Write2Right

An Exchange

I noticed in the WSJ editorial page that the Pope was responsible for the end of the Cold War.

AR

(After having read the article sent by AR)

What can I say other than observe that the recent anti-Pope John Paul II statements found in the liberal press (See the Nation, April 25, 2005 issue, p.5 as an example) are not helpful. It only supports my contention that the positions taken by liberals are both anti-Israel and anti-Jewish. Why Jews continue to support the Democrat Party, which is the driving force behind this anti-Semitic claptrap, is beyond me.

But Democrat Jews will continue to walk by the graveyard whistling away, hoping against hope it all isn't so: Sharpton, Jackson and the host of other anti-Semites that spew their anti-Semitic bile will continue to go unchallanged by the Democrat leadership. And Jews will continue to attack President Bush the best friend Jews have ever had in an American President. It is stupidity beyond understanding! The Country Lawyer

I sent the Pope article to elicit your comments about him re: Jews. Did you read the article? What do you think? Was this Pope good for Jews? He certainly loved the Palestinians - aped Bush in that department.

Your comments re: Bush, liberals, blacks & Jewish politics was, as usual, unbalanced twaddle.

AR

You state: "He certainly loved the Palestinians - aped Bush in that department." Do you have any idea what you are talking about? Bush loves Palestinians? Bush is the only American President who didn't kiss Arafat's ass and told the Palestinians that if they didn't give up on terror America would abandon them.

With respect to the Pope....he did not reflect the attitude of the Church throughout the world. The anti-Semitism experienced by the Jews in Europe over the last 1700 years was the direct result of the Catholic Church. I don't believe one Pope serving for 20 years will have much of an effect upon its attitude toward the Jews. I do believe however that American Catholics are less sanguine in their anti-Semitism but I am certain that even some minor event can change that overnight. The American Protestant leadership (as opposed to Protestants in general and Evangelicals in particular) is rife with anti-Semitism. American Catholic leadership is more confident in its religion and does not need Jews to bring their flock together as do Protestants. This being said, perhaps Pope John Paul II revealed to his flock a new approach to Jews. But over time Jews shouldn't think anti-Semitism among Catholics or Christians in general has changed very much. Anti-Semitism will always be a lurking issue for Jews, at least throughout this century, assuming they survive as a nation or a religion. With one third of its children marrying outside of their religion every generation I don't have much hope for its future.

And this is why it hurts me so to see Jews support Democrat candidates: The Democrat party has made an alliance with every moral profligate in this country from rap singers who hail rape and Jew killing in their songs to the Hollywood ultra-left which has no understanding of right from wrong and promotes sex, carnage and immorality to our children. The Pope was a symbol of hope in a sea of fetid, putrescent immorality. He attempted, by example, to make peace with the Jews. Though he did not support the battle for Iraq he understood and promoted the theory of "just war." He understood the ethical problems that are engendered by stem cell research. And though he knew that American Catholics were reluctant to follow his orthodox creed he believed in American freedom and individual liberty. Therefore whatever else he was or believed in I, as an American and a Jew, will always remember him kindly and will miss his fatherly and wise presence on this earth. The Country Lawyer

The Death of Socialism Redux

About a year after the 9/11 attacks upon the United States by a group of Islamo-Facsists I wrote an article entitled "The Death of Socialism (on the Upper West Side). It discussed the reaction of the liberal mind of this attack and the observation or perhaps the hope that it would rethink its belief in the Marxian dialectic. In that article I wrote,

But, you may ask, what does Socialism have to do with Islamic Fundamentalism, this Islamo-Fascism. Socialism, first and foremost is a philosophy which rejects God and adopts earthbound goods and products as the underlying fact of the human condition. Islam has its adherents submit to a living God. Here each dogma calls a truce, a truce to further the far greater dogma which the Islamo-Fascists and Socialists both passionately share: a deep and abiding hate for individual freedom, a desire to control the activities resulting from the human condition and a violent focus upon any person or institution that contradicts this philosophic and dogmatic belief system.

It is now two years later and after the November 2, 2004 presidential election which resulted in President George W. Bush earning four more years in office. Though conservatives, such as myself, are happy with the result the fact is I find that I am more relieved than gratified. The thought of John Kerry as President of the United States, bringing with him into his administration persons of the radical left along with their pro-Palestinian leanings would have evoked in me a deep sense of disorientation and foreboding.

The election results reveal that much new support for President Bush came from evangelical Christians who recognized in him as one of their own. In listening to my leftist friends one would think that the 3 to 4 million voters constituting this religious group will now swing our country into some kind of theocracy. Of course Roe v. Wade the Supreme Court decision which prohibits states from enforcing anti-abortion laws is now vulnerable to being overturned by virtue of the President Bush’s Constitutional power of Supreme Court appointment. Needless to say my leftist friends are apoplectic. But, little else seems to bother them. The fact that the U.S. is at war with an intransigent, radicalized and violent enemy is ignored. The fact that this enemy threatens our daily lives at home and is currently fighting and killing Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan and Jews in Israel, France and Germany seems to be of little consequence. The fact that its core constituents are virulent haters of all that is American is in some perverse way, welcomed. The breast beating and howling from the left is just plain unseemly when one realizes that nearly 59,000,000 American voters rejected a candidate who glossed over these facts or just failed to notice them as strange and dangerous positions for a country at war.

In our newspapers, our television programs and on-line publications we see graphically that the United States is "Red." Not only "Red" State by State but county by county. And what is left as "Blue" are isolated oases of the electorate constituting nearly equal the number of votes as Red but harboring opposing views on culture, war, taxes, religion, science and the environment. The left views this with dismay. The radical left views this with anger, frustration and an unrelenting desire to change this result at any cost. And just as the radical left has joined with the Islamo-Fascists in its uncompromising hate for all that is Western and particularly American, in view of what this election has revealed, it now dreams of the possibility of joining with the evangelical Christians in some temporary truce to destroy its hated nemesis, America. When told of this our leftist friends reject this idea as ridiculous. However the left is the first to say that evangelical Christians are anti-Semitic (Not true.) - as is the radical left, that evangelical Christians hold with disdain our open and free society (Not true.), a disturbing observation about which the radical left/Islamo-Fascists agree and that evangelical Christians’ desire to change America into a theocracy (Not true.), which the radical left would also agree with the Islamo-Fascists as long as God is Marx and not Jesus. Granted the radical left and the evangelical Christians are wide apart in their ontological goals. However let us not ignore that very small portion of pseudo-Christians who share the same violent approach to political solutions which mirrors that of the radical left, the white supremacists who base their radical political views on what they perceive as Christian orthodoxy. Perhaps it is this group with which the radical left wishes to join forces.

As Democrat leaders meet over the next few months to discuss future options what will be certain is their desire to rid themselves of these radical leftists who dragged their party and its candidate into a presidential campaign with slogans and belief systems which the American people continually find abhorrent. What in heaven’s name persuaded Democrats that Americans would accept defeat and deliver themselves into the hands of monstrous thugs who maintain a belief system that rejects every ethical value upon which Americans find support, is beyond understanding. And with this ejection from their party the Socialist radical left will be searching for brothers in violence.

The dogmas of the radical left in this country have always been alien even to the liberals that make up the Democratic Party. Therefore the necessary methods used by the radical left are similar to that of the AIDs virus, to cloak its true nature and adapt the trappings and language of the unwary, and should I say it, stupid hosts...in this case liberals. The radical left captures the paranoid imaginings of uninformed minds, untutored in American and world history and willing subjects who possess the unrelenting desire to satisfy the childish need to explain a chaotic and mean spirited world. Socialism, the dogma of the radical left, which always contains that kernel of violence and tyranny, is so easily transmitted into the bloodstream of untutored and childishly dissatisfied liberals. Since, in these next four years, with the taste of defeat fresh in their mouths, liberals’ passions will trump all rational thought it will be the duty of conservatives to be observant for the virus of the radical left attacking the remaining white cells of our liberal friends.

The First Lesson of War

"At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years. At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."

The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln

edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume I, Address Before the Young Men's Lyceum,of Springfield, Illinois (January 27, 1838), p. 109.

One of the most clever strategies in prosecuting war against an intractable enemy is for the aggressor to cloak his actions so that the enemy is not aware that he is at war at all. The result is that deaths and destructions are viewed by the enemy as matters of serendipity, inadvertence, accident, happenstance, miscalculation. How can this happen? How can a nation or a people not know that it is being attacked by an aggressing, devilish enemy. It’s quite simple really. The aggressor relies upon that group within the enemy nation which denies the reality of the events surrounding them, and is all to ready to blame everybody but the aggressor for the current misfortune of the nation. And why does this group deny the reality? That also is quite simple. To accept the fact that the nation is at war, that the nation may be irrevocably destroyed, that sacrifices beyond imagination will have to made, that loved ones may die horrible deaths and that all that is near and dear may exist no longer are facts beyond which the group can accept. If the group is large enough, defeat is immanent.

Examples of this phenomenon run rampant throughout history: The English in response to William the Conqueror; During the American Rebellion against Britain nearly two thirds of the colonials refused to join the Revolutionary Army; The vast majority of American Indians were thoroughly unaware of the imperialist intentions of the white man on this continent; France at the beginning of World War II; European Jews in the late 1930's and right up into the end of World War II when the victors and survivors began to count the millions of missing Jews throughout Europe the Jewish leadership in Europe, at least what was left of it, finally got the idea. The examples are many. In most cases the results are predictable.

And today large numbers of Americans who have yet to grasp the fact that we are at war with an army of Muslims, having been trained and outfitted as an army in Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, the Philippine Islands, Indonesia, Kashmir, Pakistan, Chechenya, Bosnia. The soldiers of this army have all been indoctrinated with the same and sufficient idealism to accept momentary defeats, accept death and expect victory. No matter where trained and no matter what language they speak they all share the same religion and all have been trained to kill with the same identical handbooks, tactics and weapons. And finally every soldier among them knows who the enemy is, the United States of America and every one of its people including the Muslims that live among us, if need be. And I ask are there Americans who don’t believe this? You bet! They are ones who voted for John Kerry in the last Presidential election.

The next question is, what will it take to convince this large number of Americans that we are at war? And by the time that happens will it be too late? For the colonial Americans providential luck triumphed. For the Jews of Europe, it didn’t. There are no rules, only time and luck prevails. The last election in the United States showed we are a nation divided. One half this nation knows the enemy, senses its evil and wants desperately to fight this war and prepare for its defense. The other half is oblivious, obstructs every attempt to strike back, refuses to make the necessary sacrifices to defend ourselves at home and is unwilling to unleash the massive military power of this nation for the purpose of bringing the enemy to its knees, and keeps itself ignorant of the tragedy that may await us if we do not act quickly and decisively.

"I have no word of encouragement to give!...[T]he people have not yet made up their minds that we are at war with the South. They have not buckled down to the determination to fight this war through; for they have got the idea into their heads that we are going to get out of this fix somehow by strategy!....General McClellan thinks he is going to whip the rebels by strategy; and the army has got the same notion....The people have not yet made up their minds we at war I tell you! They think there is royal road to peace, and that General McClellan is to find it. The army has not settled down into the conviction that we are in a terrible war that has got to be fought out–no; and the officers have not either."

Abraham Lincoln, 1862

The War Between the States ended with 650,000 dead and hundreds of thousands of young men who survived without arms, legs or brains. On September 11, 2001 we experienced 3,000 casualties within less than 2 hours. How many more casualties in this country, on this hallowed ground will it take to convince those who "have not yet made up their minds that we are at war..." before they believe otherwise?

The Country Lawyer

The Death of Socialism (on the Upper West Side)

The sun was down and the day had finally finished its cruel work. The evening air, which should have been crisp and jolting as a harbinger of fall, was filled with flecks of toasted tasting dust which grabbed at my throat. I had finally come out for a walk that evening and was crossing the northwest corner of 86^th Street at Broadway with my wife and son while capturing a glimpse of the faces of the residents of the Upper West Side, faces to which I had grown accustomed over these many years both as a neighbor and politician. On this bitterly quiet but disturbing evening, still September 11, 2001, I began to see something in those faces which I had never seen over the many years and the many different circumstances and seasons. It was not fear. No, it was something which at first I could not identify but as the days ands months progressed and new events began to crash into my insular and somewhat insular neighborhood I identified on their faces that which at first escaped me: it was the deep and abiding sadness of one who anticipates the untimely death as of a loved one, as if the cherished companion of a lifetime had passed permanently from this world. But the beloved cherished companion for which my neighbors grieved was no living personage that walked these streets, it was rather a political philosophy, held, cuddled and defended for over a century. They were grieving for what they now knew was inevitable: the death of Socialism.

It would be too simple to say Socialism died on the Upper West Side on September 11, 2001. It is stated with a certain bitter humor by many who know the Upper West Side well that it is the last bastion of Socialism since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. No, this was not a place where Socialism was going to die easily. This political philosophy was not going to die merely because two of the greatest buildings located in one of the greatest cities in the world were destroyed, that 3,000 people died within two hours and tens of thousands of friends and family members were utterly devastated and an entire nation rose to a level of anger not matched since the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. This political philosophy was not going to die merely because the nation=s center of war making was hit on the same day by a similar cruise missile or that a third airplane destined to hit the capital crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. No, the death of Socialism on the Upper West Side would require a bit more pummeling before it would be purged from the souls of these true believers. But on the evening of September 11, 2001 I saw in those faces, especially in their eyes, a sense of confusion mixed with shock. By that evening, though we weren=t yet familiar with their names, we knew that the persons who flew the planes and directed the flying bombs into the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon were Islamic Fundamentalists (AIslamo-fascists@, if you will) and that they obviously hated the United States to such an extent that nothing would stop them, not even their own existence. However monumental the shock of that destruction of lives and mortar took hold upon the psyche of my Socialist neighbors, the greater shock, the shock which began the throws of death of their long held political philosophy, was the realization that Socialism could lead to such a horrible act of terror. And it is this realization that everyone of its adherents have desperately kept from their consciences (and I might add from us too, the unbelievers) from the moment this philosophy was born in the 19^th Century and its development and propagation into the 20^th Century. During this period it congealed upon the brains and hearts of its supporters, rising from the foul sea of denials and blind belief, it lay dormant for a hundred and fifty years revealing for its Upper West Side adherents, perhaps for the first time, the true nature of its savage based philosophy. But, you may ask, what does Socialism have to do with Islamic Fundamentalism, this Islamo-fascism. Socialism, first and foremost is a philosophy which rejects God and adopts earthbound goods and products as the underlying fact of the human condition. Islam has its adherents submit to a living God. Here each dogma calls a truce, a truce to further the far greater dogma which the Islamo-fascists and Socialists both passionately share: a deep and abiding hate for individual freedom, a desire to control the activities resulting from the human condition and a violent focus upon any person or institution that contradicts this philosophic and dogmatic belief system.

                                      -------------------------

On a sparkling New York March evening that same year coming home from the office, I chanced upon one of my neighbors. He=s a retired Jewish gentleman, perhaps in his late 70's. Standing in front of our building without seeming to have much on his mind, and always a person with whom I could share some neighborhood gossip, I stopped to say hello. The Israeli-Palestinian conflagration was the focus of the media that week and in the course of the conversation I reflected that the Upper West Side was peopled by a large number of Jews who were substantially sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. He offered me a look of disbelief and stated that that was about as ridiculous a statement he has ever heard. I responded by asking him if he were pro- Palestinian. Silence. I asked again, but this time with more confidence since I sensed I had hit the mark. Silence. I then demanded that he answer the question: AAre you pro Palestinian?@ AI am pro Jewish@ he responded somewhat sheepishly. There was little more I could say and proceeded to my apartment. I confess that this had been a question I had asked a number of my Jewish neighbors on the Upper West Side before and was not surprised at his answer. What is it, I found myself asking at that time, that attracted these Upper West Side Jews to a cause that is so clearly antithetical to their morality, their ethics and their history as a people? The answer to that question came a lot sooner than I ever believed.

The Spring of 2002 was filled with horror. A Palestinian homicide bomber broke into a Passover Seder in Israel proper resulting in the killing and wounding of so many people it was difficult to fully comprehend the magnitude of the event. The families of the dead and wounded however understood the calamity all too well. Israel was stunned. Newspapers reported that the bomb material was Aweapon=s grade@ blowing off the the roof of the restaurant where the worshipers were praying and celebrating. Coming on the heals of this event was something even more ominous. The various discrete European Jewish communities were under attack. Upper West Siders began to read that synagogues were being burned and defaced throughout Western Europe and Jews were being attacked in the streets. Islamic Fundamentalists , who constitute an ever growing part of Western European population and who had been causing a substantial increase in the general crime rate in France and the Low countries were now concentrating their violence upon the Jews of Western Europe. My Upper West Side Jewish neighbors= faces showed for the first time the confusion of holding two contradictory thoughts simultaneously: one being a philosophic affinity for the Palestinians and their cause and the other a recognition that, no matter how distant they were from the violence being meted out upon the Jews of Israel, that they too were Jews and could easily be the next target of their Islamic Fundamentalist friends. Their minds eyes wandered over to Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, a large Arab/Palestinian community, remembering the pogrom of Crown Heights and wondering what new evil Brooklyn was fomenting against them.

The Upper West Side is a seething caldron of contempt for the fundamental precepts of American exceptionalism. It manifests itself in various ways moving through well traveled highways of discontent. And in spite of the fact that the American system provides opportunities for free thought and action it is vilified. For years Upper West Siders expressed their political beliefs by sending forth to the various political institutions, the New York City mayoralty, the City Council, the New York State Assembly and Senate, the governorship, politicians who expressed openly the Socialist philosophy that permeated their beliefs and dogma. For the last 50 years these politicians, supported by the frothing troops of hate for all things having to do with individual freedom and self reliance, the center of the vanguard coming from the Upper West Side, made it their solemn duty to tear down the great enterprises of a great city developed for over a century. A public education system that produced some of the greatest writers, scientists, philosophers, music composers, entertainers and Nobel prize winners of this country is now, within a period of 50 years, in shambles. A political system that responded to the needs of its population now responds to public employee unions, racial hate mongers, supporters of sexual perversions and the perpetrators of every type of crime at the expense of their victims. A public welfare system established to assist lower middle class temporarily unemployed workers and their wives and children became the instrument that created the very poverty it was designed to avoid. And to those that raise their voices in protest, vilification and contumely. They place blame upon the critics while ignoring the destruction which their Socialist dogma has created. The inherent failure of this depraved dogma is ignored and Upper West Siders and their troops demand ever more restrictions, ever more benefits, ever more Socialist implementation which expands government, increases taxation and control until its final failure leads to its inevitable dialectic, tyranny.

So the death of Socialism on the Upper West Side was well into its last throws long before September 11, long before the violence of the Palestinians, long before the pogroms of the Isamo-fascists in Europe. But now the knock at the door in the dead of night. Who is it, they fearfully ask? It is not who they desire it to be: the jack-booted capitalist, their mythical beloved nemesis. Rather, it is their friend and comrade, joined in hate of all things American. Now the faces of my Upper West Side neighbors reveal the shock of the concealed truth of what they so desperately tried to keep from the rest of us: All Socialism, what appears to be benign or otherwise, leads to despotism, tyranny and murder.

The Upper West Side is now a quiet and contrite place to live. Socialism is dead. It died with the falling towers and the thousands of lives that turned to dust. It died with the revelation that comrades are now hunting friends with the intent to murder. It died when the truth of Socialism revealed a bankrupt and vacuous system. The neighborhood has fallen silent and its Socialist politicians are running for cover. The reverends Sharpton and Jackson no longer can find willing Jews to kick and roust out of their beds with bed clothes still on, pushing them into the town square for their weekly treatment of humiliation and self immolation. There is now among my neighbors a quiet circumspection. In the street they pass each other quickly. They no longer stop to talk. They avert their eyes. A simple conversation may require more than they can hide.

The Country Lawyer

The Imperial Army

This Battle for Iraq is driving the hard left to drink. They just can’t get it and it’s killing them. Here they have a President who they believe can’t tie his shoelaces who, without much help from the rest of world, sets his army off to a vast, hot, dangerous, and yes, evil country, for reasons he himself can’t quite articulate, and the American people support him overwhelmingly and almost without reservation. And to top it all off he directs the Attorney General to lock up and throw the key away with respect to those who are captured or detained or under suspicion that they may do harm to our people, or our cities or other national targets, and again the American people remain generally silent, unwilling to protest what is pretty much a violation of the constitution. The hard left and their fellow travelers just can’t get their minds around this and its cause for concern among the cognoscenti. The problem is what they are failing to grasp is the exceptional nature of the American experiment.

From the very beginning of our brief history the American people understood that they were participating in an experiment that had never been tried before...the establishment of a government to protect the individual freedom of those that lived within its borders. Note, I did not say citizens. Quite a simple concept, but one that turned on its head the general philosophy that existed at the time, namely, the purpose of people was to establish and then protect government from other governments. The theory being that ultimately people would find their protection within a government which had few or no constraints. We know today this philosophy never quite worked and inevitably results in tyranny. The fact that our descendants knew this then is quite remarkable since their education wasn’t very much better than the general population of other European countries at that time.

What is so surprising is that those white propertied males, who made up the citizenry of the early American Republic were able, over time, to convince a much larger group of citizens, made of females, blacks, Hispanics and a general assortment of other ethnics, races and cultures that the theory is one which should be supported and defended, even with blood, if necessary. But what seems to be unusual about the Battle for Iraq is that this is probably the first time in American history that there is a general consensus among the population that it is better to fight the enemies of freedom somewhere else rather than at home and to start that fight first without waiting for the enemy to arrive here. What obviously drives this belief is the attack of the homeland on 9/11. And this is what the hard left can’t seem to absorb. They refer to Vietnam. But no one is listening. They refer to the "gestapo tactics" of Attorney General Ashcroft. But no one is listening. They get hysterical about the random killings of our troops in Iraq. The American people are disturbed, angry, frustrated and definitely saddened by the deaths of these soldiers, each one a prize of prizes among the citizenry. But there is no talk of retreat. The streets are empty of protesters. And what makes it even worse for the hard left, perhaps for the first time since they became a force of opinion in the country, is that the American people smell, among them, a rat. The American people sense that there is a strong element of anti-Americanism, an anti-exceptionalism among the hard left. And if this true, this is probably the biggest reason for their unwillingness to be too convinced by the arguments of the hard left among us.

The hard left accuses America and its army of imperialism. The American public seems to agree and just doesn’t give a damn.

The Country Lawyer

Lucky the Cat

A few days ago Lucky, our cat, died. Her absence already leaves a hole in our heart. When I woke in the morning she would quickly run into the bathroom where we kept Aher things@, food, water, litter box. She wanted to be petted. But don=t think for a minute that she was one of these loving types of cat. Lucky had an attitude, an attitude that was well earned. We are told that she was found as a kitten in a cemetery. She had a beebee in her neck. My son Michael and one of his roommates, realizing how beautiful she was (all black with golden eyes) mulcted her from the boys next door when she happened to wander over to their apartment. He brought her home that year during his summer break at Cornell much to the objections and fulminations of my wife Sue. Sue wanted no part of any cat in her house and she complained bitterly to me for a full week anticipating the worst when Athat cat@ would show up. No need to worry. Lucky won her heart in a nano second. One look at Lucky and Sue was her slave.

Lucky loved the house. She could go out play and we didn=t have to worry that much. At this point in Lucky=s life she was no house cat. She hunted all night and got home when she wanted to. Once in a while she came home pretty beaten up and we had to get her over to the vet. But all in all she was out there with the best of them. She wasn=t large and I assume she got through cat protocol by her good looks and a healthy sense of when to get out of the way. We never filed her claws and our furniture showed it. But when both Michael and Meredith were finished with high school Sue and I decided to return to the city to live....so the claws had to go. Meredith raised some objections but to no avail. One set of furniture was enough.

The kids are calling. Each one remembers Lucky in their own special way. Michael feels proud of himself that he had the good sense to meet mom head on and insisted that she come home to stay. Had she remained at Ithaca she certainly would have been abandoned and died in the cold and rain of an Ithaca winter. Meredith remembers taking care of Lucky and getting great comfort from her when she was experiencing those emotional roller coasters of teen age hell. And as for us, Sue and I, Lucky stayed home when the kids left, stayed home with us and gave us great joy. Lucky was there for Sue when she was holed up in the house for months after her knee operation.

When I write about Lucky I fear that I may sound mawkish, giving to Lucky far more importance in our lives than what is reasonably expected. In the scheme of things Lucky=s death except for us, is of little moment. But how is it that this little animal, having lived with us for 12 years can grab hold of our hearts with such intensity of feeling? It is not in the character of a cat, even a cat such as Lucky, even if there is such a thing at all, to have bellow forth such deep feelings of loss and love. But it is in our character as human beings to draw deep into ourselves and find love for even in the simplest of living things. I suppose we acquired this characteristic because we are physically weak creatures in a world of nasty and terrible things. We therefore learn to draw on everything we can to hold together a chaotic world with danger and death. We reach out to everything and anything to save ourselves. Well, thank you Lucky, thank you Lucky the cat, for doing your part in holding it together for us for the few moments you were on this earth.

The Country Lawyer

Pat Tillman and the Irrelevant Elite

When I recently learned of Pat Tillman's death in combat I thought of the words from Shakespeare's King Henry the V in which King Henry responds to Westmoreland's concern that the French have more soldiers on the field than the English,

"The fewer men, the greater share of honour."

But King Henry goes on to explain,

"By Jove, I am not covetous for gold;
Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
Such outward things dwell not in my desires;
But if it be a sin to covet honour;
Than I am the most offending soul alive."

Pat Tillman was a man who coveted honor; a man with a keen sense of right and wrong who directed his life to things in which he passionately believed. We all know that he turned down a $3.6 million dollar contract to play defensive back for the Cardinals. But do we know he graduated from Arizona State University summa cum laude? Here is a man who could have picked any future, any career. With his good looks and strong body he could have directed his life to any pleasure, carnal or otherwise. He chose honor.

When I think of Pat Tillman I cannot help but think of the many privileged children in this country, privileged in family, in schools, in contacts, in money who direct their lives to covet even more gold. To them Pat Tillman and those like him are foolish idealists. To them the thought of relinquishing gold for honor is downright stupid. They are supported in this by their families who have struggled to make sure their children attend, not Arizona State or some other "directional school", but Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Stanford, Michigan (University not State) Cornell. The thought of their children seeking "honor" after all that work and investment would be addressed with great disappointment. But, to seek honor by joining the armed forces, that is considered something which reflects a mental instability, irrational, something that has to be cured with no less than a psychiatric palliative, a failure in values, a distinct rejection of everything in which they believe. The very thought that their child would, after all the right education, the right grooming, the right everything, join the armed forces to defend America, is considered a distinct failure in their responsibility as parents. And this in today's world, especially during America's confrontation with terrorism, is what makes them and their children irrelevant.

Prior to the Vietnam War it was seen as a duty by the elite and privileged families of America to send their children to West Point, Annapolis, ROTC, the Airforce Academy. They believed, and correctly, that they owed something back for the blessings they received from being Americans. They imbued their children with this belief and their children absorbed this and committed themselves to this value. They didn't necessarily make the military their career but they served and served with honor.

Today America relies for its defense not upon its elite and privileged families but rather upon its middle and less affluent classes. Today's young officers come from the state universities which have thrived and grown over the last 50 years throughout America. The tuition at these schools are a third of what the elite schools charge. The big and prestigious jobs don't go to these children of the heartland. But we look to them to man the barricades for our defense. You can see them in the evening on TV when Fox News or CNN reporters jam a microphone toward there eager faces, black, white, Hispanic and out pours a surprisingly articulate explanation of whatever is happening behind them on the field of battle. We know who they are. They are the children of the gardener, the bus driver, the police officer, the secretary, the Fed Ex guy or girl, the person behind the counter, the computer technician. We meet them everyday as we go about our business. These are not the children of the lawyers at the big firms, or the investment bankers, the marketing v.p.'s, the executives at some big TV network station.

The "old money" and newly affluent families have turned their backs to America. They have received the rewards of our freedom but reject the responsibility that comes with it. I am reminded of another time in our history when the country was fighting for its life. Lincoln allowed the privileged families to buy their children out of the Civil War for a mere $300. Today, when our freedom, and our very existence is challenged the elite and privileged families don't even have to do that. Among themselves they denigrate these soldiers as ones who don't know how to get themselves out of the rain. While their children are moving up the affluent ladder of success other children are fighting and dying.

But when its over these children will be coming back. Victory will be sweet in their mouths but a deep sadness will be in their hearts for those who did not return. That taste of victory and hollow sadness will be shared by all those American families whose children went abroad to defend us. And what of those who stayed behind and made themselves still richer? Again my mind goes to King Henry's words,

"And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurst they were not here;
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon [this] day."

In other words, of those who stayed behind and made themselves still richer? Irrelevant.

God bless you Pat Tillman and God bless all the other Pat Tillmans who fought for us upon this day.

The Country Lawyer