Csquared Thoughts

the U.S. Congress

Cartoonist Keith Knight certinly reflects my feelings with this one. I think he's really got it nailed here.

which Obama?

I'm normally ticked off by the comic strip Mallard Fillmore. The creator, Bruce Tinsley, is as far to the right as I am to the left. (Though I've had a couple of email exchanges with him, and he is a decent guy who is married to a civil rights lawyer. And they both like Madeleine L'Engle.) As much as the strip usually annoys me, though, I have to give credit when he gets it right. And, although I hate to admit it, I think he gets it right here. Obama is something of an enigma much of the time and you can never be sure where his administration will come down on an issue. He has certainly upset many of his supporters for some of the positions he has taken.

I don't like to venture into politics too often here, but this one hit too close to home.

how best?

The pioneers of a warless world are the young men [& women] who refuse military service —Albert Einstein courtesy of Syracuse Cultural Workers on Facebook

I was nineteen the last year of the draft. Nixon and congress had decided that an all-volunteer army was the right way to meet the manpower needs of the military, so the draft was coming to an end. But not before my year of eligibility. This you may recall was in the waning years of the Vietnam war. But at the time the country was still very much in Vietnam.

The draft in that era had a couple of attributes. The order in which individuals were inducted was based on a lottery. And student deferments were basically non-existent. So it was with great anxiety that I anticipated the lottery drawing. I was home from college when it happened. It may have been over Christmas break. This was long before 24-hour cable news or the internet. So I was nervous and pacing all day. I turned on the earliest newscast available in the Los Angeles market, which happened to be on the local ABC station. They were smart enough to show all of the lottery numbers. But given that they started with January, and went month-by-month, my anxiety increased as I waited for August. Then finally. 205! Two-hundred-and-five. I was, in all likelihood, entirely safe.

Today we still have the all-volunteer army instituted by Nixon. And we remain mired in Iraq and Afghanistan. I can't find the exact quote, but George W's Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, is reported to have said that when you have no draft you have no anti-war movement. I did find multiple reports in which he said that he was opposed to the draft, but not necessarily for that reason.

I have to wonder whether the opposition to what's going on in Iraq and Afghanistan would be more pitched if young men (and perhaps women) were at risk of being inducted into the military against their will.

And I wonder how our presence in Iraq might be different had the military contained a greater cross-section of society, as is more the case when there is a draft.

As one who was at risk for the draft himself, I can't wish that on the young people of today. But the questions, I think, are worth asking.

not Obama

from Susan Russell on Facebook:

Obama is not a brown-skinned, anti-war socialist who gives away free healthcare. You're thinking of Jesus. —John Fugelsang (the son of a former nun and Franciscan Brother) via Ana from Elizabeth. "I love my Facebook Friends!" says Susan.

our (sometimes) mean-spirited country

The ugly anti-immigration law in Arizona has gotten a lot of news coverage. Fortunately, it has also inspired a lot of protest.

But there are a couple of other state laws that have received less attention. In Oklahoma a nasty anti-abortion bill survived the governor's veto with an override. In next-door Arkansas there was a law in place which banned gay couples from adopting or being foster parents. A circuit court judge recently struck that law down as unconstitutional. We'll see where that goes. As sex advice columnist Dan Savage pointed out, it's not the gays and lesbians who have been procreating and abandoning the children that need foster care and adoption.

I guess we can't realistically expect the world of Star Trek, where war, poverty, crime, and hunger have been eliminated. But I think we can do better than this.

Spirituality and Practice on Facebook quotes Paul Roget in Soul of a Citizen:

We can compare the labors of social activists to those of the artisans who built the great medieval cathedrals, working generation after generation on projects whose completion most would never live to see.

I guess that's a reality I need to accept,

Oh, Canada

With the winter Olympics going on in Canada, I have to say, not meaning to sound unpatriotic, that "Oh, Canada," makes for a heck of a lot better national anthem than "The Star Spangled Banner."

There was a movement some years back to replace "The Star Spangled Banner" with "America the Beautiful" as the U.S. national anthem.

Maybe it's time to revive that.

Every gun that is made...

Thanks to Susan Russell for this.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signals in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. — Dwight Eisenhower

Wow! They don't make Republican politicians like that anymore.

hijacking the healthcare reform bill

We interrupt today's regularly scheduled blog for this important perspective.

quite a difference

When our current President travels overseas I don't have to worry about cringing and feeling embarrassed. And when he speaks I can feel good about what he says. So nice. 

The Hubble and Science

So great to read that the upgrades to the Hubble have been successfully completed, and that we have several more years of great science from that marvelous workhorse.

And speaking of science, it's nice to see that science seems to have survived eight years of the Bush II administration, and now we have a White House that actually believes in science.