Hemingway: Reflection and Regret

I read Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast in 1987. I enjoyed it but the thing I remember best about the book is the ending. He gives a brief 3rd person account of his affair with Pauline Pfeiffer, his second wife, and his feelings associated with it. “You lie and hate it and it destroys you and every day is more dangerous, but you live day to day as in a war.”

I didn’t realize until recently that Hemingway started writing the book in 1957 and finished it in the fall of 1960. A Moveable Feast covers the years 1921 to 1926 in Paris. Thirty-plus years after the start of his affair, he writes, “All things truly wicked start from innocence.”

Less than a year before his death he relieves the sense of loss at the betrayal of his first marriage. “I wish I had died before I’d ever loved anyone but her.”

Hemingway’s honesty in writing of this period in his life is profound. Thirty years after the affair his reflection brought regret. How sad that in spite of his success and experiences his betrayal of his first marriage stayed with him for the rest of his life.

Sometimes I wonder if we realize that the consequences of our decisions reverberate within us forever.

Afghan Star/Afghan War

CNN’s documentary Generation Islam hosted by Christiane Amanpour profiled the TV show Afghan Star that’s modeled after American Idol. Young smiling Afghans dressed in their finest clothes, stood in line, cell phones in hand, waiting for the show to begin. CNN contrasted this ray of hope with a young Taliban fighter who referred to Afghan Star as sin.

The documentary reminded me of pictures of young South Vietnamese in Saigon riding their motorbikes during the Vietnam war, while hundreds of thousands of Americans fought for their freedom. Just as South Vietnam never mobilized for war, Afghan Star revealed Afghanistan has not mobilized to fight the Taliban.

A divided and fragmented country cannot survive when fighting a determined and implacable enemy. Afghanistan needs a leader its people can unite around. The blood of Americans, British and others cannot save Afghanistan. The Afghans know what it’s like to live under the merciless rule of the Taliban.

The U.S. can delay the Taliban take over, but only the Afghans can save themselves

Footballs from Vietnam

Recently I bought an LSU football that was made in Vietnam. I thought how ironic it was to be throwing a football made in Vietnam with my 29 year old son because that war dominated the youth of my generation. I was 18 in 1964 – the year of the Gulf of Tonkin incident. A year later ground troops were sent to South Vietnam and the war began to escalate. In time over a half million service men and women would be serving in Vietnam. Americans were to experience an onslaught of images, emotions and words that threw our nation into turmoil. Draft card burning, war protesters, napalm dropped, U.S. service men in body bags, words such as light at the end of the tunnel, carpet bombing, My Lai, the silent majority invaded the lives of the American people. The war touched almost every American home. The draft was used to supply the manpower needs of the U.S. Army. The Vietnam war and draft affected virtually every able-bodied male age 18 to 26 from 1964 until the draft ended in 1973. Eleven years later, after 58,000 dead Americans and an estimated 3+million dead Vietnamese, South Vietnam fell to North Vietnam.

When I think of Vietnam, I feel frustration and sadness, a sense of loss for all the death, destruction, anger and hate generated by that war. A war without a strategy and a body of lies betrayed the sacrifice of thousands.

Thirty-four years after the war ended, I’m tossing an LSU football made in Vietnam with my son.

We Reap What We Sow

The United States Government’s treatment of the American Indian is not one Americans can be proud of–particularly during the 1800s. If the Indians tried to live in peace we evicted them from their land. We made promises to them of a new land that was better than their own. Our government bribed and lied to the tribal leaders to get them to go along with being evicted from their land. When they resisted we fought them and after their defeat we forced them onto reservations. The Indians were left to the mercy of the U.S. Government for food, clothing and shelter. They were told where to live, and what their standard of living would be. The Indians went from freedom to being controlled by the government.

The American people are being evicted from their individual freedoms to a policy of containment by the American government. The current healthcare legislation is one more attempt for the American Government to move the people from the known to the unknown territory of healthcare reform. We are being promised a healthcare plan with undefined coverage and costs. Americans who ask questions are ridiculed or ignored. We are being enticed then threatened. The president and congress, choosing to stay with their own healthcare coverage, refuse to move with us into the new healthcare territory.

There is a saying that what goes around comes around. I wonder if we look back at how the U.S. government treated the American Indian we’ll see foreshadowing of how they will treat us.

Failure Is Not An Option

There was an article in the Dallas Morning News on Saturday, July 25, 2009, about 80 year old Suvern (Vern) Freeman Simmons. She opened a restaurant in the 1960s. The restaurant closed this week after 40+ years. Vern comments that she was the mother of 7 children living in the West Dallas projects when her husband left her. She prayed for help to take care of her children.  This woman prayed and then took her God-given talent and put it to use to support her family. What a remarkable story.  After reading Vern’s story, I thought of Ninfa Rodriguez Laurenzo. Following the death of her husband she opened Ninfa’s on Navigation in Houston, Texas. Today there are many Ninfa’s throughout Houston and the surrounding area. There are so many people today who squander their talent and reputations while these two women took the talent God gave them and did something with it. There’s an old saying, “Quitters never win and winners never quit.”  These women are an example of what we all need to do today.  Our nation’s future depends on each of us taking personal responsibility for our lives. 

This nation was founded on trusting God and a desire for individual freedom. A majority of Americans today demand individual freedom while rejecting personal responsibility. Failure is acceptable to them as long as there is someone to blame.  Our Founding Fathers knew that failure meant death for some and submission by all to the British. Today our nation stands at an economic precipice of disaster. Vern Simmons and Ninfa Laurenzo did not rely on others to take care of them. They took responsibility for themselves and their families. That’s exactly what we need to do. We can be forced into economic submission by our foreign creditors or we can change and survive.

Lying and the U.S. Presidency-Part 2

There have been two presidents in the past forty years who have been popular with a majority of the American people. They were Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. I was going to write about Ronald Reagan trading arms for hostages with Iran but after considerable thought I have decided against it. I believe Ronald Reagan is the only president in my lifetime that had a genuine affection for the American people and actually showed it. I still believe it and it has been over 20 years since he was in office.

Bill Clinton could have saved this country a lot of headaches if he had admitted his inappropriate relationship with Monica Lewinsky. I believe if he had immediately admitted it to the American public the majority of the people would have accepted it and moved on. Instead we went from denial to Hilary’s comments about a vast right-wing conspiracy to Monica’s dress which provided proof of the relationship to trying to define the meaning of the word ‘is’ to impeachment—and  all of this for nothing. During the Monica years, Al Qaida grew bolder and stronger while we were being distracted. 

Presidents are just like the rest of us: we get into trouble when we fail to deal openly and honestly with each other.

Lying and the U.S. Presidency – Part 1

There have been three presidents in my lifetime that have suffered major harm or destruction by lying. They told lies when the truth would have mitigated them from the damage of their actions. If Richard Nixon had gone on TV and taken total responsibility for the break-in after the Watergate burglars were caught, I believe his presidency would have been saved. The American public knew of the bitterness that existed between Nixon and the Democratic Party. The American people would have seen the Watergate break-in as a political miscalculation instead of a criminal act. By stonewalling Nixon set in motion the process that lead to his resignation.

The Watergate break-in occurred in June, 1972. In November of that same year, Nixon won reelection carrying 49 states with Massachusetts being the only state that McGovern won. If he’d told the truth, Nixon would have served out his presidency and Watergate would have disappeared from the headlines.

In August, 1974—twenty six months after Watergate—Nixon resigned in disgrace from our nation’s highest office–the office he’d spent his entire political life seeking. Read The Washington Post coverage.

The following verse comes to mind when I think of the disastrous end of Richard M. Nixon’s political career.

Then you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.   John 8:32

The truth will always set us free.

Healthcare is too Important to be Left to Politicians

In the 1940s Canada and the United Kingdom implemented National Health care. Sixty plus years later, Canada with a population of 34 million and the UK with a population of 61 million struggle to provide health care for their people. Their citizens who can afford it come to the US for health care instead of waiting for extended periods of time in their own country. The president and members of congress are proposing health care legislation to provide medical care for the US with a population in excess of 306 million. The U.S. population is nine times the size of Canada’s and five times the size of the U.K.

They want to transform the medical care treatment of Americans virtually over night without any idea of the consequences. How can our country’s health care system absorb these massive changes without descending into chaos.

Congress does not need to pass legislation that will affect every citizen and almost every business in this country. Instead we need to start with the uninsured and help them first.

How is congress going to address the country’s healthcare costs associated with the twelve to twenty million undocumented immigrants in this country whose healthcare needs are currently being met at emergency rooms through this nation?

Congress should work through each healthcare issue and coverage slowly and methodically and not let the President bull-rush them into passing massive health care legislation that is unread and un-debated. We do not want this legislation to end up like the Energy legislation House Bill 2454 that was still in the process of being written when passed by the House on June 27th. That’s like signing a blank check and leaving it up to the lobbyist and a few staff members to insert whatever they want into this bill. It should be mandatory that every word of every bill be read and its impact known before being voted on by Congress.

One thing to remember: while President Obama, Harry Reid, Ted Kennedy and Nancy Pelosi are proposing legislation that will drastically affect the healthcare of the American public this legislation will not have any impact on the quality of their own healthcare.

U.S. Senators and U.S. Representatives have access to the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. They pay premiums but the taxpayers subsidize 72 percent to 75 percent of the cost of their health plans.
Congress not only has the Federal Employees Healthcare benefits but doctors and other health professionals ready to serve their needs. They also have access to the Naval Medical Center.

When it comes to domestic legislation, our president and congress remind me of General Custer at the Little Big Horn who decided to attack the Indians without concern for the number of Indians he would be fighting. We have to stop passing legislation without counting the costs in dollars and the impact on the American people.

America’s Snooze Button

In 1973 the energy alarm clock went off in this country when the oil embargo impacted our lives. We were awakened to our dependence on foreign oil. Things got better and we hit the snooze button and went back to sleep. I don’t know how many times the energy alarm clock has gone off since then but we keep hitting the snooze button.

In the summer of 2008 when the price of gasoline went up, the alarm sounded again, but by the Fall as prices began to decline, we hit snooze once again. For 36 years, we’ve been hitting the snooze button.

In the 1980’s the Japanese auto makers gave this country’s auto industry a wake-up call. Twenty years later, with alarms going off more frequently the auto industry is in serious trouble.

In 1993 the world trade center was bombed and throughout the 90s we kept getting warnings but the snooze button kept getting hit. On September 11, 2001 we got a wake-up call at the expense of 3,000 lives. The financial crises hit us hard in the Fall of 2008. Numerous economic Paul Reveres kept warning us, but no one in authority paid attention. We have faced the economic crises with a bailout. I am afraid the bailout is our economic snooze button. Are we going back to sleep or are we going to finally wake-up?

I believe our president should form several teams to look closely at the numerous issues we are facing. Issues such as aforementioned wake-up alarms of energy, the auto industry, the economy, banking, finance and many more. It might help if they started off by reading Managing the Unexpected: Assuring High Performance in an Age of Complexity Volume I  by E. Weick and Kathleen M. Sutcliff.

I don’t think our government and business leaders have a conceptualized view of our problems or recognize the unexpected in the making. Sometimes the unexpected screams its warning like the 1973 oil embargo. Other times it is more subtle like the auto industries loss of market share in the 80s. There is an old saying: Snooze you lose. Sounds trite but it’s true. In our case, it may be snooze and be defeated.

Is Our Generation Too Smart To Listen?

Sam Rayburn, former Speaker of the House of Representatives, said, “Any jackass can kick down a barn; but it takes a carpenter to build it.”

Virtually all of our nation’s infrastructure was built by generations that preceded mine. The interstate highway system, space program, sewer system, power plants, public buildings, and universities—you name it–all were in place or being finalized by the time I reached 30. What have we built since 1976 that will benefit this nation and will last past our generation. We have not invested in this country. Our bridges, sewer lines—the list is endless—are in desperate need of repair or replacement.

Congress and this administration passed an 800 billion-dollar-plus spending package this past spring that does little or nothing to benefit our country as a whole. It’s just a bunch of one-off projects that will benefit a specific community or narrow special interest group. It is a bill without vision or scope—nothing but pork.

We need to stop this spending and evaluate what this country truly needs. Let’s build for this generation and generations to come instead of leaving our children and grandchildren a mountain of debt and a third-world sewer system.

Can you name one thing that has been built in the last 15 years that will benefit future generations? If you can think of anything, leave a comment. I’d like to know what it is.

Sam Rayburn also said, “If a man has good common sense, he has about all the sense there is.” Think about it.