Tales of the Tarantula
Page 13
Fear is a curious thing. It makes rational people abandon reason. FDR knew that. In fact, he began his inaugural address like this:
President Hoover, Mr. Chief Justice, my friends:
This is a day of national consecration. And I am certain that on this day my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the Presidency, I will address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our people impels.
This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure, as it has endured, will revive and will prosper.
So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.
FDR knew that if he could calm people’s fears, he could get them to act rationally. If he could take emotion out of the equation, people would use their brains and they would find solutions to the nation’s problems.
I bring all this up because just as 2008 was a distant echo of 1933, so too is the fear that ran rampant in the 1930s alive and infecting our nation in 2015 in myriad ways.
We fear terrorists, illegal immigrants, criminals. Democrats fear Republicans and Republicans fear Democrats. Our politics is rampant with fear. Let’s take just one simple example. According to the GunPolicy.org there are about 300 million guns in the United States. These guns killed 12,532 people in 2014. Estimates are that 1 in every 3 Americans owns a gun.
Why do people have guns? Fear.
Talk to a Second Amendment enthusiast and you will find a very scared person. Gun ownership increases with fear. And fear defeats any rational attempt to legislate controls on guns. So is it any wonder why the more people are killed by guns, the more people want to own theirs?
Another more mundane example is SUVs. Despite high gas prices until very recently, SUV sales have remained high. Why? Because once you own an SUV you feel defenseless in a smaller car. What if you get hit by an SUV? Many people rationalize that you need to have a light truck in order to survive on the road today. And what’s that all about – fear. So people have flocked to buy these gas guzzlers and some even went so far as to buy Hummers, the assault rifle of SUVs.
Finally, there is the fear of “the other.” This is an ancient fear that rears its head at regular intervals. Currently, the “others” include Mexican immigrants, homosexuals and Muslims. Our political discourse, aided and abetted by the Supreme Court, adds to the problem by using fear as a political weapon. If you really were to pay attention to the political advertisements that are coming our way in the next two years you would be paralyzed with fear. What to do?
Americans have got to get a handle on their fears. Now I know that for many people that is a tall order. But surely the 74% of Americans who believe in life after death can bring themselves to suppress their fear of death enough to act rationally on issues like gun control.
One positive effect of having had cancer twice is that I no longer fear death as much as I used to. So for me the feeling that a gun in my house may hurt someone I love trumps the fear that might lead me to buy a gun for “protection.” The rationality of my decision is bolstered by the recent sad story from Idaho where a 2-year-old playing with a gun he found in his mother’s purse shot and killed his mother in a Walmart. Think it was a freak accident? Think again. The very same tragedy happened a month earlier in Oklahoma. There, the three-year-old child picked up the gun while his mother was changing a one-year-old’s diaper. Why does the mother of a small child who probably has safety plugs on the electrical sockets at home carry a gun?
That four-letter word, FEAR – fear that always results in bad judgment and often leads to tragedy. I could go on and on about the ways in which fear infests our nation. I haven’t even mentioned the overblown reaction to 9/11 that puts military in our bus and train terminals and makes us take our shoes off at airports. But my wish for 2015 is that Americans get a grip on their fears and contemplate Franklin Roosevelt’s wise admonition – “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Only then can we begin to rationally solve our nation’s problems.
Grandpa explains it all – Bryce’s first birthday
February 9, 2015
So dear grandson, you’ve completed your first orbit around the sun. This is where you came in last year. Since then, the old earth has gotten a little hotter as global warming continues. There’s even been a thaw in our relations with Cuba. Terrorism continues to make news with bombings and beheadings keeping our attention. A couple of airliners disappeared. Ebola appeared in Africa. And the 2016 presidential campaign has begun.
All of these are significant, but there was one development in your first year that I want to focus on because it may be bewildering to a newcomer to the planet like yourself. That is the idea that people get treated differently by other people because they have a darker skin color. You see, in the last year we have had several incidents where men with dark skin were killed by police officers and a lot of people thought that this wouldn’t have happened if the men were light-skinned like you and me.
I don’t know for sure if that’s true, but it sure got a lot of people upset enough to get off their couches and out into the streets to stage protests. So we should pay some attention because you will find that large protests are rare these days. Most Americans are pretty docile. They can’t be bothered to get involved in something as disagreeable as protesting. When something moves them to protest, we all should sit up and take notice because it must be awfully important.
Now you may find it strange that people could be treated badly just because they look different. But I am sorry to report that that’s the way it is in this world. It has been that way for all of recorded history, although the extent of the bias varies over the centuries. You have already probably noticed people who look different. You probably judge them not by their looks, but by what they do for you. Whether you like people or not is based on their actions toward you. You don’t care what color the arm is that’s holding that bottle.
Grownups like to think they do that too, but they don’t really do it as well as you do. We always make judgments based on our past experiences or (even worse) on the experiences of others. This is called prejudice because we pre-judge based on false ideas called stereotypes rather than withholding judgment until we can see a person’s actions.
In the United States we have a sorry history of treating people with darker skin as less valuable than people with light skin. Even the founding fathers of this country valued dark skin people being held as slaves as only three-fifths of free, white people. This idea has unfortunately survived in some form to the present day when people question whether the lives of black people are worth as much as the lives of white people.
It is very sad for me to report that due to white privilege in this country, I don’t have to worry about you being shot or killed as much as I would if you had darker skin. And that is simply tragic for this country. It’s something I hope you and other people your age will work on in the next 50 years.
It has to start with you and your contemporaries keeping your color blindness. Back in the 1950s, Oscar Hammerstein wrote a song for a musical show called South Pacific in which he noted that “You Have to Be Taught” to be prejudiced. The song says:
You’ve got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught
From year to year,
It’s got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You’ve got to be carefully taught
You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade,
You’ve got to be carefully taught
You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Be
fore you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You’ve got to be carefully taught!
I hope that you never are taught to hate. It’s a foul lesson and unworthy of the “man for others” I hope you will be. In a few years, we grownups will turn over the country to you and your friends. It’s up to you to stop treating people differently because their “skin is a different shade.” Stay color blind, my dear Bryce. Please, stay color blind.
Love,
Grandpa
Politics and religion are like oil and water
February 2015
Do you remember in the 1984 film Ghostbusters where Harold Ramis and Bill Murray were armed with these large ghost-fighting ray guns, and Ramis warns Murray “Don’t cross the streams or it will be very bad”? Well if you think of politics and religion as the two streams, like in Ghostbusters, very bad things happen when you cross the streams. The Founders knew this and promoted a separation of Church and State to keep the streams separate.
Well, Ronald Reagan crossed the streams. In order to get elected in 1980 he helped get the Religious Right energized to get involved in politics. Religious people were not inclined to do this prior to 1980. They had been appalled by the decision in Roe v. Wade in 1974, but they had not really organized until people like Ralph Reed and Jerry Falwell saw that there was political gold here waiting to be mined. Issues of faith now became issues on which politicians were required to take a stand. This is why what used to be matters of science have become political issues.
As a religious person, I know there is no inherent conflict between science and religion. I was taught by the Irish Christian Brothers that “the Bible is not a science book.” The problem is that there are many people who believe it is. These people are called Fundamentalists. Fundamentalists pose a problem for people of faith. Those of us who do not take the Bible literally find it ludicrous that intelligent people can turn off their intellect in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence and believe that the earth is only a few thousand years old rather than the 4.5 billion years that science shows.
While we cannot stop people from believing in visiting space aliens or talking snakes, we do not have to respect those beliefs if they fly in the face of scientific proof. By that I mean that while there is freedom of religion and people are free to be Mormons, Scientologists or Episcopalians, they are not free to mandate that their religious beliefs must trump science.
So when the overwhelming scientific evidence shows that climate change is real or that vaccines are safe or that we evolved from apes, religious beliefs have no value. Faith explanations of physical phenomena are necessary only where there is a gap in our knowledge. This is the only place where faith and science come into conflict. So while science has ruled out a belief that the earth is only as old as the Bible says, it has not ruled out the possibility of a creator. In fact, the Big Bang theory is completely consistent with the idea of a creator. It is possible to be both religious and a scientist, and in fact many famous scientists have been famously religious.
Both religion and politics have their place, but they are toxic when mixed. Separation of Church and State was the best idea the Founding Fathers ever had. We ignore it at a peril to our democracy.
Getting his first sugar high
March 2015
Kids love sugar.
Who am I kidding? Just about everyone loves sugar. But it’s not very good for us. That’s how I got to be 60 pounds overweight. Be it cake, candy or ice cream, I crave sweets. I often joke that I wasn’t born with just a sweet tooth – I have a mouth full of them. So when my blood sugar levels began to rise in recent years and my doctor began warning me of impending diabetes, I had to admit that I was addicted to sugar. I think this particular addiction is shared by most people.
Cutting back on sugar was key to my recent weight loss. I hope that it also helps me avoid diabetes. But sugar is the devil constantly tempting me. So when my grandson Bryce was born, his parents decided to have his first year of life be sugar-free. He has been eating fruits, and that is about as much sweet as he has been allowed.
Bryce enjoying his first cupcake
But when his first birthday party came, the celebration included Bryce’s first cupcake with icing. To say that he enjoyed it is an understatement. He rubbed the icing all over his face and even into his hair as if to enjoy the sugar by osmosis. Bryce smiled from ear to ear as the sugar high registered in his brain. As his grown-up relatives watched, Bryce became a sugar baby. Can candy be far behind? Oh, the humanity!
A day that will live in infamy
April 2015
FDR’s sober characterization of the attack on Pearl Harbor belongs equally well and in my opinion is a more apt description of May 4, 1970. That day is one of the darkest in my lifetime. Because on May 4, 1970, National Guard troops opened fire on unarmed students protesting the war in Vietnam on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio. The troops were sent there by a governor intent on squelching the protests. And they succeeded. Once young people saw that the First Amendment was a sham and people could be killed for simply disagreeing with the government, the protests began to die away. This was accelerated by the end of the draft as students no longer had a personal stake in the war.
I was a Junior in high school the day four students were shot to death at Kent State. We fashioned black arm bands out of fabric or paper and the school administration immediately banned the arm bands. It seemed like the “establishment” was hell-bent on stopping all protests. The older generation wanted us all to just shut up and stop reminding them that we were losing thousands of Americans every month in a hopeless war in Vietnam. And it worked. After Kent State, most of us lost the idealism of the ‘60s and just capitulated to the capitalist dream. Long-haired hippies like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak turned to making fortunes in business.
Baby Boomers were criticized for protesting the war and refusing to buy into the American Dream, and then when they capitulated to the pressure, they were criticized again.
I think the most frightening thing about Kent State was that it revealed Americans’ true feelings about free speech. Polls showed that most Americans actually thought the shootings were justified. Later, the National Guard was exonerated of any blame and several students were indicted on criminal charges. This led Baby Boomers to despair of a country where our leaders paid lip service to constitutional freedoms, but the reality was deadly different. So we all recognized the futility of protests against the war and moved on with our lives.
But the truth is that the anti-war protests did actually succeed. Eventually they won the hearts and minds of a majority of Americans and the war ended in a retreat that was unthinkable in 1970. Many of these people who Nixon called the “Silent Majority” abhorred the violence of some protests, but came to back the message – the war was a waste of American blood and money. The country may have been turned off by the looting and burning that sometimes accompanied what started as peaceful protests, but they heard the message and eventually were persuaded by it.
That is the lesson I prefer to take from Kent State. When leaders are deaf to the concerns of citizens, protest is worthwhile, even when lives or property are lost in the process. Because ultimately it takes an extreme situation to jar most people to think beyond their parochial concerns to the issues that really matter. So whether it be protests against a war, or protests against police injustice or brutality, the protests are worthwhile for the country. And that is true even when it disrupts our society, because injustice can rarely be purged from human society without disruption. This invasive procedure on the body politic is the price of societal course correction. We should not fear it. It will bring a healthier country in its wake.
Remembering a dear friend
May 2015
My friend Steve Quigley died suddenly a few days ago. He was just 62. And I still can’t believe he’s gone.
Although we
attended Fordham Law School at the same time, I did not meet Steve there. I met Steve when I was hired at my current law firm. Steve was already on staff, and he was among the first to welcome me. I remember him saying on the day we were introduced, “It’s great to have someone with experience come aboard.” You see, Steve and I were the same age. In fact, he was just nine weeks older than me. And it was unusual for a law firm to hire a new lawyer who was not just out of law school. So at 47, I was a very mature lawyer and Steve immediately recognized a kindred spirit.
It did not take us long to bond. We immediately found the Fordham connection. That was followed soon by the Jesuit college connection. He had gone to Canisius and I went to Holy Cross. But Steve was more than just a product of a Jesuit education as I was, he was the epitome of the Jesuit ideal of a “man for others.” Before he became a lawyer, he had worked for the Jesuit Volunteer Corps (JVC) doing good works for the needy in Philadelphia. And that was his true calling. But he saw that having a legal degree would help him both make a better living to support the family he wanted to have and give him the ability to help more people with a wider range of problems. So he became a lawyer.
But he never really left the JVC. He was constantly in touch with his JVC family and when his own children were old enough, he encouraged them all to serve as JVC volunteers. And they all did! At the time of his death, Steve was under consideration to become Executive Director of the JVC. This would have closed the circle. Steve had reached the nominal retirement age of 62 and he was planning to retire from law and get back to his true calling – helping others fulltime. But it was not to be. Last week, he died of a massive heart attack while in his law office.