Post-Thanksgiving Gratitude

O

ver the centuries, Thanksgiving has gradually become America’s official we-are-lucky-to-be-where-we-are-and-what-we-are-today celebration.  There are millions of reasons – literally – for this exceptional phenomenon. Yet those reasons come packaged in so many combinations and permutations that it would take a Cray supercomputer to calculate their number and composition.

If this sounds like hyperbole, consider this:  Where else in the world in the last 400 years have so many people gravitated?  Yes, we have shortcomings; plenty of them – both individually and as a nation – but where else have so many of the world’s wretched come for relief and for an opportunity to start over again?

The answers are self-evident and need no further articulation.  Everybody on this globe knows where in the Western Hemisphere lies that great land of freedom nestled between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. 

Enormous problems confront America today: 

There is the comatose economy, much of it brought on by our own man-made internal political intransigencies. 

There is that seemingly never-ending war on two fronts – one being waged in the open, the other largely clandestine – in Afghanistan and Pakistan; and we are opening a third front in Yemen to choke out the roots of radical Islamic Jihad.  

Within our own boundaries we are getting besieged by a similar home-grown terrorist threat conceived by organized cells or by lone American citizens with problematic allegiance, motivated by the same ideology.

Despite those daunting challenges, it’s still a good time to count not only our individual blessings, but also our national ones.  I remain an optimist about the U.S. and am – most of all – grateful that it welcomed my mom and dad from our friendly neighbor to the north.

I know what it means to be a first-generation immigrant whose parents labored under the most dreadful of economic conditions – worse than those of today – as they raised a family whose offspring sought education, employment and opportunity. 

Somehow, we pulled through; and we never looked back. 

Thanks America.  We love you.

Angel Time at the Bridgewater Commons Mall

At about 10:30 AM, two days before Thanksgiving Day, at a time when the Mall was quietly anticipating the crush of Black Friday, Sally, who works on the Mall’s staff, was busy hanging holiday wish cards on the Salvation Army Angel Tree.  

Sally hangs wishes on the Angel tree

There are two such trees at the Mall.  The one that Sally was working on is located on the lower level, in a walkway about half the distance between the new California Pizza Kitchen restaurant and the huge Christmas tree in the atrium at Center Court:  That’s where Santa is doing his job, greeting all of the parents and children.

The second Angel Tree is displayed just outside of Macy’s, on the mid-level of the Mall.  You can’t miss it.  Both trees are now completely festooned with lights, decorations and those precious wish cards which represent as diverse a cross-section of this area’s needy as you could imagine.  

The other tree on the mid-level near Macy's

 Those 
 Angels are of all ages, size, gender, and color – just like you and me.  Yet they all share a common trait.  They would like someone to pick up one of those tags, read about them, and make a wish come true. 

Your task, should you choose to accept it, is very easy:  Each one of those Angel tags bearing a wish shows the person’s first name; age; gender; clothing size if appropriate; or that person’s other gift desire.  

Gift drop-off box, mid-level, Guest Services, Center Court

All you need to do is to purchase the wished-for gift, affix the  person’s tag on it,  and bring it unwrapped to the Guest Services Desk located on the Second Level, Center Court.  There you will find a big red box awaiting you.  Done!

Go ahead.  Be an Angel yourself!

The Campaign and the Presidency

There is an ocean of difference between waging a campaign studded with promises of hope and change and delivering on those promises.

There were many commitments made to the American people during Obama’s candidacy.  In the race for the 2008 presidential prize, I zeroed in on the one which I felt 100% certain that he would not deliver on if elected:  His commitment to begin the drawdown of American troops from Afghanistan by July, 2011.

Don’t ask me about all of my reasons why, because I could write an interminable essay on it, but the single most important point of skepticism is that he was expressing an idealistic point of view upon which I felt certain that he simply would miss the mark. 

In his recent book, “Obama’s Wars,” Bob Woodward telegraphed President Obama’s intent to extend the Afghanistan timeline when he wrote that the president would reveal a new strategy by December 2010.  Right on schedule, Mr. Obama now says that we are there until at least 2014.

What Mr. Obama did not explain is just what the end game is and how much it will cost us in more lives and treasure.  

American soldiers are being undermined by the inept leadership of Afghanistan’s puppet President Hamid Karzai who cares more about his personal security and precarious political position.  

The man hunkers down in the capital city of Kabul, the only part of Afghanistan over which he holds any degree of control, thanks to American delivered protection.  He is unsafe in his own country and shuns travel to his subjects outside of Kabul for that reason.

In gratitude, Karzai hampers U.S. military operations by demanding rules of engagement for our troops which endanger their lives.

 Meanwhile, his counterpart over the border in Pakistan refuses to grant American requests to extend the strike zone of U.S. drones in that country.  This further endangers American lives and reduces the chances of neutering key Jihadist killers who may gravitate to undeclared safe havens in Pakistan.

While speaking of his Afghanistan timeline extension, Mr. Obama did not specify the billions more which will be wasted on nation building projects in both of those countries, as the U.S. tries to drain its own economic swamp where those dollars could be put to better use.  This country can’t do it all for everybody else, especially for the ungrateful.

OK!  I know.  This is not the cheeriest of messages just a few days before Thanksgiving.  I promise the next post will be lighter, but some things need saying.

Thanks for reading.  Have a good week and remember, stay engaged.

IN REMEMBRANCE:  Forty-seven years ago today in 1963, our young President John F. Kennedy was gunned down while on a campaign tour in Dallas, Texas.  Also on this day, C.S. Lewis, the famed author of The Chronicles of Narnia, passed away of natural causes.

He Thought His Words Would Not be Remembered

On a Friday long ago, a significant event happened on the fields of Pennsylvania that passed by largely unobserved.  It was a short commemorative address delivered November 19, 1863, and it lasted only a few minutes. 

The man who spoke outdoors that day on the battlefields at Gettysburg didn’t think that anyone would ever remember what he said. He wasn’t even the main speaker and he uttered only 271 words.

His handwritten notes were part of a ceremony to dedicate the bloody earth upon which thousands of American youth from the North and the South fell in what would prove to be the decisive battle of the American Civil War.

Below are a few words culled from those of Abraham Lincoln, one of our greatest presidents, who delivered the Gettysburg Address 87 years after the American Revolution of 1776.  It began with:

“Four score and seven years ago…

We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation [America] might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. . .

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.”

On that day in November 1863, Lincoln was convinced that his nation had been waging the right struggle to hold together the nascent American Republic, despite the enormous loss of life. 

Today, in 2010, can we be as confident that it is worth the price of American blood to support the political and military systems of corrupt regimes in regions half-way around the world whose leaders and citizens don’t give a fig about the American system of values?

“Obama’s Wars”

I recently finished reading Bob Woodward’s latest book, Obama’s Wars.  The use of the plural in the title suggests to the reader that Woodward is about to discuss both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.  But that’s not the case.  Woodward concentrates solely on Afghanistan. Iraq is nothing but a necessary reference, if not a distant memory.

Perhaps the most striking feature of Woodward’s 416-page work is the incredible access which this man has to the highest levels of elected, appointed and military policy makers within Washington’s Beltway, including the President.  As I paged through his work, that point comes through clearly, and I don’t think it’s a good thing: 

It puts Woodward in the position of being far too powerful as a sole-source filter and disseminator of insider information, much of which is classified.  The reason is simple:  No one can determine whether or not the distillation of the information which he presents to the reader is without bias, despite his impressive credentials.

There is also a potential conflict-of-interest related to his other position as an associate editor at The Washington Post.  For example, information from secret reports on wartime strategy was leaked to Woodward for his book and was also published in the Post.

Woodward’s writing in Obama’s Wars is highly documented, but the names of well-placed, unidentified sources from which he obtains much of his material is not available to readers.  

Other previously published sources are meticulously outlined in chapter notes.  Yet most of Woodward’s critical information and description of the relationships between major players seems to have been derived from what Woodward acknowledges as “primarily from background interviews and firsthand sources.”

According to journalistic protocol, those background sources cannot be identified by name, so that makes it possible for an author to construct a composite picture from interviews and to present it in such a way that pits one character in the drama against another.  There is much of this type of reporting in Obama’s Wars.  So which characters do you believe?

I recommend reading this book, but only with a highly critical eye (and not before bedtime!). 

Kristallnacht, the Beginning of a Terrifying Nightmare

Seventy-two years ago to this day, the Nazi regime under Adolph Hitler instigated riots all over Germany against its Jewish citizens.  When it was all over hundreds of synagogues had been ransacked, many destroyed, and at least 267 of them set on fire. 

The fury of the mobs was also let loose on thousands of Jewish businesses and homes throughout Germany and parts of Austria, where sledgehammers were taken to Jewish property.  The broken glass which littered the streets gave this – the beginning of the Jewish Holocaust – its name Kristallnacht, “night of the broken glass”

A swell of anti-Semitic sentiment had been gradually building up prior to the night of November 9, 1938, but it was the killing of a German diplomat by a 17-year old German-born Jew, Herschel Grynzpan, which became the pretext for this organized assault against Judaism:

Herschel’s parents had been deported to Poland, together with thousands of other Jews of Polish origin, despite the fact that by the 1920’s, "most German Jews were fully integrated into German society as German citizens."

That night of state-sponsored terror would become the formal beginning of years of nightmarish oppression, starvation, and abuse that European Jews would endure. 

It would not stop until Allied troops put an end to World War II, finally liberating the concentration camps and ending the persecutions that we now know of as The Holocaust.

This gives every rational-thinking American pause to consider what would happen to Jews in the Middle East, if anti-Semites like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had their way.

Gotcha! Speed Cameras Rake in Cash, Irk Drivers

The use of speed cameras is one of the hottest topics when it comes to its proven ability to catch drivers flat-footed, blasting through a red light pedal to the metal.

That’s why, in my current visit to the Washington area, an article in the Metro section of the Washington Post captured my attention.  According to columnist Petula Dvorak, the main justification that authorities use to install speed cameras is that they reduce accidents and fatalities “in school and construction zones as well as traffic trouble spots that have been known to maim and kill.” 

In Montgomery County, MD, officials highlight their effectiveness in reducing infractions by pointing out that in the first few years after they were installed, collisions have gone down by 30% in those locations.

But there is another hot-button rationale:  These innocent looking units hanging atop cross beams at intersections and mounted on vertical poles by the side of the road are astonishingly effective money-making machines.

Montgomery County has been dubbed “the speed camera capital of [this] region.” The number of cameras installed here grew from about twelve in 2007, to 109. 

Net Result:  In 2009, the county pulled in just under $21,000,000.

No, I have not mistakenly thrown in too many zeroes!  (Just imagine how much dough these digital wonders would generate for Bridgewater, if strategically placed along a few key roads and at intersections within our township.) 

However, they come with another cost, one with which Montgomery County officials are apparently OK.  These cameras have infuriated enough drivers in this area to the extent that a viral hatred for these tricksters has grown, and motorists have taken to ingenious ways of temporarily disabling them.  

Dvorak writes that they have been “cut down, torched, painted, silly-stringed, paint-balled, foiled by a simple Post-It note over the lens and repeatedly capped with Styrofoam cups and boxes.”

Just presenting the facts! 

Have a good weekend.  Thanks for reading and don’t forget:  Stay engaged.

Just One of those Things?

Not only did he sweep into office on the commitment of hope and change, but his charisma with millions of admirers seemed like the beginning of a long romance, one which would be cemented into an enduring and prosperous marriage with the American public.

Yet the honeymoon turned quarrelsome almost from the beginning and, if the polls are correct, some people in the wedding party may want a change in the family.  

When I thought about the developments of the last two years, the lyrics of an old Cole Porter song delivered by the Chairman of the Board came to mind.  As I began humming its melody today, one of the stanzas seemed appropriate no matter what the outcome of today’s elections:

“If we'd thought a bit about the end of it
When we started painting the town
We'd have been aware that our love affair
Was too hot not to cool down.”

The fallout from that torrid affair several years ago is now spilling all over the political landscape and into the lives of millions of ordinary Americans at home, as well as into those of U.S. men and women fighting in far off lands. 

The collective hope of many and the promise of harmonious change that emanated from the campaign speeches of Barack Obama now seem like a distant clarion call. Change did occur, but it has left millions badly bruised and has produced too many casualties.

If meaningful results aren’t produced, it could be:

 “So good-bye, dear, and amen
Here's hoping we meet now and then
It was great fun
But it was just one of those things.”

Americans are a patient and forgiving people, but only if they know that its leaders are genuinely moving in the right direction.