TRADITIONS

TRADITIONS

This week’s column is a bit of a personal reminiscence. So I ask upfront for your indulgence!  It seems I have been writing about a lot of big issues in the world, in politics, and in society. So this week, it will be a topic interesting and poignant and personal.

When we are growing up, in a small town or a large city, it is natural to assume that what we do, the traditions we honor, are worldwide. As we get older, we often see that some of those “traditions” were actually local.

I grew up in a small town in western Pennsylvania called Vandergrift.

The famous Ida Tarbell wrote about my town as a “workingman’s paradise.” Historians saw it as the first “company town” that actually wanted workers to have nice homes, with lots of parks, and churches on many corners. Our little town had lots of trees, lots of parks and lots of playgrounds.

It was a great place in which to grow up.

The people had solid Midwestern values. They neither had maximum needs or maximum wants. They wanted to be healthy, safe and happy.

I am writing this column on Mothers’ Day.

I went to church with my wife today and it was very different from my hometown experience. In our town, on Mothers’ Day, if your mother was deceased you wore a white carnation in the lapel of your suit or sport coat or on your dress at church. If your mother was still living, you wore a red one. So on Mothers’ Day the church was filled with people dressed in their finest and sporting a white or red flower in honor of or remembrance of their mother.

I assumed this occurred everywhere.

Well it doesn’t.

I have no idea how that tradition got started in our little town but it was a wonderful one. When I tell this story to my friends now they all think it was a great idea. Yet in living all over the country as an adult I have never seen that simple but beautiful tradition carried out anywhere else.

Easter Sunday also had sartorial tradition in my home town. In our little town most people did not have much money and new clothes were not often purchased. But Easter was the day when most of us got something new to wear. A new sport coat, suit or dress. Of course, I realize now that the way kids grow so fast new clothes were probably required annually but in my town they made it special, it was on Easter Sunday that everyone sported their new duds.

By now you have probably realized that these traditions centered on church life. Remember Mom on Mothers’ Day at church. Get dressed in your newest duds for church on Easter.

There was a reason for this and it was a deep reverence for religion, for religious teachings, and a determination to look and act your best when you were in church.

I was taught that you dressed up when you went to God’s house. It was an important day and an important occasion. And dressing in your finest was just a small way of showing your respect. In fact, there were no more important days than Sunday and no more important occasion than worship.

We also were taught traditions surrounding death. It was not hidden from us. We went to wakes and we went to funerals and we went to the cemeteries for the burials. This happened so often it provided us with an understanding of the cycles of life, imbued in us at a very young age.

One of the sayings I have always remembered, practiced and cherished was: you are never too busy to pay your respects to the dead. In our town everybody paid their respects to the dead.

Our world has changed.

I suspect it is not going to come as a surprise to any of my readers that I still honor the traditions of my youth in this regard and I will continue to do so while I still have breath.

 I understand and accept that people now have different traditions, and I have no need to try to change that nor would I be successful if I tried.

I am just so comfortable with my own traditions and they fit me like a tailor-made suit. And it is the way I choose to honor those who gave me life and helped me build my life, building blocks that stood the test of time.

ELEPHANTS NEVER FORGET

Elephants never forget!



When it comes to Republicans, most would like to forget the last two presidential elections.

They had best hope that their mascot reminds them that is not an option.

Unless the GOP understands how they twice managed to lose a national election to a man with no business experience, a man who never ran any large organization, a man who had not completed one term in the United States Senate and a man who did not understand how things get done in Washington or in the world, they are destined to lose the next presidential election and perhaps fail to be a player on the national stage.

The American people, with their votes, have said they are not concerned about the influx of illegals, they are not concerned about gay marriage, they are not interested in extreme right views especially as they are expressed by the Tea Party, and they are not interested in a government that blocks the functioning of America’s day-to-day responsibilities.

How else can you explain the American people turning down a multi-term U.S. Senator and genuine war hero, John McCain, and a highly successful, well educated and blemish free wholesome American, Mitt Romney, in favor of a man clearly an amateur when it came to government experience?

Everyone has his own take on these elections. I think the people were tired of war, mistrusting of politicians, and hopeful for something better. I think they determined someone from outside the usual line-up of presidential candidates was the answer. I think the voters did, indeed, vote for hope and change.

I don’t ask anyone to agree with me but I think the hope and change thing didn’t work very well and that, in fact, our nation has slipped greatly under this administration. I do not attribute to the president any bad intentions. I think he is an honorable and well educated man with a lovely family. There is no question he is an admirable orator. But his lack of executive and political experience has rendered his efforts seriously short of what was needed.

One would think after eight years of what we have experienced the GOP would be a sure thing in the presidential election of 2016. I think that is a real stretch.

Unless the GOP make serious course changes and learn to understand how America has grown and changed, how we have become more accepting and generous, and how much we want two parties with different philosophies of government to find compromise every day, the nation will not remain at the pinnacle of international power and certainly not remain the nation once admired by the world for the way we lived and operated.

I have no idea who the Democrats will nominate for the next presidential nomination but today it looks like the nomination is Hillary Clinton’s to lose. Mrs. Clinton spent eight years in The White House as First Lady. Everyone knows that she knew every discussion, every problem and every plan. All First Ladies do. So she was at least an observer of power in action.

Everyone knows she was elected as a U.S. Senator from New York and that by most assessments worked hard, learned her job, served her constituency well and was admired on both sides of the aisle.

Everyone knows she lost the presidential nomination to someone with seriously less experience but accepted a position in his administration that simply further solidified her credentials, serving as Secretary of State.

Mrs. Clinton was a star student at college and a successful lawyer.

So humor me for a minute and assume she is the Democrat nominee for President.

To this resume she adds the possibility of being the first woman to achieve the office. Such a “first” attracts many votes.

So tell me, regardless of how unhappy the American people might be with Barack Obama at the end of his term, will they turn on Hillary Clinton to vote for any Republican who continues to bleat about immigration issues, argues against equal rights for gays, wants to stop gay marriage and wants to prohibit a woman from making her own decision on abortion.

While I have serious reservations on some of the issues outlined above, I acknowledge that I am in the minority in those reservations and I believe firmly the GOP will have no chance of defeating Mrs. Clinton if they do not change their stance on many national issues

I am not unmindful of the strongly held beliefs of many Republicans in their traditional positions. I admire many people who think of themselves as part of the Tea Party movement because I know how dearly they love America and how strongly they want to see her return to traditional values. I am not writing here about the value of consistency or the importance of loyalty to one’s principles. In this column I am writing only on the pragmatic question: how can the Republican Party regain the presidency of the United States.

I understand for some Republicans, especially the more conservative, winning the presidential election is not as important as building a party of traditional values. I understand they would rather lose national elections than pander to ideas to which they do not subscribe.

But politics is the art of the possible. And our country needs leaders, policies and programs that speak to the majority of our people. The GOP has recently failed to produce these. If they are to remain viable with reference to leading the nation they must adapt.

At the time of this writing, I see no national Republican of enough gravitas to pull this off and I see a party unwilling to face the need to change.

Our nation works better when there is a seriously effective two party system. We do best when two parties are strong enough to require compromise in the crafting of legislation. We are at our best when big issues are seriously discussed  and voters participate in large numbers in deciding the way forward.

The GOP has two years to reach a proper conclusion on this, identify a leader with experience, wisdom and appeal, and to build a platform that appeals to voters previously unidentified with the party.

This is a mighty big task.

DO NOT TEST US!

Notes of Concern....
  ...Jack Blair


Do NotTest Us!




You do not want to anger the USA. 

We are a tough group, and we can make life very unhappy for those nations or leaders who anger us.

Why, not so long ago Iran actually said they would annihilate our ally Israel, wiping it off the face of the earth, just as soon as it could get a nuclear weapon. Well, that really set us off. We told them to cut it out and to stop their experiments and not to dare make a bomb. They promised they would cut back and slow down.

We got their attention for sure. But our friends in Israel don’t feel very secure. We will have to talk to them and ask them to stop being such nervous nellies. Iran wouldn’t dare ignore our warnings.

And how about Syria?

We told that despot Assad that he needed to step down and turn his government over to the rebels in his country. We even got a couple of our tougher European allies to join us in sending pretty serious messages. We predicted the rebels would win years ago, and Assad would be gone. While it is true he is still there and the rebels are in retreat, and that he has announced he will run for re-election, we still believe that down deep we have struck fear in his heart and that he will never win the next election.

Right!

And now, just when we thought the Russian Bear was tamed, the KGB throw-back Vlad Putin is taunting us.

We warned him. We gave him every chance.

Now we had to get really tough.

His friends, Oleg Belavantsev, Sergei Chemezov, Dmitry Kozak, Yevgeny Murov, Alexei Pushkov, Igor Sechin and Vyacheslav Volodin are not permitted to get  visas to come visit the USA. They cannot invest here. If they have any money here, we are not going to give it back.

Now that is pressure! 

Imagine, if any of these guys like to vacation in Miami Beach, throw the dice in Los Vegas, take in a Broadway Show, well, all that is gone now. They will just have to sit around in their multimillion dollar Dachas on the seas over there in Russia and stew in their juices. When they finally get fed up, they will go to their pal Vlad and convince him to give back Crimea and any other lands that he might have scooped up by then.

Right!

Now, we are tough, but fair. Our President made it very clear that none of these penalties actually apply to Vlad. He can still come on over if he wants, any time he wants. No hard feelings.

Further, so the Russians don’t misunderstand, we gave them a heads up that we would not send in any troops. We just will keep stepping up these really uncomfortable visa cancellations and money freezing.  If they keep all this up, there won’t be anyone in Vlad’s close circle of advisors or their extended families that will be able to buy a Christmas gift at Tiffany’s, place a bet on a horse in the Kentucky Derby, or enjoy some Hagen Daz ice cream in Atlantic City.

I hope my older readers realize that if Harry Truman had taken this approach to world affairs, he would have told the Emperor of Japan that Tojo and his generals and admirals would no longer be welcome in our fair cities and would simply have to put up with all those cherry blossoms in Japan and drink nothing but sake.

And in the interest of fairness, we would have told them that  we would not bomb Hiroshima or Nagasaki and that they could expect sanctions in the form of our not importing any Toyotas or Hondas.

That would surely have brought hostilities to a rapid halt.

I tell you, my readers, you couldn’t make this stuff up!