the need of life for others.

The images of need coming out of Haiti are powerful. They affect us all.

Along with the buckled roads and crumbled buildings and bodies come the tears of the living.

Survivors' needs sometimes come in sobs, sometimes in wails of disbelief, sometimes in anger. The elders cry for the loss of memories, hoping for the strength to start again. The very young cry not fully understanding the new memory of loss of place and family.

There is worry from all, especially from the children for their security of familiar bed vanished within seconds and adult fear is infectious.  Parents do what they can to comfort the little ones, to reassure, but parental eyes always mirror the heart.

There is really no way in a single news report, or a newscast, that anyone can show you the immensity of the damage or the intensity of the effort to embrace or cling to life, or the effort of strangers to help or the frustration of authorities who can't help everyone immediately.

Right now Haiti is a country that screams, you can feel it as victims search for completeness in the puzzle of rubble and find yesterday's peace is tomorrow's uncertainty.

As we hear the stories of those in need, as we become numbed by the statistics of loss, we cannot feel secure because we have normalcy, because we have shelter or we have food or ice cream or because it didn't happen here.

Real security only comes from giving.  Instantaneous response to need defines true service. The humanity of our world is personified in giving, not only of our abundance, but of our substance, so that the victims know that the collective healing spirit of what we call community has not forgotten them in what we know as compassion and humanity to man.

JD's Mom

John Denver’s Mother died Sunday. She was 87.

A coincidence, I suppose, but I had just written about John a few weeks ago when early morning sunshine touched my shoulders as I sat near a window. Check the January 7th post.

I had the pleasure of talking to Erma Deutschendorf through the years when she would attend the magnificent Windstar symposiums at the music tent in Aspen.

She was a simple woman living in a small house in the Aurora section of Denver. Inside were pictures and portraits of John, mementoes of his tributes and travels and then after John’s untimely death the omnipresent heartache of a Mother who loses a child.

Many years ago I was the recipient of her hospitality when she hosted a gathering of the Windstar Foundation Board at her home. John’s brother Ron Deutschendorf conducted the meeting.

I have a wonderful vision of John greeting his Mom in some ethereal place without time or pain, and filled with the love and light of peace and comfort. I think he’d even sing for her and tell her grand stories of where he’s been and what he’s done all these years he’s been away.

John’s brother Ron has had the burden of heart and hope for his Mom these past several years. My sympathy to him and to all who are saddened by her passing.

Erma Louise Deutschendorf (1922-2010).

Comfort of Friends and Music

Note to anonymous commentator on Grandparent's Rights.

You make a valid point and I will rethink my original position. Thanks RGS

-0-

Tuesday's Post:

As I write this I am listening to “A Te, O Cara,” from the opera “I Puritiani” by Bellini. It is one of my favorite selections of all Operas, with the possible exception of Puccini’s “O soave fanciulla” in La Boheme.

Having said that and the fact that this post has nothing to do with the music I am listening to, but everything to do with the generation of comfort, I suppose they are minutely and mystically connected.

I recently returned from a gathering of elders and almost elders celebrating the 80th birthday of a mutual friend.

I looked around the long table of aging friends and felt privileged being in their company for they are all successful and accomplished gentlemen either active or retired in their chosen professions.

It mattered not that we were all friends from previous outings and experiences. At the moment of dining and libation we were all equal colleagues and acquaintances joyfully celebrating a singular and special moment in another’s life.

My mind moved to what some mystics call “the sacred moment of being” and I rejoiced in the moment, the feeling of freedom, the wonder of expectation and the knowing that camaraderie is instantaneous and fleeting in this density and time, but eternal elsewhere.

I will see these souls again here, if that is given to me to experience and if not here somewhere else in the eternity of being. Trying to fathom that moment in a restaurant bar with glasses clanking and dishes rattling and ambient laughter is at best difficult, but possible if one truly lives in the moment.

I don’t get there often, but when I do it's wonderful.

Martin Luther King

Martin Luther King
© Rolland G. Smith 1995


I had a dream the other night
and Martin Luther King was there.
He spoke in tones befit the wise
and asked me if I’d share
The news of how his dream came out,
since he had been away.

I told him times had changed somewhat
but the dream was still a dream
And somewhere in these many years was
progress, or so it seemed.
Tell me, he said, what has happened,
since he had been away.

We’ve legislated out the hate, I said,
but laws can’t touch the mind,
If bias reeks within the heart,
there cannot be a human – kind.
It’s still not true, he said,
for he had been away.

And then he said, where he is now,
there is no ONE color bright,
Not black or white, yellow or brown.
There is only a loving light.

It’s the truth I lived, and live,
he said, as he went away.

Grandparent Rights?

I know, I know, sometimes it's not good to beat an old horse or whatever the old saying is.

But, I'm remembering a Supreme Court decision of ten years ago on grandparents rights which I disagreed with then and still do now.


The Court basically said grandparents have no rights when it comes to access and visitation rights with their grandchildren.

The intricacies of the case are not important, but the emotion of it tuged at the hearts of all grandparents who can empathize with the emptiness of not seeing their kids' kids.

We live in a society today where divorce is easy and prevalent. Children, once products of a loving relationship, become pawns in the often vitriolic battles between divorcing couples. The pain of divorce, for whatever reason, brings on attack in one parent or another and most times both. Often the attack affects whatever or whomever the other partner loved, specifically their parents. Thus by denying a grandparent the access to a grandchild the hurt of the grandparent can be transferred as pain to the divorcing parent.

This supreme court decision was based on a hesitancy of further legalizing a states intrusion into the alleged family unit, albeit a single parent unit.

All parents, divorcing or not, should be aware of what psychologists and anthropologists have been telling us for years. Young people need the experience of generational understanding and experience. Grandparents bring a unconditional balance that parents most often cannot provide.

It is no wonder that the United States is one of the few nation's on earth that does not revere its elders. Unfortunately the supreme court decision reinforces that unnatural condition.

Haitian Earthquake

Somehow it doesn’t seem real. It's very close to the United States. We are, in fact, neighbors. We watch the pictures of destruction in disbelief and see rescurers digging for children and adults in collapsed buildings. We report the dead in numbers, not names. We can repair buildings, and roads, but the bodies that held the names are gone forever.        

All we can do is embrace the Hatian people in our hearts and send relief supplies.  Grief is such a painful personal hurt. Sorrow is more universal in its heartache, for it acknowledges on a higher level the collective loss to humankind. How many of the dead numbers were potential scientists, poets, leaders or potential parents of genius.

Empathy is not only the capacity to understand another’s feelings, it is the willingness to comfort, to cry together and to share the strength of hope when so many see nothing but despair.  Hope lets those who hurt know they have not been forgotten by a loving spirit as it manifests itself through a helping hand, a hug or a shared tear.

Mark McGwire

Baseball great Mark McGwire has admitted using steroids after years of denial.

I still like to hold onto the naïveté that it is a gift to play in any professional sport. So many try, and so few make it. Those who do make it have a responsibility first to themselves and then to the fans that elevate them by adulation, admiration and expectation.

Players are temporary holders of the sacred gift of gamesmanship and they must hold it honorably as a Grail for those who follow them.

Mark McGwire failed in that honor. It is also a failure of major league baseball and all professional sports that tend to look the other way, especially when dollars are at stake.

In recent years professional sports players have been charged with murder, assault, burglary, and weapons and drug possession. For them it is a litany of lack. Lack of self esteem, lack of judgment, lack of character and lack of respect for the institution of whatever sport they are playing and the game of hard competition.

It may also be the Pandora's box of plenty. Too much money, too soon, too young and not enough experience in the hard, but honorable choices of life.

Intellectual Property?

Somebody better tell Mexico to read history.

Here’s the issue.

The Mexican government claims it owns the intellectual property on various pre-Hispanic artifacts, which Starbucks was using as imagery on mugs. Specifically, it's upset about images of an Aztec stone calendar and the Pyramid of the Moon from Teotihuacan.

Mexico wants Starbuck to pay a licensing fee in order to use the images.

Good grief! How do you own what was never yours?

“Pre-Hispanic,” that means before Mexico was Mexico and before Spain sent the sword and disease to conquer, loot and obliterate thriving cultures in what is now central, South and portions of North America.

I would suggest all Mexican authorities read the book, 1491, by Charles C. Mann. It contains revelations about the Americas before Columbus.

México, tiene una gran cultura, no reclama otra historia.

Arctic Cold

Good Morning,

I wrote a version of this a few years back, but it is appropriate for the current freeze along the Eastern seaboard. It is eight degrees where I live. I have a fire going and it is comfortable inside.

"The warmth of a long ago sun spreads into my room as a log fire burns its way to ash giving back the heat and light of many season’s growth. Flames dance in a flickering grace of form and color. Heat is the result. Light a soft byproduct.

A few feet away is the cold. It is a stinging cold with only a window glass to hold it back. It’s double glass, a bulwark of silica that another temperature and time turned into a transparent glazing of clarity and protection.

In old houses with single panes of flawed glass frost would decorate the panes into a translucent crystal of art, but not now. Modern houses are too tight for nature’s cryogenic beauty to seep in and paint the panes with a cameo of cold. Too bad! Most kids today will miss the vision of feathered frost on the inside of a windowpane where they can scratch their own design into the thin sheet of condensed ice.

Just beyond my outer pane is an astringent cold that if you stepped outside without protection it would hurt, tear the eyes and tighten the inner nose when breath is necessary. It’s an arctic tight. Not a tight of clothes and layers, but a tightness of breath.

But I’m inside and warm and I feel safe.  Proximity to potential danger seems to do that. Other dangers will evoke a similar feeling. High winds, flooding, blizzards, and even summer heat can harm, but if we feel safe, protected while near the danger, then the rest of the feeling and fear basks in the comfort of illusion. Safety is only as good as the protection that holds back the danger.

Damn it’s cold outside!"

Hume's Assertion

Ah…there is another religious controversy brewing in the media. Last weekend news anchor Brit Hume was a panelist on a news program. At one point, the discussion centered on the Tiger Woods infidelity admission and his fall from golf's lofty professional perch.

Hume said that he believed Tiger Woods' Buddhist faith didn't offer "the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith.”


Whoa! People reacted. Pundits pontificated. Discussion ensued.

The question asked in one pole, “was it wrong for Hume to say what he did?”

In the pole calculations 49% said it was wrong and 51% said it wasn’t.

To me, the question asked in the pole was wrong. Hume has the right to his convictions and to say whatever he thinks, that is the guaranteed right of all of us. The question rightfully to be asked is Hume correct in his assertion? 

If God, as all religions profess, is All There Is, omniscient, omnipresent, then God is in all beliefs, all faiths, all religions, and in all things.

Now the questions are: does the Christian faith have a lock on redemption? To go a little bit further, does the Jewish faith have a lock on being God's favorite people? Do Moslems have a lock on any of their beliefs? Does any religion have the right to kill another because someone else doesn’t believe the same as they do?

The final question is: does any religion have the right to claim superiority over any other belief?

I think not to all questions, but let us ask God.

Sunshine and Shoulders

I had a profound awareness this morning as I sat in a chair next to an Easterly window. The sun rose without a morning cloudiness to obscure or dilute its rays. I was reading a new book from Deepak Chopra while the early morning light bathed my shoulders with its warmth through double glazed windows.

I paused in my reading and thought of my old friend, singer, entertainer, actor, activist and environmentalist John Denver and his song, “Sunshine On My Shoulders.”

I replayed in my mind his many gifts to the world.

John was a poet, a singer of songs, a friend to many, an idol of millions the world over. He died in a plane crash in October 1997.  We continue to honor our friend with personal memories of his laughter and his profound intellect.

We remember his public gifts of song and self, his harmonies of love and nature, his vision for a sustainable future and all of the joys of life he shared through an extraordinary ability to entertain.  His songs would take us to places where troubles couldn't reach, at least for a while. His lyrics encouraged us to seek a higher ground. His hugs were special for they were given without condition and his smile personified his spirit and his love of life and human kind.

Someday we will celebrate his life without the salt of sadness and that's right. We all come into this world, make choices, make sacrifices, laugh a little, love a little, cry a little and learn through experience that the true importance of life is to share our gifts, to be true to ourselves and to make the world a little better place to live.

I hope I have more sunshine on my shoulders soon. I like remembering my friend.

New Year Thoughts

So here we are in the first week of the New Year and a New Decade. Now that the celebrations are over and the resolutions made and we are back to work or school, where do we as a spiritual collective community in human form go from here?

I have an answer, not THE answer, but one that seems as good as any other. We continue to create what we call experience, good and bad, so that we can individually and collectively move toward “oneness ” with the Divine. It is the guiding principle of finite existence acknowledging the Divine as the motivator of life.

My conclusion is drawn from nature. Yesterday I watched a swirling snow shower with each individual flake dancing with and within the wind currents and eventually settling into a collective ground blanket of crystalline white.

Once settled onto the earth all appeared to be one covering comprised of individual flakes linked together in a batten of white. The flakes reminded me of our souls, or spirits dancing with physical life. There are similarities between the two that help us understand the divinity within our consciences.

Each of us living on earth, all six billion plus of us, both enemy and friend alike and each snowflake are the individuations of the indivisible. We each are formed uniquely and meld into a oneness, yet we maintain and sustain our individuality.

Once we see that within the frailty of human thought we are really “one,” we will have peace.

I will hold that thought until in manifests as the reality of life.

Elder v's Senior Citizen

This is a one-time verbal campaign to change the name “senior cititzen” to “elder.” I like the singular sound of “elder” better than the duality of “senior citizen.” Elder sounds wise to me. Senior citizen sounds Orwellian at best and old at worst. Elders can be primitive, sophisticated, plain or profound. We must listen to them not silence them.

The native peoples of the world use the term elder as a plateau of respect, honor and acquired wisdom and as a sacred reminder of the ancestral past. Modern society, flooded with its passion for youth and anything new sees seniors as a nuisance, something to tolerate and move aside.

We often hide our elder’s brilliance and accumulated knowledge in the belief they are finished and have nothing more to contribute. We smother their life stories and valued memories into boxed rooms and medicated minds.

We need to free them with avenues for public expression and participation.

Elders are the strata of humanity. They are the human schist of wisdom precipitated into the sediments of experience. Elders have the acquired pallor of experience and the wrinkled rows of worry and the knowing that youth must learn it their own way.

We need to find ways for the young to acknowledge the elder in themselves and the elder to reactivate their enthusiasm of youth. Anthropologist Margaret Mead said that’s the way to have agreement between generations.

Body Scan

A major airport in my area will soon get the full body scanning machines to check passengers getting onto flights. I’m OK with that, but many are not.

Some people are insisting it is an invasion of privacy; that argument is puritanical hogwash.

The world is filled with over six billion human beings. To point out the obvious there are only two sexes.

Everyone knows what the private parts of men and women look like. The images from the scanner are not publically seen and erased as soon as the next person is scanned, so what’s the issue?  If a full body scan saves even one life from an individual who wants to do harm then bring it on.

People who don’t want their private parts scanned need to get with the global mentality of today that there are people, organizations, and radicals out there who would like to kill people and there are deluded souls who will blow themselves up believing martyrdom is their reward.

To me it is insane to argue privacy when lives are at stake including your own.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year everybody!