"Old Crusoe, will there be vaginas and penises in your post?" [View All]

[saltpoint]

“No. But there will be vivid hyacinths, and a way forward.”

This post attempts to bank off a sturdier, clearer, better-organized one by JeffR:

<http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x4509397 >,

which I cite here to beckon anyone registered with DU to visit and read. Come to JeffR’s post as a welcome guest and bring entact heart and mind.

To be sure, there are websites in which vaginas and penises play prominent roles but this post on this website is not among them. Titillation may reign at “Miss Trixie’s Fun Page,” but that is not my offer for readers herewith. Sorry to disappoint.

A man was trampled to death this morning by Black Friday shoppers who rammed through the doorway of a Long Island Wal-Mart, stampeding over him to get to merchandise inside the store. This bears mention because most of us know better than to hurt someone to advance our own selfishness and most of us know that the pursuit of the material is an ethically insufficient undertaking, and made worse by the timing of this morning’s consumer stampede: “Out of my way, asshole – I’m shopping to celebrate the birth of Jesus!” Stomp. Stomp. Stomp.

As referenced in the Christmas song, the three guys from the Orient showed up with expensive gifts chosen perhaps in correspondence with the reverence they felt for the baby in the manger. But one kid in attendance brought only his drum, and offered on that clear desert night just that lone, sweet music. Same manger. Same baby. Same reverence. A real gift is a real gift is a real gift.

No Christian myself, I side with Jackson Browne, “a heathen and a pagan / On the side of the rebel Jesus,” because I hold in deep respect the rebel Jew of the first century who tongue-lashes the money-changers and tips over their tables. Unchurched most of my life, I’ll still take the temple of prayer over the den of thieves. Henry Paulson, phone home.

And give me also Jesus the community organizer, who after a storm devastated the Gulf Coast would likely have waded without hesitation into the dank, black floodwater to offer comfort and rescue, unlike the model of the current President, who essentially sat on his worthless ass and did nothing.

Not all of our presidents have been as clueless or as callous or as cruel. In his Inaugural Address in 1961, John F. Kennedy reminded the nation, “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.” That was almost half a century ago. But his words are as resonant as if he had just spoken them this morning or last night.

In the dark and deceitful days of the presidency of Ronald Reagan, there came this:

“The most elementary of our adversarial relationships are in terms of the power of the state, which has never been so great in the history of mankind. That power can destroy us all. It’s a terrible power to entrust to people who are not spiritually great, that’s all there is to it. You see it in the callousness, self-aggrandizement, insensitivity to the plight of the poor. In the general level of ethical conduct, the state has become an abomination”

--Poet Stanley Kunitz, interview with the Washington POST, 1987


Barack Obama offers us his Inaugural Address in a few weeks. It will be another cold January day, cold enough to kill coatless presidents like William Henry Harrison, cold enough to see a president’s breath as the speech is delivered, and far too cold for someone who is homeless to be homeless in DC or Detroit or anywhere else.

President-Elect Obama’s transition team is forging priorities for the new administration. Again, banking off JeffR’s post referenced above, I reiterate the request to (and need for) contact with the women and men forging priorities – from as many of us as possible -- a request to send an email to the new president’s transition team to respectfully but forcefully ask that poverty be considered an imperative for Barack Obama and his Cabinet.

Your email does not have to be long. Just make it concise in form and sincere in tone. For the last 8 years, there was likely no one in the Bush administration paying a lick of attention to any progressives’ ideas or suggestions.

That is about to change.

The contact site for Obama’s transition team is:

http://www.change.gov/page/s/contact

People living in poverty are not represented in Washington by lobbyists. Others must lend their voices also to encourage government officials to carry issues like housing and health care and hunger to the forefront and to keep these concerns vibrant and immediate in the offices of our government.

Please consider sending an email letter to the transition team. Please consider also copying your local representatives, your U.S. Representative, and your two U.S. Senators on your emails. We want all who have ears to hear to listen.

Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty in 1964. At that time the rate of poverty in the U.S. was c. 19%. Michael Harrington, author of THE OTHER AMERICA, set it at 22%. Depending on how studies counted those in poverty, the figure appears to average about 20% of Americans. A war on poverty was justifiably an essential focus of a Great Society.

Much of the logistics for this commitment involved the newly-created Office of Economic Opportunity. Among its early directors were Sargent Shriver and – I am not making this up -- Donald Rumsfeld.

By the time Johnson left office the rate of poverty was 11%, roughly half of what it was when he assumed office. A president set the goal of eliminating poverty. He did not achieve that goal. But he cut the rate in half.

Nixon’s election in 1968 heralded a gradual, then more rapid, reversal of gains against poverty. Nixon’s 5 years, Ford’s 2, Reagan’s 8, and Poppy’s 4 – a total of 19 years of “callousness to the plight of poor,” in Kunitz’s phrase, interrupted only by 4 years of Jimmy Carter, who not surprisingly went on to become a Nobel Peace Lauriat for his post-White House work in behalf of those in need.

An email letter to our next president asking that issues like housing and hunger and homelessness be as present as possible in the people’s service would serve many. It would be an act of conscience.

The contact site again is: http://www.change.gov/page/s/contact


Oh and yes, I promised you hyacinths. Here:

“If you have two loaves of bread, give one to the poor, sell the other, and buy hyacinths to feed your soul.” (Hindu proverb)