show it as it is

There has been some discussion over the past few months about what should and should not be shown and reported from the battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan. It started during the Bush administration -- those clowns who started the misguided, irresponsible, disastrous war in Iraq. Remember? Do not show pictures of flag-draped coffins carrying dead Americans returning home. The Bushies didn't want Americans knowing that war causes death. Then there was an uproar over the publication of an American soldier who died during combat. Some American newspapers published it. Some didn't. Many Americans screamed in protest.
I bring this up because I heard Robert Siegel on National Public Radio discuss reaction to a report by Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, which included the sound of Taliban militants shooting at the Marines and Afghan soldiers, their return fire and the moment when one of the Americans, Lance Corporal Alejandro Yazzie, was shot and killed.
Siegel reported that Nelson's report upset several listeners, including one who asked: "How could you air the actual incident? As a former Army captain who served as a social worker in the military and currently counsels combat veterans, I can't tell you how wrong that was on so many levels." Siegel added that the listener added that "The American public has no right to share in that moment."
Not everybody agreed. Siegel added another listener who said, "Considering the fact that most Americans have no idea what is involved in being a member of the military, combat reporting from the front is more essential now than ever."
I agree. We have been fighting two wars now for more than eight years and I can guarantee there is a very large portion of Americans who are totally unaware of the wars.

I agree with words as I do with pictures, if Americans see and read and hear what is actually happening on the battlefield, they might start to look at what is happening with different eyes. We have been fighting two wars with Americans not in uniform having no idea what the hell is happening. And I venture to say a very large portion of Americans are even oblivious of the fact that there are wars going on. And of those who are aware of the wars, how many know that to date, at least 4,378 Americans have been killed in Iraq and 1,003 have been killed in Afghanistan. More than 20,000 Americans have been wounded in these wars. And that's only counting the Americans. How many civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan are we killing in an effort to save them?

There is a price to pay for war and it is a lot more costly than dollars and equipment. It is lives and limbs and sight and senses and mental capacities and marriages and families. And for all those flag-draped coffins that come home there are far more empty minds and half bodies and blown-apart lives and shattered families. And so many of us are so unaware. And our government and the people who complain about the publication of the truth and reality of war would like us to stay ignorant about the realities of war.

So, while you enjoy your American Idol and your Olympics and your Sarah Palin and you weep over your Tiger Woods, you better also know that your American soldier is getting his leg blown off. And you better know that you sent him there because you approved of his going there because you thought it was a good idea that he go there because somebody told you it was a good idea for some good reason for some war that had a purpose and was going to accomplish something or other. And what's on TV tonight?

For Beer and Jeans

This is a song that was sung at the Grammys last night. Maybe I am seeing too much into it. Maybe I am too sensitive about war. See, there is a verse that disturbed me. Here it is:

I thank god for my life
And for the stars and stripes
May freedom forever fly, let it ring
Salute the ones who died
And the ones that give their lives, so we don't have to sacrifice
All the things we love

There is an eight-line chorus that is repeated five times:

You know what I'm a chicken fried
A cold beer on a Friday night
A pair of jeans that fit just right
And the radio up

Well I've seen the sunrise
See the love in my woman's eyes
Feel the touch of a precious child
And know a mother's love

Yes, thank god for those who die so that we don’t have to give up our cold beer and fried chicken and jeans that fit just right. And, yes, do it for the stars and stripes and old glory. And salute those who died. Should make them feel much better. Meanwhile, the peace man -- you know, that guy in the White House who won the Nobel Peace Prize who sent a whole lot of American warriors to Afghanistan – yeah, him, the president of the United States is overseeing the deaths of those we salute so we continue to enjoy our fried chicken, cold beer and jeans that fit. While actions in the name of the United States continue to kill civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. So that we don’t have to sacrifice all the things we love.

Maybe I’m reading too much into this song.

I am writing this on Feb. 1, 2010. So far, 31 Americans have been killed in Afghanistan. Another 20 coalition military personnel have been killed so far this year. The total after seven years in Iraq stands at 4,375 American of a total 4,693 coalition forces.

In 2007, U.S. beer consumption was 6.7 billion gallons, according to the National Association of Convenience Stores.

feral thoughts

We can all get along here.
That quote has been on my mind lately, but it might surprise you why. That was Rodney King in 1992 appealing for peace after days of riots in Los Angeles.
So, why have I been thinking about that quote lately – here in 2010 in Humboldt County, while feeding feral cats. OK, stay with me.
I volunteer with a group of dedicated people who take turns feeding feral cats all over our community. I feed on Sundays and Mondays. I am joined by my wife, Susan, and Carole and Cynthia and Tammy and there are many others and those that I named do so much more – with Bless the Beasts, the Humane Society, Miranda’s and other organizations that help with animals that are lost, abandoned, injured, mistreated or in other ways require assistance. While feeding, we also attempt to trap so that the cats can be spayed and neutered and some may even be adopted.
Susan and I feed at the tracks off of Commercial Street near the waterfront where the trains are. We have been doing it for years now and have gotten to know the cats and we know the newcomers and have given them names. Fluffy is a regular. We notice that Fluffy has a regular companion and they are almost always together, living and eating under one set of train cars, while on the other side, another set of cats appear to have taken up residence and prefer to eat on what I have taken to calling the Mezzanine. These two sets of cats seldom mix. Recently, two new cats have appeared on the Mezzanine – a very small coal black kitten I have yet to name and a tabby with what appears to be a bad left eye that has been very protective of the black kitten. I call the tabby Hissy because he hisses ferociously at me even while I am presenting him with his food. Hissy and the black kitten are always together. Not all the cats show up every time I feed and Hissy and the black kitten have gone missing entire weekends only to show up the following weekend. The most I have seen in one day is eight cats.
And then there are the visitors. Raccoons. Many times only one will appear. A few times there have been three and several times there have been two. I will try to divert the raccoons with a small pile of dry cat food so they will leave the cats alone. There have been times when the raccoons have appeared and the cats on the ground level have scattered across the way and joined the cats on the Mezzanine level.
The cats have a lot of train cars to hide under and in and around and I often see them as I drive in. They see the car come in and they run to follow it to the spot where I usually feed. They know the chow wagon has arrived. One time, as I drove in, I looked in the rearview mirror and three cats were running behind me.
Oh, yeah, the quote.
One day, as I drove in, I looked in the rearview mirror, and there were two cats following me, running alongside a raccoon – the three of them, running together behind the car to get to the chow wagon.
Another day, as I was feeding the cats, the raccoon appeared. He saw me and I motioned to him to go to the spot where I usually dropped a pile of dry food for him and then went to the car to scoop up a bunch. I dropped it beside the train and the raccoon came up from under the train, looked up at me and started pawing the food into his mouth, all the while watching me. I checked on the cats on the ground and they went back to eating. I crossed the way and gave food to the cats on the mezzanine. When I turned around I saw three cats and one raccoon all eating together. The raccoon had left his pile of dry food and joined the cats with their food and the cats just moved over one dish and continued eating.
And I thought about Rodney King’s quote: “We can all get along here.” And I thought about the rest of what he said that day: “We can get along here … we’re all stuck here … let’s try to work it out.”

Looking Back

Looking Back
I have often been accused of spending too much time looking back, reminiscing, bringing up the “good ol’ days.” It’s not that I don’t enjoy good today days and good today friends and today experiences. I posted on August 7, 2009, a poem I had written many years ago titled The Good Ol’ Days that touched on this subject a bit.
But, sometimes the good ol’ days come at you suddenly and without warning. It was just before the big shake here in Eureka that my wife thought I was having a heart attack. I was sitting at the computer and she was in the other room when she heard me yell. She thought I was in pain. I wasn’t. I had just received an email from someone I had not heard from in 43 years. And it wasn’t just any someone. It was M/Sgt Elton Britton, the man who had formed and directed the Cam Ranh Choraleers, the choir I sang with while stationed in Cam Ranh Bay Air Base in Vietnam from 1966 until 1967. It was a wonderful experience. The Ed Sullivan Show sent a crew to Vietnam to film us for the Ed Sullivan Christmas Show that aired Dec. 18, 1967 – a show I have yet to see. I have been trying for years to get a copy of that tape or to hear from somebody from the choir. Then, just before our house and the rest of Humboldt County, started shaking, up pops this email from Sgt. Britton.
And that’s one of the joys of enjoying spots in the past. If looking back into our past is such a sin, why do we take pictures? Why do we keep diaries? Why do we jot down notes? Why do we collect souvenirs? We have a thing with numbers – 10s and 50s. We like to look back at the year in pictures, the decade in the news, what happened 50 years ago. Fifty years ago – 1960 – I met the girl at San Rafael High School who became my first love. And I still keep in touch with her.
But 1960 was much more for all of us alive at that time: The Kennedys – John, Bobby, Teddy, Jacqueline, Ethel – Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, Angela Davis. It was racial tensions, moon landings, assassinations, Vietnam, hippies, Woodstock, sexual revolution, Timothy Leary, LSD. And so much more.
I have copious notes about the three years I spent at military school between the ages of 13 and 15. The school is putting together its 140th anniversary special to be published in May and is asking for contributions. My memories came in handy. Believe me, not all those notes will be printable. But I am glad I kept those notes. I am glad I delved into the past. And maybe I’ll do more with them. Maybe not.
I had a wife who told me that her previous husband made her throw away all of her pictures and memorabilia of her previous friends when she got married. I thought that was terrible. I would never make such a request and would never bow to such a request. Those memories are part of our lives. The friends we had are part of our lives. They shouldn’t be thrown away except by choice.
I have my memories, but I also have my todays and tomorrows. I have choir rehearsal tomorrow.

Decapitated Jesus

Here is one of my favorite Christmas stories.
I was in Switzerland and Helena and I had gone to Lausanne to take in a performance of Verdi’s Nabucco. We were having dinner at a restaurant down the street from the theatre and during dinner Helena’s phone rang. It was her 9-year-old son Jeremy. He was distraught. Jeremy had some very bad news to tell his mother, but he had to be honest and he had to tell her.
“What is it, Jeremy,” Helena asked, her voice rising with concern.
I could not hear Jeremy’s side of the conversation, but what he told her was that he had been playing with his basketball in the house and the ball went into the crèche.
“Oh, no, Jeremy, what happened to the crèche?” Helena asked her son.
The ball knocked Jesus’s head off.
Oh, God, I thought, Jeremy decapitated Jesus.
I only heard Helena’s side of the conversation, in which she admonished Jeremy that he wasn’t supposed to be playing with the ball in the house and then she tried to tell Jeremy that maybe it could be fixed.
Then she said, “Jeremy it’s not good to have a Jesus without a head.”
Helena was being serious and sincere, but the comment and the way it sounded blew me away. I covered my mouth and laughed out of control and repeated soto voce, “Jeremy, it’s not good to have a Jesus without a head.”
Poor Helena was looking at me lose control and she was trying desperately to maintain her composure and was stifling a laugh. I heard her say, “No, Jeremy, I’m not crying. It’s ok. No, I’m not laughing.”
I tried. I really did.

Some Words to Consider

Some Words To Consider

As President Obama prepares to address the nation – and the world – to lay out his strategy toward Afghanistan, it would help to look back at a recent Bill Moyers show in which he looked back at Vietnam and the thought processes that President Lyndon Johnson went through at the time. The transcript of the program, which consisted almost entirely of audio tapes, is at:
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/11202009/transcript1.html

But, Moyers concluded with:

Now in a different world, at a different time, and with a different president, we face the prospect of enlarging a different war. But once again we're fighting in remote provinces against an enemy who can bleed us slowly and wait us out, because he will still be there when we are gone.

Once again, we are caught between warring factions in a country where other foreign powers fail before us. Once again, every setback brings a call for more troops, although no one can say how long they will be there or what it means to win. Once again, the government we are trying to help is hopelessly corrupt and incompetent.

And once again, a President pushing for critical change at home is being pressured to stop dithering, be tough, show he's got the guts, by sending young people seven thousand miles from home to fight and die, while their own country is coming apart.

And once again, the loudest case for enlarging the war is being made by those who will not have to fight it, who will be safely in their beds while the war grinds on. And once again, a small circle of advisers debates the course of action, but one man will make the decision.

We will never know what would have happened if Lyndon Johnson had said no to more war. We know what happened because he said yes.


In a recent speech, Jim Leach, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, addressed incivility that is permeating the way members of Congress and politicians address one another and run for office. The transcript can be found at:
http://www.neh.gov/whoweare/speeches/11202009.html
But an important point he made:
Citizens of various philosophical persuasions are reflecting increased disrespect for fellow citizens and thus for modern day democratic governance. Much of the problem may flow from the fast-changing nature of our society which has so many destabilizing elements. But part falls at the feet of politicians and their supporters who use inflammatory rhetoric to divide the country. Candidates may prevail in elections by tearing down rather than uplifting, but if elected, they cannot then unite an angered citizenry. Negativity raises the temperature level of legislatures just as it dispirits the soul of society.
How timely as Switzerland votes to ban the construction of minarets. The vote came after a campaign of hate by the Swiss People’s Party. The New York Times editorialized the vote as “disgraceful” and a “vote for intolerance,” adding that if Switzerland’s “residents can succumb so easily to the propaganda of a xenophobic right-wing party, then countries with far greater Muslim populations and far more virulent strains of xenophobia best quickly start thinking about how to counter the trend. If left unchecked, xenophobia spreads fast. Already right-wingers in the Netherlands and Denmark have called for similar measures, and others are bound to be encouraged by the success of the Swiss People’s Party.”
And here we are, with hate and incivility and unexplained wars and mass murders in our own country and people standing by as a young girl is gang raped, our nation’s unemployment rate is in double digits with no relief in sight, divorces and suicides are at record levels among our military.
Isn’t it time for change?

Christmas in Berlin -- 1963

Twenty years ago, on November 9, 1989, the Wall that separated East and West Berlin was taken down, marking the reunification of East and West Germany.
Forty-six years ago, I spent Christmas on both sides of the Wall.
I had been working at the BMW factory in Munich and decided to take Christmas vacation in Berlin. I had arrived in Reutlingen, Germany, on June 27, 1963, a day after President John F. Kennedy delivered his "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech at the Berlin Wall and a day before my 20th birthday. The original plan was to work for a month in Germany and then return to the United States. But, while in Reutlingen, I had written the mayor of Munich who had arranged my job at the BMW plant in Munich.
I was working at the BMW plant when Kennedy was assassinated on November 22
-- the history of Kennedy's Berlin speech had been one reason I wanted to visit Berlin, which Kennedy referred to as "a defended island of freedom."
So, on Monday, December 23, I boarded a bus in the Munich Banhof at 5:30 a.m. for the 576 km or 358 mile journey to Berlin. The bus was freezing, with ice on the windows and in the toilet.
The trip was uneventful until we reached the first Soviet Zone at the East German border. The bus stopped and an armed brown-uniformed East German soldier boarded the bus and looked at all our passports. When he came to me, he looked at my U.S. passport and ordered me off the bus. I had a black beard and was dressed in black pants, a long black coat, a black scarf and a black woolen hat. Was there something sinister about my appearance? Or was it that I was the only American on the bus?
I followed the guard across a dirt yard to a yellow, one-story wooden structure where another guard looked at my passport, looked at me, looked back at the passport, asked for 10 deutschmarks for a visa, stamped my passport and sent me back to the bus.
At 6 p.m. we came to another checkpoint -- this time entering the West zone, where guards checked all vehicles inside and out. Once again, my passport was checked last, but this time without incident.
It was early evening when we arrived in West Berlin. I stepped off the bus and immediately felt I was someplace different. There was an atmosphere or an attitude in the air quite different from what I experienced in Munich.
Perhaps it was the "island of democracy" West Berlin surrounded by communist East Germany.
There were dramatic contrasts: brightly lit Christmas trees, apartment buildings with parts showing occupancy while other parts still showing evidence of World War II bombing, new structures adjacent to bomb ruins.
I asked my way to the Studentenheim -- a youth hostel -- where I got a room for 5 deutschmarks, equal to a little more than a dollar. Everybody in the Studentenheim spoke English.
On Christmas Eve, walking around West Berlin, I visited the famous Brandenburg Tur and checked out the Wall. At Potsdamer Platz, I climbed a platform and looked over the Wall into East Berlin. Potsdamer Platz before the war was one of the busiest and liveliest squares in Europe. Allied bombing during World War II left it in ruins, much of which remained on that day in 1963. I looked out across a no-man's land and took in a view that was perfect for the black and white film I had in my camera, since all I could see was black and white. Barbed wire and obstacles stretched across the bleak snow-covered terrain to the bombed-out buildings with gaping holes that had once been windows. Many buildings stood stark against a grey sky, entire walls missing, surrounded by rubble. The streets were empty, barren, bleak.
A sign erected high over the Wall reached out to the East Berliners: "Die Freie Berliner Press Meldet," or, "In Berlin the free press reports."
Under that was another sign wishing all, including those in East Berlin, "Frohe Weihnacht und ein besseres Neues Jahr" ("Merry Christmas and a better New Year").
There were other signs, printed in English, Russian, French and German informing people "You are leaving the American sector." I walked to Checkpoint Charlie, the scene of a dramatic standoff between American and Soviet tanks in 1961. Two armed soldiers manned the checkpoint, which displayed a picture of Kennedy, with a black sash across one top corner and "Mr. Praesident" underneath. Met a German man who said we should go to the East on Christmas Day.
On Christmas Day, I joined my new German friend and crossed into East Berlin aboard the S Banh. After going through passport check, we got separated so I was on my own.
The most people I saw all day were at the Banhof, where relatives and friends were seeing each other for the first time in years. The rest of the city was empty other than one rebuilt section. Bombed ruins were everywhere, very dirty, extremely quiet - a strange atmosphere. Everywhere I saw magazines and travel posters for Russia, Viet Nam, Korea and Hungary.
Propaganda pictures showed New York City slums, one of a man in filthy, ragged clothing slumped in a gutter. The caption said something to the effect that this is America.
Windows and doorways of buildings along the streets were bricked shut. The only sight I saw of Christmas was a small, skinny Christmas tree in a store
window.
After lunch in a small restaurant, I discovered I did not have enough East German money to pay and the waitress refused to take U.S. or West German money. But when she pointed to the pack of Marlboros in my pocket, I offered them to her and she indicated I had paid for my meal.
I saw signs, "For freedom and socialism our way is right" and "Die Republik braucht alle -- alle brauchen die Republik!" -- "The Republic needs all -- all need the Republic," referring to the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, or the German Democratic Republic.
I wandered some more, having no idea where I was or where I was headed -- just walking and taking in the atmosphere. At one point, I walked down a narrow side street when I saw a group of soldiers. I walked past them and another soldier walked toward me. He greeted me with "Guten Tag," which I returned. We passed each other and I continued down the street when I heard yelling in the distance. The soldier turned and yelled at me: "Vorsicht.
Halt. Eintritt ist verboten." "Caution. Stop. Entry is forbidden." It was then that I saw I was within less than 100 yards of the Wall. I made a hasty about-face, deciding it was time for this young man to go West, so I returned to West Berlin. I learned later that day that a youth had been shot attempting to escape into the West.
Back at the hostel, I spent the evening with students in a private party, eating, drinking, and listening to music. They surprised me by asking me to read a chapter in English from the book I had with me -- "To Kill a Mockingbird."
Surrounded by new-found friends in the warmth of the youth hostel, I was reminded of the earlier image I had of a lone woman in East Berlin walking in the middle of an otherwise empty street lined by brick-shuttered buildings on Christmas Day.