Author: cheriebell69@hotmail.com

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.

We all prayed for a cure when this pandemic hit.  It disrupted every aspect of our lives from work and employment to grocery shopping, public gatherings, sports, the performing arts, church, public schools and college.  Even agnostics and atheists hoped for a quick cure or a medical breakthrough whereby everyone could carry on as before and never have to worry about this particular virus again.  Basically, we all wanted to go maskless again, breathe in the fresh clean air like God intended.  We also wanted to not think about every human interaction: Will we or the other get sick and though odds have it rare, die from this disease?  Throughout the horrible year 2020, many of us lost relatives, friends, famous celebrities and acquaintances to this new virus.  Deaths and hot spots across the country kept escalating with at last count 71 million Americans getting COVID-19 and more than a half a million dead from this new unasked-for disease.

Then … out of the blue, one day we hear of a vaccine.  Then another.  Then another.  Then a one-shot vax—all proven to fight and protect us humans from contracting COVID-19.  And if the vaccinated did get it, for the vast majority symptoms would be mild, we wouldn’t end up in the hospital or die from COVID-19. The coincidence is that virologists (doctors & scientists) had been studying corona viruses for a decade. They knew a vaccine was possible.

It was HALLELUJAH time!  Everyone should have been down on their knees praising God for delivering us from this one deadly virus, and so quickly, too.  It was a bona fide miracle.

But nooooooooooooo.  Not in the year 2021.  Not in the 21^st century.  Not in America, the anti-vaccine capital of the world.

The damage done

What we have here is a failure to communicate.  No, what we have here is a failure to educate.  No, what we have here is fear and loathing run amok.  There is no denying a generation gap of sorts has evolved between Baby Boomers (including yours truly) and the mini Boomers, children of the sex, drugs and rock-n-roll generation.  Sociologists could see this coming.  Every generation has to rebel against the previous.  So the ultra-liberal, ‘if it feels good, do it’ Boomers were bound to be slapped on the face by their grown children about something.  Religion?  Politics?  No, vaccines.  Well, they picked a good one.  We either had to crack open the books and study this for a spell or just yell and cuss and roll our eyes like we did in adolescence.  OK, like we still do about a lot of things the younger kids believe nowadays.

Because Boomers were raised pre-internet and have a distrust of government due to Vietnam and Watergate, we don’t believe everything we read especially online.  We trust some news sources but not all.  It’s best to maintain an open mind.  We’d like to think we’ve grown wise and less naïve.  We also think anyone younger than us is naïve as we once were.  In this regard we try not to be harsh with the young guns.  But for God’s sake, we’re talking about vaccines here.

During the 20^th century, vaccines were considered the single most important development to improve the health and lives of Americans and everyone else around the world.  But with every medical procedure, there is risk.  Still, with vaccines the risk is extremely low and even death or sudden disease or illness have been seriously studied, not ignored.  Big Pharma, with a new shot for everything these days and perhaps responsible for dozens of required childhood vaccinations, is a punching bag along with the unfixable U.S. health insurance industry (the insured in America have it directly due to a good job benefit).  Then there is the anti-support of physicians and the entire medical establishment—a profession very few people honestly know anything about except those who actually studied it and passed tests to earn licenses to practice medicine and work in the health field.  The medical profession is not for everyone though it is the number one field to enter this century.

So Americans young and, ahem, older have a lot of built-in cynicism.  Now the cynical are becoming the majority as the Boomers die out. [But not so fast.]  Boomers are naturally cynical, apparently a gene inherited in spades by the mini Boomers and their Millennial offspring.

We have a vaccine now that will prevent or weaken COVID-19.  What’s the problem?

The problem is now pharmacists and medical practices with ample supply can’t give it away.  All kinds of gimmicks are offered including a $1 million lottery.  Vaccine centers are set up everywhere including major league sport facilities and amusement parks.  Still, a quarter of all Americans swear they’ll never get the vaccine—well, this particular vaccine.  A quarter of the country gets their news and views from Fox News.  Coincidence?

What we’re seeing here is the culmination of an education system, both public and private, that has failed to teach young people how to research, how to trust, and how to be smart.  While public schools have students focus on passing state tests, private schools, particularly religious ones, have failed to instill a lifelong pursuit of knowledge.  Learning by teaching ourselves is not something we close the book on when graduating high school.  The ability to keep learning, to research intelligently instead of just reading and watching and listening to only what we want to believe, and the much-needed critical thinking necessary to maintain our nation’s experimental democracy as well as live healthier longer lives—that’s the wrinkle in trying to encourage most Americans to get the damn vaccine.

Boomers who grew up in chaotic violent times or like me in the mundane peaceful post-Vietnam War era know this protest slogan to be a universal truth: If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.  Americans need to get with the program.  Grow up.  There’s risk in everything we do.  And when it comes to only a third of Americans being vaccinated against yet another virus to pop up on the planet, fear is the driving force.  There’s no fooling a Boomer.  Brave is our middle name.  It’s the only way to live, baby.

See, I want to know.  I was born in 1962.  By the time I entered school, the ‘colored only’ and ‘white only’ signs had been removed from public water fountains.  I grew up never knowing (never having or seeing a clue) about racial segregation—the ironclad Southern rules that applied in every single community large and small, urban and rural, with unspeakable brutality for 100 years after the Civil War.  My parents said little to nothing about it.  No other families I knew (100% white like me) said anything either.  After 12 years of schooling, the impression I had was civil rights was in the 1960s, and now everything was all right.  Or as the white suburban mothers might say, “Everything is fine, just fine.”  So, I bought it.

It was college in East Texas that I came to realize this whole other way life was in the South, for generations.  The way it was taught in American History: from Reconstruction to the Modern Age, it was like a miracle that society had changed—a complete evolution among people of an entire nation.  You know how rare that is?  Yes, as a kid I had watched “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman” with its tear-jerking ending when the extremely old crippled little bitty Black woman, in an act of defiance, slowly stepped to an outdoor ‘white only’ water fountain on public property and bent down to take a sip of water.  See, in the movie, the white onlookers didn’t do anything about it.  The police just let her be.  So as a kid, I didn’t get it.

1619: Not that long ago in the great scheme of things

See, none of us really knows anything about when slavery started in Early America.  We who were educated in American schools were taught that it (slavery) was part of our history.  Teachers sugarcoated it to avoid the ugliness (the absolute crime) of American history, U.S. history … you know, US.  The educated blowhard can justify slavery was the way of the world for thousands of years.  Look at the Bible.  Look at the Jews in Egypt.  Funny, because the Bible was used to support slavery during the Antebellum South.  The Bible was quoted to insist some people are slaves and others slave masters.  “You disputin’ God’s Holy Word?  Get me a switch.”

The 1619 Project is an ongoing journalism project sponsored by The New York Times.  Its purpose is to place slavery at the center, instead of buried or along the barely perceivable periphery, of U.S. history.  The Project seeks to relate slavery of African Americans, brought in chains to the East Coast shores in 1619 to months after the Civil War, and its relevant consequences to not only former slaves and their future families but everyone who calls himself or herself an American today.

I’m an American.  So, because I knew what I did not know, I came up with a features series while writing for a newspaper in 1994.  Each month the newspaper mail included a list of story ideas based on history, like anniversaries of historic events.  Listed under July 1964 was President Johnson’s landmark Civil Rights Act, banning nationwide racial segregation in public places and racial discrimination in housing, employment, education, etc.  For six months I researched this event and the difference it made in the small East Texas town where I lived as a reporter.  I started with prominent African Americans in the community.  They were retired teachers and principals and a coach.  They had lived in the community all their lives and recollected well their childhood during segregation.  I interviewed each of them separately.  They all told me the same stories: They were not allowed inside public buildings like court houses, had to stay out of certain areas and streets, had to eat ice cream in the summer outside a popular air-conditioned restaurant, were allowed inside shops one day a week for clothes or hats (anything they touched, they had to buy), and had to sit in the balcony at the movie theater.

On and on, the same stories, the same history … which made white people and white business owners of that era still living in the community look pretty damn bad if not disgusting.  I didn’t know if I should pursue the story, I told my editor.  He understood and thought I should drop it.  Then I talked to white and Black people of the Baby Boomer generation, not the older folks of the community (who wouldn’t talk to me anyway about this story), but people who were teen-agers and young adults when the community changed in the summer of 1964.  Their recollections were more upbeat, positive.  They were of age in 1964 and realized racial segregation and discrimination was wrong, and change had to happen.  They were young enough to welcome it.  They were not bitter about the past.  Old times were best forgotten.

The series was called Rites of Passage: 30 Years of Civil Rights and included the remarkably sudden integration of the public schools and new federally enforced rules in criminal justice which had to be followed by the deputies and police.  I never found anyone in the community who removed the ‘white only’ and ‘colored only’ signs in places like parks and businesses.  But one was my father who during the era of Civil Rights worked for a national store in a major city in Texas.

So, when a U.S. senator calls for removing the 1619 Project, a nonprofit initiative, from the federal grant program, claiming it distorts American history, all Americans should be ashamed.  We’re already ashamed of our nation’s past with slavery and other wrongdoings.  Let’s call it what it was: evil.  But for a long time, now, we are finding that the evils were not only covered up or rewritten but also silenced.  Between the Greatest Generation that fought World War II and the Baby Boomers who protested the Vietnam War is the Silent Generation.  Americans by now are collectively enlightened about our shared ancestral past, having read real-life accounts and seen photographs, movies and documentaries.  Once upon a time, Americans used slaves as cheap labor, and after a civil war over this issue (good soldiers killed and were killed over this rich man’s cause), African Americans continued to be treated as subhuman until the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

See, it’s the lies and silence that ignite social outrage.  Knowledge is truth, which sets all of us free.  America’s truth in history—the good, the bad and the ugly—is nothing to fear.  We can handle the truth. But the generation gap between much older and the middle-aged to younger Americans caught me unaware.  Look, the growing number of Americans will not cling to past lies such as America’s civil war was fought over a list of ideals (the inhumane institution of slavery being only one). And the progressive Southerner no longer will wax nostalgic over Jim Crow and allow suppressed voting rights while whistling Dixie and humming doo dah.  Like most Americans today, we find all of it backwoods and repugnant.

The trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin began as the most overtly emotional display on nationwide TV.  And this is the chosen direction from the DA, usually stone-faced prosecuting attorneys who prefer the jury hear just the facts without raw emotion from those on the stand.  Instead, the prosecution’s first witnesses whose inability to control their tears may intentionally sway the jury—the one group in the courtroom who is supposed to consider the testimony and without bias collectively determine a just verdict. One news network covering the trial ‘gavel to gavel’ titles their coverage The Death of George Floyd: Derek Chauvin on Trial.  That’s not objective.  The trial is about the former policeman and his actions which a jury will decide may or may not have contributed to and caused the death of Mr. Floyd.  The punishment phase is not part of the ongoing trial.   

In court we heard the recording of Chauvin explain to a bystander, who somehow ended up on the stand early in the trial, the reason why he did what he did.  Chauvin comes across as an officer who was not enraged or out of control.  He explained the suspect was ‘sizable’ and appeared to the police as being ‘on something.’  Videos indicate Mr. Floyd was uncooperative and working against police who were trying to put him in a squad car.  Then Mr. Floyd ended up hand cuffed behind his back and belly down on the street, telling the police he could not breathe … yet he would not stop talking, and his words turned into prayers and pleas.  To the cops, he was a suspect, and they knew he was an ex-con, and he was not going to go with them to the police station for likely booking.

Police size up a call anticipating anything can happen.  They also carry a gun and handcuffs.  If a suspect has a weapon, police shoot to kill.  Police see situations differently than we do.  When confronted with an assailant, they think “It’s his life or mine.”  These circumstances are rare in a patrol officer’s life, maybe once or never in a 20-year career.

Contrary to opinion, Mr. Floyd did not die of a broken neck.  He could not breathe in the position he was in, held down by Chauvin.  Two autopsies revealed illegal narcotics, one a dangerous and deadly painkiller, the other an equally bad upper.  Who knows how long he had been taking those drugs and that combination despite a heart condition?  Mr. Floyd had spent time in prison and must have known if he were arrested for anything (misdemeanor or felony, DUI or petty crime), he likely would end up back in prison.

Then there’s the crowd that grew around the police scene and convenience store where someone had called authorities about Mr. Floyd passing a fake bill and therefore not paying for items.  The store owners have said after what all happened—the image of a white police officer pressing the neck of a handcuffed Black man until he died at the scene, the nights of violent fiery protests, the costly damage to businesses in the area—they’d never call the police again.  Cell phone cameras and cop cams recorded the event live and have been replayed around the world.  The scene touched a nerve among millions of people who protested against police brutality.  A shrine and mural were set up at the site where Mr. Floyd died … in the hands of police.

Law & Order, gavel gavel

Americans have made police officers out to be the ‘enemy of the people.’  The January insurrection showed the self-proclaimed law-and-order folks are anti-social, malcontents, against the law, coming full circle to criminals and felons.  With military assault weapons in hand, they stormed over Capitol police like they didn’t have to ‘stop in the name of the law.’  What’s so strange is some of the insurrectionists were cops and military, and some of the Capitol police supported and welcomed the insurrectionists into the People’s House.

Police are attacked from both sides: fascists who proclaim a love of authority but not when it comes to their whims and supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement who have a right to call out bad cops for dozens of unwarranted shooting deaths more and more caught on camera. 

When it comes to law and order, we have to decide our shared ideal of the future.  Is it police who no longer carry guns?  Police who have a heart, shoot rubber bullets, or let their suspect run away because he or she does not want to be apprehended?  Or police are no longer called to handle anyone who appears to be acting weird or is doing something that poses a danger with a weapon?  Does every community need to create a separate group, and not call them a force, of psychologists and counselors who will handle people who appear to be on drugs and/or mentally ill?  And that mental health staff will be unarmed when the other person may be psychotic?  Should we have another separate group from police who will handle domestic cases (because they are the most dangerous calls for police)?

We want to believe the old way of policing is just not working and for Blacks and the disenfranchised has never worked.  We’ve grown so cynical that we believe, more often than not, justice does not prevail.  None of us civilians know what police deal with.  We’ve watched plenty of cop shows, though, so we think we’re know-it-alls.  Police have to follow laws and procedures.  They can’t arrest someone because somebody thinks something is going to happen.  And yes, in the cam world in which we live, we’ve seen some bad cops do horrific things like shooting the wrong people, shooting innocent people, shooting unarmed people, shooting people who run from the police.  Perhaps we don’t want our police anymore to overpower a suspect over petty crime.

We want police who are fair and just, who will protect the innocent and go after ‘the bad guy.’

Or maybe we don’t want police anymore.  In this country, we all can carry guns and think we can protect ourselves.    

Instead of seriously studying the problem (it seems to be just one BIG problem: inept bad and perhaps bigoted police officers) and coming up with solutions, the tables have been turned in a courtroom where a former police officer is accused by the People of not only manslaughter but murder, and everyone is pushing the jury to convict.  That is how the trial is coming across to rational minds.

(Nervous throat clearing) There was a time when I knew all the Woody Allen movies.  I have fond memories and have had a great many laughs from watching his golden period of comedy productions: “Play it again, Sam,” “Take the Money and Run,” “Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex,” “Love & Death,” “Sleeper,” “Annie Hall,” “Manhattan,” “Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy,” “Stardust Memories,” “Purple Rose of Cairo,” “Zelig,” “Hannah and her Sisters” “Radio Days,” “Alice,” “Mighty Aphrodite” and “Bullets Over Broadway.”  Quite an outstanding late 20^th century film repertoire, with homages to his beloved New York City in color and black and white, the music of Porter and Gershwin, and lots of witty jokes about s-e-x and his personal favorite musing and lifelong fear, death—the last two subjects the only things he believes in to paraphrase his character’s last line in “Sleeper.”  Come on, I was hardly alone in perceiving the little guy as a comedy genius, not necessarily sexy yet his movies afterwards seemed to cast a spell of lovemaking.

Before I knew anything about Woody Allen, other than his trademark unattractive black frame glasses and nervous comedy bits, there was a TV game show featuring a trio of celebrity couples.  In “Tattletales” the wives would answer questions, and their husbands guessed the answers then vice versa.  In a circa 1981 episode, the question for the ladies was “Who would you rather sleep with: Ronald Reagan or Woody Allen?”  The women, all seasoned actresses, answered hands down “Woody Allen.”  At the time, I could not fathom the two choices.

Reluctantly I’ve been watching HBO’s “Allen v Farrow” (an ironic title since it seems to be the other way around).  So now I’m confronted when recalling Allen’s movies with the mind of a much older woman and through the prerequisite 21^st century MeToo gaze.  There’s even a sick feeling when hearing a film expert, a former fan who purposely and thoroughly studied Allen’s body of work including nonpublished manuscripts, submits that the filmmaker habitually wrote about a young woman or a much younger female in love with or sheepishly pursuing Allen or an older man.  Guess Allen didn’t realize he couldn’t play 30 or 40 the rest of his life and get away with love scenes with women in their 20s, college girls, or like in “Manhattan” a high school student played then by 16-year-old Mariel Hemingway.

Casting perspective on a generation

When I first heard about the ugly ‘p’ word associated with Allen by his former lover and leading actress Mia Farrow, I didn’t know what to think.  The ‘p’ word became public rumor right after Farrow inadvertently discovered Allen was having an affair with her adopted teen-age daughter.  Farrow and Allen never lived together but kept separate New York apartments, not unlike ‘free floating life rafts’ to paraphrase a line by Allen in “Annie Hall,” which is said because his character did not want to live with his girlfriend Annie but wanted to continue their adult relationship while living separately.  The implication was Allen’s character, twice divorced like the actor in real life, was immature.

The ‘p’ bomb was dropped by Farrow regarding another adopted baby that Allen agreed to father.  The allegations are he had an ‘intense’ relationship with this one child, a curly haired baby girl.  Somehow in their unusually close relationship, allegedly a line was crossed—and there are witnesses including the now grown daughter herself.  She is adamant Allen on more than one occasion sexually abused her when she was a little girl.  Allen’s team of lawyers countered that the allegations were coached by Farrow in revenge for his admitted affair with her teenage daughter.

Someone bring me a martini, to paraphrase another classic Woody Allen movie line in response to a sordid romantic triangle in which his character finds himself.

The news died down when Allen was never charged with a crime, which it appears the HBO doc is implying should have occurred.  But the investigation was in the early 1990s.  We’re a more woke generation now in 2021.  We think we’re real, can see the ugly truth in everything, have reached the Age of No BS.

Still.  Like millions of former and closet Woody Allen fans, I do not know him.  There was a time I thought I’d come close to meeting him.  I was in NYC in December 1991 and planned to go to Michael’s Pub where I heard he played clarinet.  I called and found he plays on Monday nights, and I was there on a weekend.  Nevertheless, I shot pictures of the Big Apple in black and white film because of Woody Allen.  Two collages of pictures remain on my bathroom walls, perhaps exactly where they belong.

Through the years, I’ve occasionally caught an Allen movie on TCM usually around Oscar season or when they do a tribute to New York City or an era of fine comedy writers.  After all, Allen wrote for Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows” along with Mel Brooks and Neil Simon.  And like other fans, I admire the film work of art and comedy … but quietly ponder if Allen is just a dirty old man and should have gone to prison.

The Beautiful People   

When the story came out about his romance with Soon-Yi Previn, Farrow’s adopted teen daughter, any fan would think of “Manhattan.”  In the movie, his 40-something character wrestles with dating a high school girl.  With her fresh young face and girlish voice, she tells him she thinks she’s in love with him.  They have a chemistry, many things in common, as if she is more mature than her high school age and even wise beyond her years.  Yet he knows this relationship is, well, wrong.  He breaks up with her to date someone his age, but then that woman dumps him.  As creative therapy, his character records a list of things he loves.  The last thing he says to himself is the face of his former too-young girlfriend.  He thinks he screwed up dumping her and literally runs to get her back.  But it’s too late, and he has to accept it.

I also thought about other love interests in Allen’s movies and how their figures have always been slim and their appearance waifish.  In armchair psychoanalysis, I wonder if the writer is attracted to younger females, those who are not yet womanly in shape, have yet if ever developed a figure that says across the screen “Va-va-va-voom!  Now here’s a grown woman, no doubt about it.”  Mia Farrow and Diane Keaton, two of his co-stars and his former real-life girlfriends, were slim and trim and able to play younger women, not girls, for a couple of decades in Woody Allen movies.

The MeToo movement asks us to ignore the other side of an age-old story: Sometimes a young female thinks she’s in love with or, if more secure than insecure, goes after an older male.  Like it or not, this relationship (that we used to think was none of our business) has not only been the subject of art for centuries, it’s also common in life and coupling.  There is an age when a man should not date or pursue a female.  There is right and wrong, and the law makes it clear age wise.  But men have gone after younger females way before “Peyton Place.”  We even had a President who on more than one occasion dumped his aging wife for a younger model.  Men who can do.

Are we going to banish everyone who had anything to do with the older man and the younger female in real life and in works of fiction?  That would include Harrison Ford now and the director Stephen Spielberg.  Remember that scene in “Indiana Jones” where during one of Dr. Jones’ college lectures on anthropology, a female student bats her eyes closed with the legible words “Love You” painted on the lids?  Then there’s the storyline about Jones and his former dalliance with the daughter of a colleague.  The two former lovers meet up some years later in Nepal where she is still angry at him, telling him what he did was wrong and he knew it because she was just a child.  And Mr. Man tells her she knew what she was doing.  She wants an apology, and he apologizes.  Then she pushes for more remorse, and a put-out Indiana Jones responds he can say he’s sorry only so much.  The movie has a happy ending in that the two sorta get together, and we learn in a sequel made decades later they had a son.

It’s just so hard for me and maybe others to believe Woody Allen, the little weasel whose comedy centered on sex and romantic relationships, is a pedophile.  Then again, throughout his celebrity he notoriously shunned interviews and maintained a very private life.  What could have been his reason?  In his movies, his characters always make clear his disdain for the pretension of show business.

In the end Allen married Soon-Yi. They have been married a few decades and raised kids.  The couple lives and travels together as husband and wife.  They have indeed grown old together, contrary to the early Woody Allen movies when his characters doubted such a normal life possible because he was too neurotic.  Whether their love is real or their marriage a ploy to kill rumors about alleged depravity remains unknown.  Because none of us knows this man or any of these people.  Allen insists even in his end-of-life memoir that this girl Soon-Yi entered his life and eventually there was an attraction.  When all of this was blowing up in his face and nobody could believe the legendary Woody Allen was really in love with such a young girl who had absolutely nothing in common with him, having been a poor orphan across the world, he replied pitifully, “The heart wants what it wants.”

Somebody cue September Song—because that’s what I hear whenever reminiscing about a Woody Allen movie.  

After faithfully masking in public for a year now—well, now, ’cause we had to—Texans have been told it’s no longer mandated across the state.  “Yahoo!” was my first giddy reaction.  Then I started thinkin’ on it.  The news indicates Texas’ stats on the virus and related deaths are not coming down in an astounding turnabout of good luck.  And, yes, every day now many in droves are getting the vaccine including yours truly.  After my first dose, I was overwhelmed by a renewed sense of optimism, like I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.  I mean, PTL!  But I’ve never been one to separate modern medicine and religious faith.  They go hand in hand in my book.

The line for the vaccine, however, was unexpectedly long with hardly anyone paying attention to social distance markers except for me.  And then people actually butted in line, yes breaking right ahead of me.  They knew well I was there first, and still anxious individuals and couples just broke in line.  I must look like a push over, and I am to some extent but within seconds knew the score and toughened up with a look that said, “Try it, punk.”  The punks were senior citizens.  It was like everyone for himself, full panic mode.  And we were in line to get the long-awaited presumed life-saving societal normalizing VACCINE.

Walk the line

After slowly moving through the ever-expanding outdoor line to the hospital, still with newcomers darting in and out and breaking in front of attendants indoors who obviously avoided verbal altercation, it was my turn.  I showed my ID, got my temperature checked and met all the other screening questions.  Cleared, I was told to go to the gold elevators.  This must be like heaven.

No, just more winding lines upstairs.  The halls were lined with chairs where people waited ten minutes after their shot.  The shot room was large with maybe twenty stations where nurses screened us some more and went into detail about side effects and asked about allergies.  The shot was quick and painless.  I quickly removed myself from the crowded room and found an empty chair to wait any quick reactions.  Nada.  I left the overcrowded hospital doing its part to vaccine millions of Texans.  I don’t look forward to dealing with rude people when I return for my second dose.

So when the Governor proclaimed out of nowhere that Texas was removing the mask mandate, I wondered why.  Immediately came the counter: He did it to make us all happy and forget about the February deadly winter storm debacle.  Millions were out of heat, out of electricity and then out of water and facing insurmountable water damage from busted pipes.  What a multi-billion-dollar mess for state and local government not to mention our various electric businesses and of course the tens of thousands of Texans.

Behind the mask

We’re all thrilled down here in Texas to be told we don’t have to wear a mask if we don’t want to, that it should be an individual decision and certainly up to each individual business.  Right away, I noticed the list of mega stores like Target insisting the mask mandate would stick at least with employees.  I awaited Walmart, but they followed suit, too, and require masks.  Seems Big Business just yet will not ‘throw caution to the wind,’ shall we say?  Even major city mayors quickly countered the state’s no-mask mandate with a city mask mandate and public buildings’ mandate.  All right, already.

The thought of suddenly being mask free left me with mixed feelings.  I mean, the end is near, which is great, better than we were just a month ago.  We now know there will come a time perhaps even this year that we won’t have to wear masks everywhere we go.  For the most part, we don’t wear masks at home, in our cars, visiting relatives or anyone else indoors, and many of us never stopped going to restaurants and didn’t wear masks while eating with strangers though somewhat socially distanced.

Wearing a mask eight to nine hours a day at work taught me I cannot stand it and am so happy I didn’t go into the medical profession.  Wearing the mask has almost become a habit, basically a forced routine that even now I tend to forget and have to remind myself to mask up before entering public places.  I’ve kept a bag of fresh masks at work, in my car, a few in my purse.  I don’t wear it unless I absolutely have to.  And at work and just about anywhere I go, I’ll still have to wear a mask until further notice.

I thought after my second shot, I definitely wouldn’t need to wear the mask.  After all, the vaccine is about ensuring I don’t get the virus, not me protecting others from getting sick.  Like the flu shot, it’s about protecting me not others.  But lo and behold, medical scientists who know more about this stuff than the rest of us urge us to continue wearing the damn mask even after vaccinated.  It’s about ensuring that others don’t get sick and die from Covid-19.

Throughout this ordeal, I could not wait until we never have to wear masks again.  They itch and make my nose run.  I frequently lower it to drink water.  The mask fogs my glasses.  I CANNOT SEE.  I cannot breathe.  In the early months, my complexion was ruined from sweat around the chin and mouth.  I learned to change masks frequently, not unlike a diaper, because of sweat and stinky breath.  Along with lots of medical-grade breath mints, I keep disposable facial cleansing clothes at work to wipe my face before putting on my second mask for the day.  I guess I go through three to five masks daily during the work week.  This is so … stupid.  We’re in the most modern age of mankind … and still when it comes to a pandemic, we’re no better off than our grandparents in 1918 or our European ancestors who survived the much more gruesome Black Plague in the Middle Ages.

When we are for real told to ditch the masks, I wonder how hard it will be.  We still remember vividly our previous carefree lives: of hugs and kisses; concerts and travel; shaking hands when greeting or meeting someone new; touching one another lightly just for encouragement, just to let people know and feel our care for them.  Our emotional and spiritual connection with one another has been broken during the pandemic.

We are humans.  We are emotional beings.  We are not rational at our core.  Our heart is our core.  To feel is our essence.  Life used to be about experiencing and feeling everything.  Instead, we’ve been emotionally stunted—for kids struggling to learn online, intellectually stunted, too.  We like to think we are smarter than our emotional selves, but there is no telling what a year or two of mask wearing will do to us psychologically, especially the young ones.

Will we easily be able to put these days of masks and oddness behind us?  I work where no one has seen me maskless except online.  Guess I’m feeling shy.  I’ll have to start lining my lips again and wear lipstick and powder my face—routines I dropped a year ago when figuring out the mask interferes with pride in appearance.  The mask allowed a casualness that is appealing to some.  But when the masks finally come off for good—when we are assured by medical scientists it’s OK to go bare faced, as God intended—first let us take a deep cleansing breath.  And let us never take life on earth for granted again.

Not sure if it’s karma points or what, but so far in my home the power and heat have remained steady during this worst cold snap in modern Texas history.  Not that I haven’t experienced power outages, most during the spring and summer and a few during some cold nights.  Seems what starts it here is a thunderstorm, then poof!  Lights out.  In the dark I call the power company apparently directed by a robot with a female voice that knows my locale and usually confirms the power is indeed out in my neck of the woods.  Sometimes I get a restoration estimate of three or four hours.  Sometimes they don’t know when the power will be restored.  Having experienced no electricity in hot and cold weather, I guess I’d take the summer outages.  But there’s no sleep in either.  And when it’s pitch black in the house with no battery radio for entertainment and the need to conserve battery flashlights, sleep is it, like preparing for the coffin.

Texas again is an international laughingstock.  This time due to millions of folks being without electricity and heat when temperatures are in the single digits and the windshield below 0.  Hell no!  Don’t sound like Texas a’tall.  Texans have taken to social media (powered up by their automobiles) to rant with unprecedented rage about this going on for days now.  Schools are closed, not even attempting virtual learning as so many homes sporadically are out of electricity, and then there are the homeowners and apartment dwellers having to contend with the watery mess from busted pipes.  Plumbers are taking a hundred calls a day.

Texans don’t do winter well.

And apparently neither does our state government.  We’ve heard blame passed around to everyone except the Almighty.  The green deal caused this?  Governor, please.  This is more about power companies not winterizing—like they were supposed to after the big 2011 February freeze that spoiled our brand new boasted Super Bowl stadium and kept schools closed for a week due to thick icy roads.  That winter, no one dared drive around except for the Cheeseheads from Wisconsin who chuckled at our wintry conditions.  “What snow?” they said, laughing at us.

No, this lingering power outage is due to the usual culprit: corporate greed.   Passing the blame, of course they claim we Texas customers would not accept overall higher utilities for the extremely rare winter cold snap.  If you look at the Texas year, we spend a lot more time complaining about the excessive heat than the almost forgotten freezing rain and icy cold.  The suits have a point.  One time a utility company, playing good corporate citizen, waived electric bills for poor families throughout a very hot summer.  The company set October for the month when they’d come collecting.  Ha, October in Texas is like July in Wisconsin.  We usually keep our ACs running to keep cool because we’re still hot without it.  I knew the suit thinking October is the time the heat would be gone was from the north.

Freezin’ East Texas

The reason I bring up karma for spending a comfortable winter so far (knock on wood with frequent audible praises to God) is because I have spent some miserable winters in East Texas.  The worst was December 1983 to January 1984.  My car wouldn’t start.  I thought the engine block had cracked, something I heard was common up north.  An all-electric apartment where I lived circulated ice-cold air.  Then the power was out in the region for days.  In another place I stayed, the pipes froze.  I was in college and learning how to rough it in 0-degree weather.  It was 0, sometimes 2, on a warm day 7.  I learned to double and triple clothing layers including socks and wear long johns under my jeans, T-shirts with flannel shirts.  I did without bathing for a week or so and each night slept under mounds of blankets and quilts while keeping burners on from a gas stove, the only source of heat.

The funny part is, the next year in Texas I wore shorts while cooking a turkey.  Texas weather, if you don’t like it, wait a minute.  Then compare the same time year by year for lots of laughs.

Anyone remember Thanksgiving 1993 in Dallas?  I was staying with my parents for my first vacation from a reporter job in northeast Texas.  On Thanksgiving around noon as my mother and I drove out for a home-cooked meal with her sister, the snow fell, and the roads were slick.  Driving back was more hazardous.  I parked my truck, saw the Dallas snowstorm made national network news, then for days could not move my vehicle to go shopping and have fun.  The truck was stuck, as if welded by ice to a concrete driveway.  The ice would not melt.  I waited, day by day, going stir crazy as my vacation plans in the big city were ruined.  Then on my last day, my mother and I poured lots of buckets of water all around the truck tires.  I turned on the vehicle to heat ’er up, put the gear in reverse, and nothin’ doin’.  We continued our chain of bucket water until finally the truck would move in reverse.  I floored it and drove the hell out of there, waving at mother in the mirror.  I was so angry about a spoiled vacation, especially when I saw the roads were for the most part passable, that I stopped by a mall that had a New York Museum of Modern Art shop and purchased something I always wanted: a display of perfectly round polished crystals and rocks, each with its own tiny label.  It’s a game created by someone in exile during the rule of Napoleon, kind of a solitaire Chinese checkers.  It’s still on display in my home.  Whenever I dust, I hardly ever think of the wintry reason I got it, a symbol of survival.

Another miserable freezing winter lasted one whole week, again in an all-electric apartment, with no electricity and therefore no heat in northeast Texas January 2001.  Folks who lived in the country were out of electricity for two long weeks.  As a government news reporter, during the big freeze I’d drive out every morning to the water treatment plant and see what was going on.  The streets were fine for driving.  It’s just no one had electricity including businesses and restaurants.  Back at the news desk, where power was out a day or two but otherwise restored, I’d call the electric company that covered the region.  The problem with lingering power outages spanned Sherman to Tyler.  I lived right in between.  A few readers would drop by, telling me they’d lived in states like Ohio, Illinois and Wisconsin for 30 years or so and never experienced a power outage for more than a few hours, never days on end.  They hinted something else must be going on.  No, I believed what the power company said.  I understood Texas doesn’t know how to deal with severe cold … and doesn’t care to.

Some areas were restored power but not where I lived.  Each night as I came home, the neighborhood was eerily empty.  No lights.  No cars.  Everyone had left for heated shelter except me.  I’d use a large flashlight to get around inside.  Wasn’t sure what to do with the food in the fridge.  Brought some to work each day to microwave for lunch and then ate dinner there, too, before ruefully having to head home.  Couldn’t take a shower.  The water was ice cold.  Then I’d crawl into bed, still wearing socks and pants and a long-sleeved shirt, laying under every blanket, quilt and bed covering I had.  I counted 10 layers.  During the big freeze while I cried under the covers because breathing in the cold air hurt my lungs, my friend Jean called to tell me about the 2000 election verdict with Al Gore conceding.  I told her about my fate, trying to keep warm in a cold no-heat apartment.  I told her about daily calling the power company officials.  They explained the weather has to get above freezing for the crews to successfully ‘sweep’ ice off the lines.  The official maintained crews were sweeping lines every day, but the temperatures were just too cold, and the lines would freeze again and power couldn’t be restored.  There also were tons of trees that had fallen throughout the entire East Texas region that impacted service.

Cold feet, warm heart

It was colder inside my apartment than outdoors.  My teeth chattered uncontrollably.  Within five minutes, I felt the cold all the way to the marrow of my bones.  My organs ached.  I was developing a bad cough that would turn into a long bout of bronchitis.

Midweek a friend whose home had electricity offered showers and food.  I brought towels, a change of clothes, shampoo and my blow dryer, and was so grateful.

A couple more days went by.  Under the covers, I’d punch out a tent to breathe and prayed all the time for the miracle of electric heat to return.  I cried myself to sleep, it was so miserable.  In such situations I think of those who lived in concentration camps and wondered how they did it, how they survived.  I think of my parents and grandparents and their childhoods without electricity and heat other than a potbelly stove.  They really lived the lives of frontier families until electricity was provided nationwide and lastly in the poorest areas of rural America.  The thoughts didn’t warm my heart, just made me mad that people have to endure such deadly weather elements year after year.  We’re used to being in control.

But throughout all my self pity at having no power, no heat or cool air depending on the time of year, I knew the power would be restored.  This was not permanent, not meant to be intentional as it was for prisoners of war.  In Texas frigid temperatures are soon gone, even forgotten as we compare it to the miserable heat, and this is why energy providers skimped on effectively winterizing the all-important massive power grid supplying exclusively the Lone Star State.  Texans come from a proud heritage of living off the land and sitting tight during days of extreme cold or months of extreme heat.  It’s what we do down here: We deal with very bad situations and for the most part live through them, survive them, don’t think about ’em … till the next time which in terms of Texas winter weather could be decades.

Finally after one entire week of living in the coldest abode of my life, I returned home for a quick lunch and found my living room light on and the TV.  My heart was overjoyed.  Yet I was cautious—like those concentration camp survivors at the end of the war when all the guards were gone. I thought this might be a trick, and the power would go out again.  It’s happened before.  I had to make myself take in a breath.  Life was continuing, no longer frozen still.  I laughed and hooped and thanked God for the power now heating and lighting my home.  I fixed a sandwich and almost choked when realizing the only channel available was “Jerry Springer” with the topic “You’re too fat to do porn!”

I never watched his show and turned off the TV, preferring silence.  At least it was my choice.  I turned on all faucets to check for any damage.  All was well.  I did a load of laundry.  Life was instantly back to normal especially in my home.  During the power outage, I had put together a large puzzle by candlelight.  I spent a couple hours a night finishing the puzzle.  It kept me occupied.  It is Flowers by Andy Warhol.  Each of the four flowers are a different color, colors I remember fondly from my childhood: red, hot pink, orange and yellow.  The image is fun, but putting each small piece together was difficult, more so in shadows.  I organized piles based on color including the green/black for the grass.  At the time while working the puzzle, I was aware it kept my mind off the cold temperatures as each hour I thought surely the power would return.  Perhaps subconsciously I worked that specific puzzle, with nothing but close-up flowers, to assure myself of the seasons to come, that winter passes like time, and that it comes around—less in Texas than anywhere else—to force all humanity to stop … and appreciate our blessings and know we’re not alone or forsaken.

It starts with the truth. 

What we know.  What we think we know.  What we believe to be true.  What we believe to be untrue.  What our gut instinct tells us.  Truth can be an individual matter or a mass reasoning. 

Now to all that intellectual understanding necessary to determine the truth, add the terms misinformation and disinformation, both purposeful untruths, a manipulation of facts or a set of ‘alternative facts.’ 

Then play on human emotions—our knee-jerk reactions and unreasonable notions and inclinations based on how, when and where we were raised coupled with religious teachings and culture—and ta-da!  Today we have dozens of truths from which to choose … instead of just the one and only truth. 

The truth used to be called the news.  But even the mass media is suspect today, as it always has been centuries prior to the internet.  Just not so blatantly disbelieved, ignored, doubted and questioned by every kind of person as it is today.   

Where do we as U.S. citizens go for news each morning when we awake and at night before bed—that is the question. 

And that’s the way it was 

The news used to be unquestioned especially by Mr. and Mrs. America.  In the days of Walter Cronkite and Harry Reasoner and early network TV, old-school newspaper reporters were the logical hires to sit in front of a camera at 6 p.m. Eastern Time and recite the most important events of the day albeit succinctly.  The weathered face of newsmen, most who were involved in World War II, were as trusting as our fathers and honest in their reporting.  They got their facts straight.  The public had no reason to doubt the news.  

The proof was it was true. 

But after the Kennedy assassination, the turbulent 1960s, the Vietnam War, assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and another Kennedy, FBI investigations, then Watergate—most Americans grew up in a post-truth era.  We learned then to not trust our government and even the news whether network or local, big city or small town. 

Yet through the decades, the news has rarely been inaccurate. 

Why is that?  First, journalism is the search for truth.  Nothing more.  Nothing less.  The worst thing that could happen to a news business is to publicize untruth.  There are laws, too, that news institutions must adhere, one being libel, the other slander.  And any false or misleading or even an accidental oversight of facts requires a retraction.  How many of those have we seen lately, in the past 20 or 30 years?  There are corrections, and even those are rare, but not retractions which must follow untruth printed or broadcasted in and by a news business. 

Fake news comes from the mix of entertainment with news.  Since the advent of the Worldwide Web, there are so many ‘news’ sources.  Some websites are the legitimate news business such as The News York Times, CNN and The Washington Post.  The majority of online news sources are not intended to be any more than entertainment.  They cannot be relied upon as providers of truth. 

The consumer must decide what so-called news source is providing truth from the many providing entertainment and therefore can play fast and loose with the facts—and if online are not penalized for libel or slander let alone lies and half-truths that can incite and enrage the public and as we clearly see can cause harm and murder.  

Will the real news please stand up? 

A real news business will be a member of the Associated Press.  The AP, which began in the 1840s by several newspapers, is a nonprofit organization.  A news organization’s membership in the AP means several things, the most important being: The media organization is first a serious provider of news and adheres to journalism integrity.  And if a news organization does not adhere to news integrity, it cannot be a member of the AP. 

Real news stories for print and broadcast will include the who, what, when, where, why, which and how.  Facts must be substantiated from at least three different sources, preferably more, but not just one source.  Those sources when human, as opposed to a document or report, must be verifiable.  Rumor and hearsay are not news.  A professional journalist will check the background of anyone providing information which will be used in a news report. 

So now we can see why so many consumers of news are essentially bored.  The news is news, usually reported the exact same way by cable, network, radio and print.   

When news presentations started mixing opinion and political or social angles, that’s when the public lost trust.  The news was supposed to be just the facts.  Newspapers carried opinion from columnists to editorial boards and letters to the editor.  The ‘full package’ or full spectrum of covering and presenting the news from all angles was a tradition in a newspaper.  But broadcast news, especially radio, had more time to fill.  And cable news had practically 23 hours to do something.  Cable news’ national beat reporters were brought in to talk about the news and maybe dish.  In the public’s mind, the career of journalist morphed into a celebrity role. 

And Americans love celebrities, trust ’em as good for their word. 

Our press is free, which means the government does not control the news.  But freedom of the press never meant the news could be untrue, half-true or exaggerated.  No, the daily news when presented accurately is just the simple facts.  That can be quite boring for today’s Americans so in need of escaping mundane lives—or a misperceived pointless existence. 

With all that has gone wrong in online media, Americans must avoid the glitz and wowness of news-as-entertainment.  Anyone who cares about the truth in news must first seek and ensure news organizations that are bona fide, the ones that do not play fast and loose with the facts but instead verify information and substantiate sources and facts.  The truth has always been out there. 

Child of Satan, Child of God is the self-titled auto biography of Susan Atkins, AKA Sadie Mae Glutz, infamous member of the Manson Family.  From a California women’s prison in the 1970s where she would spend the rest of her life for the Tate-La Bianca murders, she tells her story of growing up middle class post WWII in a suburb.  Her father was the bread winner.  She had siblings.  But her mother was terminally ill, dying when Susan was a teen-ager.  Her father took to drinking to numb his sorrow.  He wasn’t interested in being a strong loving father and guiding his offspring through a difficult and unfair situation.  Her family disintegrated.

Susan left home early to become a secretary, experimented with drugs, worked as a stripper—a dancing job she enjoyed as the center of attention.  In the late 1960s, she met Charlie one day at a hippie party.  He was playing a mesmerizing folk-jazz guitar and singing his soft version of a beautiful pop ballad of the day.  Susan was enthralled, allowing herself to become seduced by this man, a decade older and a dangerous manipulative ex-con.  She didn’t see that or even think of it, being barely out of high school.  With groovy clothes, long hair, beard and moustache, he made a solid impression on Susan—and the looks and talent turned out to work on numerous girls the same age with similar back stories of uptight middle-class boredom and ’60s rebellion.  Charlie was cool when parents were not.  He got it.  He had all the answers. He spoke the language of youth.  In prison he had studied the Beatles, Eastern religion and mysticism, and the Dale Carnegie program of winning friends and influencing people.

Timing more than anything else brought Manson and the flower children together.  Living with Manson meant lots of LSD trips.  Drugs were more important than sustenance.  Sex also was part of the deal.  This was a commune that would not tolerate squares.  But like all cults, the Manson Family had their charismatic leader, succumbed to total mind control, cut ties to family and former friends, literally had no money, and eventually lost track of time as was the intention by Manson who controlled the kids like puppets on a string.  He broke down their will.  They allowed him to break down their will.  And like so many modern American cults, death and murder would be the ultimate sacrifice and offering to show total allegiance to Manson—no questions asked.

Society in the early 1970s got a daily televised dose of the girls on trial for murder and how they acted when arriving to court and even in the court room.  They laughed, sang songs, did whatever Charlie wanted.  They stood up one day and in unison proclaimed: “The judge is the lady.”  When Charlie shaved his head and burnt an X on his forehead, so did the girls and all his followers outside the courthouse.  Toward the end of the trial, as Charlie spoke in his defense about how he took in the kids nobody wanted (?), fed ’em (he taught them to steal and dumpster dive for food), he outstretched his arms as in the manner of Christ on the cross.  The girls wept and cried and then went into hysterics shouting devotions of everlasting love to Charlie. 

In her book, Susan pins the Tate murders on Tex Watson and doesn’t go into detail about her antics during the trial.  However, sober and mature, she wondered why no one saw how sick they were.  They were young people fed a steady diet of mind-altering drugs with little food, no vitamins, pale, thin, VD infected … Instead, society took them for the glaring angry counterculture image the Manson Family portrayed and judged them harshly.

The Family did commit murder—the most gruesome senseless brutal butchery in Hollywood history.  The beautiful young actress Sharon Tate was eight months pregnant.  What they did was unspeakable—unthinkable, until the Manson Family brought the scenario into our minds.  They scared everybody to death.

Susan looked back at her wasted youth and wondered why no adults came to their aid or noticed these were sick kids, mentally and physically and spiritually.  In prison Susan takes the teachings of Christ to heart and becomes Born Again.

If it looks like a cult and acts like a cult

What is it about Americans and cults?  We’re both fascinated and repulsed by them: the idea of a single man controlling a number of people, usually idealistic youth.  We all know the game: the charismatic man claims to have an ‘in’ with God or the ‘Truth’ which includes an end time or end game of sorts when the world will see the cult leader is right and everyone else foolishly ignorant and damned, more and more people start listening to his long-winded yet seemingly passionate speeches, donate to his cause, start hanging out with followers while dropping former friends and family unless they all get involved as well.

And always, always, cults end in death and murder.  Jim Jones portrayed all of the characteristics of cult leader right down to the trademark shades to hide constant drug abuse necessary to stay ‘on’ all the time.  When the world was closing in on breaking up his family of 900+ in Jonestown, he directed a shocking mass suicide, something followers had rehearsed often and certainly expected.  Finally it was for real.

Cults are such a fascination in this country that there are TV series dedicated to the subject, profiling the leader and surviving followers, all the juicy sexy goings on, brutality in ‘other’ thought or action, and then murder.  The difference in cults today is they are even easier to get into with the internet and most recently the economic downturn and human isolation.

Do you know that the rest of the world, countries much older and having survived centuries of wars, think Americans are the eternal optimists?  America is about moving forward.  It’s about living in the future not the past.  It’s about making something of yourself.  It’s rarely about hanging onto a proud thousand-year history that binds us together.  That is because half of Americans are relatively newcomers, have no family heritage in this land dating back to the 17^th century.

Cults provide a deep bond with a leader who ‘gets through’ to people whether a large or small group.  Manson knew how to manipulate his followers and picked the few who would kill for him.  After all, he was the only one who had an axe to grind with Terry Melcher, the record producer who snubbed Manson’s rock star dreams and who owned the house where the Tate murders occurred.

The DC Capitol mob attack was bound to happen.  Like the Manson Family and the People’s Temple, timing brought all the elements together for a cult who would be groomed to murder for their leader.  Tens of thousands of Americans today have allowed themselves to replace religion with politics.  Along with the towering popularity of Fox News and their brand of fast & loose journalism and a slogan that boasted “you decide,” we’ve become a splintered society even more so with a plethora of alternative news internet sites promoting a revolution (another Manson/Jones/Trump spiel) and then there’s QAnon created by God only knows.  [My guess is the Russians.]  For thousands of disenfranchised, distrusting, disillusioned Americans, all the alt-right conspiracy theories just make sense.  Please read the attached link below on the political cult that has definitely evolved in 21st century America.  Susan Atkins was right: Cult members are sick.  And society must intervene somehow some way … because cults always think alike and culminate in disaster.            

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/you-evolving/202011/can-trumps-followers-be-called-cult

Don’t get me wrong.  I am excited about the prospect of Joe Biden serving as the next U.S. President, and even more so for Kamala Harris as our first woman VP.  But … since the DC Trumper mob, I was thinking maybe if the greatest position in the land, formerly called the Leader of the Free World, was replaced or retooled, some of the anger would die down.

Anybody?  Thoughts?

Seemed worth pondering considering Trumpers have shown themselves as killers and cultists.  Their insurrection drew thousands of Americans who selfied their way into the U.S. Capitol and, violating police orders, absolutely took over.  Didn’t look like they had any plans to seriously declare themselves the New America.  By their own videos, they mostly roamed around, having no idea where to go to ‘stop the steal.’  Looked like the only real plan they had was to hang U.S. legislators, VP Pence and especially their favorite punching bag Speaker Pelosi. 

Look, it seemed after four exhausting years of chaotic Trumpian rule, whereby we didn’t have a President no how, and if his devotees are willing to kill to keep him in office—well, the U.S. Presidency no longer serves a useful purpose.  Trump did everything in his ‘power’ to destroy democracy.  Our country was not made great or better but has ended up bad and worse, the worst we’ve been in our lifetime.  One of the first things Biden will have to do is repair our nation’s image and standing in the world, leading us out of the pandemic in which we all find ourselves suffering through so very slowly, hardly reassured by our leader.

And with all those Trumpers ensuring Biden won’t be inaugurated President, plus their sexist-racist hatred toward Kamala Harris ever gaining the title, seems like maybe we should think along the same lines as baby Trump, no doubt holding his breath and fuming: “If I can’t be President, no one will!”

Grow up

Guess it would take an act of Congress to change the Constitution and do away with the Executive branch—or maybe tweak it a bit to be held collectively by the longest serving senators and representatives, perhaps five or nine.  That might rearrange the Speaker, majority and minority leaders.  Not sure how the whip would fit in.

After ransacking the Capitol, one Trumper said pitifully, “Guess we could form a new government now.”  They realized there’d be no hangings and were bored at the thought of reading mounds of bureaucratic paperwork.  It does take a special person to perform the duties of a U.S. legislator, someone who doesn’t mind reading thick legislation for comprehension.

This kind of stupid attempt at violently overthrowing the government, just to re-install a preferred leader, is why our nation’s Framers debated allowing every American the right to vote.  In that era, many of the Constitutional Framers believed only the educated deserved, and fully understood, the ramifications of such a sobering privilege.  But the debate ended with the Framers allowing all men the right to vote and in so doing determine our country’s fate and future.  Our world’s young democratic government of the United States of America has had a mighty good run.  Looks like modern Americans cannot even make it last 250 years.

Trumpers are made up of a wide array of miserable snots.  There are the white supremacists and meth gangs, alt right media consumers, Q-anons, self-proclaimed conservative Christians, anti-immigrants, anti-government, anti-authority, anti-taxes, racists, bigots, anti-Semites, anti-education, anti-media, anti-Hollywood, anti-abortion, anti-civil rights, Fox-only viewers, internet addicts.  And some, I assume, are good Republicans.  They all have one thing in common: Everyone should believe just exactly like they do.  Wonder when a group this enormous—half the country—will ever realize they don’t agree among themselves?  In fact, each sect probably hates the others.

Yet they allowed themselves to see a ‘leader’ in Donald Trump just because he talked tough, bullied Republican contenders for President, announced himself a Nationalist (white supremacist), merchandized his name all over the world, said he was a very wealthy man, plus had his own major network TV show and was a show biz celebrity.

The largest chunk of Trumpers reside far outside of cities and major metropolitan areas.  The right-wing orchestrated misinformation and disinformation against the outcome of the 2020 Presidential election was more about America’s small town-big city residential divide.  No doubt folks in rural communities talked to everyone around about who they voted for.  And since everyone they knew said “Why, Trump, of course!” that was it.  The election was stolen.  Trump had to have won.  There just ain’t no other way when you see all the pro-Trump counties in red across the U.S. map.  Look at it!

Simmer down, here now.  There is a way Trump did not win.  Comparing America’s major city populations to all the mid-size, small town and rural communities across the country is like comparing … a billion dollars in debt to a trillion dollars in debt.  The latter rivals the number of stars in the sky.  The vote showed Biden won only by seven million.  It was a very tight contest between Republicans and Democrats.  And we don’t have to remind Republicans how the Presidential winner is the one with the most Electoral College votes, just like their wins in 2016 and in 2000, neither a landslide.

America’s divide is much more than Trump and his lies about election fraud and childish inability to concede the election.  Americans are not going to agree on religion, politics, abortion, race, immigration, taxes, the news media and even social media.  We NEVER have come together on these issues.  But Trumpers believed he won so intently they’d storm the U.S. Capitol and search to kill.  Participants committed serious federal crimes with long prison sentences if convicted.

Being American, as I understood it, is to be a little skeptical—not a downright mean cynical pessimistic hard-headed irrational spoiled brat.  Americans should question our government, never blindly believe anything or anyone who is elected to lead our government.  What happened to my America?  Half the nation believes in Trumpism and a convoluted rigged U.S. Presidential election.

Perhaps 21^st century Americans don’t deserve a President anymore.  Trump was the first one who was more arrogant than humbled, more reckless than responsible, indifferent than caring, unfeeling than empathetic, unkind than kind.  He prefers Louis XIV furniture to low-key American.  My point is Trump was never a United States President to begin with.  He ruled like a king.  He never cared to understand the purpose of the modern American Presidency.  Along with his die-hard supporters, perhaps most Americans by now have forgotten the necessary purpose of calm, rational, intelligent wise leadership.