Blog Title

Why not the Beatitudes?

2026-03-22T17:00:00Z

Nationalists who contend that the US is a Christian nation are pushing to have the Ten Commandments posted in every public school classroom, elementary through university.

Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee have already passed such laws, in some case even specifying a specific 11” by 14” poster. Several other states are following suit.

While the courts adjudicate the Constitutionality of the separation of church and state, I have an even more fundamental question: WWJD?

This acronym, popularized by evangelical youth in the 1990s, asks disciples to consider "What Would Jesus Do?" before making choices — “a guide to act with love, compassion, and kindness in difficult situations.”

While it’s true that Jesus didn’t abolish the Ten Commandments, the Bible says he did fulfill it by instituting the higher law of Love (Matthew 5:17).

In that case, here’s my question:

Why aren’t “christian” nationalists, if they want the nation to be more Christ-like, pushing to have the Sermon on the Mount posted in classrooms? Why not, indeed? Many biblical scholars would say that the Sermon (Matthew 5:1-48) summarizes the most essential teachings of Jesus.

Or if Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is too long, how about just posting the brief Beatitudes at the heart of the Sermon (Matthew 5:1-12)? …“Blessed are the merciful, the meek, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, etc.”

Or maybe post an even shorter version of Jesus’ gospel. When asked about the greatest law, Jesus replied, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 22:37-40)

Personally, I think homes and houses of worship are the places where religious concepts are best instilled, not public schools. Religious freedom for all is thus protected.

But if your aim is to foster a Christian nation, wouldn’t you want to post the loving words of Jesus, rather than the schoolmaster law that he fulfilled with Love?

Biblical references are from the New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition (NRSVUE).

I Like Ike

2026-03-07T17:00:00Z

Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower would never be chosen as a presidential candidate by today’s Republican Party. The GOP has veered so far to the right that a centrist such as Ike might say that the true RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) are those today who have departed radically from traditional Republican conservatism.

Just try to imagine Eisenhower giving his 1953 “Cross of Iron” speech at a Republican presidential convention in 2026:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people... This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

Seventy years later the theft Eisenhower described continues, as funds to meet human need are increasingly funneled into militarism. Updating Eisenhower’s math to assess the financial cost of today’s Iran war is a sobering and disheartening exercise. Some estimates place that cost at a billion dollars PER DAY. (See Iran War Cost Tracker, which today tallies $7.5 billion dollars.) This, of course, is in addition to the direct cost of lives lost and injured, cities devastated, economies damaged, etc. for a war whose end is unknown.

And yet, this week both houses of Congress failed to pass war power resolutions that would reclaim their sole Constitutional authority to declare war, restoring the balance of power to curtail the executive branch’s unilateral and preemptive Operation Epic Fury.

The war hawks try to circumvent their Constitutional limits by describing the Iran conflict not as a “war” but as a “military exercise” — shades of Putin’s 4-year preemptive invasion of Ukraine? And they say it had to be done without Congressional approval to retain the element of surprise — shades of Pearl Harbor? What would Ike think of his Grand Old Party today? You could hardly dismiss him as a “woke” pacifist. He was not only commander-in-chief of US armed forces but also a five-star Army general, and Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe during World War II.

Yet when he left office (eight years after the Cross of Iron speech he delivered in the earliest months of his presidency) Ike gave a similar warning in his final address about the growing threat of the “military-industrial complex.”

Today we would need to amend Ike’s caution to include the “military-corporate-entertainment-MAGA-educational-Christian nationalism” complex. But Eisenhower gave us an early warning signal, and for this I’m hanging on to my “I Like Ike” campaign button.

President's Day

2026-02-19T17:00:00Z

Remember when Tom Sawyer duped his friends into whitewashing Aunt Polly's picket fence? I was reminded of that story by the efforts of the Trump administration to whitewash American history. On the recent President's Day this fiction-becoming-fact parallel hit home with news that signs at the President's House in Philadelphia were removed because they stated that George Washington kept nine enslaved people there. Doing this to somehow burnish the reputation of one who reportedly "could not tell a lie" is in itself a lie. Let's not be duped into believing that our checkered past of 246 years of Black enslavement, lynchings, and Jim Crow laws can be simply covered over and forgotten.

Fight Truth Decay

2026-01-29T17:00:00Z

Several years ago I posted the following link about the strenuous mental gymnastics required to believe The Big Lie of 2020 election fraud -- a foundational belief that undergirded the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and fuels the corrosive distrust and division that are undermining our republic yet today. As the current administration seizes Georgia's election records (which have already been recounted three times, once by hand) and threatens legal action for alleged impropriety, the following post helps put it all in perspective:

The 2020 Election Wasn’t Stolen: All The Key Facts Debunking The Big Lie

Lessons of History

2026-01-27T17:00:00Z

In 1968, eminent historians Will and Ariel Durant sounded a prescient word of caution in their book, The Lessons of History.

A democracy can be undermined, they wrote:

If war continues to absorb and dominate it, or if the itch to rule the world requires a large military establishment and appropriation, the freedoms of democracy may one by one succumb to the discipline of arms and strife. If race or class war divides us into hostile camps, changing political arguments into blind hate, one side or the other may overturn the hustings with the rule of the sword. If our economy of freedom fails to distribute wealth as ably as it has created it, the road to dictatorship will be open to any man who can persuasively promise security to all; and a martial government, under whatever charming phrases, will engulf the democratic world (pp. 79-80).

These observations of nearly 60 years ago echo George Santayana's original quote, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Hopefully we'll learn from the past, rather than attempt to ignore or deny it.....???

Venezuelan misadventure

2026-01-07T17:00:00Z

In light of the administration's Venezuelan misadventure I offer this thought exercise:

What would be the US response if another nation were to determine that President Trump is a war criminal, issued a warrant for his arrest, and in a military exercise knocked out our defense system, killed 60 Secret Service personnel and used flash grenades in the White House, capturing the president and his wife, flying them out of the country for trial?

And what if that country explained their incursion of a sovereign state by describing it not as an act of war but as a legal "law enforcement action?'

And a final question, If our administration's actions in Venezuela were as righteous and justifiable as some claim, couldn't any other nation use the same argument to justify their invasion of the US? By international law and long-held custom, a preemptive attack on a sovereign nation is illegal and an act of war.

"American exceptionalism" is no exception.

January 6 2021

2026-01-07T17:00:00Z

LEST WE FORGET: JANUARY 6, 2021... As efforts increase to whitewash or erase the always-checkered history of our nation, PBS News Hour has offered a tremendous service by documenting in-depth the events of January 6 -- the lead-up, the day itself, and the aftermath.

In our post-fact, post-truth environs these days, you can see for yourself the riot and its intent. I hope millions will view this coverage and re-dedicate themselves to the ideals of democracy that US citizens have long pledged to uphold--allegiance to liberty and justice for ALL. Here's one of many links:

5 years later, the fight over how Jan. 6 is remembered continues

Never a husband shot

2025-07-28T17:00:00Z

I'm testing the axiom that "there never was a husband shot by his wife as he was washing the dishes." So far, so good .......

The 3.5% Rule

2025-06-19T17:00:00Z

"Historians who study social movements worldwide have coined the term "3.5% rule" -- that throughout history, few authoritarian governments have withstood 3.5% of their population peacefully mobilized against them in a sustained way."

Per MoveOn.org, the recent No Kings rallies sponsored by Indivisible numbered some 5 million protestors at 2,100 events, adding that the 3.5% rule "helps us understand just how big our movement needs to get to stop Trump's tyranny -- on the order of more than 11 million people showing up again and again."

How about next time, and the times after, we "each one bring one?"

June 20 update

HOPEFUL NEWS: CBS reports that "Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are looking to limit President Trump's ability to order U.S. strikes on Iran amid its ongoing war with Israel, emphasizing that only Congress has the power to declare war under the Constitution." Where is the resolution by which Congress has granted to President Trump the authority to bomb Iran? Meanwhile, the entire world holds its breath awaiting the decision of one man regarding the fate of the Middle East, and possibly the globe itself.

The Hidden Life of Trees

2025-04-02T17:00:00Z

The October Glory maple tree that newly joined our family began turning red a few days ago. We thought these were new leaves coming on, but looking closer discovered hundreds of maple whirligigs instead.

It got me to thinking... What if the first thought of the human species was to benefit the NEXT generation?

We could learn a lot from trees. 🍁 (The Hidden Life of Trees, by Peter Wohllben, has many a lesson.)