Brake to Kill

This week started with five people getting shot to death on Sunday and five people getting shot to death on Wednesday. Odds are, at the level of gun violence in this country today, five more will get shot to death on Saturday.

            The shootings occur a week after the United States Senate failed to pass one of the most non-restrictive gun regulations – universal background checks for gun buyers. The National Rifle Association has been blamed, and deservedly so, for blocking what 90 percent of the country believes is a measure, no matter how small, of safety against gun violence.

             Arguing against gun safety regulation is like arguing against brakes for cars – brakes only penalize slow drivers, or, as the NRA likes to argue, gun regulations only hurt the law abiding gun owner.

            Exactly.

That’s what regulations do.

Regulations make sure every law abiding one of us adheres to rules intended to make us as individuals and as a society, safe and legal. After all, every criminal with a gun was once a law abiding gun owner.

It’s not that this sort of reasoning escapes the great minds of the NRA’s leaders, it doesn’t. They just choose to ignore it.

Unfortunately, they ignore it at the peril of everyone else, even their own.

Can you imagine the auto industry arguing against brakes? Even while people are killed in car crashes that could be avoided but for the installation of brakes. Can you imagine Congress refusing to pass legislation requiring brakes because of the proverbial “slippery slope?”

First brakes, then seat belts and the next thing you know the government will tell us to put our children in car seats!

            Of course the auto industry would never have gotten off the ground without brakes on cars. Who would buy their products? They would be too dangerous to drive.

             Yet, guns are far more dangerous than automobiles and gun manufactures appear unconcerned about declines in profit. But that’s the beauty of gun violence. The more the violence ratchets up, the more the NRA calls for more people to have guns, and the more people think they need a gun.

             If I was a conspiracy nut I’d think the NRA and gun manufacturers are creating the violence to keep the membership dues and profits rolling in.

             But I’m not. I’m just a frustrated American who doesn’t understand why we need so many unregulated guns in this country.

              

 

 

A song: Pandemic (From the Noir Collection)

Paulie’s Got Plague

I’m tellin’ you Red

Paulie’s Got Plague

And he’s making it spread

 

City’s facin’ a pyre

With Paulie runin’ ‘round like lose ‘lectrical wire

Officials want calm; not panic in the street

Ignore press inquiries while making their sweep

 

If you don’t know Paulie’s he’s short and swarthy

Red’s his gal, she’s tall and curvy

Meet either one and they’re feverishly sweaty

Don’t hesitate to fire when ready

 

Paulie’s demise was on a rented bed

That’s were we found him, that’s what we said

So come on out, if you’re in there Red

We need to shoot you – shoot you dead

It’s the only way to stop the dread

 

Oh, where are you Red?

Didn’t you hear what we said?

You got the Plague and Paulie is dead

You got the Plague and Paulie is dead

 

Funeral for a Friend

           When it comes to funerals, there are not too many I really want to attend.  It’s not that the solemn ceremony depresses or saddens me; I like to believe wherever the deceased has departed is a better place.  It’s just that funerals are too anti-climatic.

Roy, though, was a friend whose funeral I felt compelled to attend, in part to comfort his wife, Wanda. But I also felt a connection with him; he was comfortable to be around.  No matter how I was feeling before having a conversation with him, after our conversation I always felt good about things.

                He was an unassuming man, yet Roy offered so much and touched so many that no one other than those who knew him would understand. His greatest capacity, perhaps his gift, was to listen, and have patience for those, like myself sometimes, who were too busy talking rather than listening.

                To hear Roy discuss politics, religion or social issues was to realize, even marvel, that this simple man – he was a barber by trade – had a scholarly depth; a self-made man. He was a studious observer of the human condition; he could see life’s hypocrisies and ironies and laugh.

                He also could see the good and bad in people, accept all their human failings and talents, yet not judge them. He was a warm man who seemed to always have a smile for people.

                Roy’s compassion knew no bounds. He was not discouraged by the state of society or the world at large. He was a devout Christian, never wavered in his optimism. Church was critical in his life. That is where I met him.

                When the doctors told him he had terminal cancer, only mere months before he would die, Roy remained joyful and hopeful. He was leaving this world, but had faith that he was going to a better one.

He was selfless, a pillar of strength for Wanda, who herself had battled cancer. He wanted to make sure she was happy when he was gone, suggesting to her one day a few weeks before his death that she begin now to find a companion.

                She protested, of course, it wasn’t even in her thought process. He was her love. She would be with him forever, though she knew what he was offering and loved him all the more for it.

                As he was dying, becoming weaker by the day, he helped his wife, who struggled often alone to care for him, with his funeral arrangements – a brief entombment service at the cemetery immediately following his death and the next day a service to celebrate his life at their church.

He wanted nothing elaborate or long, but enough for remembrance and to offer comfort to his wife and family and friends. He ensured there was money for a luncheon after his service, including ice cream for dessert. Roy loved ice cream.

                 The entombment service for Roy, in a small chapel in the cemetery, was brief. His pastor spoke a few words, sublime yet appropriate. As I sat and listened, I knew I was going to miss Roy. Attending his funeral was perhaps about keeping that connection to him.

                We meet so few remarkable people in our lives (or maybe we don’t spend enough time seeing how remarkable the people we do know are), but those we know, we want to stay connected to, even after they’ve gone.

A skeptical Catholic

            Forgive a skeptical Catholic, but something seems suspicious with this process of Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation, official today, and the coming conclave to elect a new pope. This isn’t conspiratorial, just a little surmising, a supposition, if you will.

            Keep in mind that while the papacy and the Vatican are venerated as most holy by not only the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics, but also those of other faiths, it’s also massive in its power and influence, which lends to palace intrigues.

            The pope, cardinals, bishops and other ecclesiastical dignitaries are, after all, human, susceptible to ambition and deceit, even in the name of the Lord.

            Consider first that 53 percent of the 117 cardinals who will elect a new pope in the conclave were appointed by Pope Benedict, according to the Catholic News Service.

            Second, Pope Benedict has taken the title of pope emeritus and will live in the Vatican, albeit in a convent within the walls of the Holy See.

            These two facts taken together could lead one to surmise that Benedict will have enormous influence in not only the selection of the new pope, but also in the new pope’s reign, which comes at a time of upheaval in the world and the church.

            Moreover, before becoming pope, Benedict was Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, who the late Pope John Paul II named as Prefect for the Scared Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. The office’s origins are steeped in the 16^th century Roman Inquisition.

In this position, Benedict served as a tenacious defender of the faith, reaffirming the church’s position on birth control, homosexuality and inter-faith dialogue, which clearly puts the church’s doctrine at odds with most American Catholics.

In his role, Benedict (Ratzinger) went after theologians who did not tow the line; he suspended Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff for his support of liberation theology, which interprets the teachings of Christ in relation to liberation from unjust economic, political and social conditions; he censured others.

As cardinal and as pope, Benedict has been accused of covering up the sex abuse scandal that has long plagued the priests and prelates of the church.

No doubt, there are forces in the church battling to steer its course in the 21^st century; those who want reforms for progress and openness and those, like Pope Benedict, who don’t believe change is necessary in the centuries-old church.

The reformers may be gaining the edge. In his final public audience, held earlier this week in St. Peter’s Square, the New York Times quoted Benedict saying he sometimes felt “the waters were agitated and the winds were blowing against” the church.

It could be the 85-year-old pope felt he is no longer strong enough to stand out front and wage the battle, but that he can, from the privacy of his secluded apartment in the Vatican, direct the next pope to fight on.

The election of the new pope and the course he (she?) sets for the church may tells us much.

The Lord works in mysterious ways.

Hobby, Salk and the health care debate

 

            Oveta Culp Hobby is unknown to most people today, but she stands as an unwitting symbol of this nation’s rather complicated embrace with government-funded social programs that many Americans mistakenly refer to as socialism.  

In 1955, following severe polio outbreaks, Hobby, as the cabinet secretary to Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s newly created Department of Health, Education and Welfare, legalized the first polio vaccine.

            Two things about this are interesting: Eisenhower entered office to stop what he described as “creeping socialism” from social programs – such as Social Security – that were created under the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s.

            Yet, Eisenhower went on to expand those programs in order to serve more people, and Hobby, who apparently opposed government administered health programs, approved the distribution of a vaccine in a national mass inoculation program.

            The program was necessary, if not life-saving. Three years prior to its approval polio outbreaks had increased dramatically from the average 20,000 per year to nearly 60,000 and 35,000 in ’52 and ’53, respectively. An alarmed public demanded action.

            Private industry toiled away on finding a vaccine, spending millions of dollars and predicting it would be years before an effective vaccine would be available.

            However, Jonas Salk developed a test-proven vaccine in 1952, for which he declined to seek a patent that would have reaped a fortune for him. “There is no patent,” he reportedly told a newsman. “Could you patent the sun?”

Salk devoted seven years researching the vaccine, which historian William O’Neill described as “the most elaborate program of its kind in history, involving 20,000 physicians and public health officers, 64,000 school personnel, and 220,000 volunteers.” More than 1.8 million school children took part in the trial.

            Salk’s work took place at the University of Pittsburgh, School of Medicine, under the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. Founded in 1938 by President Roosevelt – himself a victim of polio – it was funded through public appeal to give a dime and support research for polio’s eradication.

The organization later became known as The March of Dimes.

            While Hobby may have been a mere instrument in a tax-payer supported program to improve and ensure the health of the public, Salk and his views embodied the spirit of what those programs really mean to a democracy as wealthy and capable as ours.

            Which brings us to today’s health care debate. For all the sound and fury about government intrusion and costs, even some ardent liberals have missed the point.

If you listen to what people who support universal access to health care are saying – and this includes people without insurance and even those with limited coverage – and if you go back to the roots of this debate that began in the 1930s, you will find the health care debate, first and foremost, is not about containing costs.

It’s about equality and rights. It’s about ensuring that everyone has access to the same quality of health care as our elected officials at the federal, state and local levels.

Yes, containing costs is an important element, and it is not as difficult as the health care industry and some politicians would like us to believe, but the real question is this:

Why provide elected officials and government workers optimum health care at the expense of taxpayers, yet many, if not most of those taxpayers must settle for less, and in many cases, far less coverage because they can’t afford to pay for it?

This question goes to the heart of who we are as a country. The social programs that emerged in the ‘30s were designed not to grab a chunk of the free market or ideologically enslave people as critics argue, but simply to help people.

It’s the same reasoning for government-funded – not government-run – health care. Wouldn’t an insurance pool of 300 million Americans drive down costs?

The present arrangement drives up costs and seems to neither promote domestic tranquility nor the general welfare. Where is the equality we supposedly are trying to build this country on that was stated in the Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed … .”

In the health care debate we have to decide whether health care is a certain unalienable right or whether we want to pay the extreme costs in life and money for patenting the sun. 

           

 

Transfiguration

Course I'm respectable. I'm old. Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough – John Houston, as Noah Cross, in “Chinatown.”

            Eighty-five-year-old Pope Benedict XVI’s decision to retire from what is a lifelong post appears to signal change to the nearly 2,000 year-old Catholic Church that for the last three decades has been buffeted by the high winds of change.

Technology – from television to computers to the Internet – has afforded more knowledge and education to Western Civilization’s populations, raising questions about faith and some church practices that have not changed in well over a millennium.

The church’s one institution in particular, the male-dominated clergy where women are forbidden to become priests, cardinals or even the pope, bedevils many Catholics. The reasons and rationalizations neither make sense nor sustain logic.

            Yet, the church is not a monolith of poor reason and irrationality. It has reversed it self on some important issues.

After imprisoning for life in 1633 the physicist, mathematician and astronomer Galileo, for making the observation that the Earth rotates around the sun, the church started to recant less than a hundred years later. Its pillorying and detention of the man who is known today as the father of modern science was, perhaps, wrong.

            In December 2008, the 400^th anniversary of Galileo’s earliest telescopic observations, Pope Benedict praised his contributions to astronomy. Interestingly, in 1741, another pontiff, Pope Benedict XIV, authorized the publication of Galileo’s complete scientific works.

            To demonstrate how far the church had come in recognizing the once heretical scientific explanations of Galileo, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences announced in 2008 that a statue of the astronomer would be erected on the Vatican grounds.

Less than a year later, though, the Pontifical Council of Culture announced that plans for the statue were suspended. It’s another example of how non-monolithic the church really is, though not for lack of trying to keep it monolithic.                                                                                           

Forces for and against progress and enlightment are at constant battle within the church.

In his homily at Mass this week, Pope Benedict spoke of “sins against the unity of the Church,” hinting at Vatican office politics, according to an NBC News report. It’s unclear exactly what his Holiness was referring to; the actual meanings of his pronouncements, like those of his predecessors, are often veiled. 

            The Vatican is an institution of immense power and wealth, largely secretive, filled with mystery and intrigue. For most people, it’s another world, one that seems very old and far removed from their own contemporary lives.

            Even the pope’s speeches on love and spirituality are distant in their impact, if there is any impact, to the average person, whether or not they are Catholic.

            Despite the church’s power and wealth, its keepers struggle from an ancient fortification, Vatican City, to maintain relevancy in a fast-changing modern world. It has failed to even adequately address the child sex-abuse scandal that has rocked the church to its core and threatens the existence of the Holy See.   

            Curiously, the last time a pope resigned was 1415. Pope Gregory XII was elected under condition that he would abdicate the papacy when rival Pope Benedict XIII who presided from Avignon, France, did. Their abdications ended the Western Schism that lasted 39 years and was driven by politics rather than theological disagreements.

            Once Pope Benedict XVI steps down at the end of February, it will be fascinating to see who the College of Cardinals elects as the new pontiff and what it will mean for the future of the Catholic Church.

Send in the Drones

As a technological breakthrough, drones, or unmanned, remote-controlled vehicles, go back to the late 19th century, in the twilight of the Victorian era, when at a Madison Square Garden exhibition in 1898 inventor and electrical engineer Nikola Tesla demonstrated a radio-controlled boat.

The public who witnessed the boat speeding around a pool of water believed magic or telepathy controlled the little vessel, according to Christopher Eger's 2007 book, "The Robot Boat of Nikola Tesla: The Beginnings of the UUV and remote control weapons."

Tesla called it a "teleautomaton" and tried to sell the invention to the United States military, but the government showed little interest, according to P.W. Singer's 2009 "Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century."

After more than a century of tinkering, drones (or as their manufacturers and users prefer, unmanned aerial vehicles) have not only been perfected, but embraced by the government as a means to wage war at extremely low costs compared to the traditional means of waging war.

It's not just a matter of waging war at low cost, it's waging war effectively at low cost -- drones can spy, search, target, destroy; and can do it with stealth.

And while drones are unmanned, a man, or woman, sits at a remote location controlling the drone, identifying its target via video camera, and directing where it's going to fire its Hellfire missiles.

Tesla's concept has come a long way in 114 years.

While a technological achievement, drones are also a moral qualm for many Americans; the idea of killing so effectively and efficiently and, at times, outside the limits of the U.S. Constitution.

That American law enforcement agencies are turning to drones for crime surveillance makes us more jittery about our constitutional rights to privacy, not to mention the government's limits in search and seizure.

Congress and the Obama administration are taking the proper course in starting debate on the use of drones, militarily and domestically. We're a democracy, right?

However, the laws and policies that emerge from this debate will likely lead to greater expansion of drones, particularly in the military. In fact, drones may will set us on the course to finally becoming what we've loathed to become -- policeman of the world.

The U.S. military is already spread around the world trying to keep law and order in remote and not-so-remote places. Sending off to do battle in far away lands is an American tradition that began with the Spanish-American War, which occurred the same year Tesla invented his "teleautomaton."

It may have been hard for the public -- and the government -- to imagine Tesla's vision becoming a reality in 1898.

But today, with technology changing the world rapidly, it's not hard to imagine American-controlled drones patrolling the skies around the world, and invited to do so by nations willing to pay or at least share the cost for such a service.

Like it or not (and there is clearly much not to like) drones are the future, but we need to figure out how they fit within our democratic principles.