Category Archives: events

Electing Time Travelers

Posted on by
Reply

Some of the people we elected yesterday will decide how we travel through time.

This weekend we fell back from daylight savings time to standard time. Officially the change comes at 2 a.m. yesterday. There always are some folks who don’t get the message or forget the message and find themselves arriving at the end of church services instead of at the beginning, or an hour late for tee time if they worship the putter instead.

There are a lot of folks who think we should have daylight savings time year-around.  Going back to standard time will give us more daylight in the mornings but we’ll be in the dark an hour earlier in the evening. The Hill reported last week about the efforts in Congress to keep daylight time year around. It cites a poll that says, “Most Americans want to abandon the time change we endure twice a year, with polls showing as much as 63 to 75 percent of Americans supporting an end to the practice. But, even if the country does do away with the time change, the question still remains whether the U.S. should permanently adapt to Daylight Saving Time (DST) or Standard Time (ST).”

Most of the country is on daylight time eight months of the year and switches to standard time for four months. There are always some contrarians, of course. Hawaii and Arizona stay on standard time all year.  Hawaii decided the Uniform Time Act of 1967 meant nothing to a state that is so close to the equator that sunrise and sunset are about the same time all year.

Arizona has a different reason.  It doesn’t want to lose an hour of morning time when it’s cool enough for people to go outdoors in the summer.

Residents of or visitors to Puerto Rico, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, the Virgin Islands and American Somoa don’t tinker with their clocks twice a year either.

And there’s the rub, as Hamlet says in his soliloquy.  Some folks like permanent standard time because it’s more in line with our circadian rhythms and hels stave off disease. But in March, the U.S. Senate passed a bill that would make DST permanent—the Sunshine Protection Act (who thinks up these insipid names for bills?)—because of its economic benefits because more Americans would go shopping if it remains lighter in the early evening hours.

The movement to protect the sunshine has been led by Senator Marco Rubio of the Sunshine State of Florida. He says the change would reduce the risk of seasonal depression.  That strikes us as a little silly and reminds us of the time when Missouri decided to adopt DST in 1970 when some of the ladies who were regular listeners of “Missouri Party Line” on the local radio station where I worked were vitally concerned that their flowers would not get enough sunlight if we tried to “save” daylight.

The Senate has passed the bill, as we have noted. Final approval is iffy because the Lame Duck Congress has only seventeen working days left before it becomes history.  But if the House approves it, permanent DST would go into effect a year from now.

—Except in states that now operate on Standard Time. They won’t have to switch.  We recall the days before DST became more common when we had to change our watches when we crossed certain state lines.  Our annual trips from Central DST Missouri to Eastern ST Indiana in May always left us uncertain about whether to change our watches until we stopped some place with a clock and learned that CDST was the same as EST.

At least, I think that’s how it went.

Polling has found no consensus on which time should be the permanent time.

If we eliminate switching back and forth, we could be endangering our safety.  Various safety officials tell us that we should replace the batteries in our smoke and carbon monoxide detectors when we change our clocks.  To keep some battery life from being wasted, it is suggested that they be changed either when clocks are adjusted for DST or when they’re adjusted for plain ST.  That assumes the battery-changer remembers which time is the time to switch. We know of no one who marks their calendars for such events.

The article in The Hill’s series “Changing America” delves into the pros and the cons:

Sleep experts say the health benefits that could come from a permanent ST are crucial for a chronically sleep-deprived nation. In response to darkness, the body naturally produces melatonin, a hormone that helps promote sleep but is suppressed by light. Thus, having too much sunlight in the evening can actually work against a good night’s sleep. 

The status quo leads to circadian misalignment, or “social jetlag,” says Beth Malow, a professor of neurology and pediatrics and director of the Vanderbilt sleep division. Malow also authored the Sleep Research Society’s position statement advocating for a permanent ST. 

Under DST, our work and school schedules dictate our actions; while in an ideal scenario, environmental changes like lighter mornings and darker evenings would regulate sleep patterns, Malow explained in an interview with Changing America. 

“There’s a disconnect when we have to wake up early for work or school and it’s still dark outside and we want to sleep,” she said.

Light in the morning wakes humans up, provides us with energy, and sets our mood for the day. “It actually aligns us so that our body clocks are in sync with what’s going on in our environment,” Malow said.

Having more energy in the morning can also make it easier to fall asleep at night when it’s darker outside. 

Overall, ST “maximizes our morning light and minimizes light too late at night,” Malow said. 

When the body doesn’t get enough sleep, risks of developing heart disease, diabetes, and weight gain all increase.  Insufficient sleep is also linked to some forms of cancer.

Polls show younger individuals are less likely to support abolishing the clock change, largely because they’re more flexible than their older counterparts who support nixing the practice. 

But teenagers and young adults are at a higher risk of negative impacts from permanent DST, partially because they’re already primed for sleep deprivation.

“What happens when you go through puberty and you become a teenager is…your natural melatonin levels shift by about two hours, so it takes you longer to fall asleep,” said Malow. “[Teenagers] end up going to bed or being tired at 11 o’clock at night, even midnight sometimes, but they have to wake up early for school.” 

Students who wake up in darker mornings and drive to school could be at a greater risk of car accidents. The same is true for workers with early commutes and individuals in the north or on western edges of time zones who tend to experience more darkness overall.

“Sleep is really, really important to our health. And right now, what we’re doing is imposing mandatory social jetlag for eight months out of the year,” Malow said. “And we’d like to—rather than going to mandatory social jetlag for 12 months out of the year—to stop the clock and go back to Standard Time which is much more natural.” 

Despite the myriad of health benefits that come from adopting ST year-round, having more sunlight in the evenings if DST were permanently adopted is a tempting prospect for many Americans, especially those who work or attend school indoors all day.

Who got us into this mess?  The Washington Post says we can blame two guys. George Hudson, from New Zealand, wanted more daylight time in the late afternoon to collect bugs.  Britisher William Willett wanted more time to play golf late in the day.

Their idea didn’t catch on until World War I when Germany, bogged down in trench warfare with the French and the British, adopted it to save coal. England soon followed suit. It didn’t catch on in this country until 1917 when stockbrokers and industries lobbied for it. The Post says they overcame opposition from railroads that feared the time change would confuse people and led to some bad crashes.  And farmers opposed it because their day already was regulated by the sun and they saw no reasons to fiddle with the clocks.  David Prerau, who wrote Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Savings Time, told the Post dairy farmers didn’t want it because they’d have to start their milking in the dark if they wanted to ship their product out on the trains. “Plus, the sun, besides giving light, gives heat, and it drives off the dew on a lot of things that have to be harvested. And you can’t harvest things when they’re wet.”  Getting up an hour early didn’t solve that problem.

This country adopted DST in 1918 with the Standard Time Act. DST was repealed the next year and wasn’t seen again until FDR reinstated it during WWII for the same reason it was instituted in The Great War—to save fuel.

In 1966, Congress passed the Uniform Time Law. In the 1970s we got permanent DST for a while, also an energy-saving issue because we were in the midst of an energy crisis caused by the Middle East Oil Embargo. That situation caused major inflation issues including in energy prices—at the gasoline pumps and in home heating and electric bills—to skyrocket. The great minds in Congress decided we needed permanent DST to reduce excess utility costs.  But the public didn’t like it and the experiment ended after ten months.

Then George W. Bush got the Uniform Time Act amended to change the sates when clocks were to spring ahead from April to March and we’ve had our present system since then.

Does it really work or is it just something to politicians to fiddle around with from time to time?

A 2008 Department of Energy report said the Bush change cut the national use of electricity by one-half of one percent a day.  Ten years or so later, someone analyzed more than forty papers assessing the impact of the change found that electricity use declined by about one-third of a percent because of the 2007 change.

More contemporary studies show similar small changes in behavior when DST kicks in.

One study supporting the economic advantage of permanent DST was done by JP Moran Chase six years ago.  The study looked at credit card purchases in the month after the start of DST in Los Angeles and found it increased by 9/10th of a percent.  It dropped 3.5% when DST ended.  That was good enough to recommend fulltime DST.

Another report showed robberies dropped by 7% during DST daytimes. And in the hour that gained additional sunlight, there was a 27% drop in that extra evening hour. That’s in Los Angeles.

Rubio maintains that having more daylight in the evening could mean kids would be more inclined to get their noses out of their cell phones, tablets, and computers and go outside and run around playing sports.

Maybe they could take up golf.  Or looking for bugs that proliferate in the twilight. Imagine a parent suggesting those ideas for their nimble-thumbed children.

So what’s better—having kids standing in the dark waiting for the morning school bus or riding the school bus into the darkening evening and arriving at home where the lights are all on?

The people we elected yesterday are likely to make this decision sooner or later. Let us hope they’re up to it.

 

Giving Up Hope

Posted on by
Reply

Tomorrow is the first of November.  Next weekend is the end of Daylight Savings Time for the year.

We’ve been getting cold leaf-dropping rains.

We call this season “fall” because that‘s what the leaves do.  And moods.

The baseball season will end this week.

The last NASCAR race of the year is coming up  next weekend.

It is always hard to admit—always—-that summer is gone. But when Thanksgiving is only about three weeks away and Christmas is less than 60 days in the future, the reality I have been ignoring wraps its cold arms around me and I must at last abandon hope that I will be warm for about five long, dark months.

Every year, I go around in short-sleeved shirts and feel cold because I am reluctant to admit it’s time to start wearing long-sleeved shirts and jackets.

The lightweight sweatshirt I wear to the YMCA three days a week is enough for now and the cold air against my uncovered legs makes me grateful for heated seats and a heated steering wheel in the car, both of which are operating by the time the car and I get to the stop sign up the street.

Nancy has gotten me some nice wool shirts. They’re hanging next to each other at the end of a rack in my closet.  The polo shirts are still at the front.

Not for long.  My resistance to wool shirts is weakening.  Soon, I will promote the long-sleeves to the front and the short sleeves to the back.  Soon I will remove the shorts (remember when they were called “Bermuda Shorts?” You have to be of a certain age, I think.) from the hook in the closet, and when they’ve been through the washing machine put them in a drawer—-but maybe there will be one more day to wear them. All day.

Nancy was raised in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Yep, I married a “Yooper.”  She likes these crisp, chill days.

Opposites attract, you know.

When people complain of the heat, I tell them, “I waited all winter for days like these.”

In a previous life, I was an indoor cat who always looked for the sun spots.

Baseball is gone. But there’s football and the Tigers have figured out how to win a game or two and the Chiefs are on a roll.  And soon there will be college basketball—a game played by people in shorts.

But then come the fallow days when our basketball team has lost its last (tournament, we hope) game. When the Super Bowl is over.  And all that is left is golf (Leon Wilson’s 1905 book was the first to call it “a good walk spoiled.”) and the NBA and the NHL, both of which—in this house—generate no heat.

The Kansas City Royals and the Texas Rangers play the first game in the Cactus League on February 25 in Surprise, Arizona. The Grapefruit League, in Florida, begins the next day in Jupiter, with the Cardinals against the Washington Nationals.

116 days from today is the first true sign of spring.  The voice of Rooney will be heard in the land once again. And hope will be restored.

-0-

Banned Book Week

Posted on by
Reply

I have a pin that I wear on rare occasions that says, “I Read Banned Books.”

And I do.

I’ve read Huckleberry Finn.  The Bible (well, parts of it), Grapes of Wrath, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (not just the good parts), In Cold Blood, The Naked and the Dead—–

Probably more.

And as consumers of these columns know, I am clearly corrupted, probably an abuser of something or other, and have read a forbidden word or two that most second-graders already know.

This is the fortieth anniversary of Banned Books Week, It was started at a time when there was a sharp rise in actions to take books out of schools, libraries and even out of bookstores. It was created by Pittsburgh librarian Judith F. Krug who became the director of the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom. Later she joined the Freedom to Read Foundation and after Time magazine did an article in 1981, “The Growing Battle of the Books,” founded Banned Books Week.

One of the biggest promoter is a century-old (founded in 1922) organization called PEN America, which says it “stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide.” Originally the acronym stood for “Poets, Essayists, Novelists.”  But the group has broadened its tent to include playwrights and editors and even more people. So “PEN” is no longer an acronym for anything but the organization is for free exposure to ideas.

Not long ago the organization calculated about 140 school districts spread throughout 32 states had issued more than 2,500 book bans, efforts that it says affect almost four=million students in more than five-thousand individual school buildings. It has identified at least fifty groups with at least 300 local chapters advocating for book bans.  It says most of those groups have formed in the last year.

PEN America keeps an annual index of schoolbook bans.  That list for the school year ending June 30, 2022 lists 2,535 instances of banning 1,648 titles.  The organization says 674 of the banned titles address LGBTQ+ themes or have characters who are in that category. Another 659 titles featured characters of color and another 338 addressed issues of race and racism.

Political pressure or legislation designed to “restrict teaching and learning” (PEN”s phrase) were involved in at least forty percent of the bans.  Texas had 801 bans in 22 districts. Florida had 566 in 21 districts. Pennsylvania had 457 in 11 districts.

The organization says the movement is speeding up resulting in “more and more students losing access to literature that equips them to meet the challenges and complexities of democratic citizenship.” It says, “Ready access to ideas and information is a necessary predicate to the right to exercise freedom of meaningful speech, press, or political freedom.”  It cites this except from a 1978 decision in a Federal Court case in Massachusetts:

“The library is ‘a mighty resource in the marketplace of ideas’ … There a student can literally explore the unknown and discover areas of interest and thought not covered by the prescribed curriculum. The student who discovers the magic of the library is on the way to a life-long experience of self-education and enrichment. That student learns that a library is a place to test or expand upon ideas presented to him, in or out of the classroom… The most effective antidote to the poison of mindless orthodoxy is ready access to a broad sweep of ideas and philosophies. There is no danger in such exposure. The danger is in mind control.”

Sixteen instances of book banning are on the new PEN index.  Six are from Nixa. Four are from Wentzville.

(3 actions)  Alison Bechdel, Fun House, A Family Tragicomic, banned in classrooms, Nixa May 2022; Banned pending investigation, North Kansas City and Wentzville (October, 2021)

Echo Bryan, Black Girl Unlimited, the Remarkable Story, banned in library, Nixa,  February 2022

Jano Dawson, This Book is Gay, banned in libraries, Lindbergh School District, October 2021

Jonathan Evison, Lawn Boy, banned pending investigation, Wentzville School District, October, 2021

Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing, banned in libraries, Nixa, May, 2022

Lisa Jewell, Invisible Girl, a Novel, banned pending investigation, Wentzville School District October 2021

(Two actions) George M. Johnson, All Boys Aren’t Blue, banned in libraries and classrooms, Nixa School District, May, 2022; banned pending investigation, North Kansas City School District,  October, 2021

Kiese Laymon, Heavy, an American Memoir, banned pending investigation, Wentzville School District, October, 2021.

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, banned in libraries of the Nixa School District  February, 2022.

Logan Myracle, l8r g8tr, banned in libraries and classrooms, St. Francis Howell School District,  October, 2021

Elizabeth Scott, Living Dead Girl, banned pending investigation, Rockwood School District, March, 2022

Nic Stone, Dear Martin, banned in classes, Monett R-1 School District, December 2021

Jeanette Walls, The Glass Castle, banned pending investigation, Nixa February, 2022

I am a writer, a journalist, an author, a longtime supporter of my local and regional libraries. I do not have much patience with those who want to dictate to me what I might read, how I might speak, or what I might think.

Perhaps I am the kind of person those who want to dictate those things fear.  Fear is a lousy reason for running a society or a nation.  People who are different will not go away and keeping someone from reading about them won’t drive them away.

So for the rest of this week, be a good American.

Read a banned book.  There’s a list of them above.

 

 

 

 

Why Hasn’t Ukraine Lost?

Posted on by
Reply

Ukraine’s counterattack against Russian invaders appears to have stunned a lot of Russian soldiers and their commanders—and a growing number of influential people in Moscow who are starting to openly criticize Vladimir Putin for his unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

Putin expected a quick conquest.  Why didn’t he get it?  And why is he, as of this writing, getting his butt kicked by a supposedly smaller, inferior, force?

You might find it interesting to explore a book that explains why.  It’s the same reason Hitler didn’t conquer England, why the United States fled from Vietnam, and probably why the Taliban controls Afghanistan.

The book is Malcom Gladwell’s David and Goliath, a study of why bigger is not always best, why stronger does not always prevail, and why—believe it or not—the underdog wins so often.

While most analyses of military actions focus on military capabilities and/or failures, Gladwell focuses on people and what happens when their country is attacked by a seemingly overwhelming force.

He writes that the British government was worried as Europe sank into World War II that there was no way to stop a German air offensive against the country. The country’s leading military theorists feared devastating attacks on London would 600,000 dead, 1.2-million people wounded and mass panic among the survivors, leaving the Army unable to fight invaders because it would be trying to keep order among the civilians.

The eight-month blitzkrieg began in the latter part of 1940 and included fifty-seven consecutive nights of bombing.

But the people did not panic.  Military leaders were surprised to see courage and almost indifference.  The reaction puzzled them as well as psychiatric workers expecting the worst.

And they discovered the same things were happening in other countries under attack.

What was going on?

Gladwell writes that a Canadian psychiatrist, J. T.MacCurdy, determined that the bombings divided the populace into three categories: the people killed, the people who were considered near misses—the people who survived the bombs, and the remote misses—people not in the bombed areas.  MacCurdy said the people in the third category developed “a feeling of excitement with a flavour of invulnerability.”

While the toll in the London bombings was, indeed, great (40,000 dead and 46,000 injured), those casualties were small in a community of eight-million people, leaving hundreds of thousands of “emboldened” near misses, people that MacCurdy said became “afraid of being afraid,” a feeling that produced exhilaration and led them to conquering fear and developing self-confidence “that is the very father and mother of courage.”

Hitler, like the British military command, had assumed that a populace that had never been bombed before would be terrified. It wasn’t. Instead, it was emboldened.

“Courage is not something that you already have that makes you brave when the touch times start,” writes Gladwell. “Courage is what you earn when you’ve been through the tough times and you discover they aren’t so tough after all.”   He maintains that the German expectations that the bombings would terrorize the people and destroyed their courage was a “catastrophic error” because it produced the opposite result. He concludes the Germans “would have been better off not bombing London at all.”

Gladwell explores the “catastrophic error” this country made in Viet Nam when its political and military leaders believed they could bomb the Viet Cong into submission.  Thousands of pages of interviews of Viet Cong prisoners indicated the result instead was that the bombings made people “hate you so much that they never stop fighting.”

Many of the prisoners maintained no thoughts of winning but they didn’t think the Americans would win either.  Nor did they think they would lose. “An enemy indifferent to the outcome of a battle is the most dangerous enemy of all,” Gladwell writes, and leads to a shift in advantage and power to the underdog.

His thoughts might help us understand why, after 30 years, the Gulf War has failed to install democracy in that area and instead has left Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan far from what we dreamed they would become.

We hope the ideas are not tested on Taiwan.

Those who go to war expecting to win through might and power alone are Goliaths. And, as Gladwell sees it, all they’re doing is creating a lot of Davids.  And—although Russia’s invasion is not mentioned—in Ukraine, the shepherds with slings are swarming.

(The book is David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, New York, Little Brown and Company, 2013 (with a revised paperback edition by Back Bay Books, 2015. His thought-challenging musings also cover such topics as class size, prestigious colleges, art, dyslexia, and crime.  If you want a sample of his perceptive interpretation of how underdogs so often prevail, go to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziGD7vQOwl8 and if you want more on other topics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RGB78oREhM)

(Photo credit: youtube Ted Talk)

 

Irreverence

Posted on by
Reply

I was talking with one of my friends at the Y last Friday morning and the conversation drifted, as it always does, all over the place.

We eventually started talking about family heirlooms and how the current generation—Nancy and I have two members of one, she doesn’t—has no interest in them.  The silver service grandma used to dig out of the bottom dresser drawer when people were coming over for a special occasion, the doilies great aunt Marge made, the quilt (oh, lord, the quilts!) from who knows?

The nick-nacks from the places we and our forebears visited—the ash tray from the Great Smokeys (a clever pun of a souvenir), the paperweight with a picture of an enrupting Old Faithful embedded in it, matchbooks galore from hotels and motels long closed and either rotted or demolished, dried up pens from the same places, an old felt pennant that says “Rock City.”

All of that STUFF.

The coal oil lamp from the days before farms had electricity, the radio with a built-in 78 rpm record player, the salters that used to be placed on the dinner table for special occasions so people could dip their radishes in some salt before eating them, the stiff old baseball glove that great uncle Herb used in the 1920s.

My mother-in-law, Yuba Hanson, referred to STUFF as things having a “sedimental value,” being as meaningful to someone else as the dust that gathers in the corners of seldom-used and thus seldom-cleaned rooms, like sediment.

And then we slid into discussing disposing of this or that relative’s clothes after their deaths—parceling things out to surviving relatives who find something close to still being in style and giving the rest to Goodwill or the Salvation Army, and taking dishes and cooking utensils to this or that re-sell-it shop.

And I asked—–“What do you think will happen to Queen Elizabeth’s clothes.”

Yes, we really should be more reverential about the late Her Majesty (by the way, how long to do you have to be dead before you are no longer “late?).  There are millions of people, probably, in the United Kingdom who would take umbrage at such a comment.  But this is the United States and we cut to the chase.

We do not expect to see a sign on Buckingham Palace Road with an arrow pointing the way to London SW1A 1AA reading “Garage Sale.” It’s not uncommon to see a few racks of no-longer-fitting clothes in garage sales.  But we’re not going to see anything of the sort at Buckingham Palace.

Queen Elizabeth was known for her hats—which matched the rest of her attire when she was out in public.  What is to become of them?

This grossly irreverent thought has occurred that should offend so many people:

We understand that it is customary within the Catholic Church for the galero, the red ceremonial wide-brimmed tasseled silk hat of Cardinals, to be suspended from the rafters of the cathedral in which they served a month after their deaths.

The first Queen Elizabeth was the daughter of King Henry VIII, the king who broke with the Catholic Church and created the Anglican, or Episcopal, Church as the Church of England. Perhaps her large collection of hats could be distributed to the oldest Anglican churches in England, one to each, and be lifted to the rafters as a tribute to the person who headed the Church of England longer than anyone in its 488-year history.

We are aware that some will find this discussion unsavory.  But to common folks such as most of us who deal with the disposal of the worldly goods of family members who have left us, the question might lurk somewhere in the recesses of our minds but we are afraid to ask.

And she had an irreverent side to her, too.  Ten years ago, some might remember, she opened the London Olympics by “parachuting” into the stadium.  She did a video with James Bond (Daniel Craig) who went to Buckingham Palace to provide her security as she went to the royal helicopter and headed to the stadium where a stunt double jumped out of the chopper and moments later the real Elizabeth was introduced in the stadium.

Or there is the video she shot of tea with Paddington Bear in which he offered her a marmalade sandwich only to see her reach into her ever-present purse and pull out one she claimed she always kept for emergencies.

Both are on Youtube along with other moments when the Queen was just Elizabeth.  I have a feeling she would have enjoyed doing a turn on Downton Abbey if the story line were to continue another eighty years beyond where the latest movie left off.

We probably would not have written this irreverent entry if we had not seen three news stories the day after Her Majesty’s death.  One asked what would become of her beloved dogs?  She had four or five dogs, “two Corgis named Muick and Sandy, a Dorgi called Candy, and two Cocker Spaniels,” as Newsweek reported them.  There was much speculation already.

The second news story reported that the producers of the Netflix television series “The Crown,” a biopic inspired by the life of Queen Elizabeth II, had decided to pause the filming of the sixth and apparent final year of the series “as a mark of respect” on the day she died. We have seen no date for resumption of the filming although it appears it won’t happen until after her funeral. The series’ website says it is about “the political rivalries and romance of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign and the events that shaped the second half of the twentieth century.”  The writer of the series, Peter Morgan, says it is “a love letter to her.”

And ABC was quick to assure subjects of the United Kingdom that their money with Her Majesty’s face on it would still be the currency of the realm.  She was the first British Royal to have a photo on paper bills, in 1960. The Bank of England has indicated more details about changes in currency will be announced after the 10-day mourning period.

A spokesman for the Bank of Canada says there are no plans to change the face on that country’s currency. The same is true in Australia although a new $5 note with the image of King Charles will be issued at some undetermined date.  New Zealand has the same plans although its new bill will be a $20 bill.

That’s paper money.  Coinage?

The custom of the reigning monarch being on coins began with the last King Charles, the 17th Century Charles II.  The custom is to issue new coins with the new monarch facing the opposite direction the immediate past-monarch faced.

It is said she had a “wicked” sense of humor—or humour as her people would spell it.

I wonder if she ever counted the number of hats she had and laughed.

(photo credit: elle.com)

Unprecedented

Posted on by
Reply

“Unprecedented” is a word frequently heard these days in our national political discussions.  We thought it might be interesting to see what other times “unprecedented” has been applied to our Presidents.   “Unpresidented,” if you will, although it isn’t a real word.

It was unprecedented when the nation selected its first President who was not a member of an organized political party.  He also was the first President unanimously elected, a truly unprecedented feat: George Washington.

The idea that a President would never veto a bill while in office was unprecedented when John Adams did, or didn’t, do it. Adams had a lot of “not” precedents: the first President who did not own slaves; the first President who was a lawyer; the first President to lose a re-election bid and the first President who did not attend the inauguration of his successor.

Thomas Jefferson’s defeat of an incumbent President (Adams) was unprecedented. (So was the method of his election.  In those days the President and Vice-President each accumulated electoral votes.  Jefferson and his running mate, Aaron Burr, each got 73 electoral votes. Incumbent John Adams had 65 but his running mate, Charles Pinkney, only had 64.  The House of Representatives cast 36 ballots before Jefferson won 10 of the 16 state ballots. Burr had four and Maryland and Vermont delegations tied within the delegation.  All of this was unprecedented, too, of course.)

James Madison took the unprecedented step of asking Congress for a declaration of war.

The election of Senator James Monroe to the presidency was unprecedented.

John Quincy Adams’ election was unprecedented because he was the first President who lost the popular vote.  (None of the candidates got a majority of the electoral vote, throwing the election into the House of Representatives under the 12th Amendment. Thirteen state delegations favored Adams, seven favored Andrew Jackson and four favored William H. Crawford.)

Andrew Jackson’s administration was the first administration to pay off the entire national debt.

Martin Van Buren’s presidency was unprecedented because he was the first President who was born an American citizen (all of his predecessors had been born as British subjects).

The death of William Henry Harrisons while in office was unprecedented.

The House of Representatives took an unprecedented vote to impeach President John Tyler.  It failed.

James K. Polk took the unprecedented step of refusing to seek a second term.

Zachary Taylor had never held a public office before becoming President, an unprecedented event.

Millard Fillmore took the unprecedented step of installing a kitchen stove in the White House.

His successor, Franklin Pierce, took the unprecedented step of installing central heating in the White House.

James Buchanan was our first bachelor president. Historians debate whether he was gay.

No president had been murdered until John Wilkes Booth took the unprecedented step with Abraham Lincoln, who is the only president to hold a United States patent.

The House of Representatives held a successful unprecedented impeachment vote against Andrew Johnson.  The Senate held an unprecedented trial and failed to convict him.

U. S.  Grant vetoed more than fifty bills, an unprecedented number.

It was unprecedented in modern election history when Rutherford B. Hayes won the electoral vote but not the popular vote.

James Garfield was an unprecedented President because he was left-handed or ambidextrous.

Chester Arthur took the unprecedented step of having an elevator installed in the White House.

Grover Cleveland set several precedents—the first President married in the White House; the first to have a child while President, and the first President to veto more than 100 bills.

Benjamin Harrison set a precedent by being the first President to have his voice recorded.

William McKinley was the first president to ride in an automobile.

Teddy Roosevelt set a precedent by becoming the first president to ride an airplane. (He got aboard a Wright Brothers airplane piloted by Arch Hoxsey and flew for about four minutes at Kinloch Field in St. Louis. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaFulqGGkwk). He also took an unprecedented trip on a submarine.

The first president to throw out the first ceremonial pitch of the baseball season: William Howard Taft.

The first president to hold regular news briefings was Woodrow Wilson. He also took the unprecedented stop of appointing a Jew to the U.S. Supreme Court, Louis Brandeis.

Warren G. Harding learned of his election in an unprecedented way—he heard about it on the radio.

In 1927 the Lakota Sioux tribe took the unprecedented step of adopting a U.S. President as a member of the Lakota nation. Calvin Coolidge.

Herbert Hoover took the unprecedented step of having a telephone installed on his desk.

Franklin D. Roosevelt set a precedent by serving more than two terms. Among his other precedents—the first to fly across the Atlantic and the first to establish 100 days as the first benchmark for accomplishments in office.

The Secret Service set a precedent when it made Harry Truman the first President to have a code name (General). Television set a precedent by televising his 1949 inauguration.

Television set a precedent when it gave one of its Emmy Awards to President Eisenhower who was the first President to appear on color television.

First President who was a Catholic: John F. Kennedy. He also set a precedent by being the first former Boy Scout elected to the office.

The first President to be inaugurated on an airplane was Lyndon Johnson. He also set precedents by appointing the first African-American to the U.S. Supreme Court and appointing the first African-American to serve in a cabinet position

Richard Nixon set a precedent when he attended a National Football League game. Also: First President o resign.

First President never elected to the office or to the office of Vice-President: Gerald Ford.

Jimmy Carter broke precedent when he went by a nickname instead of the formal James E. Carter Jr.  As we write this, he moves into unprecedented territory by living longer than 97 years and being married for more than 75 of them.

Ronald Reagan set a precedent when he was re-elected, the first President re-elected older than 70 (73 at the time). He also set a precedent by nominating a woman to the U.S. Supreme Court.

George H. W. Bush set a precedent when he became the first President to pardon a Thanksgiving turkey.

First President who was a Rhodes Scholar, to have an official White House website, and to perform at a jazz festival (saxophone): Bill Clinton

First President to achieve a 90% approval rating in modern polling: George W. Bush.

America set a precedent by electing African-American Barack Obama, who was the first president born outside the 48 continental United States (Hawaii) and who was the first to endorse same-sex marriage.

First President with no prior public service experience, first to be impeached twice, first president to never see an approval rating above 50%, first president to refuse to publicly acknowledge re-election defeat: Donald Trump.

Joe Biden has set a precedent by being in office past his 77th birthday. He’s the first President to get more than 80-million votes.

First President to be indicted by a grand jury?  The first President to be brought to trial on criminal charges?  The first President to wear a prison uniform?  These are unprecedented possibilities that many hope never come to pass while many others hope come true.

That’s because we are living in unprecedented times.

 

The Lake

Posted on by
Reply

Wire service reporters used to do something called a “new top” as stories developed.  If something happened reasonably soon after an original story was sent out on the wire, the reporter would write a new lede that would replace the opening paragraph or paragraphs, and editors down the line could use it and graft the rest of the story behind it.

Today we offer a new top to an old story that we related in this space on September 5, 2016.  It was about the naming of the Lake of the Ozarks.

Construction of Bagnell Dam was completed in April, 1931 and the water reached spillway level in May.

A year-and-a-half before the dam was finished, a controversy broke out about what to name the reservoir.  Union Electric, now Ameren, the builder of the dam, found itself fighting an effort in January, 1930 to name the reservoir “Lake Osage.”

A land company had bought property on the planned lakeshore and had gone to the Camden County Recorder of Deeds to register the name “Lake Osage.”  But the development of the lake was a private enterprise by Union Electric which immediately said the proposed name was not authorized and would not be allowed.

The land company liked the name because it wanted to build a “summer colony” it wanted to call Osage Beach.

But critics thought “Lake Osage” would be confusing because the new lake was only two counties away from Lake Sac-Osage at Osceola (now the Truman Reservoir).

The 1929 legislature passed a bill calling the new lake “Lake Missouri,” but Governor Henry Caulfield vetoed it.  Several other names were suggested including Lake Benton, for Senator Thomas Hart Benton.  When the legislature passed a bill in ’31 calling the reservoir “Lake Benton,” Caulfield vetoed it, too, because it referred to “Missouri’s greatest Senator,” a phrase some might question then and one that could be questionable when future men and women had the job.

Union Electric, through the construction years, had referred to the dam creating the “Ozark Reservoir,” which turned out to be the largest man-made lake in the world—a claim that was eclipsed five years  later.

By 1932 the lake was generally referred to as the Lake of the Ozarks. As far as we know there was never a formal dedication of the lake’s name.

And Osage Beach became much more than a “summer colony.”

Notes From a Quiet Street

Posted on by
Reply

It’s baseball season.  And baseball is a great radio sport.

As Jack Buck put it when he was inducted ins the Radiio Hall of Fame in 1995:

“Turn the radio on. You’ll hear a friend. You will enjoy; you will learn; you will imagine; you will improve.

“Turn the radio on, at home, in your car, in prison, on the beach, in a nursing home.  You will not be alone; you will not be lonely.

“Newspapers fold. Magazines come and go. Television self-destructs.

“Radio remains the trusted common denominator in this nation.”

Or as others have said, in various forms: “Theatre is life; film is art; television is furniture; radio is imagination.”

Perfect for baseball.

-0-

I Read.  I write.  I am an author.  A library tells me much about a town and its people.  I’ve been on various local and regional library boards for 14 years and counting. That’s why this sign was interesting:

Of course, I saw this sign on the internet.

-0-

We keep hearing critics of the January 6 Committee refer to it as a Kangaroo Court.  Do they consider another form of investigation a Kangaroo Grand Jury?

-0-

Your faithful correspondent has, for the last two cars he has bought, suggested, “This might be the last entirely gas-powered car I’ll buy.”  But we’re getting closer to where that statement will true. When grandchildren live in Colorado, a car that gets 250  miles before needing a charge doesn’t make the navel tingle.

But this one does. It’s the Mercedes EQ/XX, still in prototype stage. Mercedeces ranks its range at 747 miles. Might have to mortgage the house, twice, but when it goes into production, it might not be too hard to tell the grandchildren their inheritance is greatly diminished.  It even has solar panels on the roof to power some of the little things inside.

-0-

We have heard our most recent ex-president say at least a couple of times, including last week, that he wanted to give himself the Medal of Honor but Congress wouldn’t let him do it.

Should he ever read one of these postings (and there are some serious suspicions in this lofty place that he reads much of anything), here is how the Medal of Honor is awarded.

The main way is through nomination and approval through the military chain of command.  The second is a nomination by a member of Congress who is usually acting on a constituent’s request.  The medal is general presented by the President, in the name of Congress.

A year ago about now, I was honored to work with some veterans and with Gold Star Families to put up a monument to those families that have lost loved ones during wartime. I cherish the opportunity to have been part of that effort.

The ex-president’s remark is an insult to those who deservedly have received Medal of Honor—-or to the families of those who did not live to know they would receive it. Actually, it is an insult to anyone who has ever worn our country’s uniforms.

In fact the first time he joked about that was at an AMVETS meeting a couple of years ago and he embroidered his poorly-read remarks by kidding Woody Williams about them.

Woody Williams died a few weeks ago. He was the last surviving WWII Medal of Honor winner.  It was his foundation that supported last year’s efforts to put up the Gold Star Families Memorial Monument near the Missouri Capitol.

Our ex-president might have thought he was being funny. I am ashamed of those who laughed or applauded.

-0-

And finally, another observation about baseball:

You faithful observer has seen a new book that says “Bull Durham” is the greatest sports movie ever made. It is difficult from this recliner chair next to the TV remote to disagree.  Part of one of Hollywood’s greatest movie scripts is when Crash explains to Nuke how to use all of the great baseball clichés.

We suggest, however, that there are two baseball clichés that need to be thrown on the ash heap of baseball cliché history.

After watching  the Kansas City Royals and the St. Louis Cardinals leave some of their players behind, including some of the bigger names of both teams, when they went to Canada recently because they had not been vaccinated, we suggest these two clichés be discarded:

Take one for the Team.

There is no “I” in Team.

Maybe the Royals and the Cardinals need something we find supporting our high school sports.

Booster Clubs.

 

Two Popes and Christian Nationalism 

Posted on by
Reply

A movement called “Christian Nationalism” is called “a fundamental threat to Democracy” in a new book, The Flag and the Cross by Phillip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry.  When Gorski was interviewed by Sarah Jones for the online British newspaper, The Independent, about the book defining Christian Nationalists as people who “often have a completely incorrect understanding of American history.”  She asked, “Can you talk about what myths tend to be attractive to them and why?”

Gorski responded, “Because it puts people like them at the center of the American story and it puts the American story at the center of the cosmic drama. White Christians like us are the real Americans, and America is the exceptional nation, the chosen nation that is playing a special role in the battle between good and evil…I would add to this that if you think in terms of this narrative, if you’re a white Christian, it doesn’t matter when you showed up in the United States; you have a kind of a birthright. You belong. You were always here, in a sense…You’re part of the founding group.

“I always find this kind of ironic when you think about the folks who get sort of exercised about discussions of race and reject “The 1619 Project.”  Why do they get so exercised about this? In part because it threatens their central place in the story and makes clear that in some sense you’re really talking about who got here first.”

Perry continues, “There is this huge identify-based motivation to believe these myths about America’s past that are factually incorrect oftentimes…A lot of people in these communities are socialized into believing it because there is an entire Christian nationalism industrial complex that is built to continue to perpetuate those myths.”

He says the goal of that “complex” is to “either provide religious leaders with that kind of ammunition or to provide religious consumers, people in the pews, with information about America’s Christian past that may or may not be factually correct. It is designed…to center white Christian Americans within that story and to tell them that this nation was founded on Christian values for Christian people…And, of course, they get to decide what that means.”

(You can read the entire interview at: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/06/white-christian-nationalism-is-a-threat-to-democracy.html)

This movement has been a thousand years in the making. And, to the considerable discomfort (I hope) of those who promote a distortion of our history by claiming our country was founded as a Christian nation, we’re going to tell you about the ancient roots of this misguided movement. In doing so, we hope some readers will ask if the “Christian nation” of the early settlers is the kind of Christianity we should practice today, or honor in our politics and policy-making.

The beginning of the “White Christian America” myth is based on a corruption of the Great Command in the Biblical book of Matthew in which Jesus told his disciples to “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.”

Pope Urban II was the first to twist this command into what became known as the “Doctrine of Discovery.”  Urban led the Roman Church from 1088 until he died in 1099. He is credited with triggering the First Crusade by declaring war on all non-Chistian nations and promising absolution to those who fought to take Spain and the Holy Land back from the Muslims. For about four centuries, this doctrine was considered authorization by European kings to “discover” new lands and if they were considered non-Christian, to claim them

The real Doctrine of Discovery that shaped our nation and much of our national self-image came from the Papal Bull Romanus Pontifex of 1452 by Pope Nicholas V that extended Urban’s idea to sanction war against non-Christians throughout the world. It also sanctioned conquest of those nations.

The Boston-based Upstander Project (which says, “An upstander is a person who takes action in defense of those who are targeted for systemic or individual harm or injustice. An upstander is the opposite of a bystander.”) says these decrees are based on two assertions:

“First, Christians were the only civilized peoples and thus, they had the right to treat non-Christians as uncivilized and subhuman who had no rights to any land or nation.

“Second, Christians had the God-given right to ‘capture, vanquish, and subdue the Saracens, pagans and other enemies of Christ,’ to ‘put them into perpetual slavery’ and ‘to take all their possessions and property.’”

Portugal, a rival of Spain’s in exploration at that time, protested Nicholas’ Bull that seemed to grant exclusivity to Spain because Portugal already had seized North Africa as early as 1415 and had explored coastal Africa all the way to India.  Pope Alexander, in 1493, issued a new Papal Bull forbidding Spain from establishing control over lands claimed by other “Christian lords,” effectively drawing a line between hemispheres.  That wasn’t good enough for King John II of Portugal, who negotiated with Columbus’s friends Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, to move the line further west with the Treaty of Tordesillas, clearing the way for the Portugese to claim Brazil.

Alexander’s division line wasn’t just in the Atlantic. It went all the way around the world. A later treaty between Spain and Portugal, The Treaty of Saragossa, gave Spain and Portugal the power to seize and control all non-Christian nations on the Earth just by stepping off a boat onto those lands.

Of course, other nations had other ideas—the French and the English in particular and in years to come, the English especially recognized no papal authority.  And this is where our country’s history begins to take shape.

The concepts of these papal statements influenced the sentiments of European settlement of what is now the United States and laid the groundwork for the erroneous attitude that Christianity should be the motivation behind public policy.

It is the Doctrine of Discovery that enabled European settlers to look upon well-organized Native American socieities as inferior because they were not “Christian” regardless of how those societies interpreted God or what they called God. Since they were inferior, they had no right to the lands they had inhabited for thousands of years if Christians wanted it.

It didn’t take long for the presumptuous, righteous, Europeans to push things too far.  King Phillip’s war broke out in New England in 1675 between the son of Massasoit—the friend of the Pilgrims—who resisted colonists’ grab of his land. The war lasted until 1678 when it ended with the Treaty of Casco Bay. But the settlers did not stop doing the things that led to the war. Another treaty in 1703 also was violated by the settlers.

And so it went, decade by decade, treaty by broken treaty, as the Christian Europeans seized the heathen lands they wanted.

The Louisiana Purchase represents the Doctrine of Discovery for we Missourians.  France had taken “ownership” of that territory from Spain and sold it to the United States. But Fance and Spain only “claimed” the land under the doctrine. They did not own it.  The United States really bought “preemptive rights” to obtain the land within that territy from the tribes, either by treaty or by conquest.

Missouri?  Harvard University’s first tenured professor of American Indian history, Phillip deLoria, told interviewer David Rubenstein in 2020 that the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 established requirements for western territories to become states: “Sixty-thousand free people. What that means is if you’re a territory and you want to become a state, youneed to get your Indian people out fo there so that you can bring in more settlers. What that leads to is either removal—making them leave the state—or moving them onto reservation territories where they’re contained and compressed.”  Missouri is a perfect example.*

Historian Greg Olson has written that it took 22 treaties with 13 Native American nations before the United States had clear title to all of the land in Missouri, a process that was finally concluded in 1837, sixteen years after we became a state, with the Platte Purchase that gave us our northwest corner. .

The national attitude was encapsulated in an 1823 U. S. Supreme Court unanimous ruling that the Age of Discovery had given the Christian nations of Europe “ultimate dominion” over all of North America, that Native Americans no longer had any right to “complete sovereignty, as independent nations” and were only entitled to occupy their lands. Chief Justice John Marshall’s opinion said that when this country became an independent nation, it kept Britain’s right of discovery and gained Britain’s power of “dominion.”

The Doctrine of Discovery was carried out until European Christians’ North American empire stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific based on papal bulls declaring Christians are the only civilized peoples and therefore have a God-given right to “capture, vanquish, and subdue….enemies of Christ” and to put them into “perpetual slavery” and to “take all their possessions and property.”

The papal bulls of the Popes were Americanized in an editorial in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review editorial of July/August, 1845 calling for an end to opposition, especially from England and France, to the annexation of Texas.

” Why, were other reasoning wanting, in favor of now elevating this question of the reception of Texas into the Union, out of the lower region of our past party dissensions, up to its proper level of a high and broad nationality, it surely is to be found, found abundantly, in the manner in which other nations have undertaken to intrude themselves into it, between us and the proper parties to the case, in a spirit of hostile interference against us, for the avowed object of thwarting our policy and hampering our power, limiting our greatness and checking the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”

(Emanuel Leutze, “Westward, the Course of Empire”)

It is disputed whether editor John O’Sullivan or staff member Jane Cazneau wrote that editorial.  The phrase showed up in a December issue of the New York Morning News, also edited by O’Sullivan, advocating American annexation of the Oregon Territory.

Mainfest Destiny, America’s version of Europe’s sanctified Christian Naionalism,  proclaimed it was ordained by God that this nation had a right to displace non-European residents so the “yearly multiplying millions” had land and livelihood of their own. It led to the Mexican War that added all or parts of Arizona, Californa, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming to our country’s map. With the addition of those new territories, the concept also raised the issue of expansion of slavery into these new areas, an issue that ultimately led to civil war.

Those are things the nationalists prefer we not know, teach, or learn because—going back to the top of this entry, Christians are the only civilized people and as such they can treat others “as uncivilized and subhuman” with no rights to any land or nation.

White Christian Nationalism is not new and it is not unique to our country, nor is it unique to Christians.  Its advocates prefer that neither our school children nor their parents know where it came from and what it has done here and in other parts of the world.

Sadly, there are too many Christians who think White Christian Nationalists will go away.  They won’t.  They’ve been here for more than four centuries and they’re louder than ever, it seems.

So we are presented with a choice: What would you rather be, a Christian living in a free country or someone living in a Christian country—where history tells us we might not be considered a citizen at all?

*David M. Rubenstein, The American Experiment: Dialogues on a Dream, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2021.

Greg Olson, “White Man’s Paper Trail: Extinguishing Indigenous Land Claims in Missouri, Missouri Historical Review, July, 2021

The Fifth Amendment Debt 

Posted on by
Reply

It is possible  Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, John Eastman, Alex Jones, Allen Weisselberg and two Trumps have no idea who John Lilburne was.  But they owe a large debt to this Englishman who died in 1657.

Trump aides, advisers, and defenders Stone, Flynn, Eastman, Jones and Weisselberg have “taken the Fifth” when summoned to testify on this or that issue involving our most recent former President.

Indeed, DJ Jr., the son of the aforesaid former president, reportedly has done it more than 500 times, as did Weisselberg, the former Trump organization chief financial officer, when summoned to talk about the elder Trump’s reputed manipulation of property values to get loans.

And so, for that matter, has the Big Guy himself. More than thirty years ago when he was carrying on with Marla Maples and his then-wife, Ivana, was divorcing him, DJT was asked about 100 questions about faithful marriage and reportedly pleaded the Fifth Amendment 97 times.  The questions came from his soon to be ex-wife’s lawyer who wanted him to explain his reported dalliances with other women.

But he must have had an epiphany sometime in the next twenty-or so years when he he told a crowd of followers during his campaign, “You see the mob takes the Fifth. If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?”

How does John Lilburne enter this unsavory set of circumstances?

Isaac Amon’s article for The Journal of the Missouri Bar a while ago tell us that John Lilburne was an English pamphleteer who was arrested in 1637 for writing things the king and his Star Chamber Court did not like and he was badly punished for it.

The Star Chamber?

It was the court of inquisition in England that was above the common law and answered only to the King.  Those brought before it were ordered to take “the ex officio oath” that promised they would admit charges against them—-before knowing what the charges were.

John Lilburne was arrested in 1637 for printing and circulating unlicensed books. When he was taken before the Court of the Star Chamber and asked how he pleaded, Lilburne refused to respond until he knew the charges against him and argued that he was not bound to incriminate himself. He maintained the oath was “against the law of God and the law of the land.”  He also demanded the right to confront his accusers.

That defiance earned him a sentence in February of 1638 of a £500 fine, imprisonment at the Fleet Street Prison, and to be whipped and pilloried until he obeyed the court. In April he was taken from his cell, his hands were tied to the rear of an oxcart that pulled him through the streets, as he was flogged with a three-tailed whip before he was locked in a stooped position in the pillory.  Even then he spoke loudly against those who sought to silence him—until he was gagged. He was taken back to prison where, despite his situation, he was able to write a pamphlet describing the cruelty of his punishment and another encouraging a separation of the English government fronm the Church of England.

Eventually he was released but he continued to stand for his contention

Lilburne was called “Freeborn John” by his supporters for his contention that citizens have “freeborn rights” that include the right to hear charges against them, to face their accusers, and to refuse to say something that might incriminate themselves.

He was a soldier in the first English Civil War as a “Roundhead,” the Parliamentarians who fought against the Royalists to determine the type of government England would have and to seek religious feedom.  He left the army after rejecting the Presbyterian Solemn League and Covenant, an agreement in which the Scots agreed to help the Parliamentarians if England, Scotland, and Ireland would unite afterwards under a parliamentary-presbyterian system.

Lilburne maintained the covenant was, in effect, an agreement to preserve the religion of Scotland and was therefore a restriction on general freedom of religion. He had no problem with the Scots being Presbyterians but he wanted no part of an agreement that bound others to that faith.

In the end, the Civil Wars of England united England, Scotland and Ireland into the United Kingdom, ended the monopoly on worship and government control held by the Church of England, protected the reform movement in Scotland, and cleared the way for the Protestantism to become established in Ireland, leading to political control under the Anglican Church of Ireland, a situation that led to “The Troubles” or the Northern Ireland conflict, a thirty-year sectarian conflict between Protestant loyalists and Catholic nationalists from 1968-1998. That’s a discussion for another day, perhaps.

John Lilburne was imprisoned again in 1645 for criticizing members of Parliament for living well at a time when English soldiers were poorly treated. While in prison he penned An Agreement of the People for a Firm and Present Peace Upon Grounds of Common Right.

Lilburne’s political activism saw him in and out of prison and even banished from England for a time. In 1657, while visiting his wife (who was expecting their tenth child) on temporary release from prison, he died.

More than three centuries after his death, James Madison, who was influenced by Lilburne’s story, wrote as part of the Bill of Rights, “No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”

The Fifth Amendment and the other nine statements of OUR “freeborn rights” were adopted in 1791.

In 1966, United States Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren specifically mentioned Lilburne in writing the majority opinion for Miranda v. Arizona that police must tell suspects that they have the freeborn right to remain silent in the face of accusations against them.

A few days ago we watched Michael Flynn refuse to answer questions from a Republican member of the January 6 Committee, saying only, “Take the Fifth, “Fifth,” and “The Fifth” in responding to three questions.

A man almost four centuries ago endured imprisonment, whipping, the pillory, and even banishment from his country to give him that right.

But here’s the deal: While it is easy to think those who “plead the Fifth” are therefore hiding their guilt, there is far more to the plea than that. This amendment stands between us and Lilburne’s Star Chamber Court. All of us—you, me, them—are not forced to say something that others might consider an admission of guilt before any charges are filed. This amendment keeps the government from considering you guilty unless you can prove yourself NOT guilty.  This amendment protects our sacred concept that a citizen, no matter how reprehensible we might consider their behavior, is innocent until proven guilty.

We doubt that Mr. Flynn or any of the others we mentioned at the beginning of this piece know about or care about what John Lilburne went through to protect them.

But all of us should care—-because we Americans all have freeborn rights.

(image credit: Library of Congress)