When Two Become One

He stands there, confident and relaxed, looking out at the future he made for himself. At times despite himself. His natural gifts of intelligence, empathy, compassion, humor, almost overwhelmed by a challenge few have to meet, until two other natural gifts, courage and resilience, overcame it. In another year or so, he will have a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania.

Lined up behind him is the wedding party made up of of parents, groomsmen, bridesmaids, and, at the very end, the prize he most values and dreamed of winning from the day he first saw her, until, months later, she finally saw him. 

She, too, rode resilience and courage to this day.  When she was 9, her family – grandfather, grandmother, father, mother, older brother, younger twin brothers and younger sister – migrated to the US from Ukraine. Her father’s first job supporting the family in the US? Delivering potato chips. 

Today he oversees design in an engineering department. Today, her grandfather has passed, but her grandmother lives with the family in the old school tradition of caring for the elderly. Today she and her siblings speak English with no accent and Ukrainian with the family. In another year or so, she will have a degree as a medical doctor.

It is a sunny, warm day, the sky deep blue. Soon, he will lead the wedding party outside, through a path between 100 or so people  in white garden chairs, the bride’s family on the right and his family on the left, up to small dais, as the groomsman line up on the left and bridesmaids line up on the right. Standing in the middle is one of his best friends from childhood, who will conduct the ceremony.

The ceremony that he and his fiancee worked on for months, no detail too small, will feel simple and easy, with each of them reading vows, not from a book, but from their own feelings, words they chose just for each other. 

He will get emotional at one point and, poetically, at the exact same moment, his twin sister will too.

When it is time to exchange rings, he will turn and ask the audience to look under their chairs. With chuckles of delight, everyone will scour the ground under them. His cousin’s wife will win, carrying both rings up to them bride and groom. 

The ceremony will end with two individuals now officially melded into one, walking to the music of cheers and the warmth of standing applause. 

After the ceremony they will sit together at a single table surrounded by other tables filled with friends and family. There will be speeches, some funny, some emotional. There will be dancing until the sun is long gone, slaps on the back, hugs, tears, smiles.

Her father will note that all he ever wanted for his daughter is her happiness. And seeing that she has found it, “I’m happy, too.”

As he looks out onto his friends and family the man is not thinking about any of these things. He is not “thinking” that much at all. He is feeling the crowd’s happiness and his bride’s happiness and his own happiness at the door opening to a future he had never thought possible.

(If you like this, pass it on. If you don't, pass it on anyway. Why should you suffer alone?)

Remember How We used To Be?

In a time where we’re living in zigzag, helter-skelter, flying  upside down past-the-speed-of-understanding world, it’s calming to just look out the window of our lives for a moment below the level of leaders and oligarchs and the slow destruction of the American Experiment and see a country not at economic loggerheads with our centuries old friends, a country that doesn’t seek war, doesn’t purge and kill innocent immigrants, doesn’t corrupt the government, and doesn’t sell power to big money, and see vestiges of the old America, a place of honor and honesty, community and comity, the signs so many of us now yearn for.

(Wow. That may be the longest sentence I’ve ever written.)

For example:

1) I went to a bicycle shop in Berwyn, PA started and run by a guy who instinctively does the right thing. A number of years ago, he started collecting used bicycles, fixing them up and giving them to kids who couldn’t afford them as an incentive for them to go to school.

“Never miss a class for a year and get a bike, helmet and lock” was Steve’s challenge. 

It worked. 38 kids had perfect records that first year. 

Nowadays he’s moved the idea one step farther; the kids he teaches  – and pays – are repairing old bikes, including fancy, big name ones, and selling them for a fraction of their original cost, but still turning a profit. They’re  also managing inventory, ordering new parts, and marketing the business under Steve’s mentorship.  

Kids staying out of trouble, learning to work, earning money, learning what a business does, and, above all, doing the right thing.

Lucky kids. Lucky bicycle buyers. Lucky Berwyn.

2) The other day I went to a Hyundai dealership in Dowingtown to buy a car. I expected- no dreaded – the usual haggling, being hammered by salesmen who must make their commission no matter how many half-truths and legal lies they tell, and finally, having agreed on a deal, being ushered into a room with the “Finance” person to settle the bill, who turns out to be just another, more obnoxious  sales person, this time pushing warrantees and other add-ons.

Instead I got a manager named Jim who promised “None of that stuff” and – OK, this will be hard to  believe – kept his promise! There was no pressure, a price that seemed fair to both sides, and I got a car that included some extras I hadn’t expected. 

Who’d a thunk it?

3) There’s a bank in my town called National Bank of Malvern, which has been around since the beginning of banking in this country. It’s “National”  because in the 1800’s, before there was federal money, a very few, very well vetted banks were given “National” status by the government to print their own money.

With that kind of heritage, you’d think the bank would have the latest software and computer systems, like other nationally renowned banks, and they do. They connect with other banks and financial institutions around the country at the press of a computer key. But they haven’t replaced their staff with software robots and they don’t view their customers as data points.

So when you call to ask a questions, the phone is answered, not by a robot, but by a person -really!- who answers your questions without sending you to India or an AI.  

Hard to believe, huh.

Three examples of a culture of integrity and kindness right around the corner.

Quaint, you say? Old Fashioned? From an earlier era?  Not really. It’s all around us, from small stores to local school teachers to neighbors on the street. If we just look below the sleaze balls who control this country right now, we’ll see that the basic American culture still exists.

All we have to do is put it back in charge.

(If you like this, pass it on. If you don't, pass it on anyway. Why should you suffer alone?)

The 250th Birthday And Democracy Debate

I hadn’t read the Constitution in years. Or The Declaration of Independence. How about you?  

I read both recently as celebrations of our 250th year ramped up. Parties, fireworks, speeches, parades, holiday fun.

This anniversary is also marked by something that has not been done in 250 years:  a debate about democracy itself.

These debates involve  people at all levels of our society: politicians, cab drivers, teachers, students, old, young, rich, poor. Their back and forth fill the news and social media every day.

Much of the debate is about Trump’s power as President: can he start a war without Congressional approval? Can he send national troops into cities? Can he alter or federalize the Election process? Can he imprison people without due process? Can he “weaponize” government against his enemies? Can he stack the Supreme Court in his favor? Can he restrict freedom of speech or  freedom of the press? And so on.

At the 200th anniversary, 50 years ago, we proudly celebrated the success and resilience of our democracy, even after the resignation of a President for trying to game the system.

Today, irony abounds.

Our first President turned down a third term.  Our current President craves one.  

Our first President was so honest, a myth built up around him: “I cannot lie: I cut down the cherry tree”. Our current President lied 30,573 times n just his first term. 

We’ve proudly called ourselves a nation of immigrants since immigrants from Europe first landed. The world applauded, sending us the Statue of Liberty as a symbol of their admiration and our wisdom. Today, we argue about the value of immigrants to the country. We debate 14th Amendment, the notion of birthright citizenship all the way up to the Supreme Court. We have a Vice President who recently declared one of Europe’s biggest mistakes was to “open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants.” 

100% – every single immigrant – must pass  the US citizenship test to become a US citizen. Only 30% of US citizens can pass the same test.

And we’re not just debating about political power. We’re also losing trust in the basic institutions of democracy. 

Recent polls are telling. Only 15% of the country approves of Congress. Only 42% approve of the healthcare system. Only 35% approve of our k-12 school systems. Only 30% of Americans believe in “The American Dream”. Just over 50% have positive views of Capitalism, our economic system. 

Why now, 250 years later?

There are many answers. Here are a few.

We have a President who wants to be a dictator, or at minimum a king. He is supported by a movement, Project 2025, that wants to make government more autocratic. He is backed by White Christian Nationalists (a modern name for racists) who would overturn the First Amendment’s’ separation of church and state, and, instead merge the (Christian) church and state. 

Trump has clearly triggered the fury of today’s debate, but some of these conflicts were built into the system from the beginning.

The slavery issue almost closed down the Constitutional Convention, so the leaders punted it down the road… until it exploded in 1861…and today still burns like fire embers quietly glowing in the forest.

Slavery was also a critical component of the South’s agrarian economy, and an early version of an economic system called Capitalism. Which grew to become the most innovative and successful economic system in the world.  

Capitalism is based on a governing system diametrically opposed to democracy: dictatorship. Dictatorship is the most efficient form of governing; democracy is the least efficient. That’s why companies are dictatorships, run top-down by individuals. What they say goes. Or else.  Thus Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, etc… 

From millionaires to trillionaires in a little over 100 years.

Dictatorship does not tolerate dissension. Democracy demands it. So there has always been conflict between the two.

The fulcrum that has kept balance between democracy and capitalism all these years was a culture that believed in the rule of law as framed by the Constitution, and valued integrity over dishonesty as exemplified by The Declaration of Independence and personified by George Washington and the founding fathers.

That balance has slowly shifted over the last hundred years as capitalism’s pursuit of money and power has led to a series of laws that favor capitalism over democracy.

Three examples. 

1) In 1916, when Henry Ford heard the Dodge brothers planned to finance their new car company with Ford Company dividends, Ford stopped paying the dividends, saying he wanted to invest them back into his company. The Dodge brothers took it up to The Michigan Supreme Court, which ruled that a company’s  primary responsibility was to increase shareholder value, period. 

2) Just under 100 years later, with the Citizens United, the Supreme Court opened the floodgates for money to pour into the voting system, turning the notion of “one person, one vote” into a sick joke.

3) States across the country are gerrymandering voting districts to minimize the impact of minority voters.

As a result the value system that started this country has been replaced by greed. The rich have grown richer, the poor have grown poorer. 

Today, under Trump, we celebrate wealth and denigrate poverty. Oligarchs  (Musk,  Ellison, Zuckerberg, Page, etc…) have amassed huge power as our current President and his backers deliberately attempt to throttle democracy.

How do we turn all of this this around? How do we restore trust in our leaders, faith in our institutions, and integrity in our culture?

Read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. It worked for 250 years. It can work now.

And vote accordingly.

(If you like this, pass it on. If you don't, pass it on anyway. Why should you suffer alone?)

Speaking Truth To Power

The phrase traces back to 1942 when an American civil rights activist put out a pamphlet titled Speak Truth to Power: a Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence.

Icons of the era, like Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite first spoke truth to power over the radio in WWII, then on TV after the war. Cronkite’s truth about the failures in the Viet Nam War triggered Johnson’s exit from the Presidency and politics. Later the Washington Post and the New York Times published the truth about Pentagon Papers and the Watergate scandal. Broadcast TV amplified that truth, and eventually truth ran Nixon out of town.

Starting in 1968 CBS’s 60 Minutes has spoken truth to power for 58 years, winning numerous awards, not to mention being the most-watched news magazine of the last six decades.

Most journalists are underpaid and overworked. But they dig up the truth anyway for a variety of reasons: It’s fun; its courgeous; it’s altruistic; it’s heroic at times; it’s never boring; and  most of all, the world needs it.

Journalists witness and report parts of life unseen by the general public: rat infested slums; bloodied war zones with wounded and dead; people without heat who stuff their clothes with paper to survive the winter; police who pummel or even shoot pregnant women, children, and blacks and browns; politicians who take payoffs, and more recently; elected politicians who set records for corruption.

That’s why most journalists are liberals. 

Speaking truth to power can lead to retribution, especially in the Trump era. When conservative David Ellison, son of conservative billionaire Larry Ellison, was trying to merge Paramount/Skydance  with Warner Brothers for $110.9 billion, he needed the approval of FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, one of our mafia-styled President’s numerous lackeys. Trump disdains the media, recently encouraging the cancellation of Colbert’s Late Show, applauding the attempted shut down of Jimmy Kimmel, and suing CBS over a 60 Minutes interview of Kamala Harris that he didn’t like. Carr has also recently threatened ABC’s local stations licenses.  In glaring contrast to CBS caving in to Trump’s suit, ABC responded by accusing the FCC of “unconstitutional retaliation and coercion.”

Soon after Paramount (and CBS) offered to settle Trump’s suit for  a total of $38 million, Carr approved the merger. Ellison then replaced Tom Cibrowski, the experienced and highly respected head of CBS news, with political conservative Bari Weis, who has none – zero – experience in broadcast news. Trump praised the move.

The result has been a precipitous drop in ratings for CBS Evening News. It now has less then half of the 8 million plus viewers of ABC Evening News.

Weis promply replaced the highly respected Executive Producer of 60 Minutes, Bill Owens, with another broadcast news novice, Nick Bilton. 

The Tiffany network became The Fools Gold network.

Which has led to the resignations or firings of 60 Minutes correspondents Anderson Cooper, Sharyn Alfonsi, Cecilia Vega, and Executive Producers Bill Owens, and Tanya Simon.

That’s like losing the top players and coaching staff from a Superbowl winner. WHich prompted correspondent Scott Pelley to speak truth to CBS power.

What truth did Pelley speak? Here’s what he said in a meeting with Bilton and other correspondents.

Bari Weis  is “…murdering 60 Minutes. She does not love this place, she was brought in to kill it and is doing exactly that”.  

Her team “instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story.” 

She “has no qualifications for her job; you (Nick Bilton) have slender qualifications for this job. The changes that she’s made at the Evening News have been catastrophic, so why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?”

Admittedly it was a bit rough of Pelley, but after 37 years at CBS News and seeing 58 years of excellence in journalism decimated by incompetence or worse, deliberation, can you blame him?

The next day Bilton fired Pelley, saying “Yesterday, you hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt….your employment with CBS is terminated for cause effective immediately.” 

Clearly neither Bilton nor Weiss – nor Ellison – knows the history of screaming arguments at 60 Minutes, starting with the originals: Correspondent Mike Wallace and Executive Producer, Don Hewitt. 

Speaking truth to power, especially power with political roots, doesn’t always have happy endings. On the other hand, maybe people like you and I can respond by just not watching CBS or 60 Minutes any more.

Maybe we can speak truth to power, too.

(If you like this, pass it on. If you don't, pass it on anyway. Why should you suffer alone?)

Dog/Man

Several benches ring a small tree lined meadow. Sitting at one of the benches is a man, not an old man, not particularly good looking man, not particularly stylish man. In fact, the kind of man people forget once they pass the bench. Near the man, with a leash trailing on the ground near the bench is a dog, not an old dog, not a particularly good looking dog, not a particularly stylish dog, the kind of dog people forget once they pass the bench. 

Dog: See that guy? He’s about to fall asleep. Which means I won’t get to walk for the next half hour, if that.

Man: See that dog? All he wants to do is walk. You’d think, at his age, he’d want to enjoy the spring weather. But N-o-o-o-o. Gotta walk!

The man gets up. The dog gets up. The man grabs the leash and heads out. The dog runs in front, pulling on the leash. Then, just as the man matches his pace, the dog stops to sniff, almost tipping the man head over teakettle. The man groans.

Dog: I mean why come to the park if you can’t sniff stuff. How else will you know if any other dogs have been here? Not to mention cats, birds, squirrels. A dog has to be careful. We never know when another dog – or cat or fox or bird or human – is going to attack. 

Man: I mean I’ve known this dog pretty much all his life. I take him to the park and he starts sniffing everything in sight and pulling me along with him. And then he suddenly yanks me backward to sniff something he missed.  As though there’s a difference between the grass around a bench and… um,  the grass around that tree.

Dog: Uh Oh. There’s another bench. Will he stop and rest? Please, no! …Whew! 

Man: If that dog doesn’t stop pulling me…!

Dog:  He needs exercise because he’s old. So, my job – one of many, by the way – is to take him on long walks. I could do 10 miles, but I don’t want to kill him… that would be the end of any walks.

Man: You see, if I don’t take him for a walk at least once a day, he gets lethargic, eats less and – I don’t know – dies earlier? In nature, they say wolves and foxes do 10 miles a day. So a mile or two worn’t hurt him. Plus he gets to sniff things. Sniffing is his aphrodisiac.

Dog: Humans are really handicapped in many ways. For example, they make all these stinky things – food, dead clothes, bathrooms,  perfume (ee-yuck!)- most of which they can’t even smell. Nature can be very kind. 

Man: I’ve always wondered why dogs smell so much. I know they have better noses than humans, but so what?  I’m pretty sure he sniffs everything to show me how mediocre my nose is.  Like he can find where another dog peed and, just from the smell, know the dog. Then, he pees on top of the other dog’s pee. Then another dog comes by and pees on his pee and… ad infinitem. Stupid macho stuff.  I grew out of being macho in my…um…50’s.

Just then a woman with a golden retriever approaches.

Dog: Uh Oh!  Big dog! 12 O’clock! Coming our way! Uh Oh!  Time to bark! Gotta warn my human! I have to! I have to!   He could take him down in two seconds!

Dog barks. Man reprimands.

Man: See, this is what I hate about walking this dog. He barks at every other dog. The bigger the dog, the louder he barks. That Golden? He’s as mellow as basket of junior mints. And the woman is too. And cute. They just breezed by us. Dammit!

Dog. You’d think he’d be grateful! But Oh No. He just makes all these loud sounds at me! Doesn’t he know I don’t speak human! What an ungrateful… I mean I scared that yellow killer off! By myself!  

They walk home. The man gives the dog a treat, then sinks into the couch with a glass of water. The dog circles on the rug 5-10 times before collapsing with his treat.

Man: He can be a pain, but he tries. And what a great buddy for a daily walk.  

“Good dog!”

Dog: He can be a pain, but he tries. And what a great buddy for a daily walk. 

“Good man!”

(If you like this, pass it on. If you don't, pass it on anyway. Why should you suffer alone?)