A Long Overdue Update

Although hardly anyone noticed, my blog — “Thoughts on What We May Not Notice” — has been dormant for several years. Life got in the way, and then some!

My dear wife, Jeanne Kelly Bernish, fell ill in June, 2023 with what turned out to be viral encephalitis, a brain disorder that negatively messes up the basics of existence: walking, talking, thinking, staying awake. Jeanne had just finished and published a fiction novel when she was smitten with the sudden onset of worrisome symptoms: hand tremors, a weakening voice. All this happened in short order, like a ton of bricks falling on her head.

As I write, she is slowly recovering and remains in treatment as her caregivers search for a solution. Her legs are very weak, and she struggles to walk. Her mind is a jumble of strong executive reasoning, vivid childhood memories, and, confoundedly, the inability to recall recent conversations or the day or month.

I offer these details because encephalitis (and a subsequent spinal cord inflammation) has completely changed our lives. We are only now coming to grips with what lies ahead for us (made even more fraught by my penchant to fall down in public places, as was the case this week at a local bank branch. A quick tour of a hospital ER concluded that I had once again not damaged anything but my self-esteem and confidence).

Many couples and families have experienced similar crises. Will she be cured — back to normal, or something less functional! Can she drive? Cook? Write that second novel?

None of the many doctors treating her know the answer. The uncertainty gnaws at your gut. Can our future be viable or constrained? Can we be happy again? We both love to travel.

It’s a new chapter in our lives. New chapters are attractive, like driving on the highway and suddenly a new vista appears. Or it can be murky and dark. Still. we will deal with whatever happens as best we can. Just last night, Jeanne stayed awake in her tiny hospital room writing out notes for her new book.

It isn’t all bad. Our neighbors are incredibly helpful — guardian angels in the house next door. There are EMS crews available at all hours to come to the rescue and treat with limitless kindness. Doctors and nurses are indefatigable in trying to find out what the hell happened to Jeanne. Our children, our extended families, and our old friends have signed on to embark on this new cruise with us.

And, for what it is worth, I have returned to writing, always my only real ability. I was reading an old blog post to Jeanne the other day, and without warning, I choked up at the words I had set down years ago. This isn’t bad, I said to myself. Do this more often.

And so here I am.

Using a Cane

After two recent falls — face plants in parking lots — I now always use a cane to get around. It’s annoying and cumbersome. But I’ve come to accept that my cane is something that will help me survive a bit longer. You could say I have — literally — learned the age-old lesson, “Pride goeth before the fall.”

My knowledge of canes and their uses is pretty slim. I vaguely recall my grandmother using one. And there’s also this historical tidbit: in 1856, with the nation increasingly divided over the issue of slavery, a South Carolina Representative named Preston Brooks walked into the old Senate Chamber and, using a steel-tipped cane, beat Massachusetts anti-slavery Senator Charles Sumner to a bloody pulp (Sumner somehow survived). I doubt that was the recommended use of canes even then.

Canes are perhaps best known as props for dancers, like the incomparable Fred Astaire, who could glide across the stage effortlessly tap dancing while holding and twirling a cane. The irony of such an image needs no elaboration.

Using a cane to walk is for me now a necessity, which in a way astounds me. Never in a million years did I ever think I would someday be hobbled and unsteady on my feet. Never once did the thought even cross my mind that I would need a cane for the most basic of human activities: walking, going up and down stairs, grocery shopping.

Canes are definitely a nuisance. In restaurants, there isn’t any place to put your cane while you eat; mine usually ends up on the floor for wait staff to trip over. It is also not a good idea to go to a football or baseball game if it requires you to walk up or down the very steep stairs typical of all stadia today. I went to a football game with my daughter but left my cane in the car. As we were leaving, I lost my balance and thought I was about to tumble off the upper deck. My life passed before my eyes, interrupted by the firm grasp of a nearby fan who grabbed my arm.

Taking your cane when you fly is no fun (what is fun about flying, especially in steerage?); you are required to stow it overhead, where it tends to become buried under tons of carry-on luggage. Recently on a flight, I located my cane and as I was bringing it down, the rubber tip grazed the head of a woman directly in front of me. She turned as I awaited a full-throated reprimand but fortunately, she was quick to forgive: “No harm, no foul,” she said pleasantly. Not everyone will likely be as understanding.

I’ve slammed the car door on my cane. I have forgotten it in stores and a grocery cart. My sweet dog is terrified of my cane and goes out of his way to stay out of its range when we walk. But it does have its rewards; a few years ago, at the Palace of Versailles outside Paris, my son and I stood in a long snaking line of tourists, me leaning on my cane. Someone on the Palace staff suddenly appeared and gestured for us to follow her. We thought we were being kicked out for some unknown transgression, but instead she took us to an out-of-the-way elevator, which carried us up to the Palace’s second floor.  Sweet!

Psychologically, needing a cane is somewhere between embarrassing and unnerving. I hate that I need it because even at my age (low 70’s), I think in my mind that I am robust and agile. It is unnerving because we all want to put off the inevitable end, and we flee from its approaching menace. The cane is, to me, an avatar of impending doom.

Then again, nothing is as jolting to the body and mind as falling flat on your face. The first time, people kindly helped me as my forehead poured blood from a nasty gash. Someone sat next to me waiting for the EMS to arrive. A woman gave me a coat from the trunk of her car. Nothing broken and no concussion. But the embarrassment and sadness of this accident stays with me, like an ominous cloud over my head.

I’m not forgetting my cane any more.

 

 

 

Two Nations, Carrying On

I’ve just returned from six days in London at a time when my country and Britain are each in the midst of wrenching political and social upheaval.

In the U.S., the agonizingly long investigation of possible collusion between the Trump Presidential campaign and Russia in 2016 has concluded with no charges,  but for many not convincingly. In Britain, the decision by voters in 2015 to leave the European Union (Brexit) is still being hotly debated, with no end in sight.

About the only certainty in these situations is that government — that is to say democratic government — seems endangered and, for the truly pessimistic, near collapse in both the U.K. and the U.S.

These were the backdrop events to my first visit to the “sceptered isle” in many a year. I accompanied my wife, Jeanne, who was on a business trip; as she worked, I played the consummate tourist, visiting the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, Greenwich (on a Thames River cruise), St. Paul’s Cathedral, Stonehenge and Bath. These stops, plus lunches in pubs, dinners in delightful but pricey restaurants, and numerous rides in the iconic black beetle cabs or on the London Underground, enabled me to see a major global city at perhaps its most vulnerable since the Blitz. I came away thinking that London is cheekily self-confident even as it denizens express great uncertainty about its future should Brexit actually happen — if it ever comes to pass.

There is no doubt about one thing: London exudes energy and vitality. In many ways, it is a madhouse of noise, traffic, bustling pedestrians, honking horns and shops of all kinds and price levels. It is a kaleidoscope that never stops turning. It has sprouted high rise office and apartment buildings that contrast (and in some cases, diminish) the existing and aging facades of England’s adventurous past.

It is also, since my previous visit, delightfully (or threateningly) diverse. In one restaurant, we were served by a Russian, an Indian, a man who could not speak even passable English, and a maitre d’ with Cockney East end bravura. A guide at the British Museum was Polish; on my cruise to Greenwich, I was in company of a German couple, a French family, a group of Japanese — even the smallest wielding a camera — and two Swedes. The desk clerk at our hotel was Italian, the concierge was a proper mate named Ed who exuded quiet imperturbability.

Yet for many in Britain, diversity is not a plus. As in the U.S., many feel that a settled way of life is threatened by the flood of immigrants from around the globe. In the States, the fear is illegal immigrants. In the U.K., emigres from the British Empire’s colonial holdings in Africa, the Caribbean and India are perceived to be taking jobs from working-class families. We avoided bringing up Brexit with everyone we encountered. But one cabbie clearly wanted his “Yanks” to understand that foreigners were taking all the jobs, including becoming Uber or Lyft drivers. His attitudes may be extreme; it’s hard to say. But for intensely patriotic Britishers (especially those over age 65) the flow of immigrants from foreign lands continues to fuel the smoldering animosity that is hanging over everyday life in the U.K.

Without a doubt, Brexit dominates London life these days, in the same exhausting way the Mueller investigation has dominated America’s political scene. 

In the meantime, life goes on. London is wickedly expensive, with skyrocketing housing costs forcing more and more of residents to outlying suburbs and brutal commutes. In this, London is hardly different than most major cities; it certainly is true in Charlotte, a fraction of London’s mammoth size but hell-bent on reaching global status. Which begs the question: will only the richest inhabitants ultimately be able to afford urban life? Will the rest of mankind, in T.S. Eliot’s memorable phrase, be living lives of quiet desperation packed like pickled herrings on suffocating tube lines? It’s hard, right now, to see a solution.

Still, there will always be an England, as the saying goes. The well-maintained highways outside London proper are blessedly free of ad billboards. Brits can be brittle and brusque, but at the same time generous with directions and patient in helping Americans sort out British currency. Americans are rightly surprised to see that many people here continue to smoke with abandon. Smoking inside pubs is outlawed, but many patrons gather outside, pint in hand, to puff away.

And everywhere, at least to this observer, you can find whispers of the British way of life that once was and is now fading from view. The “Royals” as the Queen and her extended family are known, are a source of pride, even as citizens love to tease and poke the aristocracy. History above all is prized. London is packed with historic buildings dating back centuries, and museums of all sorts that are wildly popular. Among the artifacts at the British Museum there is a letter from a supplier of the Roman army, written 2,000 years ago, begging the army quartermaster to please pay an outstanding invoice. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. At the National Portrait Gallery, you will find a painting of Shakespeare as he appeared in his late ’20s; it challenges every notion you’ve ever had of that master of the English idiom. Among the portraits still on view is one of Sir Oswald Mosley, an aristocratic Fascist who liked to spew anti-Semitic tirades in Jewish neighborhoods in the East End wearing his own self-styled Nazi uniform. Another is of Sir Douglas Haig, the British general who in World War I sent a generation of young men to their deaths. No outrage, no endemic of grievance, as in America, threatens the removal of these loathed figures.

I made a special effort to visit St. Paul’s Cathedral simply because of how struck I had been as a youngster at the photograph of the church’s magnificent dome emerging from the smoke of a Luftwaffe bombing raid. It is still there, and likely will still be there after the next Ice Age crushes most everything in its path.

Does America still have that “special relationship” with England that Churchill forged with FDR in the dark days of 1940? People still talk fondly as if it were in place today, but I wonder. I rather think, instead, that each of the partners from those long-ago days is so completely wrapped up in domestic matters that there is hardly time for even a friendly phone chat. Theresa May is up to her ear lobes . . . Our President’s mind is clearly elsewhere.

Much of what we share in common remains . . . our language, our cultural interests, our fond memories (now, sadly waning) of comrades in arms against a common foe. Britain’s future course is uncertain; can it leave the EU successfully and create a new, independent nation not yoked to the Continent? Can the United States, bitterly divided and increasingly estranged, find common ground, or are we destined to become strangers in a strange land, separate and suspicious?

These are weighty, existential concerns. It’s as if our two nations are floating in the air like balloons, needing to land but seeing nothing below but treacherous forest. In the end, however, there certainly is enough grit and determination in both countries to find a way ahead. England and America are different in many respects, but alike in the belief in the enduring strength of their people to carry on, push through and find peace and security for all within their bounds.

That’s a lot to ask for. We’ve done it before. We can do it again.

 

 

 

 

Using a Cane

After two recent falls — face plants in parking lots — I now always use a cane to get around. It’s annoying and cumbersome. But I’ve come to accept that my cane is something that will help me survive a bit longer. You could say I have — literally — learned the age-old lesson, “Pride goeth before the fall.”

My knowledge of canes and their uses is pretty slim. I vaguely recall my grandmother using one. And there’s also this historical tidbit: in 1856, with the nation increasingly divided over the issue of slavery, a South Carolina Representative named Preston Brooks walked into the old Senate Chamber and, using a steel-tipped cane, beat Massachusetts anti-slavery Senator Charles Sumner to a bloody pulp (Sumner somehow survived). I doubt that was the recommended use of canes even then.

Canes are perhaps best known as props for dancers, like the incomparable Fred Astaire, who could glide across the stage effortlessly tap dancing while holding and twirling a cane. The irony of such an image needs no elaboration.

Using a cane to walk is for me now a necessity, which in a way astounds me. Never in a million years did I ever think I would someday be hobbled and unsteady on my feet. Never once did the thought even cross my mind that I would need a cane for the most basic of human activities: walking, going up and down stairs, grocery shopping.

Canes are definitely a nuisance. In restaurants, there isn’t any place to put your cane while you eat; mine usually ends up on the floor for wait staff to trip over. It is also not a good idea to go to a football or baseball game if it requires you to walk up or down the very steep stairs typical of all stadia today. I went to a football game with my daughter but left my cane in the car. As we were leaving, I lost my balance and thought I was about to tumble off the upper deck. My life passed before my eyes, interrupted by the firm grasp of a nearby fan who grabbed my arm.

Taking your cane when you fly is no fun (what is fun about flying, especially in steerage?); you are required to stow it overhead, where it tends to become buried under tons of carry-on luggage. Recently on a flight, I located my cane and as I was bringing it down, the rubber tip grazed the head of a woman directly in front of me. She turned as I awaited a full-throated reprimand but fortunately, she was quick to forgive: “No harm, no foul,” she said pleasantly. Not everyone will likely be as understanding.

I’ve slammed the car door on my cane. I have forgotten it in stores and a grocery cart. My sweet dog is terrified of my cane and goes out of his way to stay out of its range when we walk. But it does have its rewards; a few years ago, at the Palace of Versailles outside Paris, my son and I stood in a long snaking line of tourists, me leaning on my cane. Someone on the Palace staff suddenly appeared and gestured for us to follow her. We thought we were being kicked out for some unknown transgression, but instead she took us to an out-of-the-way elevator, which carried us up to the Palace’s second floor.  Sweet!

Psychologically, needing a cane is somewhere between embarrassing and unnerving. I hate that I need it because even at my age (low 70’s), I think in my mind that I am robust and agile. It is unnerving because we all want to put off the inevitable end, and we flee from its approaching menace. The cane is, to me, an avatar of impending doom.

Then again, nothing is as jolting to the body and mind as falling flat on your face. The first time, people kindly helped me as my forehead poured blood from a nasty gash. Someone sat next to me waiting for the EMS to arrive. A woman gave me a coat from the trunk of her car. Nothing broken and no concussion. But the embarrassment and sadness of this accident stays with me, like an ominous cloud over my head.

I’m not forgetting my cane any more.

 

 

 

Thoughts on Paul — The Book, the Saint, the Martyr

I’ve just finished reading Paul: A Biography, the early evangelist whose proselytizing among First Century Jews and tiny sects of “Jesus believers” established the foundations of Christianity. It was written by an esteemed biblical scholar and Anglican Bishop, N.T. Wright.

It is a terrific book, and I can’t think of another volume I’ve read recently that gave me so many surprises. Seemingly on every page, I learned something new about the time and place of the world when Paul was alive. I didn’t know he made tents. I didn’t know he had siblings. I didn’t know that Tarsus, where he was born, was a bustling city of perhaps a quarter of a million people.

And I didn’t know these important facts: First Century Rome pretty much left Jews alone. I vaguely knew that Paul was a Roman citizen — a Roman Jew — who was present at (and participated in) the stoning death of Stephen, the (much later) Roman Catholic Church’s first martyr. Nor did I know that Paul was not martyred, as we were led to believe as kids. In fact, no one knows Paul’s eventual fate. He disappeared into history like a wisp of smoke.

Paul: A Biography also can in places be a hard read, especially if you struggle, as I do, with some of the most basic faith-based concepts of salvation, redemption and — especially — resurrection. Wright’s purpose is to explore these subjects from the viewpoint of a man — not a saint — who was a aggressive prosecutor of early Christians but became a fervent acolyte for Jesus after he was knocked from his horse by a blinding vision directing him to share the news of  the arrival of the long-promised Messiah. I think for most people, that’s about the extent of their familiarity with Paul.

Wright’s book, scholarly yet largely accessible to the lay reader, traces Paul’s life from his birth in Tarsus, a bustling city in the southeast quadrant of modern-day Turkey.  He came to adulthood some 10 years after the crucifixion of Jesus in 33 or 34 AD. Once transformed from Saul, a Jewish soldier of Rome, to Paul, evangelist, Paul spent the remainder of his life traveling to and fro in the eastern lands wedged against the Mediterranean Sea, from Damascus west to Corinth, back to Jerusalem, back west again, in a seemingly endless attempt to tell as many people as he could find about the new and much anticipated Messiah. As he traveled and in between trips, Paul wrote lengthy follow-up letters to communities of Jesus-believers he had visited in Ephesus, Thessalonica, Corinth, Phillipi, and, finally, Rome. The letters, part proselytizing, part advice, part personal anguish, run to some 80 pages of the New Testament (so Wright claims) and are,  along with the Acts of the Apostles, written by Luke, Paul’s sometime traveling companion, considered by most scholars as unmatched and profoundly important accounts of the earliest years of what came to be called Christianity.

I share my reactions to this book with not a little trepidation. In part that’s because I don’t truly identify with religion — that is organized faith, whether Catholic, Jew, Episcopal, Buddhist, Shinto, or Islam. I do believe one can be sincerely spiritual by living according to the main tenets of “faith”: morality, charity, love, the Golden Rule, without having to do so connected to a religious label or movement. So I am hardly expert, or even informed, about theological matters.

The other part of my hesitation to venture into the dark and dense field of faith is the all-too-real danger of offending those who do identify themselves by their religious faith. It has been my experience over the years that discussions of faith, most often lapse into highly charged silences, as if the people covering were all speaking a different and impenetrable language.  To mention one example that is at the heart of the book, there is a fundamental difference between Jews and Christians over Jesus — Jesus the flesh and bones man, Jesus the son of God and Jesus the Messiah promised by the prophets. For many traditional Jews, then and now, it was simply unacceptable that the Messiah they had been promised by God could be someone who appeared out of total obscurity, suffered the degradation of crucifixion, and then, allegedly, rose from the dead.

Paul, with characteristic zeal, brushed aside these objections, which got him into trouble and which laid the seeds of centuries of strife, disaffection and persecution. The surprise in this is that Paul was a committed, deeply faithful Jew who accepted the resurrected Jesus as the true Messiah promised by God to Abraham and that, furthermore, Paul remained a Jew throughout his life even as he proselytized for Jews and Gentiles to join him in following the risen Christ.

How could that be! Wright provides the answer: Paul did not set out to create a new religion; in fact, the thought apparently never entered his mind. The idea of Christianity, or Catholicism, didn’t take root until well after Paul. Instead, the gospel he preached was centered in  “oneness,” that is, a unity of belief and acceptance in the Messiah who gave up his life so that mankind could live in peace and grace, and a unity of believers, Jews and gentiles alike, who saw in Jesus their hope and salvation.

Whoa! Stop! These are very weighty and fraught ideas, for Wright and clearly for me, and most likely you, as well. Perhaps it is because Paul was much later canonized as a Saint of the Roman Catholic Church; I must have blandly embraced the common wisdom that Paul converted from Judaism to Christianity when he was knocked off his horse on the road to Damascus. It was a revelation, one of many in the book, and the one that upended my thinking about the origins of faith.

Wright’s book shines brightly when it educates and informs the reader about the distant civilization around the eastern Mediterranean centered on Rome to the west and Jerusalem to the east. For example, in mid-first century, 50 A.D., civilization was more advanced than I had conceived (Tarsus, where Paul was born, was a thriving city of a quarter million people, as were Ephesus, Corinth and Damascus, and including, of course, Jerusalem). In each of those cities, small sects of Jesus-believers attempted to build new faith communities from among not only Jews but Gentiles who, if they believed anything, supported the pantheon of Roman gods, or else were agnostic.

Meantime, Wright explains, Jews lived a quasi-independent existence under the Roman Empire. Jewish life and faith centered on the Jerusalem Temple and the Torah, both of which existed in a somewhat fragile, side-by-side presence with Roman temples and Roman civil law. There were Romans, there were Jews, there were Gentiles, and there were slaves and soldiers and workers dragged into service of their Roman masters. No one was called, or called him or herself, a Christian.

Paul interjected himself, or rather, his faith in Jesus, into this world, arguing that Jews and non-Jews were now free to live together in a more peaceful and uplifting life centered on good works and loyalty to Christ the Savior. None of this conflicted with Jewish faith, Paul believed; in fact, it fulfilled the basic tenets of the prophets who anticipated the return to earth of the Messiah

Paul is portrayed as a driven, often difficult and pedantic evangelist, and not much is known about him other than his Letters and the account of Luke, whose Acts are the best contemporary description of Paul. As Wright makes abundantly clear, Paul’s energetic (and frenetic) work laid the foundational stones of Christianity — a monumental achievement. But it came at a steep price, He was constantly under threat of beatings, imprisonment and worse. It didn’t help matters, Wright explains, that Paul could be an annoying, overly fervent nag.

Paul’s last years are essentially lost in the fog of history. It is known that Paul was taken to Rome  in AD 62  during the reign of Nero (one of the worst of all Roman emperors) on spurious charges of rabble-rousing by Jewish critics in Jerusalem. He was imprisoned for two years, Wright explains, but was guarded indifferently and may have ventured as far west as Spain, In any event, Nero instituted a roundup of suspected enemies of the state, and Paul was most likely swept up in the purge and beheaded (not crucified) because he was a Roman citizen.

There is one other major point about the book well worth remaking upon. Wright constantly emphasizes that much of our understanding of Paul, and of his time, is so completely filtered through the lens of history that it is difficult to separate fact from fiction and speculation. That’s true of all history, of course. But as Wright explains, successive writings by scholars, theologians and prelates have accreted to the point that no one can be quite sure of the accuracy of what we know of Paul the man — much less Paul the apostle. Wright admits as much throughout his book, cautioning that he is speculating here or guessing there about the details of Paul’s life and that his own biases might affect our understanding.

None of these cautions should prevent anyone interested in the life and times of this monumentally influential figure from picking up a copy of Paul: A Biography. Here is one compelling reason to purchase or borrow a copy: 2,000 years after Paul, Christianity remains a major, influential and in many nations the dominant religious faith. That is an impact and an influence — by one man’s zeal to change the world — of an order of magnitude so vast that is, well, hard to believe.

Goodbye to Cincinnati

The longest I lived anywhere was Cincinnati, where I settled in 1982.

Now, Jeanne and I are heading out to Charlotte, North Carolina, a city where I spent most of my high school years, where I worked as a political reporter for the Charlotte Observer, where I worked on an (unsuccessful) U.S. Senate campaign, and where my parents passed away and are buried at nearby Belmont Abbey College, along with my oldest brother. My other brother died in a Charlotte hospice in 2015. I guess I will find out whether North Carolina writer Tom Wolfe was right in naming one of his novels “You Can’t Go Home Again.”

Here’s hoping we will prove Wolfe wrong. Jeanne has a new position doing marketing and PR for an up-and-coming software developer.  We have dear nephews close by. We are also empty nesters, but there is plenty in the Charlotte area to keep us both busy and entertained. Besides, we will be only hours away from the NC/SC coast.

Still, Cincinnati is much on my mind. I leave the “Queen City” with a myriad of thoughts and feelings, some of which I’d like to share. If you don’t mind.

Cincinnati is a wonderful, perhaps ideal, place to raise a family. Large, but not overwhelming. Ripe with a garden variety of singular townships, neighborhoods and communities — each distinctive and each with its own charms. My first stop was in bucolic Wyoming, and since 1992, sprawling Anderson Township. Two completely different places, but both with just the right mix of people, attractions and schools. I made friends in both places, who I will always cherish.

Cincinnati also is blessed by a beautiful location at a crook in the Ohio River.  If you go atop the Carew Tower, the City’s tallest building, the horizon is flat as a pancake. But a maze of valleys carved by tributaries of the Ohio has given Cincinnati steep hills and plenty of areas unfit for development. The result: vast park land and forest within the city limits.

The Ohio River is wide and rapid as it flows west and south through the area. It was an early highway of western expansion, with riverboats as the preferred mode of transport. As you drive along Columbia Parkway, which contours the river’s course and look across to Kentucky, Germany’s Rhine River comes to mind, an appropriate comparison since much of the area’s earliest settlers were German immigrants.

Cincinnati and Charlotte both have NFL teams, but only Cincinnati has major league baseball, the beloved Reds. It’s a good thing they are beloved, because lately, they’ve not been very good. Charlotte has NBA basketball, however, owned by Michael Jordan, so there’s that. It is rumored that Cincinnati also has an NFL-caliber football team.

For most of my time in Cincinnati, I worked for Kroger in its headquarters down on Vine St. Kroger in the early 1980’s was a fast-growing, increasingly national food retailer that in 1983 celebrated its 100th anniversary. My job was to represent the company to the news media as corporate PR director, and also help write speeches, address controversies, and generally speak and write transparently about a business that touched nearly every household in Cincinnati and dozens of other cities.

The guy I worked with and reported to was Jack Partridge, who recruited me from Washington, where I had worked in Jimmy Carter’s Administration. To say that we were always on the same page would be an understatement and despite our differing political views. He and I looked at our responsibilites with complementary eyes, and we felt we were serving not just our business, but the entire community. (Jack and I were early members of Leadership Cincinnati, and Kroger graciously assigned me to work on important civic matters, such as the 1991 Buenger Report on Cincinnati Public Schools).

Jack, in turn, reported to Kroger’s CEO, Lyle Everingham, a decent, plain-spoken, hard-working and astute executive who believed in delegating responsibility and expecting superior results. Some may recall that in 1988, Kroger came very close to being taken over by outside investors. Lyle, his top managers and the Board thought the idea stank to high heaven, and so they put together a financial restructuring plan that saved the company’s independence. The plan was created in part by a handful of top executives, including Bill Sinkula, Larry Kellar and one Rodney McMullen — now Kroger’s CEO.

But the plan necessitated a widespread cutback in expenses and, as a consequence, hundreds of folks in G.O., including some of my closest friends, lost their jobs. The company continued to prosper, but for old salts like Jack and me, it was never quite the same.

Skyline. As in chili. Across Vine from Kroger’s office was a Skyline Chili parlor, where Kroger people often found themselves at lunchtime. Shortly after starting work, I went to Skyline to be initiated into this somewhat mysterious and legendary concoction that, to many, represents the essence of Cincinnati. “Mikey, he likes it,” my companions laughed, mimicking a popular TV ad for cereal. I did, and still do. I will miss Skyline in North Carolina, which is more of a barbecue kind of place. I will also miss explaining to people what the hell a three-way is.

In 1998, I left Kroger to start my own communications consulting firm, called (not very creatively) Bernish Communications. My first client was Kroger, and over time I did work for Harris Teeter in Charlotte (now part of Kroger), as well as Publix in Florida. I also worked for a Canadian firm that launched one of the first self-scanning checkout systems, and a manufacturer of paper-making equipment based in northern Ohio.

Around this time, I was contacted by a community leader, Chip Harrod, who asked my opinion about an idea of his to create a museum about the Underground Railroad on the banks of the Ohio River. This region was a significant crossing point for slaves fleeing from Kentucky and further South (immortalized in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin). I told Chip the idea appealed to me and next thing I knew, I was on the founding board for the fledgling project.

The Freedom Center exists today, a yearly destination for thousands of elementary and high school students bussed in to learn about America’s prolonged cancer — slavery. Yet It has been decidedly a sore point for some in Cincinnati who believe the museum is too grandiose and offers too negative a theme to ever be popular. But to others, myself included, the Freedom Center ultimately represents an important attempt to help modern-day Americans (and others) understand the many ways slavery degrades and corrupts the essentials binding together moral, successful  societies. Yes, much of the content in the museum is difficult and unpleasant. Yet at the same time, the triumph of the human spirit, as represented by those who attempted to flee the shackles of bondage, and those who helped their escape, is an eternally uplifting message — the “arc of moral history,” in the quoted words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “is always bending towards justice.”

The Freedom Center, let it be said, likely would not exist were it not for John and Francie Pepper and former federal appeals court judge Nathaniel Jones. The Peppers truly are citizens in the most fundamental sense of the word, in which service to others and playing things forward are firmly-held values and a way of life. Judge Jones is a moral beacon of grace and guts.

One area of civic life that did reel me in was the City’s superb arts organizations. This involvement went well beyond an annual contribution to the Fine Arts Fund. I served on the Chamber Orchestra Board for a time, and spent about two years raising money for the late Eric Kunzels’s dream of a new building for the unique and inspiring School of the Creative and Performing Arts. Kunzel was a life force, a walking magnetic field, and working with him was a life lesson in the power of an idea. The new SCPA is not physically attached to Music Hall, as Eric hoped, but it’s just down the street, and I’m sure he’d be pleased with the result.

I also dearly loved the Symphony, despite the cramped seating in the old Music Hall. After an inspiring performance by the CSO, I would joyously but slowly limp out to my car. Perhaps my most treasured moment was attending the CSO’s scheduled event not long after 9/11. Maestro Paavo Jarvi (leading the orchestra for the first time) conducted a somber yet somehow affirming performance that had everyone in the hall lost in thought and yet yearning for human contact that classical music often offers. It was a singular moment; it didn’t last long, unfortunately, as America soon descended into war, retribution and gnawing fear.

After a couple of turns on the Freedom Center Board, I joined the Freedom Center staff in 2004 just in time to assist in the grand opening (remember Oprah Winfrey’s grand and elegant participation down on the riverfront). Later, I helped create a new, permanent exhibit about human trafficking, which is the despicable practice of modern-day slavery. It is, if I may say so, the best thing I have ever done. You should go see it.

I’ve continued to consult in a joint endeavor with Gale Prince, a former Kroger colleague and one of the nation’s leading experts on food safety. It’s been fun to dip back into the food sector.

And here we are, relocated to Charlotte, a much different, much larger city that also has been transformed by global economic tides. When I was a high school student here, at a tiny, all-boys Catholic outpost run by the Marianist Brothers, Charlotte was kind of a boastful backwater, a place that mid-level executives came to on their way up the corporate ladder to Atlanta or Dallas or Frankfurt. No longer. Today, Charlotte is a booming metropolis that has spilled over into South Carolina. It is the nation’s second largest banking center, after only the Big Apple, and with the skyscrapers and inflated home prices that come with explosive growth. Catholic High is now located in a large campus-like setting with high academic standards and sports excellence. Old Coach Willie Campagna would be astounded.

I will definitely be a tiny cog in a big wheel here. In Cincinnati, I was never a mover and shaker. But I was sometimes in the room, like Zelig, with many who were. During most of Cincinnati’s history hometown companies exerted an outsized, albeit mostly beneficial, influence on local affairs. Chief among them, of course, is Procter & Gamble, which to many is synonymous with the city. Political, religious, arts and cultural leaders generally sought P&G’s views out of the Company’s well-earned respect, the enormous resources it could direct to civic endeavors, and the generous executive involvement it could bring to any significant community need. Another influencer is the Cincinnati Business Committee, or CBC, made up exclusively of company chieftains, where huge and lasting decisions are reviewed alongside the normal political and governmental channels.

Local companies are critical drivers of economic growth and supporters of civic projects but these days, Cincinnati-based firms have a lot on their plate well outside the Queen City. Like businesses everywhere, Cincinnati companies must serve a national, even global audience and confront strenuous global competition. Kroger, to mention an obvious example, is a major presence in cities much larger than Cincinnati, including Atlanta, Los Angeles, Denver and Houston. Or take Fifth Third, once a proud hometown bank. Today, it operates in large swathes of the Midwest and South, while back home in southern Ohio, it must confront major competitors like US Bank and PNC — from hated Pittsburgh, no less! Fifth Third operates in Charlotte, by the way.

The impact of these swirling trends has forced businesses to broaden their horizons. Companies with deep local roots, such as Cintas or Fifth Third, must increasingly allocate charitable and civic resources in other places, as well. At the same time, public companies face constant challenges from shareholders, often hedge funds, that demand ever-rising profits. This has an impact, sometimes direct, on how much corporations invest in communities.

All this really means that Cincinnati’s economy — and its very way of life — is caught up as never before in the world beyond this corner of Ohio. Things have really opened up locally (think OTR or the riverfront); the City is no longer 10 years behind the rest of the country, as Mark Twain famously quipped. Its future is bright, but it must do more to retain and attract young professionals who often see their future as residing in Chicago, or Boston, or Austin.

Charlotte, like Cincinnati and many other urban areas, has developed energetic, vibrant suburbs surrounding the central city core. In Charlotte, development is best described as rampant, whereas in the areas around Cincinnati, growth is more measured but plainly obvious when, for example, you drive north on Interstate 75 and see that Cincinnati’s suburbs are fast encroaching on Dayton’s.

One troubling factor, however, is that the suburban communities seem largely detached from the core urban areas. Mason could just as easily be in Kansas or Pennsylvania. Fort Mill, S.C. looks like it would fit nicely into suburban Dallas. Suburbs are where the fast food and casual dining chains, along with auto supply and tire discounters ply their trades, and traffic is on the whole terrible. Few of the suburbs feel at all unique, as a result. These trends are perhaps irreversible, although Charlotte is looking at dramatically expanding its Lynx commuter train service (that now connects “Uptown” to Charlotte’s South End) north to the Lake Norman area, west to the airport, southeast, etc. Cincinnati has an urban train of sorts, but it is doubtful it will soon or ever be expanded.

But at least Charlotte has city-county government. Cincinnati does not, and this is a limiting factor to its ability to connect suburbs to the city and enable workers to easily commute to jobs in the suburbs. Clearly, visionary political leadership is needed.

Well, Cincinnati’s future will no longer affect Jeanne and me. Charlotte and Mecklenburg County operate a combined city-county government that has been in place for decades. It is by no means a panacea; Charlotte is plagued with overwhelming traffic woes, under-performing, crowded schools, and suburban sprawl that is unstoppable and shorn of charm. Its wish to expand the Lynx system is, at the moment, stymied by the lack of funding sources.

So, I am transitioning from one city where I lived for a quarter of a century to another city where I lived through my high school, college and early professional career. As a consequence, I sort of feel like I am living in two places simultaneously, with one foot firmly planted in the past and the other tentatively positioned to explore whatever future is ahead.

Folks, this is hard. Even as I make new friends and re-aquaint with old high school buds, I will long feel the tug of strong emotional attachments to the people I have known, worked with and grown close to in Cincinnati over the years. If I mentioned even one such person or family, such as Peter Larkin, John Barnett and Jim McIntire from Kroger days, or Heather Hill neighbors Bridget and Tom Breitenbach, Harry and Ginny DeMaio, Malinda and Wayne Price, the Annable’s, Barb and Sam Gamble, or just plain friends Jamie Glavic, or Norma Petersen or Ken Schonberg, Ross Wales and Richard and Penny Hoskin, I would be listing several hundred more names, and your eyes would glaze over.

So I won’t do that. Instead, I wish all of you who knew us a fond farewell — until next time. As a nation, we are crossing through a rough patch, divided by mistrust, ready to argue at the drop of a hat, using ever coarser language and behaviors. But there is no doubt in my mind that America will survive and prosper. Whenever I get down, I try to think of Maestro Jarvi, holding, ever so slightly, the last notes of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Music Hall was packed that night a little over a week after 9/11; for that single moment, no one in that crowd was a stranger. Everyone was holding up one another. That’s what we should strive for.

In the meantime, I hope we can all engage in empathy and respect, and encourage peals of laughter. Kindness and good manners will get you a long way, my Mom used to say, and while I’ve not often showed those attributes, it still strikes me as good advice.

Adieu!

 

 

 

 

 

 

What Follows Charlie Hebdo?

I happened to have been in Paris with my son, Will, the week before the massacre at Charlie Hebdo’s office. We enjoyed early Spring weather, large but not overwhelming crowds, and good food at nearly every meal. We managed several bucket list tours, from Versailles to the Musee D’Orsay, and stayed largely within the city’s popular tourist zones.

Walking the paths of history — even if surrounded by pushy tourists — gives Paris special meaning. The something that became Paris was growing back in the year 600 or so, and subsequent events offer a tapestry of human achievement and failure : the excesses of monarchy and revolution, splendor and waste, greatness and collaboration, courage and cowardice, all playing out on the streets of the city. We Americans love to belittle the French as hopeless romantics who’ve lost every war they’ve ever fought and can’t govern themselves. Yet their fierce devotion to individual freedom, forged by generations of class divisions and failed, revolving door governments, has long been an essential characteristic of the nation’s culture.

Which brings me back to Charlie Hebdo. By now, this obscure (outside of Paris) publication is well known in the world. It is vain, childish, satirical, and a thorn in the side of all that is self-important, autocratic and blustery. It is especially revered (or reviled) for its constant pokes at religion — all religions — a heritage, perhaps, of France’s age-old hostility towards clerical authority.  It was this animus that apparently led to the tragic slaughter of editors and writers on an otherwise peaceful mid-week morning, and the killing of four innocent shoppers at a Jewish market the next day.

A little more than a week later, the world’s media is moving on to the next big story, leaving many, myself included, still trying to figure out what the assault on a satirical weekly publication says about religion, radical Islam, but mostly what it says about France, a country that to most Americans remains an inscrutable puzzle. In this comment, I’m trying to fit some of the pieces together to create a coherent view of this most intriguing nation.

With 66 million people, France is the second largest European country, behind only Germany.  Roughtly 10 percent of its population identify themselves as Muslims.  There are more Muslims, and Jews, in France than any other country in western Europe. The Muslim population is largely from North Africa — Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia — and live largely in suburban rings (called banlieues) around large cities far away and out of sight of tourists and other residents.

Charlie Hebdo is peculiar to France.  It continues a long tradition, dating back at least as far as Voltaire, of the estrangement of ordinary people to all forms of authority, but especially religious orthodoxy.  It is decidely not Mad Magazine or the Onion, to which it has been compared; in fact, Charlie Hebdo in France is but one of several satirical publications that love to skewer pomposity and raise the hackles of those in power. It has existed on a shoestring budget and kept alive by a dedicated staff of malcontents — many now dead — who revel in controversy and hard-edged, often scatalogical humor.

The expansion of Muslim immigration into France, and the government’s efforts to force their integration into French society (by, for example, forbidding the wearing of hijab veils by Muslim school girls) appears in retrospect to be symptomatic of a smoldering fire that eventually consumed Charlie Hebdo. As the publication attacked Roman Catholicism, Judaism, and Islam, among many other targets, it infuriated disaffected French Muslims by publishing satirical images of the prophet Muhammed, which for many Muslims is the ultimate insult. We know the rest of the story. If disaffected Islam men and women continue to join or are recruited into terrorist cells that promote violence and nihilism under the banner of “faith,”what is the future for France, Europe, and America?

France itself is in for a period of uncertainty and fear. The government has beefed up security around the country, even as it confronts rising anger from within over what many believe is an incompetent failure to isolate the threat of radical-inspired terrorism. France’s dilemma is ours, and the world’s.

Surprisingly, given Charlie Hedbo‘s predilection to offend, its first cover after the bloodbath was remarkably restrained. The cover depicts a cartoonish Muhammed-like figure holding a Je suis Charlie sign. Above the drawing is a simple but profound statement: “All is Forgiven.”

According to the editor Gerald Biard, the cover is about Charlie Hebdo forgiving Muhammed. “We needed to figure out how to continue laughing and making others laugh. We wanted to analyze, say something about the events,” he said. “This drawing made us laugh.”

Added Zineb El Rhazoui, a Hebdo columnist: “I think that those who have been killed, if they were here, they would have been able to have a coffee today with the terrorists and just talk to them, ask them why they have done this. We feel, as Charlie Hebdo‘s team, that we need to forgive the two terrorists who have killed our colleagues.”

Remarkable. It would be understandable, of course, that anyone who has lost close friends and colleagues through a bloody attack, and who will now need armed security, would react with anger and lash out at the people and the beliefs that propelled the murderous rampage. Yet the new editors of Charlie Hebdo chose a surprisingly different and altogether uniquely French reaction: cheeky forgiveness.

Just back from France, I’m still trying to sort out the range of emotions I feel, in which the delights of a vacation with Will in the City of Light contend with the sorrow of yet another mass murder and the looming threat of more to come. Well, I know what I’m going to do, at least in the short term.  Our family is soon going to get a Golden Retriever pup. We’ve gone through dozens of names. I think we’re going to name him Charlie.

Golf Lessons

Because of my dad, I grew up around golf.  Not so much as a player, but as an observer of life and the enduring rituals attendant to any game.

Recently, I found an old photo of my two older brothers (then just toddlers) with my parents, taken in the depths of World War II before I was born. Everyone was sitting on the grass, and in the foreground was a golf bag and clubs. It was a hint of his priorities.

When I was older, Dad started talking to me about the game, and I think he was hoping I would become addicted, as he was.  While I was still in grade school, he somehow managed to arrange for me to caddy at a tournament on the women’s pro golf tour. I had the bag for a young teenage phenom (the estimable Judy Rankin), without knowing the first thing about what do to, where to stand, what to say.  So Dad gave me a quick lesson in golf etiquette that included the following Do’s and Don’ts:

Talk softly, if at all, and never when someone is addressing the ball or putting;

Encourage your fellow players by acknowledging good shots;

Adopt a deferential comportment, so that whoever is furthest from the hole always shoots or putts first;

Never stand so that your shadow crosses the putting line of another;

Under penalty of death, never — ever — forget a club around the green. And so on.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but these were more then golf instructions; they were life lessons.

Later, I took up the game and to my Dad’s horror, I tried to play left-handed, which in those days was considered weird if not strange. Finding left handed clubs was like trying to locate a truffle in the woods. My fiance (now my wife), who is an elegant ball striker, tried mightily to help me become a better player, but I persisted in mediocrity. I struggled on fairways and greens, embarrassing myself and frustrating my golfing partners with erratic play and meteor-sized divots.  About the only thing I was good at was forgetting clubs around greens and losing several sleeves of golf balls each round I played. The game also revealed something ugly in my nature, a fierce temper born of frustration.  Successful golfers have a detached, almost ethereal attitude, like Gandhi, but outside the PGA Tour, most players are violent hackers who treat their clubs like cudgels and the ball as if it were a rampaging mole.

My temper also ruined for me what is golf’s most satisfying pleasure, the “walk in the woods” experience in which the breeze wafts through the pines, birds and squirrels dance across the fairways, and the camaraderie of friends more than makes up for skulled shots, awful putts and lost balls in the rough.

Life, kids and ennui finally brought a halt to my pathetic golf career. My father passed away (a golf club tucked in his coffin), leaving me without my admired mentor. Back surgery. No time. In fact, in retrospect, my dalliance with golf parallels a prolonged and now accelerating decline in the game’s popularity. All sorts of reasons are cited, from the excessive time it takes to play 18 holes, to the damnable difficulty of the game (the only one I’m aware of in which you hit a ball that is stationary), to the erosion of Tiger Woods’ excellence, which has brought a sharp reduction in TV ratings.

Many solutions have been offered.  One guy wants to enlarge the golf hole to the size of a small tub. Others believe that soccer golf, in which players kick a ball up and down fairways, is the answer. Right.

I now participate in golf viscerally, as a silent gallery for my daughter, who has earned several high school letters in the sport. I am forbidden by my wife to impart to my daughter anything, anything at all, about swing mechanics, lining up putts or the correct club choice. In other words, I am politely mute.

What to conclude from this courtship with golf? I mentioned life lessons derived from the game, and here they are:

Praise is always appropriate, on the golf course and everywhere else.

Play by the rules and learn to relax.

Be polite, always.

Pick up after yourself.

Walk outside, no earbuds, and listen.

Accept from golf that it isn’t how you play the game, but what the game teaches you about yourself.

 

Crossing to Canaan’s Happy ml k Shore

Like many of you, I listen to music while I am exercising.  With a good pair of audio phones, I am able to pick up on lyrics that were once unintelligible.

Which is a short explanation for what I am about to write about: a prevalent euphemism in music for death or, more precisely, what happens after we die.

Death has been sadly present in my life these past months.  Bill, my oldest brother, died in March.  A well-regarded teacher at my daughter’s high school was run down by a drunk driver while bicycling in February.  Our beloved golden retriever, Captain, had to be put down in June. Robin Williams, a wonder comic and actor, died at his own hand just now.

My Brother Bill at the Shore

In the wake of these sad events, and perhaps because my own mortality is more in sight on the horizon, I found myself pondering the “what’s next” question.  What happens after death?

There are myriad answers, of course, but nothing reliable and no eyewitness accounts. Death is essentially the absence of life, the ending of mortal existence. Standing over my mother’s deathbed, as she breathed her last and came to a complete and utter stop, I was put in mind of the laws of thermodynamics of Sir Isaac Newton: a body in motion tends to stay in motion; a body at rest tends to stay at rest.

So because we don’t know what lies beyond death, people tend to either laugh it off as a needless worry, or try to find comfort in words or music (or both) typically as an expression of a religious faith, but not always. Alfred, Lord Tennyson clearly had the shore in mind when he wrote his last poem, “Crossing the Bar,” with these elegiac words:

“For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar.”

It was while thinking about these matters that an answer came to me in listening to my iTunes playlists.

There is, I found, a musical euphemism or expression for the aftermath of death.  It is the shore — the shore of a river, or the distant shore of an ocean; safe ground, in other words.  This idea appeals to me fundamentally for I find no place as relaxing and calming as the ocean shore. Perhaps this is typical of Midwesterners, because I first stuck my toes in the ocean as a teenager, and ever since, I am drawn to the sea as if I had flippers.

In the sense that the shore is expressed as a refuge from pain or loss (of life itself, perhaps), it can also be interpreted as another way to express the concept of heaven, or Canaan, as heaven is sometimes called. Here are some lyrics from my iTunes that equate death and beyond with reaching shore:

In a hymn entitled “Model Church,” an old man has come to a church as if in a dream. He sits with the congregation and enjoys the soaring choir, after which he says:

 “I tell you wife it did me good

To sing those hymns once more

I felt just like some wrecked marine
Who gets a glimpse of shore

It made want to lay aside
This weather beaten form
And anchor in that blessed port
 Forever from the storm.”

Are we, on life’s journey, a wrecked marine?  There’s no telling where the inspiration for these lines came from.  They may have come from the dramatic account of a harrowing open ocean voyage. In Acts, 27 about the Apostle Paul in the Mediterranean Sea. Paul and all on board encountered a fierce storm and most everyone panicked.  But Paul urged them to stay calm and ride out the bad weather, saying (in verse 24) “not a hair of the head of anyone on this boat will be lost.”  The ship eventually crashed on rocks on Malta and all were saved, an outcome biblical scholars believe was a metaphor for the unshakability of faith. The narrative was incidentally written by Luke, who was an experienced seafarer. Like the Odyssey, Paul’s adventure has beccome an often repeated theme of the epic life and death struggle depicted in books, movies and song ever since.

Another song, “If We Never Meet This Side of Heavan,” draws the distinction even clearer. The aftermath of death, to the believer, is reunion and rest, and final escape from pain and heartache:

“Once I was lost,
On the breakers tossed
And far away from the shore.
My drifting bark,
All in the dark,
No beacon light before.

I was sinking fast, when the lifeboat passed
And the captain (and he) took me in.
Now the storm is o’er, and I fear no more
I have perfect peace within.”

This spiritual was written by Alfred Bromley, one of America’s most prolific song writers and lyricists, who also penned these words in a bluegrass gospel song called “Rank Stranger to Me”:

“They’ve all moved away,” said the voice of a stranger
“To a beautiful land by the bright crystal sea”
Some beautiful day I’ll meet ’em in heaven
Where no one will be a stranger to me.”

So death, or more properly salvation, is associated with reaching safe harbor, as in Paul’s heroic tale.  Yet I was curious to know how this particular metaphor became such a common expression in gospel music.  Turns out that one source that may have had lasting impact was the well-known “John Brown’s Body,” A Civil War-era song sang by Union soldiers, and the source for the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” And that, in turn, bubbled up from a much older song, entitled “Say Brothers,” first included in a hymnal from around 1800.

The gist of that story is that “Say Brothers” arose as a Negro spiritual sung by slaves, in which Canaan served as a metaphor both for freedom and also a place of refuge and release for the departed. Because “Say Brothers” was a folk song, its origin unknown, it was readily passed along and spread among disparate audiences, where it became a standard in religious camp meetings — mostly in the South — in the decades prior to the Civil War.  The key lyrics, repeated no matter what version was being used, were these:

“O Christians will you meet me, O Christians will you meet me, O Christians will you meet me, on Canaan’s happy shore . . .”

Interestingly, various versions of “Say Brothers” were popular not just with enslaved blacks, but also their white owners, and Southern antebellum society in general, as well as among Northern congregations! Canaan ironically became for Southernors a word to describe their lives when slavery reigned supreme, while among northern preachers, it was meant both to mean the end of the war, but also the resting place for so many fallen soldiers.

What I am left with is the realization that my search for meaning of the word “shore,” was part of my desire to understand and come to grips with the deaths of loved ones, friends, and even an animal. What lies beyond is an ageless question, with no real answer. Yet it gives me some comfort to know that for many who have lived and died before me (like Bill), the happy shore in real life and perhaps after parting is universally thought of as place of refuge and reunion, for wrecked marines, and the rest of us.

A Personal Milestone is Reached

I’ve gone and done it.

After being a registered Democrat my entire adult life, I have changed my political affiliation to “Independent.” I’m pretty sure my parents would be turning over in their graves.

Why, you (may) ask?

I think it’s because the two mainstream parties — the Democrats and Republicans — have no interest in me, although I maintain a strong interest in politics.  I vote, religiously, but I don’t contribute much beyond meager sums to candidates I happen to know.  I’m not over-the-top wealthy, either, so the Citizens United decision equating speech with money doesn’t really apply to me.

Philosophically, I don’t feel at home in either party. The Republican Party — the Grand Old Party of Lincoln and TR and Ike — has morphed into an ugly, negative mob, pushing far too far to the right side of the political spectrum for my tastes and beliefs, while drowning out or intimidating the party’s few voices of moderation.

Yet my largest disappointment, and disagreement, comes with what’s been my party, the Democrats. I became a Democrat because my Mom and Dad were Democrats, who grew up during the Great Depression of the 1930s.  My father was poor and led a hardscrabble existence after high school, holding all sorts of tough jobs (including time with the New Deal-inspired Civilian Conservation Corps), like laying railroad tracks across the Mountain and Pacific West.  My mother grew up in a middle class setting in which just about everyone had a tough time making ends meet. Folks on those times were indelibly marked by their experiences during the Depression.  My parents were Democrats because they believed that it was the party that helped the middle class.  Others, of course, became lifelong Republicans because they resentedd FDR’s bold moves to expand government.

Both parties have abandoned (beyond lip service) any sort of cohesive approach to pressing policy issues such as education enhancement, immigration, environment protection, banking and credit reform. Republicans are at least consistent: they want less government (except for women), and reduced taxes. Democrats are all over the map on policy, yet meek and disingenuous in advocating their historically progressive agenda. Reform, to the Democrats, has become incremental and tentative, when bold, creative leadership is needed. On issues like infrastructure investment and sane gun legislation, the Democrats have become irrelevant.

It’s always been this way, you could argue.  Dysfunction is part of the political leavening process to insure against extreme solutions.  The situation is exacerbated today by an increasingly partisan media, which focuses on the horse race aspects of elections (assigning winners and losers before the race is even started) while paying very little attention to who the candidates are and what they stand for, if anything.

Meanwhile, in the wake of disastrous Supreme Court decisions, the political process is awash in cash, and it feels increasingly like Members of Congress from both parties take their marching orders from well-heeled contributors and legions of paid lobbyists. Bipartisanship has all but disappeared, replaced by confrontation and one-upmanship for the benefit of superficial, conflict-driven news coverage. (The Koch Brothers, worth an estimated $80 billion, are reportedly budgeting $125 million for this year’s midterm elections, more than either party’s combined total planned expenditures).

I’ve become disenchanted.  Can you tell? As an Independent, I hope I can find a middle, practical ground that once characterized American politics.  Yes, moderation is never sexy, especially now in today’s bling-saturated society. Yet I hold out the hope that if enough others go the Independent route, then one day there might be a critical mass for serious reform.

That’s a dream, right now.  Sort of like the dream my parents had, in the midst of the Depression, that working together, the nation could be better.