Penning Thoughts

“Mommy, are we poor?”

How does a parent answer a question like that? Sometimes kids pay no attention to the relative ‘wealth’ of those living around them. They are who they are, and they play together and drink milk and eat cookies together.

Yet, in a county where the 2000 census reports our “median family income” is $78,877; five percent of our 39,290 families live in poverty, which means they earn “below the poverty level,” a mere $18,850. Even more troubling, Census reports 9.1 percent of Arlington’s children under the age of 18 live in poverty.

Imagine what that must mean. Hunger? Missed meals? Tattered clothes? Parents working two or more jobs just to keep the family together?

Here we are in a caring jurisdiction that boasts of high incomes, exploding business construction; neighborhoods with out-of-sight housing prices and ‘McMansions’ popping up among the older homes. And almost one in ten of our youngsters live in a household where Mom and Dad (if they’re together) can barely get by each month.

Now, consider this: According to the Marjorie Hughes Fund for Children, 20 to 25 percent of the children in Arlington’s public schools have no health insurance. So, not only is a little one or teen hungry and cold at night (to keep the fuel bill down), but Mom or Dad probably can’t afford to take them to a doctor’s office when their cold takes a turn for the worse.

You’ve been there. A three-year-old screaming in pain at two in the morning with an ear infection and high fever. You and I can get in our cars and head to an urgent care facility, where a doctor can make a diagnosis and prescribe antibiotics that you then buy at the all night drug store.

With no insurance card to show and likely no car to drive, what must it be to watch your child suffer, holding their aching little form close to yours, as he or she coughs or cries or moans?

Think of it: one in four of the youngsters who sit in our classrooms may have to ‘tough it out’ and stay in bed when the flu or a bad cold hits; or worse, a broken limb. Their folks can’t afford to go to a regular doctor or the drug store, without cutting back on some other household expense. And what would that be? Food? Clothing? Utilities?

How often do you hear the phrase, “We are blessed”? And what of those who have little beyond a bag of groceries and no insurance protection? Are they ‘damned’ to live with so little?

Our society worships ‘things’ and the possession of them. We earn our comfortable incomes and live our comfortable lives, often without realizing that not far down the street or on the other side of the county there lives a mother who works into the night, cleaning others’ sheets or bathrooms or floors. Working, working and working more to make life sustainable for her children.

All the while praying, “Please, God, don’t let her get sick; I can’t help her.” Or, “Please heal my leg; it hurts so much when I bend down, and the boss says he’ll let me go if I don’t speed up like the rest.”

The County provides a number of health-related services (call 703-228-1200) for those who cannot afford to pay for them. They include prenatal services to help pregnant mothers with no access to health insurance; an immunization clinic to provide protection against the flu and other childhood diseases; a dental clinic; and a “well child” clinic which offers physical exams, vision and hearing checks, developmental and nutritional assessment, and lead poisoning screening. The County’s Public Health Services can be reached for emergencies, 24 hours a day, via 703-228-4610.

But that only takes a family so far; care for illness and medications is available for those who qualify at the Public Assistance Program, which offers financial, medical and housing help at 703-228-1350. Thankfully there is also the Marjorie Hughes Fund for Children, which works with public health nurses and school staffs to see that families with sick children get the help they need.

To help, you can send a donation to the Marjorie Hughes Fund at P.O. Box 50043, Arlington 22205. For more information about the Fund and its upcoming February 23 benefit, send an e-mail to mliles@arlingtonva.us or emailus@proamsports.com.

It’s not enough to shake your head and say, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” Open your heart and checkbook; that’s all it takes. Your gift means at least one child gets to see a doctor, gets needed medicine, instead of a tissue and aspirin. You take it for granted. Rest assured, they don’t.

Nick Penning is an Arlington freelance writer. His column, “Penning Thoughts,” appears in alternating editions of The Arlington Connection.

Imagine sitting along the Potomac — on the afternoon of August 28, 1963 — near the Memorial Bridge, which pierces into the heart of the Arlington plantation. You could probably hear the orations and ovations taking place on the other side of the river, just around the front of the Lincoln Memorial.

An historic “March on Washington” was reaching its crescendo that hot and sunny day with the arrival of a 34 year-old preacher from Georgia; a man mature beyond his years who helped transform the face of this nation.

You wonder if the traffic on the GW Parkway, which snakes along the shoulder of our county, had slowed, as it does on the night of the Fourth of July. Did people line the banks on our side and listen to young Martin Luther King declare, “I have a dream today”?

When he spoke of “freedom” and “free at last, free at last; thank God almighty, we’re free at last,” did we get it?

If you’re white, as am I, you may have puzzled, “What does he mean, ‘free at last’?” There is no slavery. People aren’t held against their will … at least they weren’t before the current Administration took office.

But I am not a black man. I did not live in a nation where it was considered ‘sport’ in some states to grab a black man from his home and drag him, with his wife and children watching, to the nearest big tree, where he was spit upon and summarily lynched by a hateful, bloodthirsty crowd.

Imagine; just try to imagine living in a world where you knew this could happen to you at any time and any place for any reason. What kind of life is that? Are you free to live “in pursuit of happiness”? Does your gut clench every night when you try to go to sleep and every morning when you raise into consciousness, wondering if this was the day the cowardly-hooded night-riders would burst into your life?

Move forward to today. In a training session at the office, the leader asks each person how they would describe themselves. “What is the one characteristic that defines you?” Each of us spoke of such things as belief, parent, spouse, or social class. But, when Joseph’s turn came, he simply said, “I am black. That is the one thing I am reminded of every day.”

Do we make that reality happen for the Joseph’s and the Mary’s and Lamar’s?

When you are seated in a restaurant, do you take a second look, when an African-American couple is shown to their booth? At the grocery store, do you find yourself looking into the shopping cart of an African-American mother, as she empties it on the belt? Do you wonder, “Is she going to use food stamps?”

And when you are walking along Columbia Pike or in Clarendon, do you feel uncomfortable if a loud bunch of young African-American youngsters or young adults approaches on the sidewalk?

Finally, when you are driving, if you’re white, you don’t live in fear that you might be stopped by the police, for whatever reason. You aren’t grabbed by the terror that a traffic stop might end with a night in jail, because you ‘look like’ someone who’s being sought for a crime.

Consider this: According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, African Americans make up12.7 percent of the US population and 48.2 percent of adults in state and federal prisons and local jails. Human Rights Watch reports, “black men [in 2000] were eight times more likely to be in prison than white men.”

This is an outrage! Add in the facts of intimidation of black voters in Florida and the car chases that have led, here in the Washington area, to the police killing of innocent African-Americans, and we get a tiny inkling of what it means to be black in 2007.

So, who is “free” in these United States? Take a moment to mentally “walk in the shoes” of a person of color, and then step into a store, a diner, or on a sidewalk. Only when we can see each other as the person in front of us, and not the person of color in front of us, will we have reached the time when we all are “free at last.” Let us work, truly work, to make that “dream” happen. Let us end the nightmare of soul-eating prejudice that lurks inside.

Nick Penning, www.nickpenning.com, is an Arlington, Va., freelance writer. His column, “Penning Thoughts,” appears in alternating editions of The Arlington Connection.

Carols floated in the air Christmas night, as a little grandson slowly wore out of energy and fell fast asleep at Grammie’s house. The radio music came not from Arlington’s WETA, which now talk, talk, talks all day and night; but from Bethesda’s WGMS, the last bastion of seasonable, reasonable music, that soothed the young tyke to dreamland.

Upstairs, the rooftop heard no more prancing, rather the sound of BBC News, which told of the passing of James Brown, the man whose mantra, “Say it Loud; I’m Black and I’m Proud!” meant more than many of us realized to a generation of African-Americans.

The next day brought sad news a little closer to home: former President Gerald Ford, an orphan who grew up to be a congressman, who lived among us in Northern Virginia; an appointed vice president who fell into office when Richard Nixon resigned; died early in the evening of December 26. His humble accession to Chief Executive brought relief from evil corruption and a long-delayed end to the horror of Vietnam.

Remember the Crescent City, New Orleans? If there’s such a thing as the genocide of a city, what the government has done to the crown jewel of U.S. culture is certainly the victim of it. Our ‘leader,’ generators and klieg lights in tow, ‘rushed’ to Jackson Square more than a year ago and made the promise: “we will do what it takes,” he said. “We will stay as long as it takes to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives.” Evacuees still beg for help to get home, but the checks to Halliburton contained no guarantee of return; just another buck to the monstrous corporation that lives off the federal trough.

On New Year’s the woefully tragic, heart-tugging photo on the front page of the big paper across the river seemed to sum up much of 2006: a fragile 19 year-old pored over the Arlington grave of her 19 year-old sweetheart, killed only six weeks after being sent to a war with no purpose.

If ever there was a time for citizen involvement in our government, it is now. We can’t just “Let it Be.” We’ve got to step forward and demand change; demand humane policies and demand the elimination of the outrageous, trillion-dollar tax cuts that served to make the rich even richer. Reaping tax rewards while starving government; which exists to serve you and me, not gluttonous corporations and those who run them.

There’s an Arlington Way that, for the most part, works. And the rest of the Commonwealth seemed to get a dose of it when Jim Webb turned out ‘macaca’ Allen. We have a responsibility to make government, beyond our county borders, work for the dispossessed and those in despair. For the working folks who are being crippled by the cost of health protection and are scared they’re going to lose their jobs. So much good could be done, if we each did our part to show to the nation what a people-centered government looks like. Guatemalan immigrant Jaimen Ortiz did his part when, as Seth Rosen reported, he rushed to catch a little two-year-old who’d fallen from her apartment window. He could have ignored her, but neither he nor any of us can take our eyes away from grief when we see it.

Let’s sow hope this year and do our part to make this fragile green orb, glistening in the incomprehensible and never-ending universe, a refuge for all of humanity. We’re all in this together. So, let’s roll up our sleeves and make this government the shining star of humanity it once was and can be again.

Nick Penning (www.nickpenning.com) is an Arlington freelance writer. His column, “Penning Thoughts,” appears in alternating editions of The Arlington Connection.

Time was, you worked hard, really hard …for decades… maybe you bought a house, a car, and helped your kids go to school. You gave to others who needed help…and then you retired.

You wonder these days if that still is a part of “the American Dream.”

Hard work, providing for your family, paying taxes for the good of your country and humankind, and then…at the end…a regular, modest income from the retirement pension that was part of the package your employer promised. That was ‘the deal’ we came to expect as return for working and living a good life.

Sometimes that promise was in the form of a binding contract, negotiated by the union that stood up for you at your job. In other cases the pension was a well-reasoned assumption, based on years and years of evidence that saw fellow employees get a steady income after retirement.

Well, there’s lots of evidence these days that ‘the good life’ is only available to those with big bucks; because the news seems to be filled each week with a report that another company, ‘forced’ by ‘excessive costs,’ has decided to unilaterally fold-up their end of the bargain and shut down the company pension plan.

No warning. Not even a hint. And then, Boom! Sorry, sucker; we just canned your pension. Go take a hike.

Here’s how the PBS NewsHour, based in Shirlington, described the scene on January 9 of this year:

“IBM, long a leader in defining the relationship between companies and employees in American corporate life last week became part of a new trend, ending its traditional pension plan,” reporter Jeffrey Brown said. “…even well off companies are making the change. In recent months Verizon, Lockheed Martin and Motorola have all announced freezes on their pensions plans.”

It isn’t just that these monster companies are freezing pensions at a certain level. No, starting with United Airlines, which took an unprecedented 2005 move that stunned the nation, corporate America is flat-out terminating pension programs. Arlington-based US Airways made its assault on its employee pensions the same year.

Congress stepped into the fray some 30 years ago and created an agency that’s supposed to protect us, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) — (http://www.pbgc.gov/index.html) — which is financed by the corporations whose pension plans they protect. But, according to another PBS investigation for the Frontline program, big business has defied its responsibilities to the extent that four years ago corporate America owed $50 billion to the PBGC. This year, the shortchanging is more than four times that amount: $450 billion.

How can business get away with that? I can’t just decide to stop paying my mortgage. Listen to how Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren described the situation to Frontline: “Let’s just be as blunt as we can. They got away with it because the regulators let them get away with it. In all those years in the ’90s, when we were doing well, when it was boom times, the big companies kept a sharp eye on what pleases the investors. … It did not please the investors to put money aside for the employees, and so the big corporations simply didn’t do it.”

“It did not please the investors”? Is that what this comes down to? Is our nation really just about making a buck? Is it true that the prevailing attitude is “What’s good for business is good for America”? Economist Martin Goldberg wrote last year, “The not too subtle message is leave corporate America alone.” And to whom would that warning be made? Why to those who ‘represent us’ across the river.

It’s no accident that business throws hundreds of millions of dollars into congressional and presidential campaign coffers. The pay the piper expects in response for his support is to be left alone, to deal with his workers however he sees fit.

This isn’t the America we grew up with, is it? America the Beautiful seems a pipedream, when you read words like those cited above. Is it all a big joke? Has Uncle Sam changed from a kindly gentleman into a cold, cynical and calculating relative?

P.T. Barnun said “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Is that what it’s about, in the end? Are we all suckers who will work until we die or until we get injured or get sick?

This is a far cry from, “Do unto others what you would have them do unto you.”

Is there any way to turn this around? To stop the relentless pursuit of wealth at any cost? We can start with the folks who occupy that shining, marble, dome-topped building on the other side of the river. If enough of us make a fuss over this, maybe the word ‘retirement’ can come to mean what it has meant for our parents’ generation.

Let’s not let it happen that we became a bitter, ‘what’s in it for me’ nation. Let’s look out for each other and try, as hard as we might, to make this life a good one for each and every one of us.

Nick Penning is an Arlington, Va., freelance writer. His column, “Penning Thoughts,” appears in alternating editions of The Arlington Connection.

As you read this, think for a moment: your nation is committing war, where hundreds kill and die in your name…right now and into this night. There is bravado, there is fear, and, I suspect, some doubt about why our nation’s flag and its tanks and planes and bombs are rolling the roads and roaring in the sky above a Middle Eastern desert.

Not many weeks ago we heard a similar screaming, ear-pounding cry over our heads, here in Arlington, as the new Air Force Memorial was dedicated near the Pentagon. Because the Air Force Thunderbirds were shooting hundreds of miles per hour overhead, their cries turned heads for miles around.

For a split second, if you’d not read the papers or had forgotten the announcement, you might have thought, “What was that!”, perhaps wondering if, in this age of White House-induced fear, we might be under some sort of attack.

Is it possible to imagine armored personnel carriers rolling down Arlington Boulevard, helicopters chopping the air, and rifle carrying soldiers walking the streets and posted at check points near, say, Glebe Road and George Mason? And that, as those planes careened through the air, muffled ‘booms,’ puffs of smoke could be seen in their wake?

Small countries and guerilla bands could never muster that kind of power….but, emerging powers such as China, and a recently rightward-drifting Japan, can bring shudders to our seemingly peaceful lives.

If we are not immune, why did we seek this war? Why did we stir up greater, worldwide hatred toward our beloved country?

Has our silence aided and abetted our elected leaders to continue forcing young men and women to stop their lives and carry armaments overseas, putting their families at great risk of losing the centers of their existence?

Now, weeks after the nerve-rattling spectacle of Air Force might, we hear talk of ‘pulling back’ or ‘pulling out,’ “as soon as they are ready to defend themselves.” You even hear the word “Iraqification” of the war, through which the reins of warfare are turned to those who live there.

If you’re in your late 50s or 60s, that word conjures up “Vietnamization,” the term then-President Nixon used as part of his ‘secret plan’ to end the war. That plan helped him win election in 1968. Yet seven more long years, and thousands of Vietnam Wall names later, it all came to a whimpering end as the last helicopter lifted the last evacuees from the top of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon.

As I’ve heard others say, how many Gold Star mothers will be told of heartbreaking loss, while those who started this madness ‘wind down’ our presence in a nation we have destroyed? Now that we know the end is coming, how many widows, how many orphans will be created in these final months ahead?

It has been said before, but is worth saying again, How do we ask another soldier to be the last one to die for a mistake?

Because, at this point, Arlington is being opened for more and more graves, in defense of what?… one man’s refusal to admit the obvious? His pitiful and outrageous attempt to ‘save face,’ as more die, and our nation becomes ever more a target in response to what he has sown.

We can pray for peace, and ask our members of Congress to bring us quickly to that end.

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Nick Penning is an Arlington, Virginia, freelance writer. His column, “Penning Thoughts,” appears in alternating editions of The Arlington Connection.

It has been 43 years; nearly half a century.

Forty-three years ago — November 22, 1963 — I was just another high school senior, finishing lunch period and heading back to the career day assembly. I began to notice groups of guys clustered around those little transistor radios we had back then.

Somebody talked about Kennedy and shots and Johnson. I envisioned them on some sort of outdoor stage and shots being fired. But, frankly, it just didn’t make any sense.

Shots? The President? What? Are you serious?

The mood was apprehensive when the assembly program began several minutes later. Then, one of the priests made a fast-clipped, solitary walk from the back of the gym to the doors leading to the stage. He whispered in the ear of the student leading the session. Jim Egzii stepped to the microphone and announced, “The President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, is dead.”

Dead? Dead? What do you mean, “He’s dead”?

Joe Lofy, who sat in front of me, fell to his knees in prayer.

The next four days found us staring at our black-and-white televisions, watching black- and-white news pictures. There were no commercials. We watched clear into the night, as he lay in state at the Capitol and throughout the following four days: confused reports, arrests, Lee Harvey Oswald, Officer Tippet, Jack Ruby and the Texas Book Depository.

On the third day, Sunday, I was just about to eat a plate of scrambled eggs after getting home from church, when I looked at the television and saw Oswald being shot.

And on Monday Jackie, Caroline and John-John led world leaders in a solemn procession from the White House to St. Matthews Cathedral, where the little boy saluted his father’s coffin. Then the procession to Arlington began; the drums beat over and over and over, interrupted by the funeral dirge and then by the Navy Hymn, which, serendipitously, we’d learned in Glee Club just weeks before.

And now the time has lengthened to 43 years, and you have to be of a certain age even to have recalled that horrific, surrealistic time.

The upcoming anniversary made me search for the facts surrounding the tale I’d heard told of JFK ‘picking out his grave.’ According to an article Kathie Scarrah wrote for the Voice of America News in May of last year, the President had been at Arlington just days before his trip to Dallas; walking near the front of the Custis-Lee mansion with its magnificent view of the river, Memorial Bridge, the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument and the Capitol further in the distance.

His guide at the time, Paul Fuqua, told Ms. Scarrah, “The president didn’t know the story of how the Memorial Bridge links Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee, pulling the two sides of the Civil War together. He had never heard that story before, so we talked about that. And then he was standing about where I’m standing now, looking down between the two, and he said that it was so beautiful that he could stay up here forever.”

Not long after uttering those words, he did, indeed, stay there forever.

That vista had contained the March on Washington scene, where Martin Luther King had given his I Have a Dream speech just a few months prior to Kennedy’s visit. While on television Vietnamese monks were burning themselves alive over religious persecution. Churches in the South were being torched by white racists.

Then, just days after his wistful moment at Arlington, shots tore through our young president’s head. Driven by his duty, a Secret Service agent had climbed onto the back of the Lincoln limousine; and a black-and-white still photograph showed LBJ being sworn in on Air Force One, with Jackie at his side in her blood-stained outfit.

No one knew what to think, except that this could not be happening. Not in the United States. These were peaceful times — peaceful, that is, if you were white — times when life had a steady, ‘normal’ pace.

It all vanished that weekend in November of 1963. The Christmas pageant was cancelled. But soon there would be the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, and then the killing of the three civil rights workers in Mississippi; the rioting at Ole Miss; and radio reports of black citizens trying, in vain, just to register to vote.

Nothing was ever the same. Our young president, who’d, inspired us to give of ourselves for the good of others, had been snuffed out. Tears would well up when you heard Richard Burton sing Camelot. We learned of the ugly side of U.S. policy overseas, the ‘benign neglect’ of African Americans robbed of the basic right to vote…a right still challenged by those who would suppress from our citizens what we demand of other nations.

No. Nothing was or is the same as it had been, during that ‘brief shining moment.’

We’ve been told, “We can do better.” Can we? Will we?

Dare we dream of ever again knowing hope and justice? Is there someone out there who can turn this nation away from selfishness and toward compassion? From “What’s in it for me,” to “What can I do for them?”

Nick Penning (www.nickpenning.com) is an Arlington, Va., freelance writer. His column, “Penning Thoughts,” appears in alternating editions of The Arlington Connection.

Finally. The time has come.

“We the people,” as stated in our founding document, are about to make decisions on how our county, our state and our nation will be operated.

“In order to form a more perfect union” we have the opportunity and obligation — in less than a month — to rise early on perhaps a frosty morning, to drive or walk or bike to the neighborhood school or church or garage or library which will that day become a “polling place.”

“To ensure domestic tranquility” we will line up to give our name, take a ballot, and enter a booth, there to decide what kind of nation, state and county we want to be or to become.

On those fronts we have much with which to be concerned.

Most disconcerting, locally, is the news that a county school bond proposal is facing, as the Connection’s Seth Rosen wrote, an “unraveling” of the usual strong consensus of support for school bond issues. The apparent controversy seems to be taking on an unfortunate “north vs. south” Arlington divide. Toward the end of Seth’s September 27 story he writes, “Those who are publicly opposing the bond package do not believe in the end it will be shot down by Arlington voters,” that through their opposition they just want to ‘send a message’ to elected leaders. That’s a dangerous path to take, when the schooling of the County’s youngsters is at stake. Study the issues, yes. But please give strong thought to what could happen if solid support for public education in Arlington is broken.

Our Commonwealth has no less controversial a question to put before you: the infamous “marriage” amendment to our Bill of Rights. While claiming to make a “definition” of what marriage is; the proposed amendment actually takes away a right some of our fellow Virginians may want to exercise.

Strange, is it not, that we would want to add to our most sacred document, which enshrines that to which we are entitled, wording that would take away a right?

This constitutional amendment, we all know, is aimed at our brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, friends and neighbors who may happen to be attracted to persons of the same sex. Sure, you might not think that ‘normal,’ but we need to ask ourselves, ‘what is normal?’ If you happen to be divorced, would we adopt an amendment denying you the right to marry again? If you are single and living with a person of the opposite sex, would we vote to fine or imprison you for not being married?

By the same reasoning, if two people are so committed to one another that they wish to make vows before God and man to bind that union, who are we to deny them that right? After all, it is called a Bill of rights, not a bill of denials.

Lastly, we are faced with the opportunity to decide who will represent us in the United States Senate; that body of our government which voted to allow our president to take this nation into an unprovoked invasion of another sovereign nation.

One candidate, our current senator John Allen, said in his debate with Democrat Jim Webb, “I stand by my decision” to grant war-making authority to George W. Bush. Webb opposed that decision.

Think what has become of our nation since that invasion: war has become a part of our daily lexicon for a period of time longer than the horrific second world war, and “torture” is now associated with our beloved United States of America.

Is this what we want? Since this unprovoked invasion took place, with Mr. Allen’s blessing, more than two-thousand seven-hundred young men and women of this land have lost their lives in a place far, far away. They were told they were avenging the 2001 attacks in New York and on our Pentagon; and they were told the madman ruling Iraq was about to use poison gas and other “weapons of mass destruction” to rain death upon us.

Over time it became apparent that neither reason was true, and that our president knew it before he made his decision to invade Iraq.

We have nothing more precious than the right to determine how we are to be governed. Please do set aside a part of your time on Tuesday, November 7, to make your way to your precinct’s polling place. Momentous decisions will be made that day; decisions that will tell Arlington, Virginia and our nation what kind of people we are.

What kind of people we want to be.

Nick Penning is an Arlington, Virginia, freelance writer.