About ten years ago, a new principal came into my room and said, “I hope you’re not going to teach your unit on evolution and creation this year.” I was surprised. He had just been hired and the school year was just about to begin. I was setting up my classroom in preparation for the first day of school.
“I was planning to,” I responded. “I’ve been starting the school year with it for quite a while now. What’s the problem?”
“Some parents came to see me who are concerned about what you teach,” he said. “And I’d just as soon not have to deal with the controversy if I don’t have to.” He wouldn’t tell me who the parents were because they requested anonymity. I argued that it was worthwhile to begin the year by teaching students that Americans have different concepts of how everything began. That those fundamental differences in thinking tend to affect how they think about other issues in history, how they behave, and how they vote. I persuaded him that students were free to decide for themselves what they wanted to believe, and that I only wanted them to understand how people think.
With a long sigh he relented, and I went ahead with the unit. Later, he told me that he was getting heat from parents on both sides of the spectrum. Jehovah’s Witnesses didn’t want their kids exposed to ideas about evolution, and secular-humanist parents objected to what they perceived as my creation bias. I’d been publishing columns in local newspapers and many were written from a conservative or Roman Catholic perspective; sometimes both.
Students would ask me during the unit what my view was. I said I would tell them at the end if they couldn’t figure it out before then. Most couldn’t, and when we were done I told them that I didn’t see evolution and creation as mutually exclusive, that I borrowed from each to construct my personal view.
About eighteen years ago, another former principal invited me to her office to introduce herself. Placed prominently, so that it was the first thing to be seen by anyone sitting there, was a sign proclaiming: “Scientists discovered something to do the work of ten men: One woman.” She sat in her long, loose-fitting dress and large, brightly-colored, shawl-like scarf with the end thrown over one shoulder - a uniform I’ve associated with radical feminists ever since. I leaned forward to read the sign. I said, “Hmm,” and then sat back. She paused, as if waiting for a comment. I didn’t make one.
Later, she visited me in my classroom to question what I was teaching. It was my habit during those years to conduct at least one debate in each US History class. Students would brainstorm topics and then choose one by majority vote. Three classes chose abortion that year. She told me she was concerned about the debates and I asked her why. She said fourteen-year-olds were too young to discuss such a controversial and delicate subject. I told her it was their overwhelming choice in two classes (others chose gun control). Again, she said they weren’t sophisticated enough.
“That’s curious,” I said. “They’re old enough to have abortions, right?”
She didn’t answer.
“Some girls in this school quite possibly have abortions you know.”
“I know that,” she said.
“So you’re suggesting that it’s okay for them to have abortions, but not to debate them?”
Again, she didn’t answer. She was called away at that point to handle another matter and I went ahead with the debates. Parents had been invited and students conducted themselves quite well. Each side presented the classic arguments we hear whenever this issue is debated and students made up their own minds at the end.
These topics have been controversial for a long time. In 1925, for example, Tennessee passed a law outlawing the teaching of evolution. A high school science teacher was charged with violating the law and he was defended by the most famous trial lawyer of the time. The prosecutor was a three-time presidential candidate and Secretary of State. The trial was dramatized the classic movie “Inherit The Wind.” Clearly, some creationists were intolerant of conflicting views at the time.
Last month (in 2005), after a local school board in Georgia put stickers in high school biology texts advising students that evolution is “a theory, not a fact,” a federal judge ordered it removed. The school board is appealing. Clearly, some evolutionists are intolerant of conflicting views today.
Intolerant creationists think evolutionists are damned. Intolerant evolutionists think creationists are dumb. Strict creationists believe God created everything and life has a divine purpose, so it logically follows that they tend to believe abortion is murder of a person created by God. Strict evolutionists believe everything happened by chance and doesn’t necessarily have a purpose; it just is. It’s easy to understand why many tend to believe abortion just removes a lump of cells with no particular significance except that it would be problematic in some way if it continued growing.
Both sides can be intolerant, but does that mean we shouldn’t debate? Quite the contrary. If we’re going to understand and live with our fellow citizens in these United States, it’s essential. How else can we function in the constitutional republic our founding fathers designed?
First published in February, 2005
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Dealing With Evil
When I was about seven, a smart-alecky girl from up the street asked me if I’d lived a million days. I said yes, and she said, “Oh no you haven’t.” With a stick, she wrote “365” in the dirt seven times and added it up to 2555. “If you lived to be a hundred, you would only live 36,500 days - not even close to a million.” Humbled, I walked home. Shortly after, I watched an episode of “World At War” with my father and learned that six million Jews were murdered in the death camps of Nazi-occupied Europe. I was struggling to grasp what a million was, yet here were gruesome images of more than six million mass murder victims.
That such an astonishingly evil thing could occur shocked me. Nothing I’ve learned since exceeded it except discovering there were six million other victims as well. I read all I could about the Holocaust until sometime in the 1980s. My curiosity had become morbid fascination, then profound depression. I had to stop my research.
Two enigmas remained, however. One was the systematic banality of Nazi bureaucrats who perpetrated the worst mass murder in history. The other was the submissiveness of the victims. Millions went into ghettoes, onto transports and into gas chambers with little resistance. It’s true that most didn’t know what would happen when the train stopped. They thought they were going to labor camps, communal farms or relocation centers. They thought gas chambers were showers. Even when told by escapees what awaited them at the camps, however, many wouldn’t believe it. There were only a few valiant acts of defiance like the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 in which Jews chose to die fighting rather than submit like sheep. That kind of courage led to the reincarnation of Israel as a country immediately after the war. This tiny nation knew what evil looked like.
What struck me about the mass murder at Virginia Tech last week was not so much the shooter, of whom much has been written. It was the reactions of victims. Most screamed, ran and hid, but a 76-year-old professor used his body to block the door of his classroom and told students to flee. They jumped out second-story windows while the old man impeded the shooter, who eventually pushed the door open and shot him to death. That this professor, Liviu Librescu, was a Holocaust survivor interests me.
Librescu would have been only fourteen in 1945, the last year of WWII and of the Holocaust. As an inmate at Thereseinstadt in Czechoslovakia, he would have had prolonged, intimate contact with evil. After, he spent thirty-three years in Romania under the control of the “Evil Empire” as President Reagan referred to the Soviet Union. Then, through the personal intervention of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1978, he was able to leave Soviet-dominated Romania and move to Israel. For eight years he lived among people who had fought off four full-scale invasions by much larger, Arab Muslim countries as well as their countless terrorist attacks. In 1986, he went on a sabbatical to the United States and stayed.
Last week, evil paid another visit to Liviu Librescu in the form of a hate-filled young man invading his classroom. I suspect the professor recognized his old nemesis right away. Such awareness would have made him different from the typical academics who run our universities today. Thinking themselves intelligent and sophisticated, they defined evil out of existence decades ago. They believed they could protect themselves by declaring their campus a gun-free zone and putting up a few signs. Jews who reestablished Israel after the Holocaust would not make such a mistake because they learned the hard way that the most effective method of deterring those bent on murdering you is being prepared to kill them before they kill you. “Gun-free zones” protect murderers, not the innocent.
My trip to Israel is still on for May 14th to the 24th. My wife and I were supposed to go last October, but rocket attacks by the evil, Iranian-financed, terrorist organization known as Hezbollah on northern Israeli cities we were scheduled to visit forced a postponement. Israeli Defense Forces attacked the terrorists in southern Lebanon but stopped short of destroying Hezbollah when Prime Minister Ehud Olmert wimped out and accepted a UN-negotiated cease fire. Emboldened, the terrorists are already gearing up for another strike. Hezbollah knows UN “Peacekeeping” Forces are about as effective as “Gun-free zone” signs.
A generation has passed since the last Arab Muslim invasion and it looks like some Israelis are getting soft. If they don’t get rid of Olmert and elect a warrior to deal with terrorist murderers, their tiny country will return to oblivion.
That such an astonishingly evil thing could occur shocked me. Nothing I’ve learned since exceeded it except discovering there were six million other victims as well. I read all I could about the Holocaust until sometime in the 1980s. My curiosity had become morbid fascination, then profound depression. I had to stop my research.
Two enigmas remained, however. One was the systematic banality of Nazi bureaucrats who perpetrated the worst mass murder in history. The other was the submissiveness of the victims. Millions went into ghettoes, onto transports and into gas chambers with little resistance. It’s true that most didn’t know what would happen when the train stopped. They thought they were going to labor camps, communal farms or relocation centers. They thought gas chambers were showers. Even when told by escapees what awaited them at the camps, however, many wouldn’t believe it. There were only a few valiant acts of defiance like the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 in which Jews chose to die fighting rather than submit like sheep. That kind of courage led to the reincarnation of Israel as a country immediately after the war. This tiny nation knew what evil looked like.
What struck me about the mass murder at Virginia Tech last week was not so much the shooter, of whom much has been written. It was the reactions of victims. Most screamed, ran and hid, but a 76-year-old professor used his body to block the door of his classroom and told students to flee. They jumped out second-story windows while the old man impeded the shooter, who eventually pushed the door open and shot him to death. That this professor, Liviu Librescu, was a Holocaust survivor interests me.
Librescu would have been only fourteen in 1945, the last year of WWII and of the Holocaust. As an inmate at Thereseinstadt in Czechoslovakia, he would have had prolonged, intimate contact with evil. After, he spent thirty-three years in Romania under the control of the “Evil Empire” as President Reagan referred to the Soviet Union. Then, through the personal intervention of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1978, he was able to leave Soviet-dominated Romania and move to Israel. For eight years he lived among people who had fought off four full-scale invasions by much larger, Arab Muslim countries as well as their countless terrorist attacks. In 1986, he went on a sabbatical to the United States and stayed.
Last week, evil paid another visit to Liviu Librescu in the form of a hate-filled young man invading his classroom. I suspect the professor recognized his old nemesis right away. Such awareness would have made him different from the typical academics who run our universities today. Thinking themselves intelligent and sophisticated, they defined evil out of existence decades ago. They believed they could protect themselves by declaring their campus a gun-free zone and putting up a few signs. Jews who reestablished Israel after the Holocaust would not make such a mistake because they learned the hard way that the most effective method of deterring those bent on murdering you is being prepared to kill them before they kill you. “Gun-free zones” protect murderers, not the innocent.
My trip to Israel is still on for May 14th to the 24th. My wife and I were supposed to go last October, but rocket attacks by the evil, Iranian-financed, terrorist organization known as Hezbollah on northern Israeli cities we were scheduled to visit forced a postponement. Israeli Defense Forces attacked the terrorists in southern Lebanon but stopped short of destroying Hezbollah when Prime Minister Ehud Olmert wimped out and accepted a UN-negotiated cease fire. Emboldened, the terrorists are already gearing up for another strike. Hezbollah knows UN “Peacekeeping” Forces are about as effective as “Gun-free zone” signs.
A generation has passed since the last Arab Muslim invasion and it looks like some Israelis are getting soft. If they don’t get rid of Olmert and elect a warrior to deal with terrorist murderers, their tiny country will return to oblivion.
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Utopian Moonbats
Ancient Irish chieftains had to be physically perfect. Should one lose part of a finger in battle he had to step down and let an intact warrior take over leadership. Why? I suspect it was to preserve the illusion that human perfection was possible. Some needed to believe their leader was flawless and they could not tolerate defects. A foolish notion of course, but one which persisted in immature societies like Irish clans.
Young children think their parents are flawless. As adolescents however, they perceive parental imperfections. Soon flaws are all teenagers can see and they walk twenty paces behind mothers or fathers in public. Many rebel in some way, rejecting parental authority and value systems. At about twenty-five or so, they should mature as they realize that nobody out there is perfect, including themselves. They learn to live with imperfections in people and in the structures under which we govern ourselves.
Most of us fall in love with someone of the opposite sex and we perceive our new loved one as an impeccable human being. That perception too wears off over time when we inevitably perceive defects. They become magnified if we persist in our childish notion that anyone could be faultless. Those who cannot accept imperfection divorce over and over as they search for the perfect mate that doesn’t exist.
All of us seem to have an inherent need to believe in something perfect and the concept of God fulfills that for most. Atheists and agnostics keep looking, however. Some worship other people they perceive to be more intelligent than they are. Others worship nature. Still others, like Marx and Engels, design what they think is a perfect system. They and their followers would impose it on humanity whether people want it or not.
When baby boomers became adolescents in the 1960s, they rebelled against their parents. That much was normal enough even with the unprecedented size of the boomer generation. Trouble is, a significant portion refused to grow up after rebelling against their parents’ value systems. Boomers raised with security and privilege on a level previously unknown considered their good fortune the natural order of things. Instead of appreciating the system that provided it to them, they brazenly trashed those practices and institutions built by their forebears. In their hubris, they rejected do’s and don’ts for human conduct learned since the beginning of civilization.
For example:
Sexual mores? Unnecessary. If it feels good, do it. Marriage? Too constricting. “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.” Drugs and alcohol? “Whatever turns you on.” Patriotism? “Imagine there’s no country. It’s easy if you try. Nothing to kill or die for.” God? “And no religion too.” Economics? “Imagine no possessions . . . No need for greed or hunger . . . Imagine all the people sharing all the world.”
Naiveté? Of course - the height of it. Baby boomers refused to grow up and many continue to resist maturation. Now they run most of our universities, media and many charitable foundations controlling billions of dollars. They largely control what millions see and understand about the world around them. The result is what you hear out of the mouths of people like Rosie O’Donnell, Cindy Sheehan and Dennis Kucinich just to name a few. Conservatives call them “moonbats” and they think in lockstep. Muslim crazies kill thousands of innocent Americans? “They only hate us because Bush, Cheney and Halliburton provoked them. If we just impeach those guys and pull out of Iraq everything will be all right. It’s American government policies that cause terrorism, not Islamic terrorists.” That’s how they think.
Even when Islamofascists themselves proclaim over and over that they intend to make the world Muslim and impose Sharia Law, it isn’t enough to crack the moonbats’ childish world view. President Bush is dangerous, not Radical Muslim terrorists. If we can just elect perfect, progressive leaders, those oppressed Muslims will see how nice we are and we’ll all get along the way John Lennon imagined: “The world will live as one.”
“You may say that I’m a dreamer, but I’m not not the only one,” goes Lennon’s refrain. I agree. You were a dreamer and, unfortunately, you weren’t the only one. There are plenty of moonbats out there in groups like Moveon.org. They elected a new majority in our Congress. Now if they can just elect a perfect president, the world will finally live as one. We’ll all be smiling happy people holding hands in utopia.
Young children think their parents are flawless. As adolescents however, they perceive parental imperfections. Soon flaws are all teenagers can see and they walk twenty paces behind mothers or fathers in public. Many rebel in some way, rejecting parental authority and value systems. At about twenty-five or so, they should mature as they realize that nobody out there is perfect, including themselves. They learn to live with imperfections in people and in the structures under which we govern ourselves.
Most of us fall in love with someone of the opposite sex and we perceive our new loved one as an impeccable human being. That perception too wears off over time when we inevitably perceive defects. They become magnified if we persist in our childish notion that anyone could be faultless. Those who cannot accept imperfection divorce over and over as they search for the perfect mate that doesn’t exist.
All of us seem to have an inherent need to believe in something perfect and the concept of God fulfills that for most. Atheists and agnostics keep looking, however. Some worship other people they perceive to be more intelligent than they are. Others worship nature. Still others, like Marx and Engels, design what they think is a perfect system. They and their followers would impose it on humanity whether people want it or not.
When baby boomers became adolescents in the 1960s, they rebelled against their parents. That much was normal enough even with the unprecedented size of the boomer generation. Trouble is, a significant portion refused to grow up after rebelling against their parents’ value systems. Boomers raised with security and privilege on a level previously unknown considered their good fortune the natural order of things. Instead of appreciating the system that provided it to them, they brazenly trashed those practices and institutions built by their forebears. In their hubris, they rejected do’s and don’ts for human conduct learned since the beginning of civilization.
For example:
Sexual mores? Unnecessary. If it feels good, do it. Marriage? Too constricting. “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.” Drugs and alcohol? “Whatever turns you on.” Patriotism? “Imagine there’s no country. It’s easy if you try. Nothing to kill or die for.” God? “And no religion too.” Economics? “Imagine no possessions . . . No need for greed or hunger . . . Imagine all the people sharing all the world.”
Naiveté? Of course - the height of it. Baby boomers refused to grow up and many continue to resist maturation. Now they run most of our universities, media and many charitable foundations controlling billions of dollars. They largely control what millions see and understand about the world around them. The result is what you hear out of the mouths of people like Rosie O’Donnell, Cindy Sheehan and Dennis Kucinich just to name a few. Conservatives call them “moonbats” and they think in lockstep. Muslim crazies kill thousands of innocent Americans? “They only hate us because Bush, Cheney and Halliburton provoked them. If we just impeach those guys and pull out of Iraq everything will be all right. It’s American government policies that cause terrorism, not Islamic terrorists.” That’s how they think.
Even when Islamofascists themselves proclaim over and over that they intend to make the world Muslim and impose Sharia Law, it isn’t enough to crack the moonbats’ childish world view. President Bush is dangerous, not Radical Muslim terrorists. If we can just elect perfect, progressive leaders, those oppressed Muslims will see how nice we are and we’ll all get along the way John Lennon imagined: “The world will live as one.”
“You may say that I’m a dreamer, but I’m not not the only one,” goes Lennon’s refrain. I agree. You were a dreamer and, unfortunately, you weren’t the only one. There are plenty of moonbats out there in groups like Moveon.org. They elected a new majority in our Congress. Now if they can just elect a perfect president, the world will finally live as one. We’ll all be smiling happy people holding hands in utopia.
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Getting Seasoned
Last Saturday I turned 56 and it’s beginning to look as though I may never become president. I have, however, outlived my father who died of a heart attack at 55. That’s something, I guess. If I make it to the average life expectancy for an American heterosexual white guy - 76, I think I’ll be satisfied. Twenty more years.
Several people have asked me lately when I’m going to retire. It’s a good question but I don’t have an answer. I’ve been teaching for nearly 32 years. It keeps me busy and with two other jobs as well I’m seldom idle. I’ve taken care of a few vacation properties for more than twenty years. My clients are great people and the schedule is flexible unless a windstorm blows over some trees or there’s some other act of God I have to deal with right away. I could pick up a few more clients and retire from teaching. That would give me more time to write - my third occupation for the last sixteen years. It’s nice to have choices, but I see myself working at something or other until I’m either drooling in a rocking chair or dead. I like what I’m doing though and I don’t want to give up any of it right now. Poet Robert Frost put it well:
It’s the last stanza of Two Tramps in Mud Time, one of my favorites. I don’t read much poetry but Frost has always spoken to me. This year’s mud time is longer than most and his words are particularly appropriate to put Spring, 2007 into perspective. The third stanza of the piece reads:
My vocation has been teaching and my avocation is writing. I want more time to write, but I don’t want to give up teaching entirely. My curriculum is twentieth century US History - weaving in civics, economics as well as current events. It all fascinates me, and even if I weren’t teaching it I’d still be studying it. So why not teach a bit longer? I’ll be back next year, at least. After that, who knows what will come along? I sure don’t.
Meanwhile, I’d like spring to come along a little faster than it is - just as everybody else in New England would. As Frost says in the fourth stanza:
It’s been snowing a bit more than a flake during this year’s mud time. As I look out the window to the snow-covered Kearsarge and Baldface on the western horizon and listen to the cold wind howl this Easter Sunday, I wouldn’t advise anything to blossom either. Not today anyway. I know the crocuses and daffodils are coming up under all that white though. My wife and I saw them sprouting in her garden just before last week’s snowstorm covered them up. This week’s storm will bury them even deeper, but I won’t lose hope.
There’s always something getting ready to blossom, even when all we can see is dark and all we can feel is cold. Frost knew that. New Englanders know that. During the Easter season, Christians know it too.
Several people have asked me lately when I’m going to retire. It’s a good question but I don’t have an answer. I’ve been teaching for nearly 32 years. It keeps me busy and with two other jobs as well I’m seldom idle. I’ve taken care of a few vacation properties for more than twenty years. My clients are great people and the schedule is flexible unless a windstorm blows over some trees or there’s some other act of God I have to deal with right away. I could pick up a few more clients and retire from teaching. That would give me more time to write - my third occupation for the last sixteen years. It’s nice to have choices, but I see myself working at something or other until I’m either drooling in a rocking chair or dead. I like what I’m doing though and I don’t want to give up any of it right now. Poet Robert Frost put it well:
But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and the need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.
It’s the last stanza of Two Tramps in Mud Time, one of my favorites. I don’t read much poetry but Frost has always spoken to me. This year’s mud time is longer than most and his words are particularly appropriate to put Spring, 2007 into perspective. The third stanza of the piece reads:
The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You’re one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you’re two months back in the middle of March.
My vocation has been teaching and my avocation is writing. I want more time to write, but I don’t want to give up teaching entirely. My curriculum is twentieth century US History - weaving in civics, economics as well as current events. It all fascinates me, and even if I weren’t teaching it I’d still be studying it. So why not teach a bit longer? I’ll be back next year, at least. After that, who knows what will come along? I sure don’t.
Meanwhile, I’d like spring to come along a little faster than it is - just as everybody else in New England would. As Frost says in the fourth stanza:
A bluebird comes tenderly up to alight
And turns to the wind to unruffle a plume,
His song so pitched as not to excite
A single flower as yet to bloom.
It is snowing a flake: and he half knew
Winter was only playing possum.
Except in color he isn’t blue,
But he wouldn’t advise a thing to blossom.
It’s been snowing a bit more than a flake during this year’s mud time. As I look out the window to the snow-covered Kearsarge and Baldface on the western horizon and listen to the cold wind howl this Easter Sunday, I wouldn’t advise anything to blossom either. Not today anyway. I know the crocuses and daffodils are coming up under all that white though. My wife and I saw them sprouting in her garden just before last week’s snowstorm covered them up. This week’s storm will bury them even deeper, but I won’t lose hope.
There’s always something getting ready to blossom, even when all we can see is dark and all we can feel is cold. Frost knew that. New Englanders know that. During the Easter season, Christians know it too.
Sunday, April 8, 2007
Kerry And My Sister
Most readers know me only as a conservative and are surprised to learn that I haven’t always been one. Seeing and hearing John Kerry several times a day is an almost-constant reminder that I used to think quite differently when I worked for him back in 1972. I was more liberal then and Kerry was staging an unsuccessful run for congress in the fifth district of Massachusetts. Prior to that, he had been involved with the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and I had been fighting city hall in Lowell, the district’s biggest city. His campaign people contacted me and I went to work for them. Some friends and relatives came into the campaign as well, including two of my sisters, Jane and Elaine. When my daughter, Annie, got married last August, they came up for the wedding and we reminisced about those days.
After Kerry lost the election, I had no more contact with him. I had sensed a lack of passion in him and had come to see him as an empty suit. But Elaine and Jane had become friendly with Kerry’s first wife, Julia, and their association with Kerry went on for a few years. Both got to know his family fairly well when they baby-sat his daughters. Elaine watched them sometimes at the three-unit apartment house we had purchased together and they played with my daughters there. Jane was younger and still lived with our parents in nearby Tewksbury. In the summer, she would sometimes accompany the Kerrys to Naushon Island, the private, seven-mile-long summer retreat of the Forbes family and help with the children.
My family has always been politically active. We were born Boston-Irish-Catholic-Democrats and politics is innate. During the 1960s and ‘70s, though, the Democrat Party veered left while the McLaughlin family veered right. Not one of the nine of us still living belongs to the party any more, and I’m sure even my father would have resigned if he had lived to see what’s happened to that once-venerable party.
The day after the wedding last August, we were all sipping wine and talking politics on the porch of my mother’s house in Lovell when Jane told a Kerry story I hadn’t heard before. We had been taking turns relating just when it was that each of us had come to dislike the man the Democrats have since nominated for president. Jane described how she was spending a week on Naushon. Unaware that she was on a nearby porch and within earshot, Kerry was telling Julia that he didn’t want Jane to eat dinner with the family that evening. When Julia asked why, Kerry explained that some dinner guests he had invited didn’t approve of the help eating with the family.
As Jane was telling the story thirty years later, she was still angry and it showed clearly on her face. She’s fully as much of a spitfire now as she was at fifteen when the incident occurred, and it had been years since I’d seen that I angry look only she can display. She has a way of pursing her lips and knitting her brow when she’s mad that is unique to her and I had to laugh. “It wasn’t funny,” she said - again with the angry expression. “I was mortified.”
“So what happened?” I asked, trying to be serious. Jane went on to explain that Julia had put her foot down and told her husband she refused to explain that Kerry wanted her to eat in another room. With that, our would-be president backed off and Jane ate with the family as she usually did. I could picture her sitting at the dinner table, looking at Kerry and doing the slow burn as only Jane can.
“John Kerry - courageous man of the people,” I said.
“That’s when I came to hate him,” said Jane.
“Understandable,” I answered.
Eventually, the Kerrys sold their house in Lowell when he went to law school at Boston College. Then he served as Assistant District Attorney in Middlesex County, Massachusetts. I finished school and moved north to the mountains to teach. Elaine and Jane married and moved to the suburbs. Kerry then ran for Lieutenant Governor under Michael Dukakis, then US Senator. Reading snippets of what he was up to in the Boston papers, I was gradually moving from left to right on the political spectrum. Kerry, obviously, remains on the left - the most liberal member of the Senate. Seeing and hearing him every day is a continuous affirmation that I moved in the right direction.
Published October, 2004
After Kerry lost the election, I had no more contact with him. I had sensed a lack of passion in him and had come to see him as an empty suit. But Elaine and Jane had become friendly with Kerry’s first wife, Julia, and their association with Kerry went on for a few years. Both got to know his family fairly well when they baby-sat his daughters. Elaine watched them sometimes at the three-unit apartment house we had purchased together and they played with my daughters there. Jane was younger and still lived with our parents in nearby Tewksbury. In the summer, she would sometimes accompany the Kerrys to Naushon Island, the private, seven-mile-long summer retreat of the Forbes family and help with the children.
My family has always been politically active. We were born Boston-Irish-Catholic-Democrats and politics is innate. During the 1960s and ‘70s, though, the Democrat Party veered left while the McLaughlin family veered right. Not one of the nine of us still living belongs to the party any more, and I’m sure even my father would have resigned if he had lived to see what’s happened to that once-venerable party.
The day after the wedding last August, we were all sipping wine and talking politics on the porch of my mother’s house in Lovell when Jane told a Kerry story I hadn’t heard before. We had been taking turns relating just when it was that each of us had come to dislike the man the Democrats have since nominated for president. Jane described how she was spending a week on Naushon. Unaware that she was on a nearby porch and within earshot, Kerry was telling Julia that he didn’t want Jane to eat dinner with the family that evening. When Julia asked why, Kerry explained that some dinner guests he had invited didn’t approve of the help eating with the family.
As Jane was telling the story thirty years later, she was still angry and it showed clearly on her face. She’s fully as much of a spitfire now as she was at fifteen when the incident occurred, and it had been years since I’d seen that I angry look only she can display. She has a way of pursing her lips and knitting her brow when she’s mad that is unique to her and I had to laugh. “It wasn’t funny,” she said - again with the angry expression. “I was mortified.”
“So what happened?” I asked, trying to be serious. Jane went on to explain that Julia had put her foot down and told her husband she refused to explain that Kerry wanted her to eat in another room. With that, our would-be president backed off and Jane ate with the family as she usually did. I could picture her sitting at the dinner table, looking at Kerry and doing the slow burn as only Jane can.
“John Kerry - courageous man of the people,” I said.
“That’s when I came to hate him,” said Jane.
“Understandable,” I answered.
Eventually, the Kerrys sold their house in Lowell when he went to law school at Boston College. Then he served as Assistant District Attorney in Middlesex County, Massachusetts. I finished school and moved north to the mountains to teach. Elaine and Jane married and moved to the suburbs. Kerry then ran for Lieutenant Governor under Michael Dukakis, then US Senator. Reading snippets of what he was up to in the Boston papers, I was gradually moving from left to right on the political spectrum. Kerry, obviously, remains on the left - the most liberal member of the Senate. Seeing and hearing him every day is a continuous affirmation that I moved in the right direction.
Published October, 2004
Kerry And Me
When I was young and foolish and liberal, I worked for John Kerry. His congressional campaign contacted me back in 1972, but my friends advised me to avoid him because he wasn’t liberal enough. Imagine that. I had been working on a monthly community newspaper called “The Communicator” with a small group of leftists who were protégés of Noam Chomsky. One was a “red diaper baby” - descended from Russian Jewish immigrant parents who were Communists.
Kerry’s campaign thought I controlled hundreds of votes in the section of Lowell, Massachusetts where I lived. I had worked with the Portuguese community there to stop the extension of the Lowell Connector, which would have gone through my house and hundreds of others. After an intense, five-week campaign, the highway was defeated by a close vote of the city council. Coincidentally, Paul Tsongas was on the council at the time and had voted against us. It all went down a month before the Democratic primary and John Kerry was facing stiff opposition. Everyone believed that whoever won the primary would easily defeat the Republican in November. Because I had a leadership role in the movement to defeat the highway, Kerry thought I could help him win. After speaking to his brother Cameron and others, I agreed, mostly because of his strong stand against the war in Vietnam. I learned a lot - enough to make me realize how distasteful modern, large-scale, electoral campaigns are. Kerry spent more money that year than any other congressional campaign in the country. Still, he lost. By the November election, I was tired of both electoral politics and of John Kerry. I didn’t like the politics of the Nixon Republican who beat him, but I liked John Kerry the person even less. I was glad he lost.
I liked a lot of the people who worked for Kerry then, but I didn’t take to him. I had no sense of what he was inside; all I could perceive there was a vacancy. There was plenty of ambition and a lot of posturing, but little else. Others saw him as a polished speaker and war hero. He reminded them of JFK - Caroline Kennedy worked on the campaign as well as several celebrities of the time. I met Peter Yarrow, Kurt Vonnegut, George Plimpton, and others. Many believed he would someday be president. Though I never heard him say it, I think that was Kerry’s intention even way back then. I had the sense that every decision he made was with that ambition in mind.
Kerry had filed nomination papers in several congressional districts that year. Only when incumbent Republican Brad Morse was appointed to a UN position by President Nixon did he decide to run in the fifth district where I lived. Clearly, he wanted to run for congress, and it didn’t matter where because it was all about him and not the people he would represent.
Now that he’s the frontrunner for the Democrat presidential nomination, I’m seeing a lot of him again. He’s older, but he doesn’t seem to have changed much. His positions on the big issues facing us, however, change often He voted for the war, but he voted against the money to pay for it and now claims the war is wrong. He voted for NAFTA, but now he’s against it. He voted against the federal Defense of Marriage Act because he didn’t want homosexual marriage to be outlawed, but now he’s against homosexual marriage. He voted against drilling ANWR, but now he supports building an oil pipeline to it. There are many other examples too numerous to list.
Kerry came to prominence as the head of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Members, including Kerry, publicly threw their medals back at the government that awarded them. Much later, I learned that Kerry didn’t actually throw his medals back. He secretly kept them and threw somebody else’s medals instead. He wanted to seem like he was throwing his medals back without actually doing it - vintage Kerry.
After losing his congressional race in 1972, Kerry went to law school at Boston College. That was smart, because BC was considered the Irish Harvard and, in Massachusetts, it was helpful politically to cultivate one’s Irishness. After passing the bar, Kerry went to work in the Middlesex County District Attorney’s office as Assistant DA. From there, he became Lieutenant Governor under Michael Dukakis and then US Senator. Somewhere along the way, he dropped wealthy heiress wife number one and picked up wealthy heiress wife number two.
With a name like Kerry, everyone assumed he was Irish, but surprise! Kerry isn’t Irish at all, it turns out. His ancestors came from eastern Europe somewhere and assumed the name Kerry. His other ancestors are Yankee Brahmins the Irish perceived as enemies. Kerry couldn’t mimic JFK unless people believed he was Irish, so that’s the impression he cultivated. As presidential candidate, he’s merged war hero and anti-war hero - brandishing the medals he pretended to throw back and criticizing the war he voted for.
I’m not so young anymore. I’m a little bit less foolish and a lot less liberal. Kerry looks older too in spite of the botox treatments, but although he changes all the time, he hasn’t really changed much at all.
Published March, 2004
Kerry’s campaign thought I controlled hundreds of votes in the section of Lowell, Massachusetts where I lived. I had worked with the Portuguese community there to stop the extension of the Lowell Connector, which would have gone through my house and hundreds of others. After an intense, five-week campaign, the highway was defeated by a close vote of the city council. Coincidentally, Paul Tsongas was on the council at the time and had voted against us. It all went down a month before the Democratic primary and John Kerry was facing stiff opposition. Everyone believed that whoever won the primary would easily defeat the Republican in November. Because I had a leadership role in the movement to defeat the highway, Kerry thought I could help him win. After speaking to his brother Cameron and others, I agreed, mostly because of his strong stand against the war in Vietnam. I learned a lot - enough to make me realize how distasteful modern, large-scale, electoral campaigns are. Kerry spent more money that year than any other congressional campaign in the country. Still, he lost. By the November election, I was tired of both electoral politics and of John Kerry. I didn’t like the politics of the Nixon Republican who beat him, but I liked John Kerry the person even less. I was glad he lost.
I liked a lot of the people who worked for Kerry then, but I didn’t take to him. I had no sense of what he was inside; all I could perceive there was a vacancy. There was plenty of ambition and a lot of posturing, but little else. Others saw him as a polished speaker and war hero. He reminded them of JFK - Caroline Kennedy worked on the campaign as well as several celebrities of the time. I met Peter Yarrow, Kurt Vonnegut, George Plimpton, and others. Many believed he would someday be president. Though I never heard him say it, I think that was Kerry’s intention even way back then. I had the sense that every decision he made was with that ambition in mind.
Kerry had filed nomination papers in several congressional districts that year. Only when incumbent Republican Brad Morse was appointed to a UN position by President Nixon did he decide to run in the fifth district where I lived. Clearly, he wanted to run for congress, and it didn’t matter where because it was all about him and not the people he would represent.
Now that he’s the frontrunner for the Democrat presidential nomination, I’m seeing a lot of him again. He’s older, but he doesn’t seem to have changed much. His positions on the big issues facing us, however, change often He voted for the war, but he voted against the money to pay for it and now claims the war is wrong. He voted for NAFTA, but now he’s against it. He voted against the federal Defense of Marriage Act because he didn’t want homosexual marriage to be outlawed, but now he’s against homosexual marriage. He voted against drilling ANWR, but now he supports building an oil pipeline to it. There are many other examples too numerous to list.
Kerry came to prominence as the head of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Members, including Kerry, publicly threw their medals back at the government that awarded them. Much later, I learned that Kerry didn’t actually throw his medals back. He secretly kept them and threw somebody else’s medals instead. He wanted to seem like he was throwing his medals back without actually doing it - vintage Kerry.
After losing his congressional race in 1972, Kerry went to law school at Boston College. That was smart, because BC was considered the Irish Harvard and, in Massachusetts, it was helpful politically to cultivate one’s Irishness. After passing the bar, Kerry went to work in the Middlesex County District Attorney’s office as Assistant DA. From there, he became Lieutenant Governor under Michael Dukakis and then US Senator. Somewhere along the way, he dropped wealthy heiress wife number one and picked up wealthy heiress wife number two.
With a name like Kerry, everyone assumed he was Irish, but surprise! Kerry isn’t Irish at all, it turns out. His ancestors came from eastern Europe somewhere and assumed the name Kerry. His other ancestors are Yankee Brahmins the Irish perceived as enemies. Kerry couldn’t mimic JFK unless people believed he was Irish, so that’s the impression he cultivated. As presidential candidate, he’s merged war hero and anti-war hero - brandishing the medals he pretended to throw back and criticizing the war he voted for.
I’m not so young anymore. I’m a little bit less foolish and a lot less liberal. Kerry looks older too in spite of the botox treatments, but although he changes all the time, he hasn’t really changed much at all.
Published March, 2004
Old New England
New England is old, and that’s one of the things I like about it. As most people learned in school, it was one of the first places in North America to be settled by English-speaking people and they left their marks almost everywhere you look. Many of the houses they built are still standing, sometimes with their descendants still living in them. Even where the houses have disintegrated, cellar holes remain.
There’s nothing I like better than to explore the back roads of New England. I keep DeLorme Atlases of four states on the back seat of my car to guide me if I’m lucky enough to find a few hours and indulge my wanderlust. As family obligations or medical treatment force me to drive to Massachusetts several times a year, I try to work in some side trips whenever possible on the way back. I’ve already taken every possible north to south route where the roads are numbered highways, so now I try to plot back-road detours along each of them. As I investigate those, I find many other intriguing, dead-end side roads too. I intend to examine them all before I die.
Usually, I don’t know how long it’s going to take to explore a road, because I don’t always know where it will lead. Many are not in the DeLorme Atlas. If my wife happens to be with me, that may limit how far down a particular road I can go or how many side roads I can take before she loses patience. If I’m traveling alone, I usually get home late. She doesn’t worry so much anymore because she knows what I’m likely to be doing. and the next time we’re passing through the area I’d been exploring, I can show her some the best out-of-the-way places I’ve found.
English-speaking people have lived in the area for over four hundred years and they’ve altered the landscape. In addition to houses and fields, they built stone walls which remain long after the house has fallen in and rotted away, and the fields have grown up to forest again. While driving along, I look for old gnarled maple trees near the road as signs for where an old farmhouse may have been located. Usually, I find a cellar hole nearby.
The earliest evidence of human habitation in northern New England goes back only about nine thousand years. Those people were probably very different from the Abenaki and other tribes encountered by European colonists. They were likely nomadic hunters of big herd animals like mammoths and mastodons, and it’s quite possible they hunted those animals to extinction. Otherwise, they left very little evidence of their stay here. Only careful archaeological investigation produces whatever artifacts they left and those can only be seen in museums or private collections. The next inhabitants, eastern woodland Indians, didn’t leave much behind either. There are some pictographs on a cliff in Lovell, some petroglyphs on rocks in the Penobscot, and some shell middens on the coast, but not much else. Their descendants still live in New England, but they’re largely assimilated, living pretty much the way I do.
Also interesting is evidence of the prehuman geology all around us. Maine, actually, is one of the most geologically varied places on earth. At Border’s recently, I purchased Roadside Geology of Vermont and New Hampshire and I found Roadside Geology of Maine online. It should be arriving in the mail any day now. I’m already trying my wife’s patience when I pull over to examine road cuts along the highway. Especially interesting are the fresh ones, like those exposed during the recent Maine Turnpike widening.
Many of us around here were forced to learn about geology back in 1988 when the US Department of Energy considered trying to bury high-level nuclear waste in the Sebago Batholith. I never heard of a batholith before that, but I read their literature and found out that a huge mass of granite formed under us millions of years ago when some magma tried to break through the earth’s mantle. It couldn’t quite break out into a volcano and cooled underground instead. The DOE said the batholith, or pluton, extended from Westbrook to Lovell and it was seamless - there were no cracks in it. That was surprising news to the dozens of well drillers who had been boring into it for decades and finding lots of cracks. Otherwise they would not have been able to find any water. Lots of angry New Englanders persuaded the Energy Department to look elsewhere for a nuclear waste dump, but my interest in local geology was reignited.
Ever since, it’s taken me a lot longer to get from place to place in New England, because I have to pull over so much and check out the evidence of history.
Published March, 2004
There’s nothing I like better than to explore the back roads of New England. I keep DeLorme Atlases of four states on the back seat of my car to guide me if I’m lucky enough to find a few hours and indulge my wanderlust. As family obligations or medical treatment force me to drive to Massachusetts several times a year, I try to work in some side trips whenever possible on the way back. I’ve already taken every possible north to south route where the roads are numbered highways, so now I try to plot back-road detours along each of them. As I investigate those, I find many other intriguing, dead-end side roads too. I intend to examine them all before I die.
Usually, I don’t know how long it’s going to take to explore a road, because I don’t always know where it will lead. Many are not in the DeLorme Atlas. If my wife happens to be with me, that may limit how far down a particular road I can go or how many side roads I can take before she loses patience. If I’m traveling alone, I usually get home late. She doesn’t worry so much anymore because she knows what I’m likely to be doing. and the next time we’re passing through the area I’d been exploring, I can show her some the best out-of-the-way places I’ve found.
English-speaking people have lived in the area for over four hundred years and they’ve altered the landscape. In addition to houses and fields, they built stone walls which remain long after the house has fallen in and rotted away, and the fields have grown up to forest again. While driving along, I look for old gnarled maple trees near the road as signs for where an old farmhouse may have been located. Usually, I find a cellar hole nearby.
The earliest evidence of human habitation in northern New England goes back only about nine thousand years. Those people were probably very different from the Abenaki and other tribes encountered by European colonists. They were likely nomadic hunters of big herd animals like mammoths and mastodons, and it’s quite possible they hunted those animals to extinction. Otherwise, they left very little evidence of their stay here. Only careful archaeological investigation produces whatever artifacts they left and those can only be seen in museums or private collections. The next inhabitants, eastern woodland Indians, didn’t leave much behind either. There are some pictographs on a cliff in Lovell, some petroglyphs on rocks in the Penobscot, and some shell middens on the coast, but not much else. Their descendants still live in New England, but they’re largely assimilated, living pretty much the way I do.
Also interesting is evidence of the prehuman geology all around us. Maine, actually, is one of the most geologically varied places on earth. At Border’s recently, I purchased Roadside Geology of Vermont and New Hampshire and I found Roadside Geology of Maine online. It should be arriving in the mail any day now. I’m already trying my wife’s patience when I pull over to examine road cuts along the highway. Especially interesting are the fresh ones, like those exposed during the recent Maine Turnpike widening.
Many of us around here were forced to learn about geology back in 1988 when the US Department of Energy considered trying to bury high-level nuclear waste in the Sebago Batholith. I never heard of a batholith before that, but I read their literature and found out that a huge mass of granite formed under us millions of years ago when some magma tried to break through the earth’s mantle. It couldn’t quite break out into a volcano and cooled underground instead. The DOE said the batholith, or pluton, extended from Westbrook to Lovell and it was seamless - there were no cracks in it. That was surprising news to the dozens of well drillers who had been boring into it for decades and finding lots of cracks. Otherwise they would not have been able to find any water. Lots of angry New Englanders persuaded the Energy Department to look elsewhere for a nuclear waste dump, but my interest in local geology was reignited.
Ever since, it’s taken me a lot longer to get from place to place in New England, because I have to pull over so much and check out the evidence of history.
Published March, 2004
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