Penning Thoughts

Who wouldn’t love to be able to change something with just one action, say, snap your fingers and the red light turns green, or blink your eyes and the sun is shining, or make a wish and you’re on your way to Hawaii?

Me? I’d been hoping that writing just one column could bring our country back. You know, the country where we didn’t threaten one another, or call the other guy an idiot, or where the president didn’t make fun of people. Just one thing, I keep thinking, and it’ll all turn around.

What the heck’s going on? It seems we’re at each other’s throats with rage. What are we doing to each other?

For some time I had talked myself into believing the atmosphere of hatred and disrespect we hear so much about in D.C, only existed in this specific vicinity. It swirls around television channels, is trumpeted on bumper stickers and yard signs, emanates from the mouths of some in Congress and stains posters that are marked-over.  

Behavior stemming from the president’s brash remarks and his call to end political correctness can’t be as bad elsewhere as it seems here, surely.

But on our trips back home to Illinois I began to ask cab drivers and wheelchair assistants, usually immigrants, I’d encounter in the airports if they were experiencing disrespect, and the unfortunate answer was, “Yes.” And as my wife and I talked to teachers about incidents at school, and to family back in Illinois, I began to see it is all too real.

The national eruption of hate and mutual distrust is not just sad, it’s tearing the fabric of our society apart. Why are we doing this to one another?

Part of it stems from Russia’s evil manipulation, taking our national original sin - slavery and the vicious racism that has stemmed from it - and gouging that disabling wound to Russia’s advantage. Using Facebook and Twitter, Russia manufactured racist ‘stories,’ ‘events’ and ‘users’ out of thin air, convinced us they were real, then weaponized them to ricochet across this “social media,” churning our emotions to a boiling point. Our division at this moment in history, sad to say, is concrete evidence that Russia’s gambit has worked.

But the guy who’s the other half of this problem lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., and he’s not into the respect we were taught as kids.

Usually, the leader of our country is sort of like our national uncle, the guy who shows you how it’s done, our representative to the world, our guide in times of trial. But we’ve never had a national uncle who says it’s ok to be unkind, to say bad things about other people, to call people names, to make fun of them, to lie.

Imagine your grandson is out playing ball and somebody yells at him, “Hey four eyes, where’d you get that stupid face?” Or your Mom is taunted, “Get out of my way, grandma!” It would make you (and me) furious.

We know things like that are happening, and mostly it’s race and nationality that are the points of each personal attack.  Non-white workers and technicians tell me, yes, they’ve experienced hateful words. 

Here they are in the country that’s been the pinnacle of freedom for the world, the place they, and your own great grandparents, grandparents or parents fought hard to win passage to; and many fought hard to defend. And someone out of nowhere, insults them with hateful words, just because of who they are. Because the haters feel they can.

At school, kids are being bullied, because of their strange-sounding last names or the color or their skin.  Shoved, because the shover knows he can; after all, we have a national leader who gave him/her the example that told them, it’s ok to be unkind, disrespectful, even brutal. 

It’s become so bad that the American Association of School Administrators, which represents local school superintendents, devoted an entire issue of their magazine to focus on how school leaders can handle the lack of civility they have to contend with in their school districts.

It broke my heart to learn that, all over this vast, wonderful country, kids are being unkind to one another at what’s supposed to be a sanctuary of safety, their school, and that parents are being picked on.

Not long after our president’s “shit hole countries” remark, I was being pushed in a wheelchair to our airport departure gate in Virginia. I asked where my assistant - remember they often depend on tips - where she was from, and she told me she came from Ghana, in Africa.

I said, “I want to apologize to you for what our president said.” Tears began to fill her eyes. “Thank you,” she said.

That’s the thing about all this. People are being hurt.

I write to Speaker Paul Ryan, because he’s third in line to the presidency, and I tell him he needs to say something. Kids and families are being hurt, I tell him, “because of the words of this president, and you, sir, say nothing?”

Every day someone is harmed. This is not normal.

Hatred is wrong. Ridicule is wrong. Lying is wrong.

Killing, is wrong.

The thing is, we’re not going to survive as the “leader of the free world,” if we attack one another. Our neighborhoods and towns, schools and cities will rupture.

We have to look at ourselves in the mirror, and ask that question. Do I want to see hatred, like my expression, stare back at me? Or do you want, long for, a smile. Let’s try to get back to the Golden Rule we were taught as children - Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Come on, America, let’s start being one people again, use the Golden Rule. Because the United States is us, just as it reads on our coins - E Pluribus Unum - One, out of many. We, together, from all the nations on this Earth, make this country great.

Respect, and we can be a guiding light. Hate, and our Statue of Liberty’s light will begin to quiver and slowly fade away; her purpose, extinguished.

##

—To see what our own national hatred of “others” has spiraled into in earlier decades, look up:

and the
arrests of Italian-Americans,

German-Americans, and

Japanese-American internment, during WWII,

Most horrifically, The Holocaust, the 1930s Nazi-inspired, anti-Jewish hatred in Europe allowed the murder of millions of human beings.

Speaker Paul Ryan sent me an email, telling me what he won’t forget about Sept. 11. This was my reply:

You know what I will never forget, Mr. Speaker? I will never forget how you abandoned goodness and morality, how you stood by and watched, encouraged an amoral monster, who set American vs American and turned our country into a hellhole for non-European immigrants.

Children are being hurt in schools, sir. Families are being shamed and harmed in public places. Yet you have done all you could to enable abhorrent, amoral presidential behavior; abet public policy based on lies.

You abandoned us and embraced a man who is tearing our social fabric into shreds.

Shame, Paul Ryan.

Shame.

In one of his earliest speeches delivered - as a 28 year old lawyer in 1838 - in his and my hometown, Springfield, Illinois; Abraham Lincoln, father of the Republican Party, spoke on political unrest and its threat to our country’s existence.

He said, in part:

“I hope I am over wary; but if I am not, there is, even now, something of ill-omen, amongst us. I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts … “

He then pleaded:

“ … Let reverence for the laws, be breathed by every American mother, to the lisping babe, that prattles on her lap–let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges; let it be written in Primers, spelling books, and in Almanacs;–let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice. And, in short, let it become the political religion of the nation; and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars.”

http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/lyceum.htm

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

– Joseph Goebbels
http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/holoprelude/goebbels.html

This column has been written in memory of Calvin Milton Jones, who died in May 2011.

“Has that ever happened to you?”

His face looked at me with the most serious expression I’d seen from this gentle man.

“Three times,” he said.

My friend, the late Calvin Milton Jones, had just sent me a copy of Dick Gregory’s talk to a Tavis Smiley “State of Black Union” convention center audience. Gregory, the comedian and activist, wondered aloud, that if Bill Clinton was truly “our first black president,” would he know (at 1 min,50 sec.) how it felt to be a black man, driving down the road, and hear a police siren:

“Mr. President, do you know what it feels like to be a black person, to be a congresslady, to be a lieutenant governor with 12 doctor’s degrees, and driving down the street, and hear the police siren, and you start squeezing that steering wheel tight, and they pass by you, and you Thank God! Damn! You didn’t do nothin’ in the first place. Do you know what it is to be black?”

The primarily black audience was in howls, cheering with a standing ovation at Gregory’s presentation. And I realized then that the expression, “driving while black,” was so real and so common that an entire audience of hundreds had reacted, knowingly and in unison, with raucous laughter at Gregory’s searing remarks.

After I watched it, I walked over to Calvin’s office and asked him, “Has that ever happened to you?”

He looked me straight in the eye, “Three times” … on the way to and from Washington and his hometown in North Carolina.

So this gentle and generous man … who arrived at the office at close to five o’clock every morning — even the day before he died, sick with pneumonia — to turn on the lights, make the coffee, check the phone and computer systems, arrange the conference rooms to be sure everything was in place for the days’ meetings … told me, with those words, that he had been stopped by police officers on three separate occasions, just because they knew they could taunt another black man.

This man, Calvin Milton Jones … who wouldn’t harm a soul, who cut all the lawns in his neighborhood, because he didn’t want it to look unkempt; who, unasked, often waxed neighbors’ cars; and who would give you the shirt off his back, if you were in need … this man had been pulled over three times for no other reason than the color of his skin.

Imagine how it must feel to look up into the eyes of a uniformed man, who, you and he know, could change your life in an instant.

And now we have young Trayvon Martin, killed by a single shot from the gun of a self-appointed ‘neighborhood watchman,’ who said Trayvon was, “suspicious … looks black” and, chasing Trayvon against orders, told 911, “They always get away.” But “they” (Trayvon) did not get away; and the man who hunted him down wasn’t even arrested.

Walking while black?

Author Donna Britt, commenting on the shooting death of Trayvon, said, “I don’t know what this child could have done to be safe, except not be black.”

Being, while black.

These two men, going about their business, are stopped for being “suspicious,” for being black men living in the world’s lone superpower; which the rest of us tell ourselves is “the land of the free” … the “sweet land of liberty” … that exists, “under God … with liberty and justice for all.”

Perhaps it is … for some.

Mr. Speaker,

Now you have assented to the release of an attack on the FBI and the United States Department of Justice by the Intelligence Committee chairman. Are you saying, by your silence and by your smiling observation of this president, that you actually favor a one-party, authoritarian government in the United States of America?

What is the limit, sir?

I am deeply, deeply concerned over the future of our nation. What will you do to preserve, protect and defend it? Will you have guts enough to stand up to this 45th president and tell him that in our country we don’t talk like that (shit hole countries), we don’t conspire against the people of our own country and we don’t lie to the people in interviews and speeches and press conferences?

We are not all fools, sir. I wonder if our republic will last until the next election day; or should we prepare for news to be taken over by the government, which would become the source of all truth?

What will you do to save this nation from the constant assault on truth and on our system of justice?

I felt so ashamed afterwards. After I told a lie.

My Mom had spent all morning taping up pretty pictures she’d cut out from Life magazine. After she finished, my brother and I continued to play, and our scooting little feet got onto the surface that Mom had decorated. The pictures began to tear. In a short time, all the pictures Mom had posted had been ripped and ruined. She came up, angry when she saw what we’d done.

I blurted out, “Frankie did it! It was Frank!”

It was a lie. A small one, but the memory of it haunts me still.

But what if Mom, herself, stood up at the PTA and declared that the principal had poisoned the town’s water tank. Mom? Really? But, why would she say that? Does she really know it? I lied about the pictures, but that’s pretty serious. She’s my Mom. It must be true.

Most of us never lie. But, if you do, no one feels good about it, because a lie is a betrayal of trust. And since we are each inclined to be truthful, most of us were stunned, when Donald Trump publicly stated that Barack Obama, the man who sought to become our president. wasn’t a citizen and, in addition, was a follower of Islam.

“Obama is a Muslim!” Wow, really? Trump’s a well known man. I see him on TV all the time. People that famous don’t lie. He’d never lie about something that important, would he? I’d be humiliated, if my Mom or my wife or my pastor discovered I’d lied to them.

Now, each day seems to begin with a statement, words and exclamation points, from a smartphone inside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. And it usually comes with a claim that will be said by some to be true, while others will likely say it is not.

This is a list of some President Trump’s pre-election claims, and the links to sources that show each claim is not true:

• “Hey, I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering.” - a long investigated lie.

• Obama isn’t a citizen - disproved.

• Obama is a Muslim - disproved.

• Obama founded ISIS - untrue.

• The Election Is Rigged - untrue.

Back in the earlier 20th century another politician with a huge ego was elected to lead a European country. His rise to power was accompanied by many questionable statements, huge statements that sounded like facts, as he presented them. Millions believed these untruths told as if true, thinking that no one that important could possibly lie about something so serious.

This European had developed a theory about truth and power. He called it The Big Lie. And here’s how he described it in his autobiography,

“[I]n the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.

“It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down.”

The European politician’s use of the big lie, after his election, was transferred to a man who became his chief information officer, who would use the lie as a central to his work,

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

When he was seeking the office, Trump said - and often says now - that the newspapers and television news reporters all lie … all the time. But how do we find out what he says every day? From newspapers and television/radio news programs. His relentless challenges and charges against genuine news are what is most troubling today, because truth, the facts we all acknowledge, is at the core of our democracy. Without truth, what are we?

Newspapers hire reporters (which I once was) to record the details of events or reveal unknown facts. News is how we find out what is happening each day, to discover what is true, what you alone could not discover, without the newspaper (or radio/TV news).

Opinions are only allowed on the editorial and OpEd pages in newspapers and commentary in broadcast news. Everything else is strictly limited to facts, or, as we call it, news. And editors — who re-read and fact check articles, before they can be printed or spoken — enforce that policy with strict attention to the details of what a reporter has written.

Presidents rarely like reporters and news, because reporters find facts that presidents don’t want to be revealed. But past presidents respected newspapers and news broadcasters, because they know they are vital to stability of our system of government. Thomas Jefferson, as he was preparing the Constitution of our nation, wrote,

“[W]ere it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.”

Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, January 16, 1787

Now, in 2018, think about the statements that “all news is fake,” the press are “the biggest group of liars,” “the lying New York Times,” and on it goes. Every reporter is a liar and everything that I say is the truth. Why would anyone keep insisting that every one of our sources of news and information is lying to us? Do we honestly believe that we have liars everywhere, except in the White House?

When you talk to people from other countries - frequently, cab drivers - you begin to understand that the freedom to speak your mind is the most valuable right we have, because some other countries don’t allow it. Spies can be everywhere, even in families. What they value most here: the freedom to speak. But with that freedom comes responsibility to say truth to others.

Oh. That European’s name: Adolph Hitler. And his information officer was named Joseph Goebbels, more frequently known as the Minister of Propaganda.

Sources:

Mein Kampf
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/excerpts-from-mein-kampf

Joseph Goebbels
http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/holoprelude/goebbels.html

Mein Kampf discussion
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/does-mein-kampf-remain-a-dangerous-book

November 29, 2017

Mr. Speaker,

You took this position to represent the nation beyond Wisconsin, and on this 84th anniversary of the marriage of Howard Penning and Jean Hartley Penning, my parents, I would ask that you consider your obligation to the rest of us.

Imagine Dwight Eisenhower, today sending out an early morning personal statement that included a fraudulent newsreel, purporting to show Black men luridly attacking white women. Imagine him visiting dozens of cities that same day, projecting the newsreel before fans at local baseball stadiums at every stop.

My Dad came back from WWII, because of Ike. And in 1952 - despite being a Democrat and an Illinoisan - Dad gave Ike his vote. The man in the Executive Mansion doesn’t deserve to have his name listed anywhere close to Ike’s, or Abraham’s or Ronald’s.

He is a man who attacked us today, by sending out on our ‘cyber-waves’ the video propaganda of an immigrant hater in Britain. Millions of people read his ‘tweets’ and even more probably watched those fascist-tainted videos.

Children and families were most likely bullied, at best; or assaulted, at worst, because of what our President did today.

And you want a tax cut, more than anything else in the world.

Your kids, Mr. Speaker; think of your kids. If you’re lucky enough to have them, think of your grandkids.

What will they say about you, on the anniversary of the day we lose our democracy … because you didn’t speak up?

The day’s not over. Will you not call this man to account for doing something Ike - the hero of the Second World War - would abhor?

This column is in memory of Calvin Milton Jones, who died in May 2011.

“Has that ever happened to you?”

His face looked at me with the most serious expression I’d seen from this gentle man.

“Three times,” he said.

My friend, the late Calvin Milton Jones, had just sent me a copy of Dick Gregory’s talk to a Tavis Smiley “State of Black Union” convention center audience. Gregory, the comedian and activist, wondered aloud, that if Bill Clinton was truly “our first black president,” would he know (at 1 min,50 sec.) how it felt to be a black man, driving down the road, and hear a police siren:

“Mr. President, do you know what it feels like to be a black person, to be a congresslady, to be a lieutenant governor with 12 doctor’s degrees, and driving down the street, and hear the police siren, and you start squeezing that steering wheel tight, and they pass by you, and you Thank God! Damn! You didn’t do nothin’ in the first place. Do you know what it is to be black?”

The primarily black audience was in howls, cheering with a standing ovation at Gregory’s presentation. And I realized then that the expression, “driving while black,” was so real and so common that an entire audience of hundreds had reacted, knowingly and in unison, with raucous laughter at Gregory’s searing remarks.

After I watched it, I walked over to Calvin’s office and asked him, “Has that ever happened to you?”

He looked me straight in the eye, “Three times” … on the way to and from Washington and his hometown in North Carolina.

So this gentle and generous man … who arrived at the office at close to five o’clock every morning — even the day before he died, sick with pneumonia — to turn on the lights, make the coffee, check the phone and computer systems, arrange the conference rooms to be sure everything was in place for the days’ meetings … told me, with those words, that he had been stopped by police officers on three separate occasions, just because they knew they could taunt another black man.

This man, Calvin Milton Jones … who wouldn’t harm a soul, who cut all the lawns in his neighborhood, because he didn’t want it to look unkempt; who, unasked, often waxed neighbors’ cars; and who would give you the shirt off his back, if you were in need … this man had been pulled over three times for no other reason than the color of his skin.

Imagine how it must feel to look up into the eyes of a uniformed man, who, you and he know, could change your life in an instant.

And now we have young Trayvon Martin, killed by a single shot from the gun of a self-appointed ‘neighborhood watchman,’ who said Trayvon was, “suspicious … looks black” and, chasing Trayvon against orders, told 911, “They always get away.” But “they” (Trayvon) did not get away; and the man who hunted him down wasn’t even arrested.

Walking while black?

Author Donna Britt, commenting on the shooting death of Trayvon, said, “I don’t know what this child could have done to be safe, except not be black.”

Being, while black.

These two men, going about their business, are stopped for being “suspicious,” for being black men living in the world’s lone superpower; which the rest of us tell ourselves is “the land of the free” … the “sweet land of liberty” … that exists, “under God … with liberty and justice for all.”

Perhaps it is … for some.

You think people “live with their own kind” and that’s the reason you never see a black face in your neighborhood?

No. Our suburbs, the homes built after World War II for returning service people, were ordered by federal housing authorities to not include any African American as a potential buyer. No black person was shown any of those houses by builders or real estate agents.

No black person could get a bank loan to buy a house in any neighborhood specifically created for white people only.

So black workers couldn’t find a house to live near their factories or offices, because those houses were never shown to people of “their kind.”

Listen to this radio program and ask yourself, “What can I do to stop the deliberate segregation in my neighborhood?” Because you know that practice continues today.

And consider this: What do we owe African Americans for the accumulated housing wealth they never were given a chance to build?

Listen: The 1A and the creation of Black-free suburbs