Words Matter

Years ago I read a sentence that has stuck with me, as if, so it seems, to prove itself true. That sentence went something like this, “Words matter, not because of what they say, but because of what they set in motion.”

I fear for what our words–our many, many words–are setting in motion in our nation and world. Specifically, I fear for what words of hatred and distrust and division are releasing into our future. They threaten to drown out words of love, of hope, of human community. Words founded upon our fears threaten to overwhelm words grounded in hope.

Yesterday the Supreme Court of the United States issued a decision on the administration's “ban” on immigration from predominantly Muslim countries. That decision and the dissents it provoked were stated in carefully-wrought words intended to justify very different points of view on the matter.

Giving the majority the benefit of doubt, I believe it really believes that what it said faithfully interprets the Constitution and the law in the only way possible.

But I also believe the majority deliberated in a kind of vacuum. The five justices read the President’s Executive Order and the Constitution and the appropriate laws while wearing blinders and ear plugs, as if the documents exist apart from daily life and political and social realities. They did not consider what their words have already set into motion: more distrust, more despair, more injustice, more anger. “The law’s the law; it doesn’t matter when it opens the door to making things worse than they already are.”

About the same time, Representative Maxine Waters urged confronting government leaders and officials personally wherever we see them, and Representative Steven King darkly hinted that we may be looking at another civil war. Loose talk, but talk that can set into motion dire events that will lead to no good end and certainly not strengthen our democracy. 

I struggle to find words that might set good into motion, that might release the power of love and compassion and justice into the world, that might channel my outrage over this current crisis into messages that point to a better way. I am not sure I know how to do this, but somehow I must.

Suffer the little children to suffer

Our daughter told us last night about trying to explain the meaning of life to our 7-year-old granddaughter in response to a question she had asked.

My doctor this morning proudly showed me pictures of his 2-month-old grandson, happily snuggled in the arms of his loving parents (and grandfather). Years of questions to be faced!

All children are born with a basic human right to tender and responsive parental love. Sadly, not all parents are capable or available to give it. That void is never, ever the child’s fault.

But when our government denies that fundamental right to children because they belong to a class of people then the fault is only the government’s. It will have to answer in the court of human decency. 

I am ashamed of and angry about this mess foisted upon us by a dysfunctional political system and a cynical and heartless administration. Yesterday’s Executive Order does little to address the current situation, and even threatens to make it worse. We should be, we can be, we must be better than this, even while securing our borders and doing justice.

Has America grown weary of making even the feeblist attempts to do right by all people? Are we choosing to inflict suffering upon the most vulnerable because our fear of the future has overwhelmed our desire to do good? Is that what the 2016 election was really all about? Today, it surely seems so.

The Final Chapter in Clare and Lulu Myers's Family

My Aunt Marjorie died recently, thereby closing the book on my father’s nuclear family. Her passing has touched me not only because of who she was, but also for what it represents.

Clare and Lulu Myers raised their six children on a farm a couple of miles north of Beaman, in southern Grundy County, Iowa. They had been born in the 1890s, and their children were born between 1915 and 1929. My dad, Keith, was the oldest, and Marj was #4, born in 1925. There were four sons and two daughters.

All of my memories of grandparents Myers are good ones. They were hard-working, honest, caring people who were deeply involved in the life of their small community and its Methodist Church. They were remarkably aware of the world beyond their corner of it. My grandfather had a little college and I believe hoped to be a teacher, but family obligations took him back to the farm. Grandmother was an avid reader all of her life.

It is nearly impossible for me to imagine how they raised their children as successfully as they did. The decade before the worldwide Great Depression of the 1930s saw the agricultural depression and droughts of the 1920s. Then came World War II. Fortunately, their farm was on some of the most productive land on earth, and their hard work as a family assured their children of food and shelter and basic clothing, if not much else. I do not remember my father ever saying they went hungry, but he often said they were poor but didn’t know it because everyone they knew was in the same boat. They would not understand being considered “privileged.” They would smile modestly if you recalled that they had “fed the world” during and after the Second World War.

Each of the six children knew traditional measures of success. They all married (only one marriage ended in divorce), they all bore children (a total of 16, 12 of whom are still living), and they all achieved the comforts and benefits of middle class American life. So far as I know none of them ever crossed the law in any but the most minor of ways. They all made their communities better places, and some made contributions that were felt beyond those communities.

Five of the six were Iowans to their deaths. Many of the next generation have also remained in Iowa, but several live out of the state. Only two of my fifteen cousins are farmers today, and both those families have supplemented their income in other careers.

My generation, transitioning into old age itself, treasures later memories of the mature Clare and Lulu Myers family. We remember family gatherings with our grandparents and their six adult children and their families. Our children only know about those if and when we tell them about them. Their children will not likely know any of their names or where and how they lived.

History tends not to take special note of families like that of Clare and Lulu Myers. For the most part they will be remembered, if they are remembered at all, as names and perhaps bland notations in old government records. But the rememberers of the memories that matter–of life and laughter and death and despair in that little farmhouse and the land around it–are now silenced. The emotions and passions that went into living in that place at that time can no be longer felt exactly as they felt them then. We have some pictures and some written first-person accounts, but no one will be able to say ever again that we were there ourselves.

They are the kind of people and families, of all classes and careers and nationalities and races, whose work and devotion made us who we are today. They made our life as a nation better than they could ever have imagined. How quickly, and how sadly, we forget and try to move on.

Honest Abe Rolls Over in His Grave

President Trump gets along well with dictators, and finds it easy to make deals with them, although it's often hard to understand what those deals are.

He does not get along well with democratically-elected leaders, and demonstrates little interest in dealing with them in any but the most superficial way.

President Trump does not understand or accept how "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" works. I fear he feels himself above democracy, including our own.

The people will pay the price.