More Great

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(The quality of greatness, explored in our entry for Dr. Frank Crane about a month ago, deserves exploration from a slightly different direction. We’re going to hearing of greatness a great deal in the next two months, so it’s appropriate we offer an additional perspective as Dr. Crane writes about—)

GREATNESS

The greatness of a man lies in his ability to interpret his age.

Such a man must have that rarest of traits and genius: he must instinctively feel his fellow men.

He is not a leader. The whole strong-man theory is a humbug. He is a servant.

The greatest man in the man who comes nearest to executing the will of the people. He is “servant of all,”

If he is a poet, he utters the word they dumbly feel.  If he is an artist, he bodies forth their impotent fancy. If he is a statesman, he materializes their political convictions. If he is an orator or a writer, he says what they all would say. Always behind him is the mass from which he draws his force.

It is this power of submerging one’s self in the current of others’ feeling that is the gift of greatness.

The lawyer is great who loses himself in the interests of his clisents.

The physician is great who gives himself up to his patients, serving the poorest of them as loyally as any subject ever served his king.

The teacher is great who is the exponent of his pupils, the expression of their intellectual curiosity, the will of their highest ambitions.

The workman is great who feels the profit of his employer, the care of his goods, and the perfecting of his work as if it were his own.

The merchant is great who senses his customers, divines their needs, ministers to their wants; and he is greater yet if he feels his responsibility to those he employs, if he is the personal embodiment of the activities of all his working force.

A president, a governor, a senator, a congressman, a mayor, is great if he knows his people; if their conscience is his conscience; if his voice is their thought; if their desires and ideals move his hand and brain.

Homer, Goethe, Voltaire, Shakespeare, spoke their time.

The great men are the manufacture of the people.

David, Caesar, Washington, Napoleon, these knew how to ride the crest of the multitudinous wave.

Even of Jesus no greater thing can be said than that He uttered the heart of all mankind.

Just the facts, ma’am*

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Well, we’ve endured two more political conventions, their tiresome tirades, their excessive exaggerations, their profound puffery, their ferocious flag-waving, their multiple misstatements, and sometimes their litany of lies.

We want to think those we root for in their pursuits of public office are pure in thought, word, and deed.  But we know better.  And we would be better if we were unafraid to challenge them, even those we support, when they mislead us.

One of the greatest responsibilities we have as citizens is to demand truth from those who seek our votes and our money. But experience shows we citizens fail to meet those responsibilities time after time.

It would be nice to say our candidates owe us their integrity.  But politics doesn’t work that way. Integrity often must be forced by those who are picking the men and women who will lead them.

So our conventions are finished. Dancing With the Candidates is down to the finals. Now it’s not Dancing with the Candidates.  It’s a World Wrestling Federation match. In the mud.

No, it isn’t.  It’s more real.

It’s a street fight until November 3. A sweaty, nasty, bloody, anything-goes brawl.

It’s too bad that we who want to be led will too much expect too little of those who want to lead.

One thing is abundantly clear after the conventions.  The busiest people in the country for the next few weeks will be:

Fact-checkers.

We should pay attention to them. We should know when the people who want to be (presumably) the most powerful person in the world aren’t shooting straight with us.  We should notice those who spout conspiracy theories—-and they seem to be more outlandish every day.  Watch out for those who say, “I have heard…” and those who, when challenged to prove their statements say, “I’ll let you know later.”

More than ever, this is a time to tell our candidates, “Prove it,” or because we’re Missourians, “Show me the proof.”

Conservative organizations are going to be especially watchful of liberal candidates. Liberal organizations are going to be especially watchful of conservative candidates.  We should pay attention to both of them.  We should pay attention to those doing their analysis from the middle. And in the end we should think for ourselves despite the plentitude of loud voices on our airwaves telling us they can think for us.  No, they can’t—unless we let them. Have enough citizen responsibility to think for yourself.

There will be carloads of commercials that wave at truth from a distance. Don’t believe them.

There already have been manipulated videos on our social media. Question them.  Better yet, turn off the social media except for person-to-person communication with people you know.

We’ll get all kinds of flyers in the mail that are not worth the postage that sent them.  Recognize them for what they are. Fill up your recycling bins with them.

It will be easy to throw up our hands, abandon our responsibilities to ourselves and to our neighbors, and just mark a ballot so we can say we voted.

Congratulations.  You just trashed your country. Or your state. Or your city.  You just put it in a big blue plastic container and rolled it out to the curb.

CARE, dammit!  Find the truth.  Demand the truth.

After two weeks of political conventions, it should be clear to all of us that we have a responsibility to reach beyond ourselves and understand who is most trustworthy in a time when truth too often takes a back seat to bombast, accusation, misrepresentation and conspiracies.

We won’t find absolute truth from either candidate at the top of our tickets or from some of their supporters. But we have a responsibility to ourselves and to our neighbors from coast to coast and border to border not to elect the biggest liar.  That’s an awful thing to say, isn’t it?  But it’s also the

Truth.

And we have to be honest with ourselves, for ourselves, to determine who that is. Sometimes that means traditional party loyalties have to give way to loyalties to something bigger. Increasingly, it means we have to get our noses away from the social media screens.

Keep up with the legitimate, established fact-checkers.  These campaigns will keep them up all night in pursuit of truths we haven’t heard from our candidates during the day.

Just the facts.  That’s all we should ask for. It’s all we should demand. There are reliable sources that will provide them because our candidates and their surrogates might not.

In a later entry we’ll try to recommend some fact-checking resources.

*Los Angeles Police Detective Joe Friday, badge number 714, the main figure in hundreds of police investigations dramatized on radio and television for decades, never said, “Just the facts, ma’am.”  Snopes.com, one of the longest-running reliable fact checking websites, says that the character typically said, “All we want are the facts, ma’am,” or “All we know are the facts, ma’am.”

Medical ink

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(The media took some not-unexpected bashing during the Republican National Convention last week. It bashed back by pointing out the numerous misleading and false claims that fell from the lips of various speakers. There also were misleading and false claims in the Democratic convention that were pointed out although one fact-checker said the challenged “truths” of the entire Democratic National Convention “didn’t have the number of misleading and false claims made on the first night of the Republican convention.” In a time when medical treatments for a terrible disease are almost desperately sought, and fact-checking has become more necessary in contemporary medical as well as political circles,  it might be time to turn to Dr. Frank Crane, a retired Presbyterian minister-turned-newspaper columnist whose writings were widely published a century ago when he referred to—-)

PRINTERS’ INK AS A MEDICINE

Printers ink is saving more lives than any other single agency employed by modern health-workers,” said Edward A. Moree, assistant secretary of the New York State Charities Aid Association, in an address at Rochester the other day.

Right for him!

Printers’ ink is the essential liquor of democracy. Kings hate it. All the manipulators of privilege dread it. It is poison to the tyrant of the Old World and the boss of the New.

It is the “sine qua non” of liberty. Liberty to human souls is what light is to human bodies.

Where there is no liberty there is darkness. Where there is darkness there is disease.

It is printers’ ink that has scared the food fakers. Only at a good round of printers’ ink will the vile, carrion flock of unclean birds that fatten on human credulity and ignorance take flight, they that sell plaster of Paris for bread, carpenter’s glue for candy, and God knows what vileness for fish, flesh, and fowl.

Printers’ ink has prevented more tuberculosis than all the doctors have cured. It has spread right ideas of sanitation, upset old mildewed superstitions, opened windows, lured people outdoors, flooded fearsome brains with truth and despairing hearts with hope.

It has built hospitals and supports them.

It has prevented epidemics, driven hush-mouth authorities to activity in remedial measures of cleansing. Cholera and smallpox were conquered by it; malaria and yellow fever flee before it.

It is all well enough to give an individual Epsom salts or calomel, but what the public needs for what ails it is plenty of printers’ ink.

There is some value in the medical profession, but also a deal of hocus-pocus, as there is in everything that becomes professionalized. The best part of the science of medicine is that part which can be told in plain language so that the common man can understand. Every newspaper ought to have its health department.

What people need to know is the truth about health, about food, and about simple living. The more truth they know the less drugs they will take, the less useless and harmful food they will eat, and the less they will run after religious cure-alls and crazy fads.

The newspaper is the health of the state.

“You may cure individuals of their ills in the privacy of the sickroom,” says Mr. Moree, “but to cure the public of its ills you must get into the newspapers.”

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If you want to read a more complete version of Moree’s feelings about health and newspapers, you can go online and find an article he wrote for The American Journal of Public Health, February, 1916. The article is “Public Health Publicity: The Art of Stimulating and Focusing Public Opinion.”  https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.6.2.97 He  also wrote on “Public Health and Politics.” https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/000271621606400114

 

 

The danger of finger-pointing

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Postmaster General Louis DeJoy was summoned to recent congressional committee meetings for what became a partisan public flogging or a partisan public head-patting because of the mess the current administration has put the United States Postal Service in at a critical time. Does he deserve such a flogging or congratulatory head-patting?

The correct answer is “yes,” largely depending on whether you are an R or a D.

The USPS does have problems but the timing of the correction and some of the justifications offered for it have created a climate of suspicion.  Last weekend, the Associated Press ran a lengthy fact-checking article that covered an entire page of our local newspaper. It looked at claims made during the Democratic National Convention by Joe Biden and claims made at various recent times by our president.  Part of the article examined President Trump’s claim that the post office “probably” loses “three or four dollars” on every package it delivers for Amazon. The AP says the truth is that package delivery is NOT the cause but something else is—and that’s where today’s observation fits.

The House has approved $25 billion for the Post Office to make sure it can operate at full speed during the election. Most Republicans opposed it (26 voted with the Democrats) and the bill has to get through the Republican-controlled Senate before the president can veto it—as he has indicated he will.

We have heard precious little discussion by either party in Congress or in the White House about fixing the real cause of USPS’s financial distress.

Long ago someone told me the danger of pointing a finger is that there are three fingers pointing back at you. A few days ago a retired mail carrier friend suggested I look at legislation passed in 2006 as the root cause of the turmoil that has engulfed today’s most visible but perhaps most under-appreciated public servants.

Last year, the Institute for Policy Studies, which bills itself as a “progressive think tank” (and please, let’s not dismiss these findings because it comes from somebody calling themselves “progressive,” another honorable word that has been ruined by raving talk show hosts) issued a study called “How Congress Manufactured a Postal Service Crisis—and How to Fix It.”  The opening paragraphs could not be more clear:

In 2006, Congress passed a law that imposed extraordinary costs on the U. S. Postal Service. The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) required the USPS to create a $72 billion fund to pay for the cost of its post-retirement health care costs, 75 years into the future. This burden applies to no other federal agency or private corporation.

If the costs of this retiree health care mandate were removed from the USPS financial statements, the Post Office would have reported operating profits each of the last six years. This extraordinary mandate created a financial “crisis” that has been used to justify harmful service cuts and even calls for postal privatization. Additional cuts in services and privatization would be devastating for millions of postal workers and customers.”

The study—you can read it on the internet—clearly states that the action of Congress in 2006 placed a burden on the Postal Service that is choking it. If that burden did not exist, we might not be in a crisis ripe for political exploitation because the USPS would be profitable.

Is it fair to blame the Trump administration for today’s postal service brouhaha? Perhaps better, is it fair to blame the administration for taking advantage of the mess Congress created to seek an advantage in this year’s election?  Strong Trump critics will say, “definitely.” Trump supporters are likely to accept the president’s finger-pointing at Amazon and its owner, Jeff Bezos who—as we noted last week—owns a Washington newspaper that aggressively challenges the truth of many Trump statements, as the reason for poor financial performance.

The law was passed when Bush 43 was President and both chambers of the Congress were Republican.  Today’s Republican administration appears to be trying to capitalize on the crisis created by a Republican Congress in an earlier Republican administration.  But it is unfair to put the problem entirely in the lap of the majority party.  Democrats controlled the Senate 2009-2015 and controlled the House 2007-2011 and did nothing to ease or eliminate the problem.

The reality is this: It makes no difference which party created the problem.  Both parties have a responsibility to correct it.  And reducing services instead of correcting bad policy enacted in 2006 is not the responsible step to take, particularly at a time when a worldwide health crisis will keep many voters at home on election day and wanting to use the mails to vote.

Some people on both sides of the aisle need to get their priorities straight.

But when a congressional blunder becomes a matter of seeking political advantage rather than seeking to correct a mistake that is now hampering a public service, correction might be an unrealistic hope absent change in partisan numbers or political attitude in Washington.

Here’s a suggestion:

Although it is too late to do anything now, write letters to your U.S. Senators and your member of Congress asking them to fix the crisis they or their predecessors caused.  We can be sure the letters will be delivered.  We wish we could be as sure that the right people will read them and act in your best interest and the best interest of the people who carried your letter to them.

Congress can point all the fingers it wants to point at somebody else. But it needs to be reminded that the number of fingers pointing at IT as the cause of this crisis is three times as many.

Congress caused the problem. Some of those who were there in 2006 will be expecting the United States Postal Service that they crippled fourteen years ago to put their campaign literature in your mail box telling you what good servants they have been.

It does not feel good in this election year to think the people who bring us that campaign mail have more commitment to service and more public integrity than the people whose mail they are delivering.

Today is what we have

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(By the end of the week our political conventions will have finished, each positively assuring us that the names at the top of the ballot will make us great or build us better, each speaking as if those candidates alone can do these things—as if there are not two other branches of government that could or must  have a say.  Dr. Frank Crane suggests that candidates and their parties and their promises are less important to us the we are to ourselves, not just today but—-)

EVERY DAY

Every day!

In those two words lies the secret of all attainment.

It’s not what we do once, with all our hearts, and with every splendid ounce of strength, that counts so much as the things we’ve been doing every day, whether we felt like it or not.

Every day! Therein is mastery.  The marvelous, velvet, utterly exquisite beauty of such piano-playing of Paderewski’s, or such violin performances as Maud Powell’s—it looks spontaneous but it is the result of many a hateful day’s laborious routine.

Every day! That is the road to perfection.  The speaker who can hold and charm an audience, the debater quick and ready and not to be confused, the baseball player, the woman always socially at ease—everybody, in fact, that can do anything well owes that poise and finish to the slow efforts of every day.

No matter how gifted an actor, how naturally endowed, he cannot be a master without infinite practice.

Young people do not realize the tremendous cumulative power that lies in time.  Take ten years. Say you are twenty. By the time you are thirty what enormous efficiency you might build up if you would only use every day a certain amount of time.

Almost everybody wastes enough hours in ten years to get a doctor’s degree in any university.

In ten years you might be speaking and reading fluently in Spanish or French or Japanese, you might be an authority upon geology, botany, chemistry, English literature, history, or whatever fits your ambition, if you would only be faithful every day.

Every day!  The universe is constructed on routine. The sun rises every day, the stars revolve, the seasons come and go by schedule, your heart beats and your lungs fill and empty as regularly as the clock ticks, every generation of men or of animals is the result of numberless preceding generations, over and over again Nature tries her hand and her matchless perfection is only the stored-up treasure of endless practice.

And in character every day means even more than anywhere else. The most honest man is the man who has been honest every day; the most virtuous woman is she who has behind her present virtue the inertia of a whole life full of virtuous thought and deed; the happiest person is the one who has long practiced being happy, and that soul is coolest and surest in a crisis who every day has schooled himself in self-mastery.

No force is so great in any man as the stored-up power of what he has been doing every day.

(Ignace Paderewski (pronounced Pad-er-efski’) was a Polish statesman, pianist, and composer who, as his country’s new Prime Minister and Foreign Minister signed the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I. He was a spokesman for Polish independence who, during a concert tour of the United States, encouraged President Wilson to support an independent Poland as part of the Fourteen Points discussions that led to the treaty. He was 81 when he died in 1941, about two years after Hitler ended Poland’s freedom.

Maud Powell was the first American woman to achieve worldwide notoriety as a violinist. She was among the first instrumentalists to record for the Victor Talking Machine Company’s red seal records, which later became the classical label for RCA Victor’s recordings. Her recordings are still considered a standard for violin performance. She died in 1920, at 52.)

 

 

Today is what we have

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(By the end of the week our political conventions will have finished, each positively assuring us that the names at the top of the ballot will make us great or build us better, each speaking as if those candidates alone can do these things—as if there are not two other branches of government that could or must  have a say.  Dr. Frank Crane suggests that candidates and their parties and their promises are less important to us the we are to ourselves, not just today but—-)

EVERY DAY

Every day!

In those two words lies the secret of all attainment.

It’s not what we do once, with all our hearts, and with every splendid ounce of strength, that counts so much as the things we’ve been doing every day, whether we felt like it or not.

Every day! Therein is mastery.  The marvelous, velvet, utterly exquisite beauty of such piano-playing of Paderewski’s, or such violin performances as Maud Powell’s—it looks spontaneous but it is the result of many a hateful day’s laborious routine.

Every day! That is the road to perfection.  The speaker who can hold and charm an audience, the debater quick and ready and not to be confused, the baseball player, the woman always socially at ease—everybody, in fact, that can do anything well owes that poise and finish to the slow efforts of every day.

No matter how gifted an actor, how naturally endowed, he cannot be a master without infinite practice.

Young people do not realize the tremendous cumulative power that lies in time.  Take ten years. Say you are twenty. By the time you are thirty what enormous efficiency you might build up if you would only use every day a certain amount of time.

Almost everybody wastes enough hours in ten years to get a doctor’s degree in any university.

In ten years you might be speaking and reading fluently in Spanish or French or Japanese, you might be an authority upon geology, botany, chemistry, English literature, history, or whatever fits your ambition, if you would only be faithful every day.

Every day!  The universe is constructed on routine. The sun rises every day, the stars revolve, the seasons come and go by schedule, your heart beats and your lungs fill and empty as regularly as the clock ticks, every generation of men or of animals is the result of numberless preceding generations, over and over again Nature tries her hand and her matchless perfection is only the stored-up treasure of endless practice.

And in character every day means even more than anywhere else. The most honest man is the man who has been honest every day; the most virtuous woman is she who has behind her present virtue the inertia of a whole life full of virtuous thought and deed; the happiest person is the one who has long practiced being happy, and that soul is coolest and surest in a crisis who every day has schooled himself in self-mastery.

No force is so great in any man as the stored-up power of what he has been doing every day.

(Ignace Paderewski (pronounced Pad-er-efski’) was a Polish statesman, pianist, and composer who, as his country’s new Prime Minister and Foreign Minister signed the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I. He was a spokesman for Polish independence who, during a concert tour of the United States, encouraged President Wilson to support an independent Poland as part of the Fourteen Points discussions that led to the treaty. He was 81 when he died in 1941, about two years after Hitler ended Poland’s freedom.

Maud Powell was the first American woman to achieve worldwide notoriety as a violinist. She was among the first instrumentalists to record for the Victor Talking Machine Company’s red seal records, which later became the classical label for RCA Victor’s recordings. Her recordings are still considered a standard for violin performance. She died in 1920, at 52.)

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Ode DeJoy

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(Not to be confused with Schiller’s poem and Beethoven’s composition setting it to music.)

I have a friend who delivered tons of mail in his forty-year career who has a simple answer to what’s going on with the Trump administration and the United States Postal Service: “It’s all Trump and Jeff Bezos.”  Bezos is the owner of Amazon. The President thinks the USPS should charge Amazon a lot more than it does to deliver Amazon’s packages. Bezos also owns the Washington Post which maintains one of the nation’s biggest and best-known fact-checking systems. It reported on July 13 that President Trump had given out more than 20,000 lies and misstatements since taking office. Our president does not like it when someone differs with him.

The Post doesn’t just target our president and it doesn’t just target Republicans. It recently jumped on Amy McGrath’s claim that Mitch McConnell made millions of dollars from China. McGrath is McConnell’s Democratic challenger for his U. S. Senate seat.

I have a friend who remembers when mailmen used to deliver census forms and then take the completed ones to the post office where they were kept until local census workers came in later in the process and determined which four percent of the residents had not replied—and then went out and started knocking on doors.

I have a friend who receives the Catholic Missourian, the weekly newspaper of the Jefferson City Diocese—although in the summer it comes out every two weeks, I understand. He usually receives it on Friday. But recently it arrived a day late. When he checked with the local post office he learned the newspapers had been brought in on Thursday for Friday delivery but the carriers had been told to wait until Saturday—part of the slowdown in service we’ve been hearing about.

For 250 years or so we have been spoiled by the service of postal carriers such as this fellow from about 1910, who have lived by a creed adapted from the writings of Herodotus in 430 B. C.:

It is said that as many days as there are in the whole journey, so many are the men and horses that stand along the road, each horse and man at the interval of a day’s journey; and these are stayed neither by snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness from accomplishing their appointed course with all speed.

We don’t expect much from our postal service.

—Bring us our mail faithfully.

—If we mail something on time, deliver it on time.

Easier said than done especially when there’s too much snow in our driveway for us to drive out.  But we nonetheless expect to find mail in our mailbox when we struggle through the snow on foot to get there.

Our postal service has become a political football or maybe a pawn in a campaign chess match.  Our president thinks mail-in balloting will be bad for him—-although Republicans can mail in their ballots as well as Democrats.  He’s balking at additional funding for the USPS that would pay for extensive use of mail-in ballots.  He has appointed a Postmaster General whose main qualifications for the job seem to be that he has given a lot of money to the Trump campaign.  Postmaster General Lous DeJoy started removing machines that sort 30-40,000 pieces of mail per hour, presumably to be replaced by machines that can sort 30,000 pieces of mail per MINUTE although we have yet to see any accounts of the new machines being on site and ready to install when the present machines are yanked.  The Kansas City Star says four machines have been taken out in Kansas City and two more in Springfield.

He also banned overtime and late trips by mail carriers, meaning mail not delivered during normal working hours will sit in the post office until the next day, at least—including prescription medications, checks, and other time-sensitive materials.

With those policies and changes, the Postal Service expressed doubts it could handle the volume of mail ballots it will get this year. The volume is expected to jump because an increased number of voters want to vote by mail instead of going to a polling place and increasing possible exposure to the Coronavirus. The announced changes came at an important time in our democratic process and have led to suspicions that our president is using them to limit the number of mail-in ballots that are not expected to go his way.

Suggestions that the postal service is incapable of handling the volume of mail-in ballots that will go into the system increase suspicions the system is being manipulated to affect the outcome of the November election. Under normal circumstances, there should be little doubt the USPS is capable of doing that job.  After all, these are the people who year after year process a Christmas mail load that is likely to be much heavier than the load of mail ballots.  My former mailman friend, who hauled a lot of Christmas presents in his time, finds the election concerns or allegations insulting.

Just as we were about to post this entry, DeJoy announced he was going to “suspend” several proposals that had been moving ahead until after the election.  His quick turn-around came only after twenty states announced they would sue him if he continued with his plans. Yesterday afternoon he said no more changes would be made until after the election “to avoid even the appearance of impact on election mail.”  He went on, “We will deliver the nation’s election mail on time.”

The states drawing up lawsuits are nonetheless wary. Forbes reported yesterday they still plan to file their lawsuits. It would be nice if we could tell you Missouri is one of the twenty states but, alas, we cannot.  In fact, it was not until the Kansas City Star contacted Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft and reported last Friday that he had received a letter from the USPS dated July 31 saying the service might not be able to deliver mailed absentee ballots in time for them to be counted because of DeJoy’s policies. The newspaper reported Ashcroft’s office did not appear to have told local election authorities about the letter.

If DeJoy thinks he has defused the controversy with his announcement yesterday, he is likely to be disabused of that notion Friday when he explains himself to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Although the committee is led by Republicans, he won’t be able to avoid anticipated sharp questions from Democrats. As we file these observations, the White House has not blocked his appearance.

Our president, who has supported DeJoy’s plans, has made a completely unproven case that mail-in voting will result in massive voter fraud if he loses. Unsubstantiated voter fraud allegations are a familiar theme to him. Four years ago he appointed former Kansas Secretary of State Chris Kobach to lead an investigation of massive voting fraud (mostly by illegal immigrants, as we recall) in the Northeast. Kobach couldn’t get a whiff of voter fraud.

“Voter fraud” has been a theme of the president’s party for several years.  It was voiced with great passion by supporters of Voter Photo ID legislation enacted in Missouri. Four years ago in this space, we reported looking at every statewide election from the August Primary of 2008 through the November, 2014 general election.  We compiled these statistics when we referred to Voter Photo ID legislation as a “solution in search of a problem.”  We found 18 prosecutions for voter fraud (17 of them in registrations) out of 36-million opportunities in Missouri, less than one for every two-million opportunities. We have heard of NO prosecutions by our Secretary of State for voter fraud since that post in May, 2016.

With a slight bow to fairness when it comes to Voter Photo ID in Missouri we observe that critics argued, as they argue now in the mail-in voting controversy, that the real reason these things are being advocated is to suppress voting by certain demographics that do not endorse the policies of the party in power.  Those critics have been pretty quiet since photo ID went into effect.  We have yet to see any trustworthy studies showing fears of voter suppression have come true because of Photo ID.

Regardless of whether you buy into our president’s unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud in mail-in ballots or into suspicions that our postal system is a campaign pawn, we citizens deserve a postal system that does the two simple things mentioned earlier. We citizens deserve and the people who bring us our mail every day deserve to be treated better than we are being treated by those in charge of our country.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is calling the House back from its August recess to pass a bill providing the funding needed to make sure the Postal Service can handle the election mail crush. We will suggest in our next entry that the roots of this mess were created fourteen years ago and  it would be good also for her chamber—and the Senate—to clean it up.

Before we go, we anticipate in a few days the first trickle of direct mail political crap arriving in our mail box.  It’s called junk mail because it is junk and it treats the people receiving it as junk. We offer this suggestion to the USPS:  Deliver the newspaper on time to our Catholic friends and delay the political junk mail.

November 4 would be a good day to deliver it.

(About the dedicated mail carrier whose photograph you saw above: We don’t know for sure but we suspect it is a staged picture taken on his first day of work about 1910. Robert Milton Priddy, Sr.,–friends knew him by his middle name—was a rural mail carrier in the Beloit, Kansas area for more than 25 years. He died at the age of 57, three years before his grandson was born.)

Swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath

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(The Kingston Trio, the folk singing group of the 60s, had a song called “The Merry Minuet” that seemed to capture our times.  Some of the lyrics go:

The whole world is festering with unhappy souls
The French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles
Italians hate Yugoslavs, South Africans hate the Dutch
And I don’t like anybody very much!!

I refer to this condition euphemistically as “being in a state of high urinary agitation.” Everybody seems to be in that state these days and social media is a prime purveyor.  We know we’re going to become increasingly agitated as November 3 nears.  This seems like a good time to see what Dr. Frank Crane thinks about—-)

ANGER

There is no use telling you, son, not to get angry; nu use telling you any red-blooded man that.

Indignation is a natural flame that spurts up in the mind, upon certain occasions, as surely as gasoline explodes at a lighted match.

All I say is—Wait!

Don’t do anything till your heat is gone. Don’t say words, nor pass judgments, until your brain has cooled down.

For most anger is the irritation of offended vanity.

We think a lot of our opinion, and when one sneers at it, it is as if he threw mud on our white duck trousers.

We have a high notion of the respect due us, and when it is intimated that we are nobody we want to smash something to show we are somebody.

We are never angry, save when our pride is hurt.

Anger is self-esteem on fire.

So, flare up, if you must, swear and break the furniture; it may do you good. But go up to your room to indulge in this relief, lock the door, and stay there until the stork blows over.

Never write a letter while you are angry. Lay it aside. In a few days you can come back at your offender much more effectively.

Don’t transact business in heat.  When you are “mad clean through” it is your sore egotism that is operating, and acts prompted by egotism are usually ridiculous. Hang up the matter for a few days, and come to it again when your intelligence is not upset by your feelings.

One of the bet things to say is nothing. When you answer a man he gets your measure; when you keep still you have him guessing.

The cool man, who has himself under control, always has the advantage offer the hot man.

Even if you have to lick a man you can do much better if your head is clear of anger fumes. Wrath may lend a little extra punch to your blows, but self-control will plant them to better effect.

Anger dulls your efficiency. What you do goes wild. You have a lot of energy, but no accuracy.

Anger dims your eye. You see vividly, but what you see is not so.

Anger makes chaos in your thoughts. You are a crazy man. What you think in the egotism of anger you will pay for in the humiliation of saner moments.

Few good deeds have been done in anger, while all manner of crimes are due to the intemperance of wrath, such as blows, murders, and war, “the sum of all villainies.”

The first and greatest lesson for you to learn, son, is to control your temper and if your nature is touchy, to resolve to take no action until the blood is cooled.

Us vs. It—Part XI, Reasons to Act

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I bought something from the internet the other day—a photograph from a company that sells archived news photos from decades ago.  No sales tax was charged by the company, which is in a nearby state.

The purchase is a reminder.

If the state needs money—and it surely does—

There is no better time to finally approve collecting a sales tax on purchases made through the internet.

The Missouri General Assembly has gone to great lengths to avoid enacting such a requirement for a decade or more. It has refused to create a collection policy of our own and it has rejected suggestions Missouri join a multi-state compact that collects sales taxes.

Past efforts have been attacked by those who use a faulty argument to avoid the responsibility needed to enact the bill.  “It’s a tax increase,” opponents claim.

Dishwater!

The state sales tax is not—let me emphasize that, NOT—being increased. If the law requiring the state sales tax be paid on purchases on the internet were to pass, the state tax you and I pay when we buy from an internet vendor would be the same as the tax charged when we buy from a hometown business. I should be able to duck a citizen responsibility to contribute to the well-being of others by buying something through the internet.

The argument in favor of an internet sales tax is even more compelling in today’s plague-mangled economy.  Hundreds of local businesses have closed because of stay-at-home orders. Many have not reopened and some never will reopen.  But one of our neighbors (yours and mine) who owns a brick-and-mortar business knows that customers who used to buy things at that store have been buying them on the internet while the store has been closed.

The problem of local folks visiting stores, checking the prices, and then buying the same thing from an internet vendor already was a problem before virus-caused closings forced consumers to increasingly rely in the internet.  Now the question becomes whether they will go back into the hometown stores when they open?

Passing a law requiring Missourians to pay the same sales tax on internet items that they have to pay for local in-store purchases is more symbolic than profitable for the merchant.  But at the same time, promoting the reopening of brick-and-mortar businesses without taking a step that offers a slight whiff of equality with internet vendors seems pretty inconsistent (although you might have a stronger word).

The need to do this has been increased by an executive order signed by our president that he says will resume the expired supplemental unemployment payments.  The executive order will pay $400 but the states will have to contribute $100.

The legality of the executive order aside, Missouri’s general revenue fund needs every penny it can generate whether for supplemental unemployment payments, virus-fighting efforts or maintaining services even at their reduced levels.

Our state leaders have insisted time after time that testing is the key to controlling the Coronavirus in Missouri.  At this point, it’s anyone’s guess whether Congress and our president can agree on a stimulus package that will include billions of dollars for state testing. Lacking that, it’s hard for someone well detached from the ins and outs of the statehouse these days to imagine where the state will find money for that testing without further wrecking the state budget, let alone where it will find money for its share of unemployment payments without the same result.

Where the state of Missouri would find $100 multiplied by several thousand each week is a troubling question.  The governor already has withheld or vetoed hundreds of MILLIONS dollars to balance the state budget.  Schools are opening and education at all levels has been badly bruised by the necessary budget actions. Inflicting deeper cuts to the biggest places to cut, education and social services, could be tragic at a time when schools, in addition their normal expenses, have to face the costs of keeping students, faculty, and staff safe from the virus.

By making Joe or Josephine Missouri pay the same sales tax on a coat from a Internet Inc., as Sarah and Samuel Showme have to pay for the same coat from a Main Street store, Inc., Missouri’s leaders and lawmakers can send a little positive message to the businesses they want to reopen despite health uncertainties at home by collecting needed funds from consumers who want to avoid a few pennies in sales tax by buying online.

The virus has produced all the justification needed to finally impose an internet sales tax. It won’t entirely solve the state’s financial problems. But it could at least partly equalize the competition for the local dollar, provide at least some of the funding for the state’s contribution to the supplemental jobless benefit, and/or ease the depth of any additional budget cuts or withholdings.

Unfortunately, this is a campaign year and candidates will stampede away from advocating anything that can be called, however erroneously, a tax increase no matter how desperate the virus causes the state to be for additional funds. Perhaps we’ll have to wait until January to see if those whose political futures have been determined by then will screw up the courage to take this step.

Great

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(One of the most mis-used words in our vocabulary is “great.”  It is thrown around cheaply—from the sports announcers who constantly refer to a “great play” to a cartoon tiger that proclaims a sugary breakfast cereal is “grrrrreat” to those who proclaim greatness for themselves or for others in this campaign year.  Dr. Frank Crane’s century old words give us some guidance in this year when “great” is easily abused about what to look for in—)

THE GREAT MAN

The great man feels with the people, but does not follow them.

He maintains his independence of thought, no matter what public opinion may be.

He is quiet. He does not strive nor cry out.

He knows and trusts the cosmic spiritual forces and is not impatient.,

He thinks clearly, he speaks intelligently, he lives simply.

His ethics are of the future, not traditional and of the past, nor conventional and of the present.

He always has time.

He despises no human being, nor any other creature.

He impresses you much as the vas silences of nature impress you, as the sky, the ocean, the desert.

He has no vanity. Seeking no praise, he is never offended. He always has more than he thinks he deserves.

He is teachable, and will learn even from little children. He is not anxious to teach others,

He is not welcome in any sect, cult, or party, for he is more desirous of understanding than of opposing the other party.

He is rarely elected to anything.

He works for the joy of it, not the wages.

He cannot retaliate, for he cannot descend to the level of them that love to do harm.

He lives in a certain self-sufficient aloofness, so that your raise or blame does to seem to reach him.

Yet his isolation is warm, and not cold.

He is keenly alive to human relationships and influences. He loves. He cares. He suffers. He laughs.

When you find him it is as if you had found are real human being among myriads of animals. All of the simple, strong qualities of the normal soul shine in him, with no pettiness.

You feel that what you have, such as your money or position, is nothing to him, only what you are; and that if he likes you it will be not at all of anything you do, say or pay, but for what your soul is within you.

He is not deceived by the two arrant humbugs of the world, Success and Failure.

He changes his opinion easily, when he sees his error. He cares not for consistency, which is the fetish of little minds, but for truth, which is the sum of great souls.

He believes that every man comes at last unto his own, and is not impatient.

Bitterness, cynicism, and pessimism, which are tempers of pettiness, he has not; but love, cheer, and hope abound in him, for these are always the by-products of greatness.

When you love him, you yourself become great; for there can be no greatness that is not the cause of greatness in others.