Month: June 2021

The work by this year’s Texas Legislature is a national embarrassment and out of touch with the majority of people who call this state home.  Guns all around, no questions asked, visible at the ready for all to see come September.  Really?  Essentially banning abortion (well, after six weeks of conception) anywhere in Texas.  Tightening election laws to make voting and registering to vote hard on specific folks (the poor and minorities).  Even hornswagglin’ teachers who dare bring up the subject of racism … in this once proud Confederate slave-holding state … in this historically and ongoing prejudiced and bigoted nation.  Really?

All this bull is what the elected male-majority Texas Lege spent their time on in Austin this spring.  And making sure the message is loud and clear, the governor is damned determined to build a big ol’ towering steel wall along the Mexico border, this time with privately raised funds—no matter if property owners stateside don’t want it.  Texas essentially is out to prove which state is the most ultra conservative in the Union.  There’s no other reason for these kinds of backwoods barefooted ignorant Deliverance river raftin’ sinister law makin’.  To intelligent people—of the 21^st century, mind you—these new forthcoming laws make absolutely … no … sense.

Take, for instance, the new Texas law that will allow guns carried by anyone anywhere and without any training or certification.  WHO thought THIS would be a good law?  Ninety percent of the American people are sick to death over daily mass shootings.  Whoever came up with ‘guns and more guns for everyone!’ is taking a page from the bankrupt NRA and their impotent response when asked how to stop the constant shooting deaths: The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.  Like that ever happens.  What a piece of fiction, straight out of Rifleman, Gunsmoke and all the romanticized westerns and shoot-em-up big-budget Hollywood movies.

Texas has pushed this issue right into a new generation that wants the Second Amendment gone.  The tired old comeback about ‘an armed citizenry prevents a tyrant or coup or the government itself from taking away our freedom’ doesn’t wash either.  Again, too much bloodshed … for decades … and none of it for any political reason—always some obscure young man with anger issues and easy access to military assault rifles.  How do we know this?  Because the ones who did not commit suicide or die by cop during their moment of shooting rage tell us the ease of obtaining a high-power military assault rifle made all the difference in accomplishing their mission: to kill as many people possible.

And Texas wouldn’t be Texas if not whining about abortions ever’ day, again for decades.  Abortion on demand is a federal law, a right women and girls have, and no state in the U.S. can take it away yet.  The lawsuits to restore abortion in Texas will cost millions of tax dollars.  Quite a cow chip to be a-steppin’ into.  The Legislature didn’t prove anything other than what’s on their minds and in their hearts: Females are dirty little *^%$#@s.  If Americans have said it once, we’ve said it a thousand times: Government should stay out of private lives.

The ’21 Texas Lege is not well read because if they were, they would heed the warning: “Who controls the past controls the future.  Who controls the present controls the past.”  It’s from the book Nineteen Eighty-Four about an authoritarian government that bans words and cuts out history and truth to suit its purpose: controlling the masses.  In the book, the government calls itself Big Brother so the people will think it’s for their own good to obey.  In the real world in which we live, a democracy, history teachers (and any educator) do not need the Texas Legislature telling them what and how to teach.  This issue to ban race discussions in the classroom comes down to whites not wanting to come across as bigots and privileged in the past or today.

White people can put up with a lot.  But when it comes to Black people ‘pushing the envelope,’ such as protesting against citizens dying by the hands or guns of police or once again bringing up monetary reparations still owed from the Civil War, white people in this country will inevitably put their foot down.  They will not tolerate any more open discussion, let alone allow impressionable young Texans to hear or consider another opinion or learn the God’s-honest truth about our convoluted brutal history solely based on race.   End of subject.  If the Texas Lege hears one more word about it, they’re gonna cut a switch.

Educated people cannot live like this: told by the Texas government what to teach and what not to teach.  Who’s threatening whom?  Nineteen Eighty-Four has several slogans to instill fear of the government, but the Bible maintains “The truth will set you free.”  And it does, Texas Legislature.  We can handle the truth.  But apparently white legislators are the ones who can’t handle the truth of this state and nation.  Why not?  Money.  Some wealthy Americans, of the ilk who get themselves elected to government, have an almost evil penchant about holding onto their money—because they believe money is power. 

Things’ve changed

But the most evil and anti-American antics by the 2021 Texas Legislature were messin’ with election laws.  That body of predominately old white men think they can sit back and kick their boots up atop their legislative desks and just suppress voters.  Have they gone mad?  Yes, they bought into the former president’s sulking baby lie about winning the election and losing only because of rampant voter fraud and vote tampering.  [Can you imagine Democrats carrying on like that when Hillary Rodham Clinton lost to Trump?]  Simply put, Democrats believe elections should be free, fair and open, and Republicans think elections should be tightly monitored, restricted and maneuvered toward their guys winning. Republican state legislatures including Texas have been a-gerrymandering communities to create voting blocks in their favor in an obvious and pathetic effort to stay in power.  They’ve succeeded in only bringing out more voters, many who will vote against them, most not old, white or wealthy.

In the 21^st century, voting, like everything else we do, should involve technology.  But Americans have a big problem with trust, and that’s where Republican legislators align with the people.  American communities have held elections with no problems way before this crop of legislosers.  Anyone who runs the elections, all locally elected officials, know they risk prison if they fudge the numbers or dare tamper with the votes or results.  The Texas Lege didn’t need to waste time making a law that already exists so they can claim vote security.  Why’d they do it?  My guess is too many Democrats, too many minorities, too many working Texans with poor-to-scraping-by incomes.  You know what?  All those groups, targeted to be disenfranchised, could control this state and the U.S. if they vote.  So the Texas Legislature, in its missing-tooth wisdom, came up with pretend problems to ensure the vote remains secure (as if election tampering had been going on).  Really?  That’s news to us.

They did a double doozy on revamping election laws.  I don’t know if I will get in trouble for helping a fellow Texan find where to register to vote or how.  I think it’s everyone for herself and himself.  That is, after all, the Republican ideal.  Figure it out yourself: where to register to vote (fewer places now), where to vote (fewer places now), and when to vote (less time, no Sunday voting) and how to vote (strict guidelines on mail-in ballots especially for the questionably ‘disabled’ and ‘elderly.’)  

To the Texas governor and all the Western suits who made up these so-called laws that:

allow if not encourage any untrained idiot to wield a loaded gun in public;

stop a woman’s and girl’s right to abortion;

cut out school lessons involving racism in Texas and U.S. history;

and substantially interfere with our guaranteed right to vote including easy access to polls, voting times and days, and registration—

we’re still not going to forget the February 2021 deadly freeze.

No barbecue smoke will make 75% of Texans who lost heat for days or loved ones in zero-degree weather EVER forget.  See ya good old boys at the polls.  Run along now, ya’hear?

What can be said about President Jimmy Carter?  His post presidency has been the most active and public of his predecessors and successors.  It also has been the most altruistic.  It seems a year has not gone by when we haven’t heard of him involved in a number of humanitarian causes such as monitoring peaceful elections around the world.  And all along his wife Rosalynn by his side.  As long as I can remember, I’ve known about Jimmy Carter.  He was elected in 1976 when I was in junior high, just starting to become aware of world affairs and national leaders.  It was Jimmy Carter’s presidency and failed attempt at a second term in 1980 against Ronald Reagan when I learned the ways of politics: the differences between Democrats and Republicans—and that our nation was changing after a so-called liberal era.  Carter’s defeat, having been my first time to vote, was like a punch in the gut, being young and naïve and optimistic.  I couldn’t believe no one I knew supported Carter anymore.

Recently at a bookstore, I picked up a new book on him: His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life by Jonathan Alter.  I didn’t pick it up immediately.  I liked the offbeat cover, a colorful photo/animation portrait of Carter crafted by Andy Warhol.  After sleeping on it, I returned the next day to grab it.  Published in 2020, it was a heavy 700-page tome, and I read every word, learning something new and impressive about Jimmy Carter on every page.

The author, a former reporter during the Carter years, was surprised to find not a single book on his presidency and life had ever been compiled other than biographies penned by Carter himself.  As a news reporter in the 1970s, the author also witnessed mounds of legislation passed by Carter.  Carter is the third most accomplished president—meaning he got a lot done for this country, right behind the formidable Presidents Roosevelt and Johnson.  But Mr. Alter goes on to note that during the Carter administration, after Watergate, journalists were hyper cynical as was the nation.  Reporters wanted dirt, dirty tricks and maybe outlandish nonfiction stories with characters like Deep Throat that Hollywood would package as a movie deal.  Carter was … an honest to goodness sincere, optimistic, Christian, Baptist, environmentalist, highly intelligent Renaissance man and basic good guy.  No story there to jaded reporters and a tired nation merely surviving in the pessimistic late 1970s.

Touching history and the future

The Carter biography begins by summing up Jimmy Carter as someone who was raised essentially in the 19^th century, lived in the 20^th century yet possessed a clear vision of the 21^st century.  His family—led by a father who taught his son everything he knew about farming, mechanics and carpentry and a mother, Miss Lillian, who was a nurse and midwife birthing many children in Plains, Georgia, including a beautiful girl named Rosalynn, and who would serve in the Peace Corps in her late 60s!—was a dutiful quiet bunch save little brother Billy.  At dinner they all sat at the table together, politely eating while reading, every one of them a different book with no conversation.  The habit or ritual stuck with Jimmy and his wife and the children they raised.

Jimmy’s father was as prejudiced as any typical white Southerner of his era but not so Miss Lillian.  That woman, alone, attended numerous protests for civil rights.  She wasn’t a marcher, just an onlooker and quiet supporter.  She not only tended to the wounded African Americans harmed by police or white supremacists countering the civil rights movement, but she provided bail for arrested protesters as well as drove them to hospitals or back to their homes.  The Carters were devout Southern Baptists, but often Miss Lillian would take young Jimmy with her to African-American churches where mother and son enjoyed the live music and the emotion of the gospel—countering the reserved and regimented Baptist service.

As a kid Jimmy worked crop fields as expected by his father.  Being fair-skinned, however, he was pulled indoors when the sun was hot and replaced by Black children.  The boys would become friends, and Jimmy frequented one of the boy’s homes, eating dinner cooked by the boy’s mother whose kindness and dignity Carter credited with shaping his demeanor.  As he became a teen-ager, he was highly intelligent yet could never get along with or understand his father, a man who never praised his son.  At 17 Jimmy determined to study hard to get into the U.S. Naval Academy.  In 1943 with world war in full swing, Jimmy wanted to serve and was accepted into Annapolis.  On the day he left home for good, dropped off by his stoic parents, he never knew his departure into adulthood left them literally grief stricken and crying all the way home.  On occasion when his parents came to visit, they’d bring with them the beautiful young lady Rosalynn whom Jimmy began to notice and started dating.

Jimmy excelled at Annapolis and fully expected to serve in the war, but the war ended before he got his chance.  He and Rosalynn married and were off for years raising three sons in Hawaii, California, New York and Connecticut as Carter built an impressive naval career which led him into the innerworkings of nuclear submarines.  It was the sudden illness of his father that brought him back to Plains.  His father wanted Jimmy’s brother Billy to run the family peanut business, but the old man knew the younger sibling was reckless and lacked business sense.  After the patriarch’s passing, Jimmy, feeling weighted with heavy family obligation, moved his own back to Plains, Georgia—Rosalynn, after tasting real freedom and excitement living so far away, not happy returning to their small hometown.

Carter’s biggest regret

They returned to the South just as America was dealing with protests by African Americans for civil rights.  The Carters had become part of the country club set, but when the issue came up time and again among their white social friends, the couple simply would not comment on which side they supported.  Quietly Jimmy and Rosalynn and Miss Lillian supported civil rights and equality and nondiscrimination of Black people and all races and ethnicities.  But they never said a word.  Instead, they walked a fine line, had to as a large business owner with many employees.  Simply put, the Carter family had a lot to lose if they were outspoken like Pete Seeger or Joan Baez or Marlon Brando in those days.  The KKK would have burned down their business if not their homes and properties of all their employees.  Eventually as the issue of civil rights was not going away, the Carters lost all of their friends who soon understood the couple believed cultural change was progressive and suppression was regressive.

As an important businessman in his community, Carter made it his business to get into local politics.  He was head of the school board when segregation was ongoing, whites at one school, Blacks at another.  As the issues of inequities became known to him, he took it upon himself to tour every school white and Black.  He found all the Black schools lacking in every way.  He understood this could not continue, and he did whatever he could to improve the schools with proper books and supplies and a decent budget.  In his small community, word spread of the Carters.  Then one day his business building was painted with a racial epitaph.

Carter’s older sister Ruth became a Born Again Christian.  She talked with her brother one day about his deep depression which she assumed was due to leaving behind an exciting naval career to run his daddy’s smalltown business.  While Carter cried privately with her, they prayed together.  At that moment, Carter was Born Again, too.  Soon after he worked diligently for several months in other states as a witness for Christ in hopes others would be saved, too.  But his sister remembered a comment her brother said upon entering a higher phase of serving God: He believed he should be President.

Carter was elected governor of Georgia in the early 1970s.  One of his first tasks and honors was to declare a Martin Luther King Jr. state holiday, something he would propose nationally as president.  During his governorship, his popularity soared especially among country & Western musicians, usually from the South, and rock blues bands like the Allman Brothers with Georgia roots.  Day or night at the governor’s mansion, Carter greeted anyone who showed up.  He often had a drink in hand and with his huge smile graciously welcomed guests, young or old, Black or white, musicians or non musicians, even Bob Dylan.  Carter and his sons listened to Dylan’s albums throughout the ’60s; they bonded over the music and wordcraft.  Dylan and others in the entertainment world who met Carter back then spoke of an aura surrounding him.  He seemed … genuine.  Real.  Unjaded.  Holy.  Holy?  Yeah, holy.  Maybe just someone who was important though unpretentious.  Whenever Carter met anyone, including Bob Dylan, he would witness to them and ask if they wanted to receive Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.  Whatever the reason, a few years after meeting Jimmy Carter, Dylan converted to Christianity.

The Trilateral Commission, founded by David Rockefeller in 1973 to monitor world affairs and study solutions for big problems abroad, tagged Gov. Carter to represent one of two slots open for Southern governors.  Carter applied his innate superior studious abilities to learn every world problem and devise realistic solutions.  In other words, he took the chance appointment to heart.  Soon he believed he had what it takes to run for U.S. President.  In those days he had a lot of competition but took it upon himself to go city to city, town to town, and ask for people’s vote.  Rosalynn and his grown sons had their own separate speaking engagements to introduce the country to Jimmy Carter.  At heart Carter set out to prove one very important thing: that a Southern man could be 1) not racist and 2) elected President of the United States.  One incident that came up was the competition with fellow Southerner George Wallace.  As Carter talked state to state, Wallace, who vehemently opposed Carter (the feeling mutual), finally bowed out and offered Carter his delegates—all pro-segregation and essentially racists.  Carter quietly refused to add the Wallace bunch to his numbers.

He won the national election against incumbent President Gerald Ford.  It was … unbelievable.  But Carter always believed in himself.  After the inauguration, President Carter and his wife and their little girl Amy walked hand in hand down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House.  The family brought along an African American woman, whose prison sentence Carter had pardoned as governor, to be Amy’s nanny.  Amy attended Washington, D.C.’s, integrated public schools.  The nation had never seen anything like the Carter family.  As President, privately he prayed several times a day.  He asked anyone who was with him, including international heads of state, to join him in prayer.  He especially prayed before any major decision he had to make as president.  And yet he was a strict believer in separation of church and state and would not allow prayer to begin any governmental meeting or gathering.

With little fanfare by the press for four years, Carter commenced to reducing the military budget while significantly expanding Social Security and Medicare.  An environmentalist, he placed solar panels on the White House, which were summarily removed by the Reagan administration and decades later re-installed by President Obama.  Carter lived by his own recommendations to the American people like keeping the thermostat on 68 during the winter to conserve fuel.  He wore a sweater in the White House to keep warm.  He diligently tried to work with the Soviet Union to reduce nuclear arms.  He believed in diplomacy not bullying.  A lot of Americans hated him for it, perceiving it as weakness.

Peace on earth, good will toward men

And it was Carter’s idea to bring peace to the Middle East.  Already good friends with Egypt’s leader Anwar Sadat, Carter invited Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to join a Middle East Peace Summit at Camp David in September 1978.  According to the Carter biography, the leaders met for weeks trying to hash out an agreement whereby the two ancient enemy nations would agree to live together in peace and harmony.  More than a dozen times, Begin would come close to signing then back out.  Carter tore up each attempt and patiently, though growing frustrated, would begin again.  Finally, an agreement was announced, and the three world leaders signed the document, celebrating at the White House with hands clasped together.  The peace accord has remained intact to this day.  Carter was left out of the Nobel Peace Prize that year which the other two leaders received marking this remarkable accomplishment.  But years later Carter would receive the long overdue honor, with Willie Nelson, longtime friend and political ally, performing for the honor in Oslo, Norway.

The Iranian hostage crisis was perhaps Carter’s downfall, along with double-digit inflation and gas lines.  The Middle East was a hornet’s nest President Carter could not eradicate no matter how hard he tried.  Every day on the news and in the papers, the faces of the hostages left Americans feeling duped and stupid.  We did not feel proud of ourselves.  If only we could go in like a big budget Hollywood action movie and shoot up the enemy and free our people.  It was not to be.  Carter lost the 1980 presidential election to former California Governor Ronald Reagan, darling of the GOP and the Moral Majority who would become the loud and powerful evangelical Christian political movement.

The most ironic story about the Carter presidency, one whereby the leader was an outspoken conservative Christian (one who while in office taught Sunday School at a DC Baptist Church, hated abortion but believed government had no right interfering with a woman’s decision, who started a new Baptist church in his community when his childhood church refused to allow Blacks in the congregation) is that the Rev. Billy Graham—who boasted friendships with every U.S. President of his time, except Carter—never accepted an invitation to visit the White House or have a public or private conversation with President Carter.  Why?  Why not?  Those two should have had a lot in common yet politically did not.

President Carter started the Carter Center to help solve world problems.  Even as the Carters have grown into old age, they have taken a week every year to help build houses for the homeless through Habitat for Humanity.  They have raised tens of millions of dollars to solve little-known yet devastating Third World problems, such as the gruesome Guinea worm disease.  They have served this nation unselfishly much of their lives.  The author early in the story of Jimmy Carter shares an anecdote from people who’ve known him all their lives: When you first meet him, you like him; after you get to know him, you don’t like him; but when you’ve known him for ten years, you understand him.  Through great to little-known triumphs and bitter public humiliations, time has been President Carter’s saving grace.  He knows he’s on this earth for a reason.