Apply reason to difficulties; harsh circumstances can be softened, narrow limits can be widened, and burdensome things can be made to press less severely on those who bear them cleverly.
Seneca, Roman philosopher, statesman, and dramatist who died on April 12, 65 A.D.
On April 12, 1861, the Civil War began when Confederate shore batteries opened fire on Union-held Fort Sumter in South Carolina’s Charleston Bay. After firing more than 4,000 rounds at the fort in the next 34 hours, U.S. Major Robert Anderson surrendered. Two days later, President Abraham Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to quell the Southern “insurrection.” Thus began the deadliest war in American history with more than 600,000 dead on both sides.
On April 12, 1989, Abbie Hoffman, the 1960s political and social activist who co-founded the Youth International Party or “Yippies” and was tried and convicted of conspiracy and inciting a riot for his role in protests during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, as one of the Chicago 7, died after wallowing 150 phenobarbital tablets along with hard liquor. Hoffman’s death was officially ruled a suicide.
On April 12, 1999, President Bill Clinton was cited for contempt of court for giving “intentionally false statements” in a civil lawsuit brought against him by Paula Jones charging sexual harassment.
The art of polling is similar to almost any effort where interpretation is required: Context is important.
The Reason-Rupe pollsters seem to get this. Their recent survey covers not only a lot of ground (the president’s job performance, possible candidates in the upcoming elections, health care, morality and war) but goes into some depth on a number of the issues covered. For instance, each of Obama’s major challengers is put in the context of several competitive scenarios — Obama vs. Romney, Obama vs. Santorum (the poll was conducted before Santorum dropping out), Obama vs. Gingrich, Obama vs. Paul, etc.— with even possible third-party runs brought in. All very interesting.
The biggest section of the poll concerned health care. These questions also probed alternatives, eliciting opinions explicitly in the context of possible options and outcomes. But the results regarding Iran’s nuclear capabilities were especially provocative. Nearly half of Americans tend to favor military action against the country were we to discover that the Iranian government was developing nuclear weaponry. But, when the conflict was considered as a long, dragged-out affair — of the same variety as happened in Iraq — support dwindled, and the numbers opposed to intervention went well over half.
Not shocking. Costs matter. Context matters.
The most amusing element of context in the poll emerged in one pair of questions regarding Obamacare. Is the federal requirement to carry medical insurance unconstitutional? Over 60 percent said yes. But switch that mandate to requiring Americans to buy broccoli and other healthy foods, and those crying “unconstitutional” shot up to 87 percent.
Now that’s Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.”
Americans too often forget how ugly politics used to be. In the 19th century, “tarring and feathering” was just one terrible way among many of “making a point.” Drenching somebody in hot tar is painful; putting feathers on that someone and sending them running was humiliating, as well.
And a sign of horrid cruelty.
Politics, which (we should remind ourselves) is how we publicly decide who gets to use the awesome and awful powers of the state (itself known to be the cruelest of cold monsters), can’t help but conjure up hate and violence. We must remain vigilant against that tendency.
So the recent killing of a Democratic campaign manager’s cat — actually, his child’s pet — and its desecration with the word “liberal” marked on it, has a context.
But that context is no excuse. It’s an incredibly sick, deranged, hateful act. We should all hope justice prevails.
The campaign manager responded reasonably, condemning whoever did it without casting blame about blindly. Too bad I can’t say that about the comments to the article on ThinkProgress.org. Many commenters there blame all “conservatives,” right-wingers, Rush Limbaugh, et al.
Like racist rhetoric, this paints blame with a wide brush, holding a whole group of people responsible for what one person in that group does. Shameful. But it’s even a bit worse in this case, since the guilty person has not been caught, so we don’t even know who did it or whether that person was actually a “conservative.”
Isn’t it time to get past blind hatred of the “they”?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
On April 10, 1778, Commander John Paul Jones and his crew aboard the USS Ranger set sail from Brest, France, headed toward the Irish Sea to raid British warships, the first mission of its kind during the Revolutionary War. Jones is remembered as a “Father of the American Navy.”
On April 10, 1942, the day after the surrender of the main Philippine island of Luzon to the Japanese, the 75,000 Filipino and American troops captured on the Bataan Peninsula began a forced march to a prison camp near Cabanatuan. During this infamous trek, known as the “Bataan Death March,” the prisoners marched 85 miles in six days, with only one meal of rice during the entire journey. By the end of the march, which was punctuated with atrocities committed by the Japanese guards, hundreds of Americans and many more Filipinos had died.
“Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear — kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor — with the cry of grave national emergency.”
“It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.”
Thank goodness the CIA didn’t investigate my preschool drawings. I went wild with pencil and pen, drawing such mayhem that surely my parents should have been hauled into a klieg-lit interrogation room.
But they weren’t. Such dystopian dynamics had to wait a few decades and befall 4-year-old Nevaeh Sansone and her father, Jessie Sansone, of Kitchener, Ontario.
At school, Nevaeh drew a picture of her father holding a pistol. What was her father doing with the gun? Reportedly, little Nevaeh informed adults, and I use that term loosely, her dad was “getting the bad guys and monsters.”
No wonder, then, that when Jesse Sansone came to pick up Nevaeh and his other kids at school, he was picked up, instead, by police.
The child’s concerned teacher had tattled to school officials, who then contacted Family and Children’s Services, who brought in the, uh, big guns — who arrested and strip-searched the child’s father.
Waterloo Regional Police Inspector Kevin Thaler informed reporters that Nevaeh and her siblings told police where in the house the gun was stored and that the children had accessed it.
“It is a four-year-old that we’re taking the information from,” Thaler explained, “but the fact is that this disclosure was very descriptive and very alarming to the officers investigating this.”
He elaborated: “The kids were scared.”
Yeah, I’ll bet they were.
After several hours of harassing the children, humiliating the father and scaring the pregnant mother, the cops figured out that the gun was a toy. According to the father, it was “completely transparent. It doesn’t even resemble a real gun, at all.”
Fake gun. Real panic. Foolish, fear-ridden officialdom.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
“Our experience of the governments of the world, our knowledge of the weapons at their disposal, and our awareness of our own limitations justify pessimism. But some mysterious factor deep in the human psyche has produced a countervailing conviction that educating, organizing, uniting, and acting will make a difference.”
On April 9, 1969, the “Chicago Eight,” indicted on federal charges of conspiracy to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, pled not guilty. The eight antiwar activists were David Dellinger of the National Mobilization Committee (NMC); Rennie Davis and Thomas Hayden of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS); Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, founders of the Youth International Party (“Yippies”); Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers; and two lesser known activists, Lee Weiner and John Froines. The defendants were ultimately found not guilty of conspiracy, but the jury convicted all but Froines and Weiner of intent to riot. Though the others were each sentenced to five years in prison and fined $5,000, none of the defendants served time because in 1972 a Court of Appeals overturned the criminal convictions.