There is something cathartic about screaming in unison: ENOUGH!
Friday, September 12, 2008
Thursday, September 11, 2008
In today's paper
UP, UP AND AWAY
............SHADES OF FRIEDENS UNITED CHURCH OF CHRIST. We watched a crane lifting the steeple safely down to blocked-off street at 13th and Juneau in Milwaukee. It was about 1983, the year Dee and I were married. After decades of standing watch over the city skyline at the direct west of the Pabst Brewery, the mortar of the ancient steeple was crumbling, pieces of terra cotta were falling in the street below, and there were no funds to effect a repair.Friedens was scheduled to be phased out due largely to a change in demographic make-up of the neighborhood, and severely diminished attendance. But the UCC stood justly behind the church, and sent a fresh-from-seminary preacher there to minister and also oversee the demise. Those were unforgettable and life-changing moments.
As we watch the phoenix-like return of the Waukesha E & R UCC church from the flames of a fire, burned down by a fluke (as we lay abed in a convalescent home), we hail the stalwart members of the old church on Wisconsin Ave and their will to live, overseen, captained by our friend, the able Rev. Jim Gorman.
The irony of this steeple-raising is not lost upon us.
^.^
photos and newsprint by the Waukesha Freeman
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
"Without the great and noble deeds of liberals.....
[New York Times Op-Ed Columnist]
Ignorance must really be bliss. How else, over so many years, could the G.O.P. get away with ridiculing all things liberal?
Troglodytes on the right are no respecters of reality. They say the most absurd things and hardly anyone calls them on it. Evolution? Don’t you believe it. Global warming? A figment of the liberal imagination.
Liberals have been so cowed by the pummeling they’ve taken from the right that they’ve tried to shed their own identity, calling themselves everything but liberal and hoping to pass conservative muster by presenting themselves as hyper-religious and lifelong lovers of rifles, handguns, whatever.
So there was Hillary Clinton, of all people, sponsoring legislation to ban flag-burning; and Barack Obama, who once opposed the death penalty, morphing into someone who not only supports it, but supports it in cases that don’t even involve a homicide.
Anyway, the Republicans were back at it last week at their convention. Mitt Romney wasn’t content to insist that he personally knows that “liberals don’t have a clue.” He complained loudly that the federal government right now is too liberal.
“We need change, all right,” he said. “Change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington.”
Why liberals don’t stand up to this garbage, I don’t know. Without the extraordinary contribution of liberals — from the mightiest presidents to the most unheralded protesters and organizers — the United States would be a much, much worse place than it is today.
There would be absolutely no chance that a Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton or Sarah Palin could make a credible run for the highest offices in the land. Conservatives would never have allowed it.
Civil rights? Women’s rights? Liberals went to the mat for them time and again against ugly, vicious and sometimes murderous opposition. They should be forever proud.
The liberals who didn’t have a clue gave us Social Security and unemployment insurance, both of which were contained in the original Social Security Act. Most conservatives despised the very idea of this assistance to struggling Americans. Republicans hated Social Security, but most were afraid to give full throat to their opposition in public at the height of the Depression.
“In the procedural motions that preceded final passage,” wrote historian Jean Edward Smith in his biography, “FDR,” “House Republicans voted almost unanimously against Social Security. But when the final up-or-down vote came on April 19 [1935], fewer than half were prepared to go on record against.”
Liberals who didn’t have a clue gave us Medicare and Medicaid. Quick, how many of you (or your loved ones) are benefiting mightily from these programs, even as we speak. The idea that Republicans are proud of Ronald Reagan, who saw Medicare as “the advance wave of socialism,” while Democrats are ashamed of Lyndon Johnson, whose legislative genius made this wonderful, life-saving concept real, is insane.
When Johnson signed the Medicare bill into law in the presence of Harry Truman in 1965, he said: “No longer will older Americans be denied the healing miracle of modern medicine.”
Reagan, on the other hand, according to Johnson biographer Robert Dallek, “predicted that Medicare would compel Americans to spend their ‘sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was like in America when men were free.’ ”
Scary.
Without the many great and noble deeds of liberals over the past six or seven decades, America would hardly be recognizable to today’s young people. Liberals (including liberal Republicans, who have since been mostly drummed out of the party) ended legalized racial segregation and gender discrimination.
Humiliation imposed by custom and enforced by government had been the order of the day for blacks and women before men and women of good will and liberal persuasion stepped up their long (and not yet ended) campaign to change things. Liberals gave this country Head Start and legal services and the food stamp program. They fought for cleaner air (there was a time when you could barely see Los Angeles) and cleaner water (there were rivers in America that actually caught fire).
Liberals. Your food is safer because of them, and so are your children’s clothing and toys. Your workplace is safer. Your ability (or that of your children or grandchildren) to go to college is manifestly easier.
It would take volumes to adequately cover the enhancements to the quality of American lives and the greatness of American society that have been wrought by people whose politics were unabashedly liberal. It is a track record that deserves to be celebrated, not ridiculed or scorned.
Self-hatred is a terrible thing. Just ask that arch-conservative Clarence Thomas.
Liberals need to get over it.
Forget about your damn election:
MONA
once again puts current affairs succinctly in perspective from her repose on the south window-sill.
The morning dawned today, 9-10-08, the day after Leland's 21st birthday,with the outside thermometer at 48 degrees. The raccoon news office and headquarters of course hasn’t boosted the thermostat and won’t for some time. It's blanket and sweater and sweat paints time, and the down comforter will soon be brought out.
We walked to the post office through the former Silurian park, to mail a gnome figurine to our daughter Laurie in Alaska; Wasilla, Alaska as a matter of precision. (Yeah, we know.) The sun had risen and things were getting comfortable, almost too warm for the sweat pants, our winter uniform.
Mona is 18 years old, and is a sun-worshipper. The north side of the house might as well not even exist for her. She recently underwent a procedure at the vets to remove a bowel obstruction ($428 but we love her) and is merrily & regularly excreting now as though she is a kitten, devouring her food and properly & precisely using her litter box, a new one.
As readers know, she is also literate.
After softly mumbling through September Song, she turned and said:
"You know, without the sun, we'd be dead."
The morning dawned today, 9-10-08, the day after Leland's 21st birthday,with the outside thermometer at 48 degrees. The raccoon news office and headquarters of course hasn’t boosted the thermostat and won’t for some time. It's blanket and sweater and sweat paints time, and the down comforter will soon be brought out.
We walked to the post office through the former Silurian park, to mail a gnome figurine to our daughter Laurie in Alaska; Wasilla, Alaska as a matter of precision. (Yeah, we know.) The sun had risen and things were getting comfortable, almost too warm for the sweat pants, our winter uniform.
Mona is 18 years old, and is a sun-worshipper. The north side of the house might as well not even exist for her. She recently underwent a procedure at the vets to remove a bowel obstruction ($428 but we love her) and is merrily & regularly excreting now as though she is a kitten, devouring her food and properly & precisely using her litter box, a new one.
As readers know, she is also literate.
After softly mumbling through September Song, she turned and said:
"You know, without the sun, we'd be dead."
Dear old Mona. Another bulls-eye! Thank you.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
