Category Archives: people

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.

 

 

 

The Joy of Rest

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(I know of a top-rank executive who would close his office door each afternoon so nobody would see him taking a nap.  I took some ribbing from my news staff from time to time because along about 2 p.m., I would find a long sound file and play it back so my computer screen appeared as if I were listening to something while I slipped into a “personal screen saver mode” for a few minutes. I always thought those moments helped me cope with 70-hour work weeks.  Dr. Frank Crane, our former Presbyterian minister turned popular newspaper columnist a century ago knew the value of such things as part of his advice to—-)

KEEP FIT

Ford, the automobile man, stated in his testimony before the Industrial Commission that he gets more and better work out of men at eight hours a day than at ten.

It is a law that holds good everywhere. The first duty of a worker is to keep himself fit. And an hour’s labor when he is up to the mark, bright, keen, and enthusiastic, is worth three hours’ effort when he is fagged.

“Keeping everlastingly at it brings success” is a lying motto; it rather brings poor results, slipshod products, and paresis.

Rest and recreation are the best parts of labor. They are the height to which the hammer is lifted; and the force of the blow depends on that height. To go ahead without 107let-up is to deliver only a succession of feeble, ineffective blows.

Get all the sleep you can. Stay abed all day occasionally. Learn to be lazy, to dawdle, to enjoy an empty mind; then, when you are called to effort, you can hit with ten times the power.

The higher the quality of your work, the more necessary it is that you approach it only when you are at your best.

This is especially true of intellectual effort. You can tell, when you read a story or an article, whether it is tainted with exhaustion; it is dull, lifeless putty.

Those who court the quality of brightness, but do not keep their bodies in trim, often resort to artificial stimulants. Stephen Crane said that the best literature could be divided into two classes: whisky and opium.

Intelligent people ought not need to be told that this is suicide. The best form of enthusiasm is the natural reaction of one’s system after a period of relaxation.

The pestiferous “work-while-you-rest” apostles are ever after us to “improve our spare time,” study French during lunch, geometry while going to sleep, and history during recess. But spare time ought to be wasted, not improved.

An hour or so at the ball-game, a contest at tennis, a long and aimless walk, a party at cards, a chess match, or a time spent in jolly talk with friends are not waste; they mean restored strength, upbuilt mental acumen, the doubling of efficiency when work is to do.

Learn to let go. Learn to relax utterly when you sit down. Learn to let every faculty lie down when you lie down, and rest whether you sleep or not.

The more thoroughly you do nothing when there is nothing to do, the better you can do something when there is something to do.

The very cream of life comes from rest. The blush, the aroma, the shine of your best work lie in the hours of idleness massed behind it. The secret of brilliant work is in throwing every atom of your reserve force into it. Perpetual exertion begets mediocrity.

“Keep fit.”

That is a better rule than “Keep at it.”

Notes from a Quiet Street  (Hot Summer Days & Nights Edition)

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We have officials from Missouri and many other states who are threatening to punish school districts and local health departments, in particular, if they institute mask mandates.  Our Attorney General, Eric Schmitt, is the chief guardian against local mask mandates and he now has a class action lawsuit forbidding school districts from having the mandates. He says parents and families should decide if children wear masks, not those who act in loco parentis when hundreds of children are together.  Parents and families, he says, should make decisions based on science and facts—-as if officials in charge of hundreds of children in close contact with one another can’t make decisions based on science and facts.  Or should not be allowed to make decisions based on science and facts.

The lawsuit also cites a low COVID death rate among school children.

Isn’t one child dying from this plague too high a death rate?

We find all of this energy by governors and attorneys general—almost unanimously Republicans—on this issue peculiar.

Remind us again which party is it that does the most griping about government over-reach, especially the federal government telling states (who know what’s best for their citizens) what should be done.

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One thing we’ve noticed about the pandemic, and now “the pandemic of the un-vaccinated,” is that no preacher has tried to capitalize on it as God’s punishment for this or that nation condoning this or that whatever.  Perhaps it is because all nations, whatever their faults, are fighting this thing—and deciding what human trait is being punished is impossible to determine, even by those who in the past have claimed exclusive knowledge of God’s intent.

But maybe God can’t get in a word edgewise amidst all of the conspiracy cacophony that has helped give the pandemic new vigor.

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There’s been a slew of book released revealing more about the more chaotic last chaotic days of the Trump administration. It is unlikely—we certainly hope it is unlikely!!—that we will ever again see so many books from so many insiders so critical of a president. But there’s one insider book we are waiting for although it might not come until the author determines that he will be more benefitted than damaged by his words.  Potential bombshell-author Mike Pence seems to think the success of his future is still too closely tied to his recent past to discuss it.

But, boy oh boy, the tales he could tell…….

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We notice, by the way, that the former VP is becoming more visible on the public speaking circuit.  He’s hitting some of the big venues—a few weeks ago he repeated his lamentable attack on Critical Race Theory at the inaugural Feenstra Family Picnic in Sioux Center, Iowa.

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Watching the drought envelop the West, we are reminded of some jokes that we heard back in the very hot summer of 1953 while growing up on our little Illinois farm.  That was the summer when the thermometers reached the 90s in late May and the heat wave ran well into September with several days in the triple digits.  In fact, the last 90-plus day was not until October.  Few homes or cars were air conditioned and I can recall my mother closing the curtains in the morning to keep out the sun during the day.

It was so hot that I saw three dogs chasing a tree.

We got a little rain one day and we sent what was in our rain gauge to the University to be analyzed. It came back only 35% moisture.

That was the winter is snowed a little bit but the snow was so dry we just shoved it into the ditch and burned it.

Not sure but those might have been told by Sam Cowling on Don MacNeill’s Breakfast Club that broadcast from Chicago for 35 years on the NBC Blue Network (which became ABC Radio) and is known as the program that created morning talk and variety as a viable radio format.

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Several months ago we told the story of a Cole County man who got married into a family situation that sounded like the story told in the song, “I’m My Own Grandpa.”

Well, we’ve found another one.  From the Sedalia Capital, a newspaper founded when Sedalia was making an ill-fated run at taking the seat of government away from Jefferson City, February 21, 1925 issue.  Page 5 has a picture of a nice-looking lady captioned, “Miss Ruth Davis’ marriage to her stepbrother, Andrew Jean Stormfeltz at Kansas City, Mo., made her mother also her stepmother and her mother-in-law, and her stepfather her father-in-law. She’s her own stepsister-in-law.  Figure it out.”

We’re not genealogist enough to know, but would that make their children their own cousins, or their own aunts and uncles, step or otherwise?

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Racing: Championship chases tighten

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By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor.

Why is this young man happy?

—because he’s Pato O’Ward and he has become the points leader for the INDYCAR championship with three races left in the season.  (Actually, he’s not celebrating in this picture; he’s responding to fans a week earlier at Indianapolis.)

This man has hit another milestone:

Will Power had to sit in the pits protecting his ears when competitors tried to beat his qualifying speed.  They did not and Power picked up his 63rd INDYCAR pole, putting him within four of Mario Andretti’s career record.

O’Ward might have taken the points lead but he came up just short of beating Josef Newgarden to the checkered flag at the World Wide Technology Raceway, where the St. Louis skyline can be seen from the track at Madison, Illinois. Newgarden and three teammates dominated the top five finishing positions in the race; only O’Ward’s runnerup position kept Team Penske from going 1-2-3

Newgarden beat O’Ward by less than six-tenths of a second in a race bedeviled by early yellows and late twists that took some top competitors out.  The win, Newgarden’s third at the track, moves him past Scott Dixon into third place in the points. He led more than half of the race.

 

 

Newgarden took the lead from Colton Herta, who had led 101 of the first 185 laps but dropped out when he broke a drive shaft leaving the pits.

Palou, who started 21st, had charged to tenth when he was caught up in a three-car crash on the 65th lap, relegating him to 20th place. The crash let O’Ward overhaul Palou, the points leader for most of the season and now puts him up on Palou by ten points. Palou has had two terrible finishes in a row, counting his 20th at WWTR when he was caught up in a three-car crash before the race was half done.

Scott Dixon, who went into the race third in points, was forced to the garage area for repairs after another three-car incident. Although his crew made his car roadworthy again, Dixon was so far behind that he turned laps while some others dropped out, elevating him in the final results. He packed it in after running 100 laps, enough to get him to 19th.  His withdrawal from the race ended a string of 28 straight races in which he had been running at the end.

INDYCAR resumes its season September 12 in Portland, Oregon.

Switching to cars with fenders:

This fellow is relieved although he finished 14th in the NASCAR Cup race at Brooklyn, Michigan. That was good enough to lock him in as the 15th driver in NASCAR’s 16-driver playoff field.

Kevin Harvick had to make it on points this year because he has failed so far to extend his eleven-year streak of winning at least one CUP race.  He does have eleven more races in this season to snag a win.

The win at Michigan went to Ryan Blaney. It’s Blaney’s second win of the year. He got a push from competitor Kyle Busch on the last restart that gave him the lead he then defended for the last eight laps of the race, the only laps he lead in the whole race.

Blaney beat William Byron to the finish line by 0.077 of a second, the closest NASCAR finish in Michigan International Speedway history since timing and scoring went electronic.  Blaney, who finished second on the Indianapolis road course the weekend previous, started third at WWTR but didn’t think he had a car as good as the starting position indicated.

His win and Harvick’s clinching of 15th place on points leaves only one race left to determine that 16th driver.  And that race next Saturday night is at Daytona, where the unexpected is expected.  Tyler Reddick has a 29-point lead over teammate Austin Dillon.  Nobody else is close enough to become the 16th driver because of his number of points.  And Reddick and Dillon could be eliminated if someone who has not won a race this year wins at Daytona.

Dillon was in the playoffs last year. Reddick was not.  Two other active drivers will not repeat in the playoffs unless one of them wins Saturday—Matt DeBenedetto or Cole Custer.  Clint Bowyer, the fourth driver in the 2020 playoffs, has retired to the broadcast booth.

Forty drivers are entered for Saturday night’s race meaning two dozen will be trying to be number 16.

(Photo credits: Bob Priddy, Rick Gevers)

Check your fly

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(There is a fly that insists on sitting on the ring finger of my left hand, or on my arm, as I write this introduction to another of Dr. Frank Crane’s musings on life.  I cannot ambush it; it senses my attack and flees a split second before my other hand comes down on it.  It is a stupid fly because it does not learn of its potential ultimate punishment and continues being annoying. Dr. Crane thinks flies are more than nuisances.  And they are more than insects, in fact there are—-)

HUMAN FLIES

Oh for a human fly-swatter! That is, for some sort of a swatter that would obliterate the human fly.

The most prominent trait of a fly is his ability and disposition to bother. He is essential, concentrated botheraciousness.

He is the arch intruder. He is the type of the unwelcome. His business is to make you quit what you are doing and attend to him.

He makes the busy cook cease her bread-making to shoo him away. He disturbs the sleeper to brush him off. He is president and chairman of the executive committee of the amalgamated association of all pesterers, irritators, and nuisances.

The human fly is the male or female of the genus homo who is like the housefly.

Some children are flies. They are so ill bred and undisciplined that they perpetually annoy their mother until her nerves are frazzled, and make life miserable for any guests that may be in the house. It may be well to be kind and thoughtful toward the little darlings, but the first lesson a child should be taught is to govern himself as not to be a bother.

There are respectful, considerate, and unobtrusive children alas—too few!

There are fly wives. Realizing their own pettiness they gain their revenge by systematically irritating the husband. They make a weapon of their weakness. They soon acquire the art of pestering, nipping, and buzzing, keep the man in a perpetual temper, and blame him for it. You can’t talk to them. Nothing can cure them but an eleven-foot swatter. And these are not for sale.

Some men are just as bad. Married to a superior woman such a man is inwardly galled by his own conscious inferiority. So he bedevils her in ways indirect. He enjoys seeing her in a state of suppressed indignation. He keeps her on edge. His persecution is all the more unbearable because it is the unconscious expression of his fly nature. Also for him there is no cure but to wait till he lights some time and swat him with some giant, Gargantuan swatter. And they’re all out of these, too, at the store.

There are office flies, likewise, who get into your room, occupy your extra chair, and buzz you for an hour upon some subject that you don’t care a whoop in Halifax about. Your inherent politeness prevents you from kicking them out, humanity will not let you poison them, and there is a law against shooting them. There ought to be an open season for office flies.

Where the human flies are proudest in their function of pestiferousness, however, is in a meeting. Wherever you have a conference, a committee meeting, or a convention, there they buzz, tickle, and deblatterate. They keep the majority waiting while they air their incoherence. They suggest, amend, and raise objections. They never do anything; it is their business to annoy people who do things.

I do not wish to seem unkind to my fellow-creatures, but it does seem as if to all legislatures, conventions, and other gatherings there should be an anteroom where the human flies could be gently but efficaciously swatted.

There are Senate flies, as well as House flies, politicians whose notion of their duty appears to be that they should vex, tantalize, and heckle the opposing party at every point.

There are fly newspapers, whose only policy seems to be petty, vicious annoyance.

There are fly preachers, with a cheap efficiency in diatribe and sarcasm, and no wholesome, constructive message.

There are fly school-teachers, who hector and scold; fly pupils, who find and fasten upon the teacher’s sensitive spot; fly beggars, who will not be put aside; fly reformers, who can only make trouble; fly neighbors, who cannot mind their own business; fly shopkeepers, who will not let you buy what you want.

And the name of the devil himself is Beelzebub; which being interpreted means “Lord of Flies.”

 

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!

The simple folk

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(“What do the simple folk do?” is a song from the 1960s Broadway musical hit Camelot.” Guinevere and King Arthur discuss the lives of commoners and what they do “when they’re blue.” Guinevere notes, “They obviously outshine us at turning tears to mirth, and tricks a royal highness is minus from birth.”  Arthur’s final conclusion, after listing several things the simple folk do is, “They sit around and wonder what royal folk would do.”

Dr. Frank Crane suggests those not burdened with noblesse oblige do quite well—because it doesn’t occur to them that they should be living—-)

A MISERABLE LIFE

Poverty is a point of view.

It all depends upon what you are used to, and upon what you see others enjoying

The average realistic author who seeks to harrow the reader ‘ s feelings with his account of the wretchedness of existence is simply performing the trick of bringing a man with one set of tastes into the life of a man with another set of tastes .

The king deceives himself if he thinks the cobbler unhappy, for the   cobbler has never been king.

The poet is mistaken when he imagines the life of a rough teamster to be miserable, for the teamster is a teamster and not a poet.

Leaving actual pain out of account, most lives are reasonably content  so long as they are what they are and do not view themselves from the point of what they are not .

Much of the description of the hollowness and emptiness of existence  we find in George Gissing or Upton Sinclair and their ilk might be thus parodied:

“Little do we suspect the sorrows of the poor. The days crept on with leaden feet for   Archibald Vandergold. There was no golf nor lawn tennis. Only the full routine of behaving himself and earning a living.

“In his little flat there was only one servant and she was absent  Thursdays.

“There were no mistresses nor chorus girls to eat lobster and drink  Veuve Cliquot with him at 1 a. m. No, only one wife and a child.

“He had to reach for the bread at table himself, and pass his own plate when he wanted another piece of ham. No butler stood behind his chair and whisked away his plate every time he took another spoonful of beans. Like all the dreary bourgeois to whose class he belonged, he did his own buttling.

“To arise in the morning and select your own collar, tie your own tie, and stoop over to put on your own shoes until the temples throb with the constrained attitude, to have no valet to turn on the hot water for your bath, but to be compelled to handle the faucet yourself; to go out to the dining room and drink your coffee instead of having James bring it to you as you lie abed; to ride downtown on a tramway instead of taking a morning gallop upon your thoroughbred; to have no polo ponies, no private yacht, not even to belong to a club; to have no box at the opera where you can wear your dress suit and loll about and converse with duchesses and millionaires’ daughters in Robert W. Chambers’s* dialogues; such is the life of that submerged class which the reader of the average magazine society yarn hates to think about.

“Little do we suspect the sorrows of the poor. Archibald Vandergold felt his humiliation. His bathtub was not of porphyry. His cigarette case was not gold with his monogram on it; it was leather and carried the advertisement of a coal dealer.

“He actually went to church Sundays with his wife and child and not to a gilt restaurant with another man’s wife.

“The darkness of his narrow existence can be imagined when it is added that he actually liked his wife, liked to go to church, enjoyed being decent, and was interested in his business.

“And, pardon my vulgarity in saying it, but the whole fetid truth must be told—the poor wretch did not own an automobile!”

*American science fiction and historical fiction writer 1865-1933)

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—–

Humanitarian

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(We admire those we call “humanitarians,” but they’re just being human. That’s something all of us can be. Dr. Frank Crane wrote 106 years ago about what it takes to be a human-itarian—-)

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE JUST HUMAN?

It means to love folks; to be drawn instinctively to any human being; to gaze on the face of every passer – by with curiosity; to feel the heart warm a little even when looking at an old portrait in a book of one who lived five hundred years ago; to have a sense of uneasiness in    solitude, so that one wants to hunt up the sewing maid or the janitor for a bit of talk  to find pleasure in watching from the window the people in the street; to have every man and woman tempt to acquaintanceship; to see in every room, where people live, something to pique the      imagination; to follow with the eyes every schoolboy and wonder what home he comes from, what companionship he goes to, and what dreams occupy his soul; to feel awe at every old house, deserted and desolate, because human laughter has rung there; to reverence every church because men have worshipped there; to feel a touch upon the soul at the sight of a name carved on a tree, because human feeling is traced there; to hate war, because it means the extermination of men and the spoiling of men’s handiwork; to love human qualities in birds, beasts and things, as the fidelity of the dog, the playfulness and affection of the cat, the whimsicality of the parrot, the docility of the horse and cow, the water that babbles, the fire that talks and dances, the wind that sobs.

It means to be touched with pity at all human misfortune; to have a pang shoot through you when another’s finger is crushed; to shed tears when another’s heart is broken; to feel saddened at the thought of the many lives that are dull and hopeless; to take in one’s own mouth the misery of the multitude; to be shattered and rocked in the depths of the soul at the sight of a prison or a madhouse; to seek in one’s least words and ways to cheer and help any human being one may meet; to smile against the grain for another’s sake; to have an unconquerable aversion to causing pain, or even embarrassment; to avoid drawing attention to one’s own success before the unsuccessful, to one’s own talent before the ungifted, to one’s own health or beauty before the  diseased or ugly; to be insincere rather than unfeeling, so that one pretends mightily to enjoy the box of sweets a little child has given, though one inwardly detests them; to spare the feelings of   the washerwoman as readily as the feelings of the banker; to seek to set any one at ease who       approaches with shyness; when one asks the road to go with him a little way; to treat with respect all who wish to become acquainted; to be gracious even when in a surly mood; to listen patiently and interestedly to the egotist, the domineering and the opinionated, and to encourage the hesitant and diffident; to try to find some points upon which we can agree with every one; to shun all conflicts and seek all fellowships; to take some part in movements for the protection of   the weak, so that one helps do something in an organized way for the rights of children, of laborers, of criminals, of the crippled and the defective, of the common citizen against systematic plans to prey upon him.

To respect every human being and to despise none; to shrink from spoiling any man’s ideal or hope; to shun power and control over people and seek to serve and help people; to value a human soul above all moralities, religions or laws; and to esteem life greater than all institutions.

This it is to be just human.

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.)