Category Archives: generally

A DEI Christmas Hymn

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This is a night I look forward to every year—the Christmas Eve service at our church, an evening we are drawn together in peace and in awe. We’ll probably hear the choir sing a song or two from our Christmas cantata the Sunday before last, and we’ll join in congregational singing of familiar hymns, hear the Great Story told again, and head out in the inspired quiet that follows.  Maybe we’ll drive around a little bit and take in yard decorations—a trip down a street long known as “Christmas Tree Lane” perhaps. Some years it’s cold and some years there’s snow and it looks and feels like Christmas. But it’s Christmas regardless of weather, regardless of neighborhood, regardless of culture.

I love the magnificence of some of the traditional Christmas music but I think the hymn that carries a special Christmas message, particularly in these times, is my favorite or at least very close to the top of my list of favorites.

It is music written in 1951 by Alfred Burt, a minister who died much too young, with lyrics by his church’s secretary, Wihla Hutson—who provide lyrics for music the Burts, senior and junior, wrote for their cards each year.  The Burt hymns are gentle and lovely.  The Jimmy Joyce Singers put out an album of them more than fifty years ago. It’s on Youtube and the CD is still available.

Here’s a hymn that’s probably unacceptable to some. But I think it needs to be played, sung, and heard by everybody—because it’s about everybody.

We have several videos at the end to let you hear how various people and groups perform this universal song.

Some Children See Him   (Wihla Hutson and Alfred S. Burt  1951)

Some children see him lily white,                                                                                    The baby Jesus born this night.                                                                                      Some children see him lily white                                                                                      With tresses soft and fair.

Some children see him bronzed and brown,                                                                  The Lord of Heaven to earth come down.                                                                      Some children see him bronzed and brown                                                                    With dark and heavy hair.

Some children see Him almond-eyed,                                                                            This savior here we kneel beside.                                                                                  Some children see him almond-eyed                                                                              With skin of yellow hue.

Some children see Him dark as they,                                                                            Sweet Mary’s son to whom we pray.                                                                              Some children see Him dark as they,                                                                              And Ah! They love Him too.

The children in each different place                                                                                 Will see the baby Jesus’ face                                                                                         Like theirs, but bright with heavenly grace                                                                       And filled with holy light.

Oh, lay aside each earthly thing                                                                                      And with thy heart as offering                                                                                        Come worship now the infant king                                                                                  ‘Tis love that’s born tonight.

Carolyn Mawbry Chorale Some Children See Him arr. Jay Rouse

Bebe Williams sings: (1325) Some Children See Him (feat. Bebe Winans) – YouTube

Tennessee Ernie Ford: Some Children See Him

John Williams with the Boston Pops, the Boston Children’s Choir, and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus: John Williams: The Carols of Alfred Burt

The complete album:

Jimmy Joyce – This Is Christmas: The Complete Collection Of Alfred S. Burt Carols in 4k (1964)

The Peace Speech

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Less than six months before his murder, President Kennedy spoke to the graduating class at American University in Washington, D.C.  It became known as his “Peace Speech.”

Today we are going to recall those remarks, delivered June 10, 1963 because they speak of a nation to which we should yearn to return and to be dissatisfied with leaders who want to deliver anything less.

We are not engaging in nostalgia with this entry. We are engaging in hope as it was embodied in a President who believed in doing for his country, not for himself, and summoning his generation to follow in that spirit.

(If you wish to hear President Kennedy’s voice as you follow along, go to Bing Videos.)

The ‘Peace Speech’

It is with great pride that I participate in this ceremony of the American University, sponsored by the Methodist Church, founded by Bishop John Fletcher Hurst, and first opened by President Woodrow Wilson in 1914.

This is a young and growing university, but it has already fulfilled Bishop Hurst’s enlightened hope for the study of history and public affairs in a city devoted to the making of history and to the conduct of the public’s business. By sponsoring this institution of higher learning for all who wish to learn, whatever their color or their creed, the Methodists of this area and the Nation deserve the Nation’s thanks, and I commend all those who are today graduating.

Professor Woodrow Wilson once said that every man sent out from a university should be a man of his nation as well as a man of his time, and I am confident that the men and women who carry the honor of graduating from this institution will continue to give from their lives, from their talents, a high measure of public service and public support.

“There are few earthly things more beautiful than a university,” wrote John Masefield in his tribute to English universities — and his words are equally true today.

He did not refer to towers, or the campuses. He admired the splendid beauty of a university, because it was, he said, “a place where those who hate ignorance may strive to know, where those who perceive truth may strive to make others see.”

I have, therefore, chosen this time and this place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth too rarely perceived – and that is the most important topic on earth: Peace.

What kind of a peace do I mean? What kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and build a better life for their children — not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women — not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.

I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age where great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age when a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War.

It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.

Today the expenditure of billions of dollars every year on weapons acquired for the purpose of making sure we never need them is essential to the keeping of peace. But surely the acquisition of such idle stockpiles — which can only destroy and never create — is not the only, much less the most efficient, means of assuring peace.

I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men. I realize that the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war — and frequently the words of the pursuer fall on deaf ears. But we have no more urgent task.

Some say that it is useless to speak of peace or world law or world disarmament — and that it will be useless until the leaders of the Soviet Union adopt a more enlightened attitude. I hope they do. I believe we can help them do it.

But I also believe that we must reexamine our own attitude — as individuals and as a Nation — for our attitude is as essential as theirs. And every graduate of this school, every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war and wishes to bring peace, should begin by looking inward — by examining his own attitude toward the possibilities of peace, toward the Soviet Union, toward the course of the Cold War and toward freedom and peace here at home.

First, examine our attitude toward peace itself. Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it is unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable, that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view.

Our problems are manmade. Therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable and we believe they can do it again.

I am not referring to the absolute, infinite concept of peace and goodwill of which some fantasies and fanatics dream. I do not deny the value of hopes and dreams but we merely invite discouragement and incredulity by making that our only and immediate goal.

Let us focus instead on a more practical, more attainable peace, based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions, on a series of concrete actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all concerned. There is no single, simple key to this peace, no grand or magic formula to be adopted by one or two powers.

Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic, not static, changing to meet the challenge of each new generation. For peace is a process, a way of solving problems.

With such a peace, there will still be quarrels and conflicting interests, as there are within families and nations. World peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbor, it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement.

And history teaches us that enmities between nations, as between individuals, do not last forever. However fixed our likes and dislikes may seem, the tide of time and events will often bring surprising changes in the relations between nations and neighbors.

So let us persevere. Peace need not be impracticable, and war need not be inevitable. By defining our goal more clearly, by making it seem more manageable and less remote, we can help all people to see it, to draw hope from it, and to move irresistibly toward it.

And second, let us reexamine our attitude toward the Soviet Union. It is discouraging to think that their leaders may actually believe what their propagandists write. It is discouraging to read a recent authoritative Soviet text on Military Strategy and find, on page after page, wholly baseless and incredible claims, such as the allegation that “American imperialist circles are preparing to unleash different types of wars, that there is a very real threat of a preventive war being unleashed by American imperialists against the Soviet Union, and that the political aims of the American imperialists are to enslave economically and politically the European and other capitalist countries and to achieve world domination by means of aggressive wars.”

Truly, as it was written long ago: “The wicked flee when no man pursueth.” Yet it is sad to read these Soviet statements to realize the extent of the gulf between us. But it is also a warning — a warning to the American people not to fall into the same trap as the Soviets, not to see only a distorted and desperate view of the other side, not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible, and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats.

No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue. As Americans, we find communism profoundly repugnant as a negation of personal freedom and dignity. But we can still hail the Russian people for their many achievements in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture and in acts of courage.

Among the many traits the peoples of our two countries have in common, none is stronger than our mutual abhorrence of war. Almost unique among the major world powers, we have never been at war with each other. And no nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union in the Second World War. At least 20 million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and families were burned or sacked. A third of the nation’s territory, including nearly two-thirds of its industrial base, was turned into a wasteland, a loss equivalent to the destruction of this country east of Chicago.

Today, should total war ever break out again, no matter how, our two countries will be the primary targets. It is an ironic but accurate fact that the two strongest powers are the two in the most danger of devastation. All we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first 24 hours.

And even in the cold war, which brings burdens and dangers to so many countries, including this Nation’s closest allies, our two countries bear the heaviest burdens. For we are both devoting massive sums of money to weapons that could be better devoted to combat ignorance, poverty, and disease. We are both caught up in a vicious and dangerous cycle with suspicion on one side breeding suspicion on the other, and new weapons begetting counterweapons.

In short, both the United States and its allies, and the Soviet Union and its allies, have a mutually deep interest in a just and genuine peace and in halting the arms race. Agreements to this end are in the interests of the Soviet Union as well as ours, and even the most hostile nations can be relied upon to accept and keep those treaty obligations, and only those treaty obligations, which are in their own interest.

So, let us not be blind to our differences, but let us also direct attention to our common interests and the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.

Third, let us reexamine our attitude toward the cold war, remembering that we are not engaged in a debate, seeking to pile up debating points. We are not here distributing blame or pointing the finger of judgment. We must deal with the world as it is, and not as it might have been had the history of the last 18 years been different.

We must, therefore, persevere in the search for peace in the hope that constructive changes within the Communist bloc might bring within reach solutions which now seem beyond us. We must conduct our affairs in such a way that it becomes in the Communists’ interest to agree on a genuine peace.

Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy, or of a collective death-wish for the world.

To secure these ends, America’s weapons are non-provocative, carefully controlled, designed to deter, and capable of selective use. Our military forces are committed to peace and disciplined in self-restraint. Our diplomats are instructed to avoid unnecessary irritants and purely rhetorical hostility.

For we can seek a relaxation of tension without relaxing our guard. And, for our part, we do not need to use threats to prove we are resolute. We do not need to jam foreign broadcasts out of fear our faith will be eroded. We are unwilling to impose our system on any unwilling people, but we are willing and able to engage in peaceful competition with any people on earth.

Meanwhile, we seek to strengthen the United Nations, to help solve its financial problems, to make it a more effective instrument for peace, to develop it into a genuine world security system — a system capable of resolving disputes on the basis of law, of insuring the security of the large and the small, and of creating conditions under which arms can finally be abolished.

At the same time we seek to keep peace inside the non-Communist world, where many nations, all of them our friends, are divided over issues which weaken Western unity, which invite Communist intervention or which threaten to erupt into war. Our efforts in West New Guinea, in the Congo, in the Middle East, and in the Indian subcontinent, have been persistent and patient despite criticism from both sides. We have also tried to set an example for others by seeking to adjust small but significant differences with our own closest neighbors in Mexico and Canada.

Speaking of other nations, I wish to make one point clear. We are bound to many nations by alliances. These alliances exist because our concern and theirs substantially overlap. Our commitment to defend Western Europe and West Berlin, for example, stands undiminished because of the identity of our vital interests. The United States will make no deal with the Soviet Union at the expense of other nations and other peoples, not merely because they are our partners, but also because their interests and ours converge.

Our interests converge, however, not only in defending the frontiers of freedom, but in pursuing the paths of peace. It is our hope, and the purpose of allied policies, to convince the Soviet Union that she, too, should let each nation choose its own future, so long as that choice does not interfere with the choices of others.

The Communist drive to impose their political and economic system on others is the primary cause of world tension today. For there can be no doubt that, if all nations could refrain from interfering in the self-determination of others, the peace would be much more assured.

This will require a new effort to achieve world law, a new context for world discussions. It will require increased understanding between the Soviets and ourselves. And increased understanding will require increased contact and communication. One step in this direction is the proposed arrangement for a direct line between Moscow and Washington, to avoid on each side the dangerous delays, misunderstandings, and misreadings of the other’s actions which might occur at a time of crisis.

We have also been talking in Geneva about our first-step measures of arms control designed to limit the intensity of the arms race and reduce the risks of accidental war. Our primary long range interest in Geneva, however, is general and complete disarmament, designed to take place by stages, permitting parallel political developments to build the new institutions of peace which would take the place of arms.

The pursuit of disarmament has been an effort of this Government since the 1920’s. It has been urgently sought by the past three administrations. And however dim the prospects are today, we intend to continue this effort, to continue it in order that all countries, including our own, can better grasp what the problems and possibilities of disarmament are.

The one major area of these negotiations where the end is in sight, yet where a fresh start is badly needed, is in a treaty to outlaw nuclear tests. The conclusion of such a treaty, so near and yet so far, would check the spiraling arms race in one of its most dangerous areas. It would place the nuclear powers in a position to deal more effectively with one of the greatest hazards which man faces in 1963, the further spread of nuclear arms. It would increase our security, it would decrease the prospects of war. Surely this goal is sufficiently important to require our steady pursuit, yielding neither to the temptation to give up the whole effort nor the temptation to give up our insistence on vital and responsible safeguards.

I am taking this opportunity, therefore, to announce two important decisions in this regard.

First: Chairman Khrushchev, Prime Minister Macmillan, and I have agreed that high-level discussions will shortly begin in Moscow looking toward early agreement on a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Our hopes must be tempered with the caution of history but with our hopes go the hopes of all mankind.

Second: To make clear our good faith and solemn convictions on this matter, I now declare that the United States does not propose to conduct nuclear tests in the atmosphere so long as other states do not do so. We will not be the first to resume. Such a declaration is no substitute for a formal binding treaty, but I hope it will help us achieve one. Nor would such a treaty be a substitute for disarmament, but I hope it will help us achieve it.

Finally, my fellow Americans, let us examine our attitude toward peace and freedom here at home. The quality and spirit of our own society must justify and support our efforts abroad. We must show it in the dedication of our own lives, as many of you who are graduating today will have a unique opportunity to do, by serving without pay in the Peace Corps abroad or in the proposed National Service Corps here at home.

But wherever we are, we must all, in our daily lives, live up to the age-old faith that peace and freedom walk together. In too many of our cities today, the peace is not secure because freedom is incomplete.

It is the responsibility of the executive branch at all levels of government — local, State, and National — to provide and protect that freedom for all of our citizens by all means within our authority. It is the responsibility of the legislative branch at all levels, wherever the authority is not now adequate, to make it adequate. And it is the responsibility of all citizens in all sections of this country to respect the rights of others and respect the law of the land.

All this is not unrelated to world peace. “When a man’s ways please the Lord,” the Scriptures tell us, “he maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him.” And is not peace, in the last analysis, basically a matter of human rights, the right to live out our lives without fear of devastation, the right to breathe air as nature provided it, the right of future generations to a healthy existence?

While we proceed to safeguard our national interests, let us also safeguard human interests. And the elimination of war and arms is clearly in the interest of both. No treaty, however much it may be to the advantage of all, however tightly it may be worded, can provide absolute security against the risks of deception and evasion. But it can — if it is sufficiently effective in its enforcement and if it is sufficiently in the interests of its signers, offer far more security and far fewer risks than an unabated, uncontrolled, unpredictable arms race.

The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war. We do not want a war. We do not now expect a war. This generation of Americans has already had enough, more than enough, of war and hate and oppression. We shall be prepared if others wish it. We shall be alert to try to stop it.

But we shall also do our part to build a world of peace where the weak are safe and the strong are just. We are not helpless before that task or hopeless of its success. Confident and unafraid, we labor on, not toward a strategy of annihilation but toward a strategy of peace.

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The speech was delivered only eighteen years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki and only eight months after the Cuban Missile Crisis that frightened leaders of both countries into starting back-door discussions. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev called it “the greatest speech by any American president since Roosevelt.”

A few weeks later, the United States and Russia signed the first nuclear test ban treaty outlawing tests in the atmosphere, under water, and in outer space.

But that was then. This is now.

Maybe in looking back we can find hope in moving forward

(Photo credit: Google Images)

Don’t you just wish he would just shut the Hell up? 

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I was almost desperately wanting to post something today that wasn’t about the most disreputable, dismal, destructive, disruptive, delusional politician of my long lifetime. And then he did something so sleazy that the only relief I can have is the steam pouring out of my fingers as they type these letters.

Actor and director Rob Reiner and his wife were stabbed to death in their home last week and our President could not wait to post a typically utterly distasteful and disgraceful rant about it on his social media page.

There is no class, no dignity to this man—especially after some graceful things Reiner said about the assassination of one of the president’s most loyal and most-recognized supporters.

Reiner was an unabashed active liberal but he was capable of respecting those starkly different from him in numerous ways.  When Charlie Kirk was murdered, Reiner told talk show host Piers Morgan who asked him how he felt about the killing, “Absolute horror and I unfortunately saw the video of it. It’s beyond belief what happened to him. That should never happen to anybody. I don’t care what your political beliefs are. That’s not acceptable. That’s not a solution so solving problems.”

“And I felt like what his wife said at the service at the memorial they had, was exactly right. I’m Jewish but I believe in the teachings of Jesus and I believe in ‘do unto others’ and I believe in forgiveness and what she said, to me, was beautiful. She forgave his assassin. And I think that is admirable.”

Contrast that with this disgraceful attack from someone who enjoyed being idolized by Charlie Kirk:

Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace!

To their credit, a significant number of Republicans have repudiated Trump’s comments, but not Trump influencer Laura Loomer, who thinks Trump is spot on, commenting, “Rob Reiner had a level of TDS that likely exuded a level of craziness around those he spent time with. Many people who have crazy kids have psychiatric issues themselves.”

Reiner’s son, who is reported to have mental health issues, is considered the suspect in the killings, prompting Loomer to say he’s typical of children of celebrities who often become “total dead beat losers because many were raised to have no accountability by parents who subscribe to hardcore liberalism. Trump is right. Reiner himself sounded insane when he would speak. Imagine how crazy his own kid was… on drugs. We have a mental health crisis in America.”

Good Lord!

Rob Reiner, no matter how his liberality might be interpreted, is far more of a man than a president who could not resist immediately spitting venom on his life. The only person who truly suffers from TDS is Donald J. Trump, a political Typhoid Mary who has infected tens of thousands of others with help from vocal manure-spreaders such as Loomer.

I want to live long enough to read Trump’s obituary. Whatever good he does will be buried under descriptions of his lack of character and lack of empathy, his arrogance and his narrowness.

Chilon of Sparta, one of ancient Greece’s Sages, said about 600 BC, “Of the dead man, do not speak ill.”  I doubt that Trump knows about Greek philosophers or Roman stoics but I suspect the tone of his comments about Rob Reiner will lead many other to violate Chilon’s advice with Trump’s own demise.

He wants only praise when that time comes—and afterward.  Surely he knows or fears it’s not going to happen. But he still believes he can bully his way to some kind of political immortality—by repeatedly displaying political immorality.

Thankfully, most of us want to be remembered as being better people than he is. And we will be.

Kakistocracy

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My fellow scribes have used various “tocracy” words to describe the deplorable condition of our national government but I think I have found the correct one.

Writers have a tendency to collect volumes of famous quotations, historical quickfacts, and thesauri, dictionaries—-I even have one by James Lipton that gives the proper word to describe flocks of various animals (a murder of crows,

The other night I was loafing through Peter Bowler’s The Superior Person’s Book of Words, a tiny thing packed with words such as usufruct and bucentaur and manque or noyade or quakebuttock or (the last word in the book) zzxjoanw.

Bowler defines “kakistocracy” as:

Government by the worst citizens. For reasons which can only be speculated upon, there is no word for government by the best citizens. Aristarchy means government by the best-qualified persons, but the latter are not necessarily the best—indeed, an aristarchy could quite conceivably be a kakistocracy. 

‘Nuf said.

Traditional?

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Donald Trump, who often has accused his accusers of engaging in witch hunts, appears to be off on a witch hunt of his own, a witch being anyone who does not advocate “traditional views.”  HIS “traditional views.”

We hope somebody asks him for a comprehensive definition of “traditional views” so that I know whether I am involved in “domestic terrorism,” another subject that it would be entertaining to hear him define.

During the weekend a memo written by loyalist Pam Bondi, whom Trump has designated to supervise the Justice (rather loosely defined these day) Department, was leaked. It tells the DOJ to put together a list of “domestic terrorism” groups.

What constitutes such a group?

It is what the Trump/Bondi DOJ chooses to consider “extreme viewpoints on immigration, radical gender ideology, and anti-American sentiment.”

In other words, it’s those who disagree with President Trump who, in our observation, is never going to rival Noah Webster in defining words and terms.

Reporter Ken Klippenstein revealed the memo.  And who is he?

An interesting character. Young, used to work for The Intercept, a nonprofit news organization considered to be well into the political west wing, a former correspondent for The Nation, a  liberal magazine, and a part of the growing online news world. His father is a theoretical chemist at the Argonne National Laboratory. He says his mother’s family was undocumented immigrants from El Salvador.  College grad with a degree in English literature. He has broken other stories using leaked material, too.

We wonder how quickly his name is in a Pamagram sent to the list.

Trump is not the first ruler to impose his “traditional views” on the people.

Tomás de Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition from 1483 to 1498 under appointment of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, the patrons of Christopher Columbus who ventured forth during a period of extreme persecution of Jews and Muslims to spread those traditional (Christian) views to whatever heathens he found when he arrived someplace that he did not know he was going to.

Going back even earlier, we can talk about Pope Stephen VI, who in a remarkable fifteen months pulled all kinds of stunts including the calling of the infamous Cadaver Synod in which he put his dead predecessor on trial for perjury and the illegal assumption of the papacy.  He dug up the corpse of Pope Formosus, put papal vestments on it, propped it up on a throne and had a mock trial.

The corpse did not mount much of a defense and after being found guilty was stripped of his vestments and ceremonially maimed (three of his fingers were cut off) before the remains of his remains were thrown into the Tiber River. There was widespread disapproval of Pope Steve’s definition of “traditional views” and he wound up in prison where he was strangled to death, apparently by non-traditionalists.

Long before Russia had Stalin and his “traditional views,” it had Ivan the Terrible—Ivan IV—who reigned for more than fifty years. He, too, started by promising reforms but quickly was consumed by paranoia and formed his own secret police that terrorized and murdered his subjects by the thousands, one of who was his own son.

Romania in 15th century had Vlad III who once ordered 20,000 enemy soldiers impaled, their bodies remaining on display as a warning against disloyalty. Vlad the Impaler, he is still called.

His cruelty wasn’t just reserved for outsiders; he targeted his own people as well. Vlad would punish dishonesty and laziness with extreme torture, sometimes impaling entire villages. Laziness and dishonesty also were abhorred by our Puritan ancestors, but they just stuck people in the stocks for a few hours—

—Unless they were witches.  Hanging, pressing, and drowning seemed to have been the Puritan Christian cures for those tendencies.

As far as I know, nobody has accused President Trump of being a Puritan. So we’d appreciate it if he’d offer a clear explanation of his terms sometime when he’s awake and not playing the Game of Invective all night on his social media account.

We don’t want to spend any more time—although we could—listing other rulers who sought to protect “traditional values” as they defined them. And we certainly don’t want to suggest that President Trump fits the mold of those we have cited and others on various lists of vengeful rulers. But punishment for differing with any ruler who considers himself the only one to define “traditional values” has a past that must raise questions about a person of questionable personal ethics setting a national agenda for you and me.

The Trump memo also demands creation of “a national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.”

The President’s definition of “domestic terrorism threat” as being any organization that uses “violence or the threat of violence” to oppose “law and immigration enforcement, extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders, adherence to radical gender theology, anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, or anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government” and the aforementioned “hostility towards traditional views on family, religion, and morality.”

Except for MAGA and January 6, 2021 celebrants.

You will excuse me, I hope, if I cannot consider Donald J. Trump in any way fit to determine nation’s views “on family, religion, and morality.”

The Constitution aside, this is a pretty broad mission for our national ruler. Just about everybody falls into one of these categories in one way or another, including me. And you.

Apparently, however, there is a way that we can become immune to prosecution under this policy. We just have to cough up a nine or ten-figure amount to pay for decoration of the monstrosity of a Trump Worship Center that will stand for decades as a tribute to his bad tase and his desire to have more monuments to himself than anybody since the ancient Egyptian pharaohs.

I’m going to put an orange jumpsuit on my Christmas gift list to make sure I’m properly dressed when the traditional values Pamgoons come for me.

 

 

Sister State

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I want to tell you about a special place that should be our sister state.

Most of us are familiar with sister cities and other sister states—-usually, in Jefferson City’s case, a town with similar cultural roots in Germany.  Missouri has a sister state relationship with Nagano Prefecture in Japan. Jefferson City’s sister city is Munchberg, Germany.

Missouri, a state, should have this place as a sister CITY for a reason I’ll mention later.

The scenic town is six-thousand feed up in the Himalayan foothills of India, about 180 miles north of New Delhi and is known affectionately as the “Queen of the Hills.”

It’s a Hill Station, a British phrase used to describe a popular tourist town at higher elevations where people who visit to escape the summer heat in the valleys below. Although the phrase has been used in other countries, India has more hill stations than any other country.

The city has been a popular tourist destination since a British miliary officer established it in 1825.

Seven years later, the Surveyor General of India, George Everest, wanted to make it an anchor of the Great Trigonometric Survey that provided a detailed map of the Indian subcontinent.

The what? It was a comprehensive survey that used mathematics to provide a precise map of the whole Indian subcontinent. It was started in 1802 by the East India Company in the days when the British Empire was being put together.  The company was created in 1600 as a trading company that at one time controlled the subcontinent and Hong Kong and was the largest corporation in the world—so large that it had its own army of 260,000-man army, double the size of the regular British Army at times.  The survey took almost seventy years. Its most important feature was the first measurement of the highest peaks in the Himalayas, including the one named for Surveyor General George Everest.

By the start of the Twentieth Century, the town had about 65-hundred permanent residents. But the population more than doubled in the summers. Among the prominent families to spend summers here were the Nehrus. For a time, the Dalai Lama lived there. The population in the first decade of the Twenty-first century had gone past 30-thouand.

It is said that a good set of binoculars will provide a nice view of the Himalayas

Visitors today can travel on Camel’s Back Road, named for a rocky outcrop that reminds people of a camel’s hump. It’s a popular hiking trail that includes the oldest Christian Church in the Himalaya Mountains, on a nearby road.  The snowy peaks of the big Himalayan peaks are visible through binoculars from the road.

The forty-foot high Kempty Falls, one of several waterfalls in the area, is about nine miles from the town, and Lake Mist, where the Kempty river flows, is a popular stop for hikers and other tourists. There’s a municipal garden and a lake where visitors can rent padd  boats.

The remains of Sir George Everest’s laboratory are in a park. Happy Valley includes an academy, a municipal garden and a Tibetan sanctuary. An ancient Hindu temple dedicated to the Snake God Shiva is nearby.

And then there is Cloud End, a dense forest, and Van Chetna Kendra, a bird sanctuary that was the last refuge of the now-extinct Mountain Quail.

One of the oldest and most highly-regarded colleges in India, St. George’s College, is there. It’s been run by the Patrician Brothers since 1893.

There’s a lot more to see and to do in the multinational community of Mussoorie, the “Queen of the Hills” of India.

Sounds like an interesting place.  Maybe we should get to know it better.

Save me a place on the flight, Governor.

 

T-shirts

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It is Christmas catalog time and several of the catalogs we’ve gotten already are peddling t-shirts.

I found one, though, that is a pre-Christmas one, good for this season. It commemorates one of the great moments in broadcast journalism. This REAL fake news.

WKRP Turkey Drop

Why are they called t-shirts?  We’ll save you a trip to Wikipedia where you will find a history that, like the shirts, covers the topic and doesn’t require a lot of material.  They’ve been around for thousands of years and in ancient times were called tunics.  But here’s the simple reason they’re called t-shirts:

When you lay them down flat, they look like the letter “T”

That’s kind of disappointing. I was hoping for something more ancient, a more colorful story.  But the Wikipedia article about t-shirts is what you’d expect—something simple, not particularly interesting, just something simple for a simple topic.

Well, anyway, these catalogs often have amusing t-shirts in them. I’m not talking about some of the gross stuff printed on t-shirts that most of us wouldn’t be caught dead wearing but that some people think are amusing enough to wear with pride in the Wal-Mart or fast food place checkout line.

I don’t much like standing in line at a fast food restaurant with people wearing t-shirts referring to excrement, sex, or that are generally an insult.  But I do like a clever one.

“I’m a multitasker. I can listen, ignore, and forget at the same time.”

“Bigfoot saw me, but nobody believes him.”

“Everyone is born right-handed. Only the gifted overcome it.”

“I don’t have my ducks in a row. I have squirrels and they’re everywhere.”

“I have a hen who could count her own eggs. She was a mathemachicken.”

“Hunkle. Like a normal uncle but way better looking.”

(I can identify with this one): “It’s weird being the same age as old people”

“I don’t want to go through things that don’t kill me but make me stronger anymore.”\

“When 2 people argue online I believe whoever spells correctly.

(For a nurse): “Cute enough to stop your heart. Skilled enough to restart it.”

“Meddle not in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup.”

“90 percent of being married is yelling “WHAT” from other rooms”

“Either you love dogs or you’re wrong.”

“Octogenarian: A chronologically gifted person in their 80s.’

“Being a trophy husband is exhausting.”

“I don’t mind getting older but my body is taking it badly”

“If I said I’d fix it, I will. There is no need to remind me every six months.’

“I do not think, therefore I do not am.”

“Be alert. The World Needs More Lerts.

“I wish more people were fluent in silence.”

“Your design here.”

“I have selective hearing. Sorry you weren’t selected”

“A Little More Kindness, a Litle less Judgment.”

“Please be patient with me. I’m from the 1900s.”

“This is my stepladder (illustration). I never knew my real ladder.”

“Fat People are Harder to Kidnap”

“Retired. I’m free to do whatever my wife wants whenever she wants me to do it.”

“I was addicted to the Hokey Pokey. Then I turned myself around.”
“I was Normal two Kids Ago.”

“I am often mistaken for an adult because of my age.”

Or a bid more seriously:

“When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty—Thomas Jefferson”

“Think—while it’s still legal”

“We Are Not Descended From Fearful Men.”

“The Constitution. I Read It For The Articles.”

These things often show up on cars and trucks as bumper stickers. Pulling up to someone close enough to read the sticker breaks the boredom of a long drive, hoping they don’t stop suddenly.

Want to share your favorite t-shirt?  Preferably one that is not insulting or profane. Try to remember you’re a responsible person in polite society when you write it in the comment box below and hit enter.

The Sayings of Charlie

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One side lionizes him. Another side vilifies him.  It should not be hard for both sides to agree that Charlie Kirk was a divisive figure, which is not altogether bad at times because properly-presented division should trigger properly presented discussion.

—In  an ideal world anyway.

n an ideal world anyway.Some speakers are provocative for the purposes of dividing people. Others speakers are provocative as a way to bring people together. Will the passage of time and the softening of partisan passions that time-borne perspective brings produce more productive understandings than these times now allow?

We present to you today a lengthy series of quotes from Charlie Kirk whose recent assassination is a national tragedy regardless of the spectrum with which we observe our political world. We have found some comments that we think apply to his side of the aisle as much as he applied them to the other side. We have found a few that almost sound a little liberal.

Put together from brainyquote.com and msn.com, these quotations, and a couple of others from Snopes, we think, gives us a peek at the character of the man. Some who read these entries will enthusiastically agree with everything he said. Some will enthusiastically disagree with everything he said.

Was he playing the game of divide and conquer?  Was he trying to encourage the other side to cross over into unity?

In the emotion that comes with tragedy, acknowledging greatness or acknowledging something far less is easy. The sharpness of the differences is a reflection on him as well as a reflection of us.

Perhaps the healthiest thing to do with Charlie Kirk’s verbal legacy is to ask ourselves why we react to his words as we did when he spoke them—-and how we can get beyond those differences, if we have the courage to look within ourselves to do so.

Five years from now, ten years from now, when the emotional response to tragedy had passed, how do you suppose we as individuals as well as we as a nation will think about the things he said—if we remember them at all?

When you reach the end, you might rightfully ask, “Did he really say all these things?”

Factcheck.org put out a lengthy piece asking the same question and answering it. We suggest it will be helpful if you read the article regardless of which Kirk side you are.

Viral Claims About Charlie Kirk’s Words – FactCheck.org

There also are other fact checking sites on the internet you might want to look at.

At the end of this long list, we will present some compelling thoughts of former Vice President Mike Pence who put the focus on these days after the assassination more on where it should be.

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If you believe in something, you need to have the courage to fight for those ideas – not run away from them or try and silence them.

We have to tell our babies to stop crying.

As government imposes the will of a few upon the many, the many begin to resist. Ultimately, it becomes necessary for the government to use force to make the people conform.

When you deliberately distort and selectively present the truth, you lie.

I’m urging all my millennial peers and the young people coming up behind us to look for signs and symptoms of them being in a Democrat-induced delusion. Don’t confuse the dream state of the socialists with any sort of reality. If you spot any signs of this politically terminal affliction within yourself, please seek help.

One of the most horrifying and surprising evolutions we have witnessed among our widespread campus network is the rapid movement away from tolerating opposing ideas and respectful debate to the deployment of obscene bully tactics from the left.

The truth is that while those on the left – particularly the far left – claim to be tolerant and welcoming of diversity, in reality many are quite intolerant of anyone not embracing their radical views.

Many textbooks fail to present students with both sides of an issue. Students are being pushed toward an education that demonizes free enterprise while advocating top-down government, deficit spending and class warfare.

I started a college campus-based nonprofit in June 2012 called Turning Point U.S.A. to target millennials in college. Our mission was to create a powerful conservative grassroots activist network on campuses and identify, educate, train and organize students to promote the principles of freedom, free markets and limited government.

Political correctness is the deadliest of political weaponry.

Liberal-socialist women generalize about women as if they are some sort of monolithic voting block of disenfranchised, victimized citizens.

For anyone who can only handle about 12-minutes-per-day of anything news related before needing to retreat into isolation, allow me to recommend spending those 12 minutes listening to the opening monologue of ‘The Rush Limbaugh Show.’

The Democrats want a pathway to citizenship for the illegal immigrants so they can become Democratic voters in a few years – and some Democrats even argue that non-citizens ought to be able to vote in U.S. elections.

You can’t watch Fox News without seeing five or six segments a day about the nuttiness on college campuses.

Liberals like to say there aren’t any limitations on speech, and it’s true that they can say or do just about anything. But conservatives apparently can’t even stand still while wearing a MAGA hat without crossing a line.

Say what you will about President Trump’s tone, tactics or tweeting, but even his most strident critics admit he’s at his best when on the offensive.

Conservatives are branded bigots and we are falsely accused of hate speech when we express traditional values and ideas that have made America the greatest country on Earth.

This silent majority are the Americans who love God, their family, and our amazing country. They don’t want their morals, their job, or their lifestyle threatened by the government or any candidates.

Cultural Marxism that has permeated all of Europe and has been the driving force that has brought France – the nation of Liberty, Fraternity and Equality – to the brink.

President Trump identifies the hatred and intolerance expressed by his radical opponents and names it for what it is.

I believe we’re broken by sin upon birth.

If there’s one thing Democrats are good at, it’s killing American jobs.

The perverse gift of the Chinese coronavirus is that it has given Americans an up close and personal look at the horrors of big government – and, by extension, socialism.

When students have access to low-interest loans and government aid, colleges have no incentive to cut costs. Why should a college lower tuition if more students are able to pay with subsidized loans from the government?

If you take away what a person owns, you control what that person can do.

It is part of our human nature to want to be liked. It is part of our human nature to worry about what others think of us. It is an attribute of greatness and of American exceptionalism to not surrender to our nature, but to be guided by an inner calling to persevere and to prevail, no matter the personal cost.

Democrats have long been the party of voter fraud.

Nothing in socialist doctrine argues for the abuse of power, from Thomas More, to Karl Marx, to Chavez, to Ocasio-Cortez. Historically, however, it has been the case that socialist countries often end up violently suppressing their citizens.

How can it possibly be that so many Americans are rallying to support Ocasio-Cortez, when all they need to do is look at Venezuela to see where she is leading them?

We have been indoctrinated to see the world through a politically correct lens.

There are young conservatives out there, and there have been for decades.

Many migrants awaiting asylum hearings in the U.S. never show up for their court dates. And the longer they stay in the U.S., the more sympathy they draw in the media and from many compassionate Americans.

Too often, teachers and professors misrepresent conservative viewpoints, and intentionally muddle what it means to be a conservative.

Whenever there has been a debate on the national stage, nobody has had to go looking to find me. I’ve been there. Always making the argument for free markets, first principles, and limited government.

It is extremely difficult to stand up for principles when many of your friends are automatically liberal or just do not care.

Trump is the first president in a generation who is willing to take political risks to secure our border.

In addition to making sense and serving the needs of justice, rehabilitating prisoners and releasing them when they are ready can save taxpayers money.

Tiger Woods experienced perhaps the greatest fall from grace of any celebrity in American history.

Entrepreneurs take measured risks, not hopeless gambles.

America’s young people deserve more than a mediocre future – and we now have demonstrated proof that President Trump is building a path for our success.

The United States has been turned into a mindless true-false test, instead of the complex essay exam, it should be. You are either for open borders, or you are racist and anti-immigration. It just doesn’t work that way.

There is no question that automation is – and has been since the start of the Industrial Revolution – displacing workers and creating disruption within the economy and labor market.

Young people in college – many living away from their parents for the first time in their lives – are particularly vulnerable to the leftist propaganda campaign designed to turn them away from supporting President Trump and turning them away from believing in American exceptionalism.

In politics as in sports, the best defense is a good offense.

Since the end of WWII, France’s steady movement away from Western ideas of individual liberty and self-determination – and toward collectivist action and conformance – has created a people overly dependent on government, hobbled by crippling taxes and lacking in individual initiative.

We’ve been conditioned to see a video of white people in MAGA hats standing in front of a Native American and assume that the white people are racists.

For years, elites in both political parties have ignored the illegal immigration crisis growing on America’s southern border.

The left has viewed the coronavirus pandemic as a political ‘opportunity’ from the start.

I know many young conservatives all across the country that are isolated and ostracized due to their beliefs. They are portrayed as bigots, misogynists and ignorant just because they are conservative.

A healthy economy is a foundation for a healthy future.

Yes, America is a nation of immigrants – but the immigrants have to enter legally.

Yes, college tuition is a problem for many young Americans, but it is a problem exacerbated by government subsidies and an overwhelming demand to get a college degree, despite high dropout rates.

I have been advocating in favor of free markets and against socialism since I was a teenager.

The case for socialism is always made based on an ideal and a promise. The ideal is that humans can lovingly coexist in a sharing and peaceful way. The promise is that this time, unlike failed attempts elsewhere, socialism will be implemented properly, and no citizen will suffer as a result.

The real reason Democrats are pushing for universal mail-in balloting has nothing to do with the global pandemic which originated in China; they simply believe it will help them win elections.

We have to teach goodness to our infants.

We live in a welfare state society – one that is already bloated and overburdened. We cannot continue to absorb and support an endless stream of people who will inevitably need legal residents to subsidize their lives.

Conservatives by and large believe in the corrective power of the free market above all. If we don’t like how private companies are doing business, we should just start our own to compete, right?

Once we lose our border protection, the road to citizenship, voting and welfare benefits for a flood of new immigrants will be all but paved.

I founded Turning Point U.S.A. to take the fight for ideological diversity directly to a progressive stronghold: the nation’s leading colleges and universities.

We must also be real. We must be honest with the population. Having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty… We need to be very clear that you’re not going to get gun deaths to zero. It will not happen. But I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment,

I can’t stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new age term that does a lot of damage.

Black women do not have brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s slot.

This is something that I hope will make Taylor Swift more conservative: Engage in reality more… Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.

Gun control, like vaccines and masks, is focused on making people feel ‘safe’ by taking freedoms away from others. Don’t fall for it.

Now, I will say that for future retirees, people under the age of 45, we should absolutely raise the retirement age. I’m going to say something very provocative. I’m not a fan of retirement. I don’t think retirement is biblical. You say, ‘Charlie, I’m just gonna retire and I’m just gonna go golf.’ I think, what a waste of the gifts that God has given you.

I have a very, very radical view on this, but I can defend it, and I’ve thought about it. We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the mid-1960s.

MLK was awful. He’s not a good person. He said one good thing he actually didn’t believe.

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Former Vice President Mike Pence, who had watched some of the angry words spoken in the wake of Kirk’s death, suggested we develop or keep a proper perspective on what had happened and what we should do and be next:

“I truly do pray for his family, commend law enforcement in the community. But you understand the anger in this moment? It’s understandable, but I think we’ve got to be careful about putting America on trial whenever we see evil overtake the hearts of any individual, and in this case, absent additional facts, it was one person responsible for Charlie Kirk’s assassination. He needs to be brought to justice, swift and certain.

“Can people in public life do better in the way that we speak with one another and about the issues facing the country? Of course, and democracy depends on heavy doses of civility. But Charlie Kirk was a champion of the First Amendment, a champion of free and open debate. He ultimately died defending it, and I think on that principle we should stand and ensure that it’s part of his legacy beyond one.”

—Regardless of whether we agree with what Charlie Kirk said, we must remember that he had a right to say what he said, just as critics have a right to express themselves. And all of us should oppose any efforts to end or limit that freedom.

A death might still the voice of one person but we cannot allow it to mute the voices of all of us.

Need Your Trash Hauled?

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Maybe the Mayor of Chicago and the Governor of Illinois should not object so much to the President’s plan to  deploy National Guard troops to the Windy City.  Ditto folks in Memphis, the next American city in line to be invaded by the United Stats Army.

Based on the experience in Washington, D. C., the National Guard is making streets safer by picking up trash and doing gardening duties at national monument sites. One doesn’t want a tourist to trip over something or to be horrified by a wind-blown hot dog wrapper.

The National Guard reported during the Labor Day Weekend that its 2,000 troops had collected more than 500 bags of trash and cleaned more than 3.2 miles of roadways.

They’ve been doing a lot of the work that National Park Service workers would be doing if the Trump administration hadn’t fired thousands of them. One-fourth of the NPS workers were axed by enthusiastic DOGE-oriented actions. National Guard members, trained to fight on foreign battlefields and to serve in domestic disaster areas have instead helped with forty “beautification projects” in D.C.

Those National Guard troops also have disposed of three truckloads of plant waste.

It’s costing one-million dollars a day for the National Guard to serve as gardeners and garbage men in our nation’s capital.

As for fighting crime in one of the most crime-ridden cities in the world, there are a lot of places in the world, and even in red states with far higher crime rates than D.C.  Or Chicago. Or Los Angeles.

The Guard reports it made 1,369 arrests in the first three weeks including one guy who threw a sandwich at a member of the Guard. But Trump’s choice for the district’s prosecutor, former FOX news host Jeanne Priro, reportedly hasn’t been able to get a grand jury indictment in a couple of high-profile cases, not even against the deadly sandwich thrower.

Numerous studies indicate many more cities are more “entitled’ to National Guard protection (or                                       trash collection and gardening) than D. C., LA, or Chicago, based on crime. Many of them do not have Democrats as mayors so they apparently will just have to let the garbage pile up and let the weeds grow in their parks and around their monuments.

There’s a lesson here.  If you don’t want the president to order the National Guard to invade your town and pick up your trash or spread mulch in your beautified public places, elect a Republican mayor.

Too bad, though. Your high murder rate will stay high and your city will not be cleaner and more beautiful.

If you want your low murder rate to stay down, but you don’t want to hire extra people to clean up your streets and your parks so that the President will send inexperienced trash-hauling soldiers to do that, elect a Democrat, especially a black one.

It’s not about crime. It’s about cleanliness.

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Trump Invades His Own Country

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President Trump likes to rail against an “invasion” across our southern border. Whatever your thoughts about that claim, his present actions to put armed United States military personnel in our cities based on clear lies should be even more alarming because his military invasions, or threatened invasions, of our cities betrays our national founders and undermines one of the foundations that separates us from oppressive governments now and in the past, in other places.

Trump has deployed troops in Los Angeles and in Washington, D.C., and is threatening to do the same in Baltimore and Chicago. He has responded to Maryland Governor Wes Moore’s invitation to walk the streets of Baltimore with insults and increasingly frightening incoherence including a threat to withhold federal funding for the reconstruction of the Francis Scott Key Bridge.

The governors and mayors in the cities he has invaded are Democrats. Republican governors and mayors have remained silent and unfortunately are likely to remain so until Trump’s actions, incoherence and name-calling reach a point that is so toxic that Republican leaders believe he is enough of a threat to their own survival that they, too, must turn on him—which they must have courage and selfless principles enough to do

Nations are lost when leaders become cowards.

Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker on Monday made a case against Trump that must not be ignored. The wolf is approaching the doors of all of us.  I hope you will heed what he said.

I want to speak plainly about the moment that we are in and the actual crisis, not the manufactured one, that we are facing in this city, and as a state, and as a country. If it sounds to you like I am alarmist, that is because I am ringing an alarm, one that I hope every person listening will heed, both here in Illinois and across the country.

Over the weekend, we learned from the media that Donald Trump has been planning, for quite a while now, to deploy armed military personnel to the streets of Chicago. This is exactly the type of overreach that our country’s founders warned against, and it’s the reason that they established a federal system with a separation of powers built on checks and balances.

What President Trump is doing is unprecedented and unwarranted. It is illegal. It is unconstitutional. It is un-American.

No one from the White House or the executive branch has reached out to me or to the mayor. No one has reached out to our staffs. No effort has been made to coordinate or to ask for our assistance in identifying any actions that might be helpful to us. Local law enforcement has not been contacted. We have made no requests for federal intervention. None.

We found out what Donald Trump was planning the same way that all of you did: We read a story in The Washington Post.

If this was really about fighting crime and making the streets safe, what possible justification could the White House have for planning such an exceptional action without any conversations or consultations with the governor, the mayor, or the police?

Let me answer that question: This is not about fighting crime. This is about Donald Trump searching for any justification to deploy the military in a blue city, in a blue state, to try and intimidate his political rivals.

This is about the president of the United States and his complicit lackey, Stephen Miller, searching for ways to lay the groundwork to circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities and end elections.

There is no emergency in Chicago that calls for armed military intervention. There is no inter- insurrection. There is no insurrection. Like every major American city in both blue and red states, we deal with crime in Chicago. Indeed, the violent crime rate is worse in red states and red cities.

Here in Chicago, our civilian police force and elected leaders work every day to combat crime and to improve public safety, and it’s working.

Not one person here today will claim we have solved all crime in Chicago, nor can that be said of any major American metro area. But calling the military into a U.S. city to invade our streets and neighborhoods and disrupt the lives of everyday people is an extraordinary action, and it should require extraordinary justification.

Look around you right now. Does this look like an emergency? Look at this. Go talk to the people of Chicago who are enjoying a gorgeous afternoon in this city. Ask the families buying ice cream on the Riverwalk. Go see the students who are at the beach after school. Talk to the workers that I just met taking the water taxi to get here. Find a family who’s enjoying today sitting on their front porch and ask if they want their neighborhoods turned into a war zone by a wannabe dictator. Ask if they’d like to pass through a checkpoint with unidentified officers in masks while taking their kids to school.

Crime is a reality we all face in this country. Public safety has been among our highest priorities since taking office. We have hired more police and given them more funding.

We banned assault weapons, ghost guns, bump stocks, and high-capacity magazines. We invested historic amounts into community violence intervention programs. We listened to our local communities, to the people who live and work in the places that are most affected by crime and asked them what they needed to help make their neighborhoods safer.

Those strategies have been working. Crime is dropping in Chicago. Murders are down 32% compared to last year and nearly cut in half since 2021.

Shootings are down 37% since last year, and 57% from four years ago. Robberies are down 34% year over year. Burglaries down 21%. Motor vehicle thefts down 26%.

So in case there was any doubt as to the motivation behind Trump’s military occupations, take note: 13 of the top 20 cities in homicide rate have Republican governors. None of these cities is Chicago.

Eight of the top 10 states with the highest homicide rates are led by Republicans. None of those states is Illinois.

Memphis, Tennessee; Hattiesburg, Mississippi have higher crime rates than Chicago, and yet Donald Trump is sending troops here and not there? Ask yourself why.

If Donald Trump was actually serious about fighting crime in cities like Chicago, he, along with his congressional Republicans, would not be cutting over $800 million in public safety and crime prevention grants nationally, including cutting $158 million in funding to Illinois for violence prevention programs that deploy trained outreach workers to deescalate conflict on our streets. Cutting $71 million in law enforcement grants to Illinois, direct money for police departments through programs like Project Safe Neighborhoods, the state and local Antiterrorism Training Program, and the Rural Violent Crime Reduction Initiative, cutting $137 million in child protection measures in Illinois that protect our kids against abuse and neglect.

Trump is defunding the police.

To the members of the press who are assembled here today, and listening across the country, I am asking for your courage to tell it like it is.

This is not a time to pretend here that there are two sides to this story. This is not a time to fall back into the reflexive crouch that I so often see, where the authoritarian creep by this administration is ignored in favor of some horse race piece on who will be helped politically by the president’s actions.

Donald Trump wants to use the military to occupy a U.S. city, punish his dissidents, and score political points. If this were happening in any other country, we would have no trouble calling it what it is: a dangerous power grab.

Look at the people assembled before you today, behind me. This is a full cross-section of Chicago’s leaders from the business world, the faith community, law enforcement, education, community organizations, and more. We sometimes disagree on how to effectively solve the many challenges that our state and our city face on a daily basis. But today, we are standing here united, in public, in front of the cameras, unafraid to tell the president that his proposed actions will make our jobs harder and the lives of our residents worse.

Earlier today in the Oval Office, Donald Trump looked at the assembled cameras and asked for me personally to say, “Mr. President, can you do us the honor of protecting our city?” Instead, I say, “Mr. President, do not come to Chicago.”

You are neither wanted here nor needed here. Your remarks about this effort over the last several weeks have betrayed a continuing slip in your mental faculties and are not fit for the auspicious office that you occupy.

Most alarming, you seem to lack any appropriate concern as our commander-in-chief for the members of the military that you would so callously deploy as pawns in your ever-more-alarming grabs for power.

As a governor, I’ve had to make the decision in the past to call up members of the National Guard into active service, and I think it’s worth taking a moment to reflect on how seriously I take that responsibility, and on the many things that I consider before asking these brave men and women to leave their homes and their communities to serve in any capacity for us.

As I’ve said many times in the past, members of the National Guard are not trained to serve as law enforcement. They are trained for the battlefield, and they’re good at it. They’re not trained to arrest people and read them their Miranda rights. They did not sign up for the National Guard to fight crime. And when we call them into service, we are reaching into local communities and taking people who have jobs and families away from their neighborhoods and the people who rely upon them.

It is insulting to their integrity and to the extraordinary sacrifices that they make to serve in the Guard to use them as a political prop, where they could be put in situations where they will be at odds with their local communities, the ones that they seek to serve.

I know Donald Trump doesn’t care about the well-being of the members of our military, but I do and so do all the people standing here.

So let me speak to all Illinoisans and to all Chicagoans right now.  Hopefully the president will reconsider this dangerous and misguided encroachment upon our state and our city’s sovereignty. Hopefully rational voices, if there are any left inside the White House or the Pentagon, will prevail in the coming days. If not, we are going to face an unprecedented and difficult time ahead.

But I know you Chicago, and I know you are up to it. When you protest, do it peacefully. Be sure to continue Chicago’s long tradition of nonviolent resistance. Remember that the members of the military and the National Guard who will be asked to walk these streets are, for the most part, here unwillingly. And remember that they can be court martialed and their lives ruined if they resist deployment. Look to the members of the faith community standing behind me today for guidance on how to mobilize.

To my fellow governors across the nation who would consider pulling your National Guards from their duties at home to come into my state against the wishes of its elected representatives and its people, you would be failing your constituents and your country. Cooperation and coordination between our states is vital to the fabric of our nation and it benefits us all. Any action undercutting that and violating the sacred sovereignty of our state to cater to the ego of a dictator will be responded to.

The State of Illinois is ready to stand against this military deployment with every peaceful tool we have. We will see the Trump administration in court. We will use every lever at our disposal to protect the people of Illinois and their rights.

Finally, to the Trump administration officials who are complicit in this scheme, to the public servants who have forsaken their oath to the Constitution to serve the petty whims of an arrogant little man, to any federal official who would come to Chicago and try to incite my people into violence as a pretext for something darker and more dangerous: we are watching and we are taking names.

This country has survived darker periods than the one that we are going through right now, and eventually the pendulum will swing back, maybe even next year. Donald Trump has already shown himself to have little regard for the many acolytes that he has encouraged to commit crimes on his behalf.

You can delay justice for a time, but history shows you cannot prevent it from finding you eventually. If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law.

As Dr. King once said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Humbly I would add, it doesn’t bend on its own. History tells us we often have to apply force needed to make sure that the arc gets where it needs to go. This is one of those times.

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