Category Archives: events

Moderates-in-waiting

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President Trump heard something a few days ago that he hadn’t heard before. He was booed by an audience he had called to hear his latest, uh, whatever.

Boos at a Trump rally?

Who else was listening?

Who else in the Republican Party was listening?

Maybe we’re reading too much into the event. But there have been, all along, questions about how tight Donald Trump’s grip on the party will remain the longer he is out of office.

It’s doubtful many people left the rally and left Trump because he suggested it might be a good idea for people to get their COVID shots.  It was only a tepid endorsement but it was the first time he had encouraged his followers to do what he had secretly done before leaving the White House.

Boos.  At a Trump rally.

And on this quiet street, these thoughts quietly began to emerge.

The competition for Roy Blunt’s to-be vacated Senate seat has drawn several Republican early entrants, the biggest names of which seem determined to prove they are the most like Trump. They are betting Trump will be the dominant force in the 2022 elections that he claims he will be.

But there are some other Republicans who are holding their counsel.  And it might be wise for them to do so. August, 2022 is a long ways away, politically. The world can take a lot of turns in the next twelve months.

But beside that there’s the issue of mathematics.

Let’s go back to the 2016 presidential primaries. We wrote just before Missouri’s primary that year that earlier state primary voters “seem to favor ANYBODY BUT” Trump with the ABT vote through Super Tuesday that year looking like this:

Iowa   76% Anybody But Trump

New Hampshire  65

South Carolina  67

Nevada  54

Alabama  57

Alaska  66

Arkansas  67

Georgia  61

Massachusetts  50 (although in the total vote, he lost by about 20,000 out of 631,413 cast)

Minnesota  79

Oklahoma  72

Tennessee  61

Texas  73

Vermont  67

Virginia  65

Kansas  77

Kentucky  64

Louisiana  59

Maine  67

Hawaii  58

Idaho  72

Michigan  64

Mississippi  53

Trump had cracked the 40% support level only six times in 22 opportunities up to that time. By the time of the Missouri vote, only four GOP candidates remained in the running.  Eight candidates on the ballot had dropped out but their names could not be removed.  In 2016, Trump got 40.84% of the Missouri votes.  Ted Cruz got 40.63 (and he did not ask for a recount).  John Kasich and Marco Rubio combined for 16.2%.  The rest was scattered among the withdrawn candidates or for “uncommitted.”   The fact is that in Missouri, as in the other states, the majority opposed Trump.

We now have five big-name candidates trying to convince voters they have the shortest political umbilical cords linking them to the former president.

Might there be a moderate Republican or two just quietly watching the internecine warfare among the COTs (Children of Trump)?  And might we see a moderate Republican candidate step forward about the first of the year who can win the Republican primary with 35% of the vote while the five (so far) COTs divide the 40%—assuming Trump still has a solid-enough 40% following in the party by then?

COTs go 25-20-10-5-5% and the moderate polls 35% and moves on to November.

Memo to the COTs in the aftermath of the Alabama boos:  Be nervous. Somebody not like you might be lurking.  And one person who looks good to the 60% can beat the five of the 40.

Or maybe we’re just reading too much into that rally the other day.

 

 

 

Hope

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About twenty-five years ago Dr. Harrison Schmidt traveled from his Albuquerque home to speak to a group in Jefferson City.  I do not recall everything he said although I recall the general topic.  But one sentence from his remarks is vivid in my memory and it is worth thinking about today.

We are living through troubling times, particularly in the last two calendar years, times of uncertainty and fear caused by a pandemic, times of uncertainty in our political system and campaign-induced fears, warranted or not, of our national future followed by the frightful events of January 6 and their lingering impacts on our political mentality.

There are major differences of opinion about the greatness of our nation.  Have we been made greater or has our greatness been dimmed by events of the past half-decade?  Do we dare think, regardless of how we answer that question, that we truly can be great or greater still?

We cannot be either if we wallow in self-pity, if we focus on our unresolved shortcomings as a people, if we accept that we as a people are limited in what we can achieve, what we should achieve, what we must achieve.  We cannot be if we worry more about false differences that divide us—and those who would stoke fears of those differences—than in the common interests we have within our diversity.

And so we come to Dr. Schmidt, world-famous geologist best known for finding one rock and finding some orange soil.  The rock is known as Troctolite 76535.  The soil is a mix of orange and black volcanic glass formed in a process we known as a “fire explosion.”

One rock and some dirt.

From the Moon.

Harrison Schmidt was the last person (for the last 48 years and counting) to set foot on the Moon.  The rock has been called by NASA “without a doubt the most interesting sample returned from the Moon!”  Note the exclamation point. Mission objectives do not often feature them.  Troctolite 76535 is at least 4.2 Billion years old and is significant beyond its age. It shows that the Moon once had a magnetic field “generated by a dynamo at its core” as our Earth has.

And the dirt shows that the Moon once was volcanically active, explosively so.

Dr. Schmitt, who reached 86 in July, is one of the four Moonwalkers still alive (Buzz Aldrin turned 91 on January 20; Dave Scott turned 88 in June and Charlie Duke will hit 86 in October).  Schmitt was 37 when I watched from the press site at Cape Kennedy as he, Gene Cernan, and Ronald Evans thundered into the night sky in December, 1972.

More than two decades later, when he talked in Jefferson City about space, his mission, the discoveries made in the Apollo program and the opportunities that waited for a nation unafraid to reach for the stars, he reminded us:

“Apollo is often forgotten as having been a program where 20-year old men and women were managed by a few 30-year olds, none of whom believed anything was impossible.”

Think of that last clause: “None of whom believed anything was impossible.”

That’s the path to national greatness.  It’s not just for 20 and 30-year olds.

Whether it’s finding rocks on the Moon, finding a vaccine against a worldwide plague within months or even finding middle political ground, we know that nothing is impossible.  But we have to look beyond ourselves. We have to look up for hope rather than down on others.

This entry can be dismissed as saccharine babble. And it might be by those to whom tomorrow is to be feared and to whom uncertainty precludes discovery. But they will not seek exclamation points in life and might limit opportunities for others to find them.

Greatness is not created by cultivating fear and uncertainty personally or on a broader stage.

Greatness is achieved by those who go beyond those issues, none of whom believe anything is impossible. Political leaders might say it.  But it is you and I who must live it and lift up others to join us.

It’s time for more exclamation points!

I’m sorry, but—–

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This is going to sound cruel.

Awful.

I’m going to say it anyway—because what others are saying by their actions or inactions is just as bad or worse.

I almost lost a friend to the Delta Variant a few weeks ago.

She’s making a slow recovery, finally off the ventilator that saved her life.

She is a vaccine-denier.

I’m glad she didn’t die.  I’m glad she’s getting well.  I’m glad none of her immediate friends or family have been stricken as badly as she was.

But I’m not sorry she got sick.

No, that’s not quite right.  I am sorry she got sick.

But she asked for it.

She gambled that she could go without vaccination and not get hit by the virus.

She lost.

She lost a lot, although fortunately she did not lose it all.

She had the usual excuses—no full FDA approval; it’s only for emergency use; fear of side-effects; stories of people who got sick anyway; the need for more research first; don’t want to be a guinea pig; it will affect my DNA; I’m healthy and my immune system works just fine, etc.

The CDC says that, as of August 2, more than 164 million people have been fully inoculated. That means that every day, 164-million Americans have been willing guinea pigs and are proof these vaccines work.  That should carry some weight. A lot of weight, in fact but some people are so fixated on the inflated anti-vax rhetoric that won’t believe this reality.

The CDC says less than 0.01% of vaccinated people develop breakthrough infections that produce serious complications or death. Deaf ears listen to such figures.

DNA is not affected.  This virus doesn’t attack the cell nucleus and that’s where DNA resides.

I suppose it is as hard for me to understand why somebody decides to roll the dice on their health instead of getting a shot or two that is proven effective as it is for anti-vaxers to understand why they shouldn’t get shots.

I bet I’m not the only person who is troubled by what we should feel under these circumstances.

Conversations with medical personnel have not been uncommon for me lately, and I’m hearing irritation, frustration, anger and resentment in their voices because they have worked themselves to the bone for the last year and a half, have watched people decline and die before there was a vaccine and now they’re inundated by people who don’t need to be sick or dying who are demanding medical care. And the medical profession is duty-bound to provide it.

It is hard not to look at people such as my friend and think, “Well, you got what you deserved.”  Or to want to ask, “If you worry about the side-effects of getting a shot, why don’t you worry about the possible side effect of NOT getting a shot?  Is death not a side effect that should motivate you?”

I’d much rather attend a funeral WITH somebody who has a sore arm than attend a funeral FOR somebody who died without one. I came close to attending such a funeral a few weeks ago. So did my friend, although she would have been beyond knowing whose funeral it was.

There is a certain guilt that comes with being callous enough to say that those who refuse to protect themselves get what they deserve.  Nobody deserves to get sick with this thing.  Nobody deserves to die.

But I can’t bring myself to be particularly sympathetic.

I don’t want to go to someone’s funeral angry that they are dead. I’d rather go to a funeral being sad.  But I’m afraid anger would be the predominant emotion.

So a few questions for the people who don’t want to get shots:

Why should I send you a get-well card? How should I feel if you gamble and get very sick?  How should I feel if you gamble and you lose everything?

How should I mourn friends who threw away their lives because irrational politics overrode rational thoughts of self-preservation?

What should I say to the grieving spouse you leave behind? The comment, “Well, at least they died doing what they loved to do” becomes even more ludicrous when what they loved to do was LIVE!

I probably won’t go to your funeral at all. It’s your fault that I have to make that choice. I don’t want to be your pallbearer.

It’s awful to feel these conflicting emotions.

It’s cruel.

I’m sorry, but—–

Bicentennial

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A big weekend is ahead as Missourians celebrates its bicentennial—two-hundred years since President Monroe signed the proclamation making Missouri the nation’s 34th state, the second state west of the Mississippi.

But if all we do is look back, we’re ignoring a responsibility we have for creating the state that will celebrate its TRIcentennial.

The Maori people of New Zealand have an ancient proverb: Ka mua, Ka muri that translates into “walking backward into the future.”

That is what our bicentennial is about—walking into a future we cannot see while looking back on the historic and the familiar things that shaped the present, knowing that we have changed as a people during this journey and that our descendants will be a changed people, too.

Some who do not understand how different we are fear who or what our next generations will be—and out of that fear are making what surely will become futile efforts to confine that future to present, or even past, standards that often are not based on history but are based on the myths of history.

We cannot stop time and if we are realistic about our future as a people, we must recognized that those who gather to celebrate our state’s TRIcentennial in 2121 will be different in appearance, social relationships, political references and in a multitude of other ways we cannot anticipate no matter how hard we might resist.

We are honoring those first settlers of mid-Missouri. But the historical record shows how different from us they were.  We know the names of the men but it is harder to learn the names of their wives and even more difficult to learn the names of the slaves they brought with them. We know they were people of hope, of ambition, and hard work, qualities necessary to survive in a world where fire was an essential ingredient of life. We live in a world where fire is a disaster at worst and a mostly decorative feature of a modern living room at best.

In our world, our homes and even the furniture in them are not products of our own hands. We travel farther in an hour than they sometimes traveled in a week, more in a day than some of them traveled in their lives.

They were not the first Missourians.  In Montgomery County’s Graham Cave State Park, evidence has been found of human habitation 10,000 years ago, long before the Osage populated much of Missouri—and other sites in Missouri date back farther than that.

We are observing 200 years in a place inhabited for thousands of years. We should honor the memories of the ancient ones, too.

We celebrate the bicentennial of man-made boundaries that define where we are and a history that tells us who we have become. But if we look only back on what was and became what is, we are making a serious mistake.  Walking backwards into the future endangers those who will be that future.

Our responsibility is to turn and face that future, respectful of the past but unafraid of the changes that our descendants will make because they must remain, as the people of 200 years ago were, people of hope.

What we do today—what we ARE today—lays the foundation for the state and nation our grandchildren’s grandchildren will inhabit.

So the Missouri bicentennial gives us some choices to make.  Will we continue to follow the trails our ancestors established through extraordinary effort and the  inalienable truths and hope that they brought with them……or will we follow trails of fiction and fear too easily established these days, and too easy to blindly follow?

Will we be a people fearful of one another, often victims of those who would generate fear among us for their own purposes or  power…..or will we be a people who recognize there is nothing wrong with a different heritage, a different color, a different outlook on identity, a different faith?

Will we be people spooked into division, derision, and disrespect….or will we be a people of thought, who seek understanding rather than hostility, people who respect knowledge, and who trust our neighbors regardless of their differences from us?

Will we be the kind of people who choose leaders who  DEmand blind allegiance or the kind of people with wide-open eyes and minds who choose leaders who COmmand respect?

What kind of people are we going to be as we lay the foundation for the kind of people we want our grandchildren’s grandchildren to be?

A hundred years from now, our grandchildren’s grandchildren will gather around the then-weathered monuments we have put up to honor the bicentennial.

What kind of people—in what kind of counties, state, and nation—do we want to have gathered around those monument in 2121?

Our generations will take those first steps on the new trail that stretches before us—the steps that will determine what kind of people and what kind of nation will be here in 100 years. We cannot take those steps by walking backward into the future. We must be unafraid to recognize our grandchildren’s grandchildren will not be like us.  We have to lay a foundation that allows them to be better than us.

We have to create a trail that is broad enough for all and grows broader as it advances. We have to create a trail that is not darkened by division, derision, and disrespect but is brightened by intelligence, independence, and acceptance.

And we must begin building a foundation strong enough to support a  greater nation than we are today.

So let our celebration of the past be brief.  Let our steps today be steps that those celebrating the TRI-centennial of our Missouri will be as grateful to us for taking—as we are for the steps taken by those who were here first.

We will honor the yesterday by the honorable steps we take today into tomorrow.

(The State Historical Society of Missouri was designated by the Missouri General Assembly to be the lead organization for planning the bicentennial. Coordinator Michael Sweeney has worked with every county to plan some event or project celebrating the event. You can learn more about what’s happening statewide or in your area at https://shsmo.org/missouri-2021.)

CRT

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A legislative committee has started holding hearings on Critical Race Theory, a 50-year old academic and legal-studies concept that has been weaponized for political advantage in the last few years.  Among the strongest criticism is that it rewrites history, changing the narrative from a nation founded on Christian values to a narrative that makes white people ashamed of their race (even, some critics say, brainwashing kindergartners into being ashamed of being white).

CRT has become so pervasive in our civic discussion that my Sunday School class talked about it a Sunday or two ago.  More accurately, I talked about it to the Sunday School class.

Faith is a personal thing and while I was comfortable discussing it with that class, I am not one who is comfortable publicly waving it about. But I often find myself in these divisive times turning to Paul’s letter to the Galatians (people living in modern Turkey) that admonishes, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” There are slight differences in the wording depending on the version of the Bible you prefer but the sentiment is the same.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where even many professing Christians of all races still seem to miss Paul’s point. Among its virtues, Critical Race Theory points to the many times when the concept of “you are all one” has been violently meaningless.

As for re-writing history: history needs some rewriting so that it is more history than myth.

To pretend that race has not been a major force in the history of the United States is deception, a willingness to accept myth rather than recognize a historical record that should compel us to be better than we are—regardless of our race. To suggest that it does not still influence attitudes and standards is to disrespect those who have walked a different path than yours for generations.

We should not fear raising the issue of ongoing racism in America.  Although I wish it were not true, it is hard for me to dismiss accusations that there remains a current of it in our country—especially after my experience in discussing removal of Jefferson City’s “Confederate Rock” and listening to an African-American woman who favored its removal read an unsigned letter she received that referred to her thirteen time as a “Nigger” and suggest that she is the kind of woman the Ku Klux Klan was created for.

There, I’ve used the word. I refuse to remove its ugliness by turning it into the linguistic pablum that is “N-word.”  We do no service to ourselves as a people by avoiding the issues behind it and barely beneath society’s surface.

I live in a part of Missouri sometimes referred to as “Little Dixie” because of the high percentage of enslaved people before the Civil War—the 1860 census showing almost ten percent of Missouri’s population in 1860 was enslaved.  Cole County, where I live, was at 10.3% and, perhaps because of the heavy anti-slavery German population, was one of the lowest counties in this region.  Across the river, the census showed almost 26% of the population of Boone County was slaves. Callaway County was at 25. A little ways upstream, 37% of the population of Howard County was slaves. One-third of the population of Saline County was enslaved.  More than one-in-five residents of Cooper County were slaves.

Within my lifetime, I remember the day a black couple moved into an upper-middle class white neighborhood in Columbia and in the newsroom where I worked, we listened to the police monitors for any signs of trouble. There was none.

I was ten feet away from Jefferson City’s leading realtor the night he urged the city council to defeat an ordinance saying people of color could live anywhere in town they could afford to live because of what it would mean for property values.

I have seen history and I have read historical myth—-do any of you remember from your elementary or even high school history lessons when slavery was ever discussed except in the context of the Civil War?

Here’s an interesting little piece of information that underlines the history-as-myth proposition:

Massachusetts—where the righteous Pilgrims and Puritans supposedly founded a nation based on Christian values and religious freedom (a myth of its own)—became the first British colony to legalize slavery, in 1641. Did anybody ever hear that in the Pilgrim stories we were taught as children?  Or even the stories we relate each Thanksgiving as adults?

Missouri law has long held that it is a crime “to take any woman unlawfully against her will and by force, menace or duress, compel her to…be defiled.”  Our present statutes use different language but that’s the way the law was in 1855 when a Callaway County slave named Celia, purchased by farmer Robert Newsom at age 14 was raped by Newsom on the way to his home. She had three children, at least one by Newsom, When she was 19 or 20, she killed Newsom in self-defense when he tried to rape her again.  She was hanged because the law against defilement of an unwilling woman did not apply to slaves.

Along the way we might have heard something about the Dred Scott Case but we’ve forgotten that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in that case that slaves—as well as free persons of color—could never be U.S. citizens.

Is it useful to know that the Missouri House of Representatives was completely white for a century before Walthall Moore of St. Louis became the first African-American member of our legislature?  Or that, in 1939, the University of Missouri—under a Missouri Supreme Court order to admit Lloyd Gaines, an African-American, to its law school in Columbia used an “out” in the order to establish the Lincoln University law school in St. Louis for black students?

Is it useful to know that no black person served as the foreman of a Missouri jury until 1945? Or that we didn’t have a state Human Rights Commission until 1957 (and, unfortunately, still have to have it today)? Or that we did not have a black member of the Missouri Senate until 1960? Or that there were no black Highway Patrol troopers until 1965?  That we didn’t send an African-American to Congress until 1968?  Or we didn’t have any person of color on our State Supreme Court until 1995?

Or that Missouri did not elect a black woman to Congress until LAST YEAR?

And that, to this day, outstate Missouri is generally not a place where a person of color stands much of a chance of serving in the Missouri General Assembly?

There is absolutely nothing wrong with recognizing these seldom-mentioned parts of our past or of our contemporary lives. There is absolutely nothing wrong with learning, at whatever age, what our society has been and, knowing that, understanding what our society still can be.

And, to the discomfort of many who are comfortable with the status quo, what it eventually WILL be.

Critical Race Theory makes a lot of people uncomfortable because it challenges us to understand that we live in a complex human society of colliding political, legal, and social interests that are affected by long-standing and often subtle social and institutional norms.

History, not myth, recognizes that we have painfully slowly grown more equal despite ongoing reluctance to do so and demographics and other studies of our evolving society that indicate the trend will continue. Some feel threatened by that slow growth and have taken to flame-throwing attacks that CRT (as former Vice-President Pence put it recently) is “a state-sanctioned racism, pure and simple.”

“America is not a racist country. America is the most just, noble and inclusive nation ever to exist on the face of the earth,” he said.

He needs to read more history and believe less myth.

What is happening here?  This largely academic concept has been around for decades. Why is it suddenly “state sanctioned racism?”

The answer is obvious.  Donald Trump discovered that this largely-academic topic has become something he can exploit for his personal political purposes and there are those who think their political futures or their grasp on political power can be enhanced by agreeing with his ongoing mendacity and his fear-stoking rhetoric.

How deep is racism in our country today?  I can’t quantify it but I know from watching and listening that we have some distance to go before we are the “most just, noble and inclusive nation” that Pence prematurely proclaims. I do not fear CRT’s reminders that we can be better than we are.

I also lack the perspective of being part of another culture—black, brown, yellow, or red—and comparing my culture’s history to my perceptions of the dominant culture.  I do not descend from slaves and sharecroppers, migrant field hands, people imprisoned during wartime because of their national origin, or people living on reservations—but I have been to those places and I have spoken with those only a generation or two or three removed from the times people were herded into camps because of their Asian heritage or whose not-distant ancestors were taken from their Native families to be “Americanized” at schools..

So I do not resent nor do I fear Critical Race Theory because it demands examination of parts of our history that have been glossed over in the story of our nation as a “shining city on a hill,” as President Reagan called us in misquoting Puritan minister John Winthrop. His 1630 sermon aboard the Arbella before it landed at Massachusetts Bay, although delivered in a different time and for a different purpose, gives us a recipe for national greatness that starkly differs fromfrom what is sometimes heard in criticism of CRT:

“…The only way to…provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. The Lord will be our God, and delight to dwell among us, as His own people, and will command a blessing upon us in all our ways, so that we shall see much more of His wisdom, power, goodness and truth, than formerly we have been acquainted with…For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.”

If we want to be the “city on a hill,” it is clear that divisiveness perpetuated by self-serving narrow attitudes and political rhetoric, is not the face we claim is an example to the world.  Winthrop’s sermon delivered 391 years ago tells us what we yet need to be.

If we are honest, we must not fear confronting our past and dealing with the lamentable vestiges of it that remain. CRT should not be seen as a sudden contemporary push to “shame” the white race.  To the contrary, it should be seen seen as a fifty-year-old challenge to be a better people—of all races—than we have been.

Much of the focus on CRT is on white-black relationships. But be aware that it is much more than that. There are branches to examine structural discrimination against Latinos, Jews, women, the disabled, Native Americans, and white immigrants.

There is no limit to the study of our inequalities, for knowing our inequalities gives us the understanding we need to end them. To paraphrase Franklin D. Roosevelt in his 1933 inaugural address, “The only thing we have to fear is ourselves.”   What he said after the actual phrase, however, is valid on this issue—his definition of fear as “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance,” after which he noted, “In every dark hour of our national life, a leadership of frankness and of vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. And I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days.”

That’s a hope that will stand us in good stead in a time when some see currying distrust and division as the key to their success, whatever the price might be to the nation.

It is better to remember:

We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.

Or as the Gospel tells us: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Given a choice of following the words of Paul or believing the words of Pence, I shall always take Paul.

 

The Future of Water

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A good part of Missouri has gotten an excessive drenching in the past few days.  But we—and perhaps you—have friends to the west who are being baked well-done by record heat and who are watching forests burn and water reservoir levels drop and disappear.

We might think we are glad we don’t have their problems—although our monsoon week is hardly without problems of its own.

For several years, Nancy and I enjoyed going to the Four Corners area for a week each fall to do archaeological work on or near the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation, adjacent to Mesa Verde National Park. We first recorded rock art from the days of the Anasazi (a Pueblo word meaning “ancient enemies”—we don’t know what those people who lived in the area until the 1200s called themselves because they left no written language). Although popular telling of their story has it that they just suddenly disappeared 750 years ago or so, archaeologists and anthropologists think they know where their descendants are, and they have developed some theories on why they fled the Four Corners area.

It’s thought they are the ancestors of the present Hopi people. One of the factors—the final straw—leading to their departure from the Four Corners area is believed to have been a 45-year drought that left them without the food and other resources needed to survive.

All of this has been brought to mind by recent reports that Lake Mead, which is behind Hoover Dam, has declined to its lowest level ever because of a drought that is now in its 22nd year. The condition is critical for 25-million people including the cities of Los Angeles, Las Vegas, San Diego, Phoenix, and Tucson.  The lake has hit a record low, down 140 feet since 2000, creating the bathtub ring you can see in recent pictures. One-hundred-forty feet is about the height of the Statue of Liberty from base to torch tip.

Some states already have imposed water rationing and they expect to tighten restrictions as conditions worsen. Agriculture is in dire straits. Adding to the awful conditions is the rise in major fires in forests that haven’t seen protective rain for years.

It’s hard to understand that green and verdant Missouri faces some water shortages of our own. Today.  Right now.  And stewardship of our water will become more critical as our population increases, as agriculture is under increased pressure to produce more and more food in an increasingly populous world, and as our economy grows.

The Department of Natural Resources 2020 update to its Missouri Water Resources Plan warns, “Although Missouri is fortunate to have rich water resources, localized shortages do exist because of the distance from adequate supplies, insufficient infrastructure or storage, water quality constraints, and other limiting factors. In many areas, surface water supplies are subject to seasonal fluctuations; supplies are frequently at their lowest when demand is the highest.”

Farther into the study we are told, “On average, the 6.1 million people and numerous businesses in Missouri consume 3.2 billion gallons of water each day. Of that demand, 78 percent is supplied by groundwater, while the remaining 22 percent is supplied by surface water.”  Three fourths of our water comes from under our feet.

We often heard testimony in legislative committee hearings on the dangers of agricultural runoff or industrial pollution going into our streams and rivers, our surface waters. A major concern, yes.  But that’s only one-fifth of the water we use or think we need to use.

Studies indicate our population will rise to about seven-and-a-half million people by 2060, well within the lifetimes of some who read these entries—them or their children—putting more pressure on water, a finite resource.  The report suggests a number of policies and practices that need to be started now in anticipation of that growth.

We need to do more than read about them. Our generation has to start something that later generations can continue to meet Missouri’s water needs.

The greatest pressure on our water supply is agricultural irrigation—65% of our water withdrawals go to farming. Major water systems (that provide us with water to drink, to bathe in, to do our dishes, and flush our toilets) are another 25%.

The study says the agricultural counties of Butler, Dunklin, New Madrid, Pemiscot, and Stoddard Counties—all in the southeast corner of the state—are projected to have the greatest growth in demand in the next four decades. High demand also is expected as our metropolitan areas become more metropolitan.

DNR says the state “generally has plentiful water sources.”  Now, it does. But the report also says, “many supply-related challenges exist.”

Much of the groundwater originating from bedrock aquifers in northern and west-central Missouri is highly mineralized and unsuitable for most uses. In northwestern Missouri, precipitation is generally the lowest in the state, and the lack of surface water availability during prolonged droughts can result in water shortages. Timing is also important in determining the availability of water, since peak demands often coincide with the driest times of the year and multiyear droughts can lower aquifers and drain reservoirs that typically provide ample supply. Even when available, the quality of the water may not be suitable for all intended uses without treatment.

We already are facing a critical problem in dealing with our water supplies. The DNR report says, “More than half of the state’s community public water systems became active prior to 1960, meaning that without repair or replacement original water pipes, mains, and equipment are nearing or exceeding their average expected lifespan…Many small drinking water utilities have indicated that they lack the funding not only to proactively manage infrastructure needs, but also to meet current water quality standards and adequately address water losses.”

At the other end of the process (to coin a phrase): “Similar to drinking water infrastructure in Missouri, a significant portion of wastewater infrastructure may be approaching the end of its expected life.”

Need an immediate reminder of how precious Missouri’s water supply is and how carefully we must use it and prepare for its future use is no farther away than the greatest of our rivers?

This past April 7, the Missouri River Basin Water Management Division for the Corps of Engineers noted the snowfall in the upper basin had been poor.  “We expect upper basin runoff to be below average,” said Division Chief John Remus. The Corps thinks the snowmelt runoff into upstream reservoirs to be 83% of the annual average this year.

Water is going to become more precious.  You and I might not notice it.  But our grandchildren could.  We aren’t going to turn into the Southwest by the end of the week.  But we have to understand that the way we use water today can’t be the way our next generations will use it.  And we need to prepare for those times.

Unlike the ancient pueblo peoples of the Colorado plateau in the 12th and 13th Centuries, we won’t have anyplace to go when the great drought hits us.

If you want to read the entire 2020 Missouri Water Resources Plan you can find it at:

https://dnr.mo.gov/mowaterplan/docs/2020-mo-water-resources-plan-highlights.pdf

The period

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Independence Day is upon us.  July 4th. We’re going to spend the whole long weekend celebrating July 4th. Not many people will thinking of “Independence Day,” though.

We think they should, especially at this time in our national history.

It is a day, or a weekend, to examine the most quoted—and greatly misunderstood—section of the Declaration of Independence. We misunderstand it because someone, apparently in the 1820s, inserted a period in a crucial sentence

Have you read the Declaration? All of it?   Have you read it SLOWLY enough to understand what it is about?  Even if you have read it, have you THOUGHT about it?

From numerous platforms in numerous towns someone will perform a public reading of the Declaration of Independence.  It will be more performance than reading, more ceremonial than meaningful.

Princeton Professor Danielle Allen’s Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality is a line-by-line exploration of what the document means and how carefully-worded it was by its creators.  She argues that while Thomas Jefferson is considered the hero-author of the Declaration, he was only one of dozens who molded it into the living document it should be today—rather than the misunderstood symbol it is in the minds of many people.

She points to the best-known (and, she maintains, misunderstood) sentence. The National Archives, which has the original engrossed document, transcribes it this way on its webpage:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Allen argues that the insertion of a period after “pursuit of Happiness” is wrong and has led generations of readers to misunderstand the intent the authors intended.

How does she know the period doesn’t belong? “Jefferson’s first draft did not have this period, nor did any of the copies that he and Adams produced…In every draft that Jefferson copied out and in the draft that Adams copied out, each of the five truths is separated equally from the others with the same punctuation mark. The manuscript in the ‘corrected’ journal, as Congress’s official record of its work was called, does not have the period. Nor does the Dunlap broadside, the first printed text of the Declaration…Those who etched these phrases on the Jefferson monument also did so without a period. All agree: this well-formed syllogism is a single sentence.”

She asserts the period makes the Declaration a celebration of individual rights. But she contends the drafters intended the phrase “to lead us directly, and without interruption, in this single sentence through ‘consent of the Governed,’ and to the phrase ‘most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.’  The sentence laying out the self-evident truths leads us from the individual to the community—from our separate and equal rights to what we can achieve only together.”

Or, as she puts it earlier in her book, “All people have rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…Properly constituted government is necessary to their securing these rights (and) all people have a right to a properly constituted government.”

Harvard Public Policy Professor Robert D. Putnam addresses that question in his new book, The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and how WE Can Do It Again.  He looks back to the assessment of our still-young country by Alexis deToqueville who studied democracy in America in the 1830s and, as Putnam puts it, “Rightly noted, in order for the American experiment to succeed, personal liberty must be fiercely protected, but also carefully balanced with a commitment to the common good. Individuals’ freedom to pursue their own interests holds great promise, but relentlessly exercising that freedom at the expense of others has the power to unravel the very foundations of the society that guarantees it.”

His study looks at times when this country “experienced a storm of unbridled individualism in our culture, our communities, our politics, and our economics, and it produced then, as it has today, a national situation that few Americans found appealing.”

But, he says, “We successfully weathered that storm once, and we can do it again.”

Putnam argues that The Gilded Age of the late 19th Century, a time when individual liberties were placed above the common good, gave way to the Progressive Era of the early to mid-20th Century in which the common miseries and challenges of The Great Depression, World War II, and the Civil Rights movement made us a nation seeking a mutual good, a nation in which “we” confronted and reconciled individual liberties and universal freedoms.. But since then we have retreated to an “I” period, when the idea of achieving liberty as a community has given way to another period of “unbridled individualism in our culture, our communities, our politics and our economics.”

On this Independence Day weekend, let’s read the Declaration—slowly—and without that period and understand that ALL of us have rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  But with rights come responsibilities.  And it is the responsibility of ALL of us to make sure that “a properly constituted government” is in place to secure those rights.

—rights that belong to all of US.

As Professor Allen notes, “If we abandon equality, we lose the single bond that makes us a community, that makes us a people with the capacity to be free collectively and individually in the first place.”

—and lessens the chances for all of us to enjoy our shared desires for  life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

 

The Pandemic re-defines work

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Most of us probably have pondered what kind of permanent changes will remain in our society when the Coronavirus pandemic is finally considered vanquished.  With variants emerging and some of them appearing to be causing a bump up in our health statistics this month, we might not be learning the answer to that question for a while yet.

Clearly, the idea of “work” has been altered by this pandemic.  What will “work” look like when this finally blows over?   A few days ago, National Public Radio ran a story focusing on how the pandemic has changed, is changing, or will change the workplace.  Audie Cornish, the host on the afternoon news show, “All Things Considered,” interviewed three people, one in particular.  NPR was good enough to provide a transcript of that interview on its webpage. We thought the discussion worthy of passing it along to those who might have missed the broadcast or who don’t listen to National Public Radio.

CORNISH: Why and how to bring employees back into the office – those are the kinds of decisions company leaders are having to make. And they’re thinking about how to give employees flexibility, how the pandemic has impacted innovation and company culture. We spoke to a variety of CEOs – Christina Seelye, CEO and founder of video game publisher Maximum Games in California, was one of them.

CHRISTINA SEELYE: Innovation’s a big one. I think that innovation – I haven’t seen the technology yet that replicates what it’s like to be in a room with people and bounce off of each other.

CORNISH: And Dan Rootenberg, CEO of SPEAR Physical Therapy Company in New York.

DAN ROOTENBERG: I do believe that people learn from each other more. There’s more collaboration. There’s Zoom fatigue. I mean, I’m on so many Zoom meetings. It’s, you know, it’s really exhausting after a while. And so there’s a totally different feeling when you get together.

CORNISH: Those at the C-suite level, they turn to experts at places like McKinsey & Company.

SUSAN LUND: So we’re getting calls from executives and chief human resource officers to say, OK, we’ve now gotten used to everybody remote. But how do we bring people back? When do we bring them back? What protocols do we need?

CORNISH: I spoke with Susan Lund, a partner at McKinsey & Company and leader of the McKinsey Global Institute. They put out a report in 2020 that was updated this year looking at the lasting impact of the pandemic on the workforce.

LUND: If you had told any business leader a year and a half ago that we were going to send the whole workforce home – at least the ones who could work from home – home for more than a year, they would say this is going to be a disaster. And, in fact, it’s worked out quite well.

CORNISH: But brass tacks, were we all more or less productive when it comes to remote work? What did your research find?

LUND: So what we find is that in the short term, people are definitely as productive, that it looks like they’re spending more time at work, in part because they don’t have the commute. They don’t have to go out necessarily to get lunch. They don’t even have the office chit-chat. So on one level, it looks like the number of hours that people are working is actually up. But long term, there are questions about innovation and new products and new ideas are going to be as forthcoming because of the remote work setup.

CORNISH: I want to dig into this data more. But first, who do we mean when we say we? Who’s been able to work from home? What portion of the workforce are we talking about?

LUND: It’s really office-based workers who are able to work from home. Overall, we found that 60% of the U.S. workforce doesn’t have any opportunity to work from home because they’re either working with people directly, like doctors and nurses or hair cutters, or they’re working with specialized machinery in a factory or in a laboratory. So it is a minority of people who even have this option. But overall, so 40% of the U.S. workforce could, in theory, work from home one day a week or more. And about a quarter of people could spend the majority of their time – three to five days a week – working from home.

CORNISH: When we talk about that 40% of people who do computer or office-based work, now a large number of them have had the experience of remote work. With that experience in mind, what are people learning about what a post-pandemic scenario could be for them?

LUND: So when you look at employee surveys, you typically find that the majority of people say, going forward, when we’re vaccinated, when it’s safe to return to the office, they still would like the flexibility to work from home a few days a week. So that’s a hybrid model. But then you do have a segment of people, maybe a quarter, who say I want to be in the office full time. Now, maybe they don’t have a good home working setup. It’s often young people in their 20s who are starting out in their careers. They want the mentorship and the camaraderie. And then you have another small portion who say I would like to work remote 100% of the time and work from anywhere.

CORNISH: There have been CEOs out there quoted here and they’re saying things like, well, we’re going to know who’s really committed to the job.

LUND: Yeah. So there is a lot of issues. So for companies going down this hybrid approach, there are a lot of pitfalls to watch out for. And one is that you end up with a two-tier workforce, that the people – it’s always the same people in the room making the decisions and other people are on Zoom or video conference, and that those on video conference end up being passed over for promotion, not considered for different opportunities because they’re not there. So companies are being thoughtful. The ones who are pursuing some kind of hybrid approach are thinking through these issues. And how do we avoid that to keep a level playing field?

CORNISH: We’ve been talking about this idea of who comes back, whose decision it is, that sort of thing. Legally, what do we know? Can employers force employees to come back? Can employers gently encourage employees to be vaccinated? What have you learned so far?

LUND: Well, it’s a complicated question. So on vaccination, it looks like it’s a bit of a gray area, but it looks like under federal law, yes, companies can require employees to be vaccinated if it impacts the health and safety of their workforce. On coming back to the office, I think it’s a little bit more clear. Companies can require people to work on site – right? – as a part of the employment contract. But what they risk, especially for talented professionals, is that people will go to other companies that do allow more flexibility on some remote work or work from home.

CORNISH: When people look back at this time, will it be considered a reset in some ways when it comes to work, or are we going to be back to where we were in 2019?

LUND: Well, my crystal ball is broken, but I think it will be a reset. I don’t think that we will go back to the same pattern of working. I think that the forced pause for everyone to spend more time at home with family and friends has really caused many people to rethink. I think that this really has been a reset.

Incidentally, Audie admitted that she was conducting this interview from a temporary studio in the attic of her house.

If you’d like to listen to the entire piece, including comments from others, go to:

https://www.npr.org/2021/06/09/1004862350/-why-do-we-have-to-go-back-to-the-office-employees-are-divided-about-returning

 

The Daily Gift

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(We were reminded this week by the death of a former colleague at the age of 44 that life and death are not predictable, not even for those imprisoned and facing capital punishment.  And what if it were?  Dr. Frank Crane ponders—–)

THE UNCERTAINTY OF LIFE

“There goes a man,” said the physician, “who is under sentence of death.”

“What to you mean?’

“He is in the secondary stages of a disease for which there is no known cure.  He is as sure to be dead or to lose his mind, which amounts to the same thing, as far as the victim himself is concerned, and one of these calamities is bound to occur within six months as the sun is certain to rise tomorrow.”

“Yet he seems cheerful. Why?”

“Because he does not know it.”

There you have the secret of contentment. For you and I, and every man, is under the sentence of death, as well as those marked by a mortal malady or sentenced by court-criminal our court-martial…

Every sunset, every clock-stroke brings us mechanically near the drop. And we know it. And we are cheerful. Why?

Simply because we do not know the date!

IF we knew that it would deaden our days and darken our minds. Just one fact of the future, if its time of happening were to be revealed to us, would paralyze life.

And so you see the falseness of another common notion, that the uncertainty of life is a bad thing. On the contrary, the uncertainty of life is its chiefest charm.

Heaven, which prescribes death, gives us death’s antidote, which is ignorance of death’s time. The sentenced world laughs and plays, drinks deep of dear human love, is busy with business—in fact the whole human comedy is interesting, amusing, and worthwhile just because the time of the certain fall is concealed.

 

Notes From a Quiet Street

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Lewis Carroll wrote a poem called The Walrus and the Carpenter that seems to fit these occasional reflections on life:

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,

“To talk of many things:

Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —

Of cabbages — and kings —

And why the sea is boiling hot —

And whether pigs have wings.”

We discussed “cabbages” separately recently. Today we want to start with some ruminations about shoes:

I have concluded that shoestrings are an endangered species.

I bought some new dress shoes recently and I can’t keep the blasted shoestrings tied.  The left shoe, especially.  I believe the shoe and its string are in cahoots, planning to make a break for freedom at some particularly embarrassing moment—perhaps when I am walking down the governor’s staircase at the capitol or when I am leaving the church chancel, carrying the communion trays, or perhaps on a wet or snowy day when I am rushing to warm and/or dry place.   The right show and its string are a little less bold but it, too, shows signs of rebellion.

The strings are round, thin, and perhaps a bit on the short side. Maybe it is a reflection of the aging of my fingers that are not so supple as they once were and thin-ish round shoe strings cannot be handled with the dexterity and the firmness of my younger days.  Or maybe its just the design of the shoestrings.

Solving this problem reveals an important cultural collapse.

Shoe stores are disappearing.

First, shoe repair shops disappeared, probably as shoe sole technology improved and longer-wearing non-leather soles became popular and shoes became more disposable and informal.

Now it’s shoe stores.

I went to a shoe store to get replacement laces—flatter ones that I could tie tighter.  The lady went to the back of the store and rooted around for several minutes before producing strings that were supposed to be of the proper length for four-eyelet dress shoes.

They weren’t.

There was enough string to get through the four eyelets but not enough left over to tie a bow knot.  I tied the two strings together and the cats have been playing with them since.  At least somebody is getting some use from them.

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If a new Profiles in Courage is ever written for our times, there will be many cowards and few heroes.  Liz Cheney will have one of the chapters.

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Took a look at a new cell phone of a friend the other day.  Holy cats!  These things keep getting bigger!  Clothing-makers need to be planning larger butt pockets.  I’m seeing commercials for cell phones that open up so they’re twice as big.

Good Lord!  They’re turning into half a tablet.  Is there a size line that won’t be crossed or will this trend continue until they have handles and wheels so we can pull them along behind us?

And when will it be impractical to call them cell phones anymore?

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Been watching quite a bit of the local news on the teevee lately.  Actually, I’ve been watching quite a bit of local weather.

With a little bit of news and sports thrown in here and there.

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Got a little political education when President Biden spoke to a joint session of Congress on April 28th.   It sounded like a State of the Union Address.  It looked like one except for social distancing.  One ingredient (thankfully) missing was the irritating introduction of common folks in the galleries who are examples of noble events or noble presidential proposals.

But it was NOT a State of the Union address.

Jordan Mendoza, writing in USA Today explained that the Constitution does require a President to “from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.”  But there’s no set time for such an address.

Ronald Reagan started a new tradition in 1981, the year he was inaugurated.  Since then neither new  Presidents nor outgoing Presidents have given a State of the Union Address coming in or going out of office.  Mendoza reported that is “primarily because a president can’t really speak about the state of the country (after) just a few weeks into office.”

Although Mendoza didn’t report it, it seems logical to suggest that no such speech is given by an outgoing president because his recommendations for action will have no weight of authority behind them—and because Congress has better things to do than listen to one more presidential address that would be mostly self-congratulatory.

Since then the new President’s speech has been “An Address Before a Joint Session of Congress.”