November 6, 2008 - Last evening driving home from Monticello my nostrils were filled with remembered smells. We have had a late harvest this year but only a few fields of corn are awaiting the combines. A few tractors were pulling chisel plows across the stubble and there was the sweet odor of the good earth blended with the dust of harvest. Looking out across the prairie was a treat of Autumn colors; brown and tan; black earth mixed with russets forming the background to white farm houses and groves of yellow and red groves and fence rows. I remembered the peaty smell of coal fired furnace smoke mixed with the tart essence of leaves burning at the street side. I heard again the rustle of leaves on the sidewalk six inches deep kicked up by my feet as I trudged down Green Street delivering the Champaign-Urbana Courier to my customers.

I remembered Mrs. Lowery who each Saturday when I came to trade the weekly coupon for her 15 cent subscription fee. I could smell again the wonderful flavor of the two pieces of fresh made burnt sugar fudge she handed me with her coins - two dimes to pay the fee and she always waved away the nickel I handed her in change. I remember it as a better time, a simpler time, the good old days. Champaign-Urbana was a beautiful place then, a Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover capturing the domestic tranquility of a nation recovering from a good war and the bad times.

Even though the picture painted over the ugliness of a divided society and pockets of poverty and deprivation hidden away I remember it as a good time. I remember Lottie Howard who cared for us while my parents went away each week day to my father's accounting office. Between the wars she had come north from the Mississippi Delta seeking a better life for her family. Though she was older than my mother by a decade she was our "hired girl". Each morning she arose early, god her own children ready to go off to school, climbed on the bus and came to our house on Prairie Street arriving before 8 in the morning. She fed us, washed us, rocked John to sleep, put bandaids on our cuts, and wiped away our tears. Then, each evening at six, she would collect her $2.00 from my father, plunk her wide brimmed hat on her head and catch the bus for her long ride home.

Lottie would cook our lunch, set the table for the five older children, then repair to the kitchen table to take her own meal. One day I asked her why she did not eat in the dining room with us. She looked shocked at the question. I still hear her voice as she answered, "It wouldn't be fittin' " and return to her kitchen to eat. My sister and I looked at each other, picked up our own plates and followed her to the long kitchen table and sat down along side of her. Anna Mary, just 6 years old, looked at her and said, " I think that this is fitting." We ate with her in the kitchen after that and she told us stories of her child hood in the cotton fields.

Yes, Champaign-Urbana was a beautiful place then, a gentle place in my memories. But it, and all of American is the more beautiful this morning. The sun came up and lit the pallet of fall in reddish gold light. My dear Lottie wasn't here to see it but memories of her were. These aren't the good old days but they are the good new days and it is morning in America once more and it is fitting.

November 4, 2008Today those of us who have cast ballots in our national election will have participated in the process of making history.  When our solitary choices are aggravated with the millions of other Americans’ choices we will have chosen either the first President of the United States with ancestral roots in Africa or we will have elevated a woman to rap the gavel in the United States Senate and sit waiting just an aging heartbeat away from the most powerful office in the world.  Regardless of the outcome we will have plated a landmark, a waypoint on America’s shared journey to the promised land of equality that Martin Luther King saw from the mountain top just before he was killed.

As I write those votes, those individual judgments have not yet been counted. But that coming landmark, historic though it may be, does not mark the end of our journey.  It does not represent the achievement of our national purpose to provide equal opportunity to all Americans, whatever their gender, whatever their genetic heritage.  So long as we can objectively measure a difference in my granddaughter’s claim to rewards for her achievements and that expected by her brother, then we have not reached our shared destination.  So long as we can mark a difference between the economic expectations of my grandson whose father was of African stock; from that of my grandson whose father hailed from South America; and from that of my grandson whose father was born of this country with a European heritage, then we can not claim that America has achieved that greatest of all of our ideals.

We have not reached the mountain top but this election shows that we will have climbed over a significant barrier to our progress on the way to the summit.  We will have shown that every child born in America, black, white, or brown can with perseverance and hard work can grow up to become President.  We will have shown that every child born in America, boy or girl, has a claim upon the most powerful office in our land,

That is, in itself, no mean achievement.  It is a graphic demonstration that we have achieved much in my lifetime.  But it is also a reminder that we have much more to do before we stake a claim that in America there is no more color bar and no more glass ceiling.  It is but a step on the journey, albeit a most important one, and while we may celebrate it we can not rest in our determination that we will cross over the mountain top to descend to the promised land.

After thought:

Here is the last minute attack ad

http://nationalrepublicantrust.com/video.html

September 25, 2008 - "Boy the way Glen Miller played, songs that made the hit parade, guys like us we had it made, those were the days. And you know where you were then, girls were girls and men were men, mister we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.

Didn’t need no welfare state, everybody pulled his weight, gee our old LaSalle ran great, those were the days!" Theme Song from All in the Family.

In 1932 the Hoover Administration induced Congress to charter an independent quasi-governmental agency, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, to bail out the tottering American financial system.  The RFC was to function as a lender of last resort, taking non-performing loans off the banks hands and making new loans to banks, railroads, and industry.  Congress initial appropriation for the RFC was $1.5 Billion at a time when total Federal spending was $4.3 Billion.  Congress insisted that a list of the recipients of RFC largess be published.

Almost immediately the agency was bogged down in bureaucracy.  It failed to disburse much of its funding.  In August 1932 the first list of borrowers was published and it revealed that many of the loans were politically motivated.  When the Roosevelt Administration took office in March 1933 the agency had not succeeded in its mission to stem the tide of bank failures and reverse the trend toward mass unemployment.  Roosevelt retained the RFC as part of his New Deal, but added a layer of banking regulation that took the banking industry out of stock brokerage and insurance businesses.  Only then did the RFC, along with the other Alphabet Soup Agencies, begin to have an uplifting effect on the broader economic health of the nation.click here for entire article

October 17, 2007 - Who are these guys?  They carry machine guns; wear dark glasses so we cannot see their eyes; and stand menacingly in the background.  They aren’t in the Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, or Marines.  They don’t take orders from any General or Admiral of America’s armed forces.  They aren’t responsible to any civil officer of the United States Government.  They are not subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice nor are they apparently accountable for their conduct under any provision of the United States Code. It is apparently US policy that they are not subject to local law in the countries in which they operate. They work for companies with strange names; Blackwater, Dynacorp, Triple Canopy.  Or do they?

Take Blackwater as an example.  In the short six and years since the Al Qaeda attack on the United States Blackwater has grown from a start up operation to one with 1 Billion Dollars in income from contracts with the United States government.  Its mission statement published on the Web contains this statement: “Blackwater is committed to supporting national and international security policies that protect those who are defenseless and provide a free voice for all . We dedicate ourselves to providing ethical, efficient, and effective turnkey solutions that positively impact the lives of those still caught in desperate times.” http://www.blackwaterusa.com/about/missionstatement.asp.......click here for entire article