Author: Nick Penning

Amendment II to The Constitution of the United States of America reads:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

The only “well regulated militia” we have in 2015 is each state’s National Guard, whose history is recorded on the site of The National Guard.

The National Guard, the oldest component of the Armed Forces of the United States and one of the nation’s longest-enduring institutions, celebrated its 370th birthday on December 13, 2006. The National Guard traces its history back to the earliest English colonies in North America. Responsible for their own defense, the colonists drew on English military tradition and organized their able-bodied male citizens into militias.

The colonial militias protected their fellow citizens from Indian attack, foreign invaders, and later helped to win the Revolutionary War.

Following independence, the authors of the Constitution empowered Congress to “provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the militia.”

However, recognizing the militia’s state role, the Founding Fathers reserved the appointment of officers and training of the militia to the states. Today’s National Guard still remains a dual state-Federal force.

[Source: The National Guard]


How is it that a gun manufacturers’ lobbying group has convinced voters that each person in our nation has a constitutional right to own and use a gun?

Because the people specifically authorized that right — by our Constitution — are the men and women who serve in our country’s sole regulated militia: The National Guard.

Just weeks after our President so movingly eulogized the nine African-Americans murdered, while praying with their killer in their Charleston church; college official Sandra Bland — who happens to be African-American — was on her way to a new administrative position in Texas.

But she never made it.

Instead, she was stopped by a white Texas police officer — who made a u-turn to follow her car — for failing to use her blinker to signal a lane change, on his turf.

She tells the officer she changed lanes to allow his car to pass.

She’s an easy catch. Who will question him for pulling over a black person, a female black person in Texas?

She complies with the officer, is issued a ticket and cleared to go back on the road. But State Trooper Brian Encinia was not quite ready to end his victory over a black woman.

Rather than walk back to his car, he stays, to ask Ms. Bland to extinguish her cigarette. She refuses, stating he has no authority to make that request.

For questioning his authority to follow his illegal and laughable command, Bland — as seen in this video — is grabbed and forcefully pulled from her car, then thrown to the ground, on which a screaming Encinia appears to force her head.

Three days later, Sandra Bland’s lifeless body was found hung, in a hauntingly empty area of the Waller County, Texas, jail.

Why?

Because she refused to extinguish her cigarette; because she had the audacity to speak back to the white officer.

In police parlance, she “resisted arrest,” for refusing to follow his command.

Officer Encinia acted as one whose authority was being challenged by an “uppity” African American woman.

Tragically, horrifically, instead of starting her new job at Prairie View College, Sandra Bland is handcuffed and taken to the Waller County jail; where, mysteriously, she is found, hanging from a plastic bag, into which she — allegedly — placed her neck.

Jail officials allege Ms. Bland told them she was suicidal; yet they did not put her on a suicide watch, and claimed they found Ms. Bland dead in her cell.

Are we to believe that these white men had nothing to do with this black woman’s death? This woman who was so “uppity” to them?

Someone check the fingerprints on the sheets and plastic bags, please? And the DNA around her neck and police uniforms.

When will this stop?

White supremacists will never get over their hatred. But when will public officials stop them from getting uniforms and guns?

Because it must be done.

Forget another “national conversation.”

We need justice. Now.

This column is written in memory of Calvin Milton Jones, who died May 25, 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 http://electronicvillage.blogspot.com/2008/02/dick-gregory-apologizes-to-bill-clinton.html (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, in unison and with raucous recognition, as Gregory spoke those searing words.

After I watched the video, 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 nearly 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 day’s 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 anything, 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, in the 21st century, with new communications technology, we have documented evidence that young black men — from Trayvon Martin’s recorded 911 attack by George Zimmerman in Florida, to Walter Scott’s recorded South Carolina murder in April — are killed with impunity by white men in authority, because these armed thugs think no one will ever find out, because they know their uniformed ‘brothers’ will never speak a word.

Authorities have brushed off criticism, calling the killers “bad apples” among otherwise good guys. Really? How is it that those apples are distributed so widely across the country, always aiming at the same black “targets”?

Unfortunate for them, we now have video phones to expose their sickening and horrendous racist terrorism. You wonder, though … if these men were the ones who were videoed, how many other badged terrorists, among us, are not?

Trayvon was 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.

My friend and Travyon, two men — one driving and the other, walking — are stopped for being “suspicious,” for being black men.

Now we know many others have been killed.

Each man lived 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.

How sad it is to be an Arlingtonian now; to have witnessed our first negative, single-issue Board campaign since the Reagan era.

This fire first struck on January 4, 2013, with an unexpected burst of lengthy, anti-Columbia Pike streetcar rhetoric from behind the dais, at the traditional and, heretofore, cordial and pro-forma New Year’s Day, Board Meeting.

(Interestingly, at the Dec. 17 swearing-in ceremony — only 18 days earlier — this new Board member spoke not one word of the streetcar.)

The person behind this ire had turned sharply against the Democratic party from which she sought and received its 2012 County Board nomination, and — just weeks before — was elected under the label, Democrat.

Then began a campaign crafted to split our County’s sound and consensus-building leadership.

She used her Board status and media-savvy persona to construct a negative, single-issue strategy, which appeared to be opposition to the Columbia Pike streetcar project.

This strategy — call it the “Party of No” — viewed in the wake of last month’s election, now seems to have had, as its ultimate goal, the election of a candidate in direct opposition to this Board member’s Democratic party.

And on Nov. 4th a small minority — 21 percent of registered (scroll down to page 10) Arlingtonians — voted for her winning candidate.

They were voters who:

– could afford to take time-off to vote on election day,

– had the means to get to the polls,

– had the ability to obtain the requisite photo-i.d. cards, and

– heard and believed the negative clank of the “No Party.”

However, “No,” centered on one person and her electoral scion, has no deepened roots.

Those who’ve seen Columbia Pike traffic, and those who live and work along The Pike, know that the centuries-old thoroughfare is a more vehicle-strained transportation corridor than Wilson Boulevard, and has been strained long before Metro planners created the “Rosslyn-Ballston corridor.”

We in North Arlington have that fast-paced Metro — tunneled beneath Wilson, under the “corridor” — around which new merchants have blossomed and ever more residents thrive at every station stop.

With its snap, post-election decision to cancel all streetcar contracts, has our Board again made solid mass transit for South Arlington but a pipe dream?

These post-election days have been a sad, sad time for citizens and fair-minded policymakers, alike, in Arlington County, Virginia.

We cannot allow our County to be overcome by the dark clouds of the single-issue “No Party,” which, as is written in Ecclesiastes, has used its campaign as a “time to tear down.”

Arlingtonians have always had pride for our Arlington Way: propose, discuss, listen, cooperate and reach thoughtful consensus.

Now is the time to prepare for a New Year, a new “time to build up.”

Choose YES for those who have devoted years of open, all-inclusive meetings, planning sessions, budget talks — formal and informal — to prepare this well-designed mass transit project for the Pike.

YES for unity.

Let’s build a positive campaign for action.

Let’s re-cultivate for 2015.

Let’s ALL restore the bloom of hope for all of Arlington.

One of Arlington’s jewels, WETA-FM radio, made an abrupt and radical move less than a month ago, when it hit the brakes on its two-year-old all-news, no music format, and, with virtually no advance notice, dropped everything to return to classical music.

But it wasn’t a return to the old WETA that the public found on its dial. No, WETA decided to be a purist, and started broadcasting nothing but classical music, with a nod to news from NPR on the hour.

The old WETA had room for not just a solid play list of classical masterworks, but also such beloved programs as Prairie Home Companion, Car Talk, All Things Considered, Morning Edition and Weekend Edition. The new WETA jettisoned it all.

The station that had introduced Garrison Keillor to Arlington and the metro area — and brought his brilliant two-hour live program to Wolf Trap every summer — had, with no warning, hit the eject button, leaving a kindly WAMU in the District to catch Garrison before he hit the ground.

When Sunday morning came around and you tuned in for Lianne Hansen’s clever, fun and thoughtful program, Weekend Edition Sunday, you discovered she was gone, too. And now one of NPR’s finest works — produced in D.C. — has no home anywhere in the Washington broadcast market.

One minute our own Shirlington station was talk, news, talking its way in competition with WAMU, and the next it was telling you to tune over to WAMU if you missed Prairie Home and Keillor’s early weekday “Writer’s Almanac” commentary.

It’s been exactly two years since WETA announced that it would betray its classical roots and move to all news/talk because “WETA’s fall 2004 Arbitron numbers were its worst in 15 years.” In other words, ratings, the thing commercial broadcasting lives and dies for, had entered the boardroom. Founder Elizabeth Campbell, quoted in 1993 by the station’s magazine, said, “I wanted what we have, which is classical music and art” with “enough news so that people didn’t feel they were going to be cut out of news,
because they were listening to music.”

Lovers of classical music, this writer included, are delighted we have classical music back. But at the expense of Prairie Home Companion? And the best news programs on the air? Why was there not room for both?

WETA’s station director told its magazine of the Feb. 2005 shift, “This was principally and primarily a public service issue.” So, what is 2007’s move?

Observers of the classical scene here know that the region’s sole commercial classical station, WGMS, no doubt reading the same ratings charts, summarily junked its listeners last month, leaving the classical market wide open. Thus, WETA jumped for the WGMS music library and sawed off some of the best programming NPR offers.

Back in 2005 we were told the shift to all news/talk was based on audience research and an “almost unanimous approval” by its board. “The station had been considering a format change for three years,” it said then.

So, how much time was spent on this decision? From all accounts it sounds as though someone heard the WGMS announcement on the radio, frantic calls were made, deals were cut and uncut, and voila! Here, again, is classical WETA.

Yes, you have regained your soul and lived up to your founder’s hopes, but did you have to toss over so much of what our Arlington public radio station had been before? How are you going to explain this one to your listeners, when that next pledge drive rolls around?

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

“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.