Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Separation of Religion and State


Normally in any election cycle the issue of religion in school comes up in some form or the other.  This year Ms. O'Donnel from New Jersey had a problem with Constitutional precedence pertaining to the intention of the founding father's when they penned the First Amendment to that great base document.  Other candidates have touched on this electrified issue.  Oh well…I am not going to get into the deep implications of the need for separation of religion from national politics since it will only cause people to get all huffy and silly in their standpoint on the issue.  Instead I will tell you my own little story of growing up in an America that did not keep their eyes on the impact of this issue on the people it was suppose to "protect."  I came to America from Ireland, a small country which can certainly boast being one of the most religiously biased nations in the world for lots of good and bad reasons.  I grew to adulthood in Southern California in a relatively small town atmosphere where virtually all of the larger religions were represented by its residents.  Religion was not something that was a normal topic of discussion except for the occasional crude or ugly stereotypical jokes passed between friends about one or more of the major religions.   This was in the mid-1950s so religion was in fact, a topic of instruction in the classroom normally handled by a weekly one two hour block of instruction presented by a visiting cleric of some sort.  To accommodate the non-Protestant students such as myself and my good buddy, Virgil Applebaum, on those days in which religion was taught, all non-Protestant students were led outside to waiting buses and vans and driven to our respective instructional sites.  The Catholic boys and girls were taken to St. Michael's Catholic Church for our weekly Catechism classes. Virgil and other Jewish students were taken to their Synagogue for Hebrew Schul.  Sounds like a solution right?   Here was a simple solution to accommodating all religions while keeping religious instruction part of the school curriculum.  Well it wasn't all twittering birds and soft breezes by any means and wound making causing all of the non-Protestant children the strongest advocates for absolutely no religious instructions during regular school sessions. Why?  Well here is what really happened.  Protestant children were told that Christian religious training would be provided in school on such and such a day.  Non-Protestant children would be provided transportation to their respective religious training site.  Remember now you are talking to pre-teens!  Here is what they hear.  "Christians who believe in God will be given religious training on such and such a day.  The children who do not believe in God will be taken out of the classroom and sent some other mysterious place that does not believe in God."  When we "pagans" returned to class to rejoin our classmates you can just imagine the remarks, taunts and personal insults that we endured on the playground.   When we entered middle school and later on high school formal religious instruction was no longer provided in any form but by then the die had been fully cast among my classmates.  I, like all Catholics, believed in some other type of God that was not Christian and very mysterious at best.  Same for Jewish students but even more so since they "denied" certain aspects of Christianity.  Do we really want to fill our children with these types of confusing images?  Just think what we went through for the six years that we were California elementary school students.  Now you know why I am so very very strongly opposed to any type of prayer or religious training in our schools. 

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

My Choice For Oppression


An exerpt from an article written by:
Sharon Davis
Professor, Ohio State University and author of
"Rising Road: A True Tale
of Love, Race and Religion
in America"

…..A radical religious group, lurking inside the country, owing loyalty to a foreign power, threatens America.  No one denies that its members have a right to worship as they please, but good Americans, patriots, feel compelled to call for curbs against the menace they present.  Because of the number of Americans sharing these fears, calls for restrictions on the religion are voiced openly and unapologetically, even proudly……The holders of such beliefs (are) not just some fringe crazies safely outnumbered by clear-eyed religiously tolerant neighbors.  To the contrary, widely popular (opposition) literature spilled from newsstands across the country like Sen. Tom Watson's Jeffersonian out of Atlanta and The Menace of Aurora, MO., whose subscriptions dwarfed those of the largest newspapers in New York City and Chicago combined.  Elections (are being) won on promises to oust (this threat).  Only true Americans should hold such positions, (goes) the warning, not (this threat) who *are) loyal first to their religious leaders (in foreign countries)….

The article goes on to describe with blistering details the various Federal and State attempts to circumvent the Constitution to counter this alleged threat.  The article also details the many acts of violence and death meted out to these people by these same "true Americans."  It is written by a noted professor but it is not about Muslims in contemporary America.   It is about Roman Catholic Americans in the 1920s.   Numerous laws on warrantless searches of Monasteries, nunneries and churches were written by several States.  Various murders of Catholic clerics and Congregationalist are drawn from various newspaper accounts.  Jews, Catholics and virtually all foreign émigrés were added to the hate roster of the burgeoning Ku Klux Klan.   In much the same manner as the forced incarceration of thousands US born Asian-American in the US, grand an elaborate apologies for our ignorance and shortcomings have been numerous but let's not forget we are not talking about ancient history here.  We are talking about several decades ago.  Will we continue down a similar road of ignorant blind hate towards our Muslim neighbors and then "make it all better" twenty or thirty years from now with some erudite apologetic blather about different times and different people?  Probably!  Then I am sure we will find someone else to hate since the American psyche does not seem to be able to function very well without someone to despise.  Whose next? Latinos – nah, they are already pretty much on the scope as targets already.  Maybe we will fall back on Eastern Europeans – they were always fun to tease.  Blacks? Probably not – hell they fight back and that is no fun.  I vote for those sneaky Canadians. Nobody can be that nice without some ulterior motive.  We need to start watching all of those Canucks now before it is too late.  Never trust anyone from Saskatchewan.  No way!!!  Yep, they are my choice and besides, we could actually drive to the war front when we invade those insidious folks from Montreal.         

Monday, October 18, 2010

I Just Know They Would Not Lie To Me


I find myself looking forward to the world after 2 November.  The people of the United States will cast votes for "change" in much the same manner that Germans cast votes for change in the 1930s.   Anything just has to be better somehow than the people they elected last time.  Yes, they seem to forget that little fact – virtually everyone of the key players on Capital Hill were put there by the same people who are screaming for change now.   At any rate, we will probably turn over the control the legislative body to the "other side" by close of business on 2 November and if we are to believe the millions of dollars worth of campaign propaganda being poured out over our media, by 3 November everything should be OK again in America.  The evil liberals will have been vanquished and the true patriots of the conservative party will now steer us to a new horizon of wealth and prosperity.  I personally will not accept anything less from them.  I mean they did promise me didn't they?   I guess I will learn to get along without my Social Security annuity and of course without the new health care law, I will have to learn to get along with less coverage since I probably will not be able afford the premiums what with my Social Security being cancelled and Medicare being downsized and all.   I am a 100% disabled Vet so I am excited about the idea of full privatization of the Veteran's Administration.  That should be really neat.  With no continuation of extended unemployment insurance, the soldiers returning from the end of the ten years of Mideast war might have a little bit of a financial burden to deal with but with all of this new instant prosperity, they should be able jump right into this new prosperity.  Banks and lending institutions will be able to shrug off any new rules under the new folks and before long even the poorest and most humble in our society will be able to commit to a 3500 square foot home with in-ground pool.  It will be so neat.  Of course by undoing the last two years of legislation, it will result in a bit of a roadblock on Capital Hill but the conservatives have spent the last two years training the American public to accept total cryonics in the legislature so we will not be surprised to see everything continue to freeze up.  Won't that be fun?  Of course Muslims, homosexuals, Latinos, and the mentally challenged in America will find things to be a little cool for a while but all they have to do is renounce all of those bad things and act like the rest of us and everything will be OK.   I am sure it will be really neat.  Of course if the conservatives and their Tea Party cultist do fail to succeed in their promised Eden, they will insure a second term for the current Chief Executive.  All he would have to do is point in "their" direction for any failures in not solving the recession, the crashed housing market, the unemployment problems, "bailouts", health care programs, trade deficits, and social welfare problems.  But I am sure they would not lie to me and they do in fact have some sort of secret plan to fix all of these things in the next two years to prevent a second term by the current POTUS.  I am sure of this since they certainly would not lie to me!


Sunday, October 3, 2010

Interesting Times


I am 66 years old and have survived a lot of things in my life including over a dozen US Presidents.  Except for the first couple (Truman and Eisenhower), I recall each of their terms in either lesser or greater detail.  Through all of their tribulations, I still recall many of their momentous decisions, good and bad in terms that caused my current political ideology to grow and become part of me.   I was a soldier in Vietnam when I voted for Nixon's first term and probably BECAUSE I was a soldier in Vietnam I could not foresee another minute let alone another four years with this person in charge of my future.   One President, Johnson, was so immune to the trappings of power that he chose not to seek a sure second term knowing that our involvement in foreign entanglements was so dangerous that the country needed someone else with a clearer understanding of those complexities.  I recall an old Chinese saying that explains how I feel now – "May you live in interesting times."  My father, a fluent Chinese linguist and cultural Chinese expert noted that this saying was actually more of a curse than a casual greeting.  He was right.  I have lived in interesting times some of which were so frightening and filled with anxious foreboding that I honestly believed at the time that my "interesting times" were rapidly coming to an end.  Through it all, I considered myself a true patriot willing to make whatever sacrifices necessary to insure the continuation of this nation's great promises to itself, its citizens and the rest of the world.  The funny part was that I considered almost everyone I knew to be equally motivated to work towards the noble goals of this nation.  I was never afraid of my government not because I was naïve but rather because I understood and firmly believed in the security afforded to my fellow citizens by the string and viable system of checks and balances.   I understood democracy and saw it as a beacon of hope for the entire world and the people lucky enough to live in this country.  There were scandals involving some of our elected officials usually involving greed or sexual misconduct but after we stopped tittering like school children we usually managed to take the appropriate steps to punish or censor these misdeeds and I trusted in the system to carry out these punishments on behalf of the citizens of the US.  I felt great distress for people forced to survive under "banana dictatorships."  I was amused at actual democracies having a devil of a time maintaining any sense of dignity as they elected and then ousted their leadership almost monthly.   I cannot actually ever recall watching a nation attempting to maintain its own form of leadership and laughing about their stupidity and blundering ineptitude.  I took all forms of government serious even the flawed ones.  They were NOT laughing matters because they, regardless of how small or large, affected us all.   Now I am witness to the greatest nation in the world doing its utmost to become the laughing stock of all nations, good or bad.  We are preparing to go to our polls to elect individuals to the "greatest deliberative body the world has known" and with such a great responsibility facing us, we have managed to assemble a veritable Barnum and Bailey side show of candidates and seem totally incapable of stopping this tragedy from occurring.  Consider that these dozen or so side show freaks have at least one thing in common – world class hypocrisy.  All of these dancing bears are vowing to hate big government and want to emasculate ot to something resembling a national level receptionist desk whose only function is to wait for someone to call and challenge us to war.  In the meantime what is left of the government should not have any voice in any matters pertaining to its citizens thereby forever burying Mr. Lincoln's belief in government of the people, by the people and for the people.  Yet these same pseudo-anarchist are spending literally millions of dollars each to insure they acquire a seat in this hoped for waddling eunuch that used to be a beacon of hope.  Just a quick review of what these dozen or so freaks and geeks are seeking:

1.      Abrogation of the US Civil Right Act and all legal precedence involved in this nations attempt to bring equality to its citizens. 

2.      The dismantling of the US Social Security system and its role as a safety net for its aged and disabled citizens.

3.     The dismantling of the US Department of Education and the ceasing of its role in insuring that even the poorest school districts receive assistance in educating our greatest assets – our children. 

4.     The dismantling of the Medicare system which currently enables our citizens the ability to receive at least emergency and necessary health care. 

5.     The dismantling of the US Department of Transportation thus eliminating this nations capability to move its commercial goods and security machinery across this great country.  

6.     Dismantling and in a couple of cases the actual elimination of the US national taxation system.  No money will mean no government.

7.      Eliminating or at least severely limiting the ability of emigrants to enteer this country thus stagnating our ability to learn from the great wealth of experience these cultures bring to a nation. 

8.     Elimination of any US national department or agency that does not pay its own way, inhibits any type of commercial ventures or does not actually add to the national GDP.   No support to the fine arts, national parks system, any programs overseeing potential pollution and quality of life issues.  

9.     All welfare programs (naturally) thus putting millions of our citizens out on the streets to fend for themselves, even those citizens suffering from mental or physical disorders that may well make them a danger to themselves and those around them.  

 Oh heck, why go on.  It's in all the newspapers.  I just have to imagine a junket to one of the NATO countries by one or more of these dozen or so clowns.  Imagine the Prime Minister of England trying to conduct a meaningful dialogue with the Belle Of Delaware and her past as a dabbling witch.  How would the Chancellor of Germany react to conversations with the Darling of Nevada who would try to explain the concepts of trading chickens for health care.  Well you see where this could lead.  We may well have to spend at least fifty years just trying to regain some semblance of dignity in the world.   Have a nice day – and please please please Vote!