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Seeking Solutions
This is a tale of how two very different people came to share a profound trust and respect. One is a serious libertarian and the other a serious liberal.
Some many months back the phone rang. Liz answered it, turned to me and said, “Frank Penwell”. Having read numerous of his letters to the editor I groaned silently to myself, “Ah me, here comes one more clobbering.” Au contraire. Frank said (something like) “I’ve been reading your columns (and I’m saying to myself, well that makes 5 I know of) and I see you as having a foot in both camps. I’d like to have coffee with you sometime and talk about where we can make common ground. I try to get people of differing political stripes together. I try to avoid extremists on all sides.” He said he managed the Grange and we could meet there anytime I was in town. We set a time to meet at the Grange. We did and must have chatted for over an hour. We found lots of common ground on broad ranging local issues. We started lots of e-mails and our relationship continues to deepen.
Actually I should not have been surprised at Frank’s invitation. After all, liberalism and libertarianism came out of the same historical context: both shared the human yearning for the freedom of the individual. That remains an important parallel. Both would agree that it is a freedom easily lost. It isn’t rocket science to look at history or current world governments and see the destruction. Historically liberalism and libertarianism went their separate ways when liberalism embraced an ethic of collective responsibility for community and libertarianism resisted that as an infringement on individual rights. But you see if you are open-minded, you can totally see how personally committed someone like Frank is with the astounding number of things he does for the community. Also I have chatted with several folks over the last months who called themselves “liberal-libertarian” or “libertarian-liberal”. I can see where this does not work for what Eric Hoffer called “The True Believer” (on either side). You almost come to the place (I have) of feeling you have no liberal or conservative friends. You have to have a strong sense of self to stand there. I’m good with the birds.
This is a crucial point the understanding of which has eluded liberals and environmentalists. Most people of all stripes do want a good environment. But the resentment of layer upon layer of (expensive) regulations is bringing a backlash. In discussing the Hood Canal Tax (otherwise known as Septic Licensing) an acquaintance said, “You mean I’m paying for someone else’s mistakes.” Yep. The citizens of the County voted against limitations on guest house construction but the Council in its wisdom overrode that. Now cometh the Critical Areas Ordinance -a vast over-reach as currently proposed. If you do not have your head stuck in the sand you will hear citizens saying enough is enough. If you do have your head stuck in the sand and can’t hear the tide will overtake you. Alas, the capacity to listen seems limited.
In the nitty-gritty department: Frank and I have come to very significant agreements on local problems including solid waste and the CAO. Both are knotty. Where I think we find common ground is illuminating problems. Sometimes we agree on the ultimate solution, other times we will not agree but I always leave feeling that I’ve been heard and that above all else I have learned something. And I leave feeling human and that doesn’t happen often these days.
In general I think libertarians would like to privatize most everything. I cannot go there. But you know what? Win, lose or draw I always leave a conference with Frank or a group he has convened thinking “Heck, whatever happens, western civilization isn’t going to end”. Besides that I’ve lost so many votes in seven decades, I’ve come to see losing as a way of life. What does now really worry me is that I have seen the face of the loss of liberty. When rumors get legs they are destroyers run amok. When name calling is acceptable liberty becomes contemptible. When scapegoating is in season, reason is out of season. The County, the State and the country, oblivious to the financial precipice we all face, can lose liberty with its all encompassing facets, in a flash. I offer you in place of the threats to liberty, the meeting of a liberal and a libertarian.
Ron Keeshan always liked a statement attributed to Albert Camus who said, “If there were a party of those who aren’t sure they are right, I’d belong to it.”
Energy And Common Sense
We have a different kind of family. Last summer when we were all together here on the island, Liz and I mused that we thought we would like to go to Fairbanks in March to see the aurora borealis. We were stunned that immediately all hands thought this was superb and we should have a yearly reunion then. Minor protestations on my part that the average night time temperature was -2 (boy was that optimistic) were deemed irrelevant. So, from all points of the US we gathered in Fairbanks.
What we found was totally unexpected. First of all, I have never been a museum buff but the Museum of the North was nothing short of awesome. Secondly, the annual Ice Carving Festival blew all our minds. We continued to go back night and day. Even watching the construction of the huge structures held us mesmerized. The color-lit ice slides at night were fantastic for all but Liz and me. Life still holds surprises and the -20 temperatures at night bothered no one.
We also went to Chena Hot Springs Resort 60 miles up in the mountains. This was another place where different expectations came into play. We went primarily to get a dark night show of the aurora borealis. But, the lack of solar activity and clouds had different agendas. We saw some minor lights the final night. Mother Nature makes no promises. But that did not bother anyone. Swimming in an outdoor hot springs pool with air temperature at -30 and also during a snow storm, was a blast.
But there was also a second reason we had wanted to go to Chena Hot Springs. I have long been an opponent of nuclear energy. Isn’t the mess at Hanford and the arguments over Yucca Mountain enough to convince rational people? You think it is difficult sighting a solid waste transfer station? Try sighting a nuclear waste “repository”! The insurance industry AND Wall Street say, “No thanks.” to nuclear power. So in steps the federal government to back it. The first thing wrong is that once again the tax-payer is on the hook for a guaranteed mess. This is nonsense. So, we had really wanted to see what had been accomplished with geothermal energy in Chena Hot Springs.
What has been done there with geothermal energy is nothing short of incredible. The resort’s electricity was formerly generated by diesel powered generators. From two greenhouses we daily ate fresh picked tomatoes and lettuce that were divine. The rooms and buildings were all heated with geothermal heat, as was the indoor swimming pool. There is an Ice Museum (ice furniture, glasses for drinks, large chess set) that is maintained year round! Working with United Technology Corporation and used parts brought in from all over Alaska, geothermal power provides 100% of the resort’s electrical power. Hydrogen, solar power and a water ram also figure into the resort’s energy mix. The resort is 30 miles from the nearest grid. When the shift was made to geothermal the cost of power production fell from 30 cents to about 6 cents per KWhr. Soon, Chena will start selling power to nearby Eielson AFB.
Now here is a place that I would like to send a large Congressional junket. Here in living color are options to tried, true and failed energies. Bernie Karl, the owner, and United Technologies Corporation are looking at sites in Florida and elsewhere to develop geo-thermal energy. Using experience gained at Chena, United Technologies has developed a production model geothermal generator. And all over the country are thousands of old oil wells filled with concrete that may provide a bonanza of geothermal energy currently kept off limits by an army of coal and oil lobbyists. But here is the coup-de-grace. Bernie is a political conservative who had developed a highly profitable recycling company. He saw an opportunity to do something patriotic"get out from underneath the mid-eastern heel of oil dependency. He also put in the only geothermal power plant in Alaska because it made economic common sense. It turned the resort from a million dollar a year loss to a profit center with clean, sustainable power.
When I look back to this past March and south to the catastrophe in the Gulf I keep asking myself what there is about this picture we don’t get?
<Ron Keeshan, with 17 Fs was a “social transfer” from the eighth grade to high school. When he graduated from high school he was a member of the National Honor Society and forever imprinted on him was what a difference a school and teachers can make.)
Law Of Unintended Consequences
Even with the return to winter variations we’ve experienced this year, spring is truly the most glorious time of the year for us. The green is rich, the swallows are back, zooming over the pond (formerly a deteriorating tennis court) consuming loads of insects, and there are more birds than we have ever seen.
The swallow show is mesmerizing. In sheer love of this place we planted dozens of new trees this spring bringing the total we have planted to about 200. I have long since lost track of the hundreds of bushes we have put in. The struggle against thistle and canary reed grass was long and hard but we prevailed. Everything we have done has been for biodiversity, food, protection and water for wildlife.
But sitting at peace on a log, mesmerized by the show in the sky and on the ground there is also knowledge that I will not see much of what has been done, grow to maturity. So be it. Hope is something you do. Immortality is for us the love and justice you leave behind. We feel we have for fourteen years worked to leave the land we occupy better than we found it. That is what one must do with the brief gift of earth we are privileged to share.
Reflection has also brought us to that difficult task of contemplating the future of this space we have devoted so much love, time, energy and money to do justice to. Entering into the softness that gratification of fourteen years of work has brought, is a cacophony of voices claiming priority rights over this piece of land.
I fantasize DNR really owning the small forest we have planted; a whole string of groups owning the shoreline that we dreamed of for ten years before we could move here; multifarious groups telling us what we could build and not build and now, fresh from ABOVE, we are told that our home, the biggest investment of one’s life is, quite simply, disposable. Pow!
Amongst many things possible are your insurance company saying no to you or a mortgage company unwilling to gamble on you and your “non-conforming” (or similar miscarriage of reason) house. All of the sudden you are unwelcome on many levels. Ultimately the pontificates hence own all your property, allowing you only the privilege of paying the increasing taxes.
Let us consider this concept of a home being “non-conforming” or some other “measured” designation. When we bought our property we did so in good faith that we abided by what was required of us and in return the governmental bodies would keep the good faith bargain made. If indeed, this bizarre non-conforming non-sense is forced upon us, the value of this land to which we have given so much to is destroyed emotionally and financially. One could elaborate on this in many ways but the avenue that has to be taken seriously is the arena called “takings”.
The Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution with its Due Process clause and Police Power has been held to mean, if a regulation goes too far compensation is required for the destruction of the value of the property. The discussion of this issue in findlaw.com references a number of Supreme Court cases on the issue of “takings”.
I want you all to think on this. A lawsuit for “diminution of value” would mean recovering the value, taxes, assessments and more. Before you glibly dismiss this, open your mind to multiplying this figure exponentially, because you are talking about a whole bunch of homes deemed “non-conforming”. From where we sit, do not take lightly a suit for diminution of value. Too often I have seen so much done where I don’t see any thought given to the law of unintended consequences. (Think stormwater, transfer station, etc.,etc.) The wildly running CAO bulldozer does not see Pandora’s box directly in front of it.
(Ron Keeshan and Liz who did a whole lot of rapping on this before it went to print.)
Phony Photos
From Beethoven’s 6th to the Moody Blues, I have always been eclectic in my love of music. Recently I have been thinking of one of my very real favorites, Nat King Cole singing, It’s Only a Paper Moon. Some will remember those great lyrics:
say It’s only a paper moon
sailing over a cardboard sky
……
It’s a Barnum and Bailey world,
Just as phony as it can be,
Alas, I think that true, and it is especially true of what is happening in the digital world. Digitally “playing” with a moon or ocean waves isn’t in any way a photograph.
I have been a photographer for 60 years. Photography has been a hobby, a passion and indeed a way of learning about the natural world. In so many things, I am old school and capitulate to the new only with real reluctance. I stayed with print film as long as I could find one where the color was minimally reasonable to me. Oh it was hard to give up print film.
Digital photography came for me with profound reservations. For one, I did not believe, and still do not believe, that the digital picture is as good as the older print from film. Secondly, many years ago, when my developer grabbed me when I walked in one day and started excitedly to show me how she could pull people out of and put others into a picture of a convertible. My heart sank to the floor. We had profound respect for each other but she was too excited to hear my heart-sick protestations. My last words were, “Do you know what this can lead to?”, but she was too excited to hear.
When I did my book, Journey Into the Web of Life, I felt it fundamentally important to put in the text that I have never and never will doctor a photograph. I now take my finger smudges out as my fingers are so arthritic I cannot seem to handle a lens without smudging it. But changing the contents of a photo in any form is, well, I feel a violation of everything I have done for 60 years.
So, it was with gusto that I read an article in the October issue of Outside magazine by Rob Haggart, a former photo editor of that magazine, entitled “This Photo is Lying to You”. Haggart calls out the people who are currently “doctoring” photos. While he does not establish some kind of informal system for keeping the issue and names up front (I don’t know if this is possible) he fearlessly tackles well known names for their chicanery in photography. Now, I use the word chicanery advisedly, because that is what I think it is. Either you saw it or you didn’t. The former is a photograph, the latter a lie, which some call “a new art form.”
Evidently surfing and climbing currently rank high among fake or posed pictures. Some admit it is not a photo, but a “created” picture, doctored electronically. One of these electronic masters, termed himself “an artist” to Haggard. No way. No way. In my love of the arts I have over decades known lots of artists-painters, sculptors and photographers. For purposes of argument here, I’ll limit it to those who sculpt or paint.
Take local artist, Terry Ogle. I love chatting with him. There is a burning creativity, a patience, an intelligence that is exciting to go head to head with. To call some electronic mish-mash “creativity” is to abuse the English language. So, some now put (buried in the print) that the picture was “created”. But I agree with Haggard, the damage is done. It is the picture that is the vehicle for communication not the printed disclaimer, if indeed one was done.
Where have we come in this? Years ago when I did a lot of work in early childhood education, Erik Erikson, then a prominent psychologist, listed his “Eight Stages of Man”, stages a person needed to complete in order to become a mature adult. The very first is the capacity for basic trust (as opposed to learning basic mistrust and the life-long problems that creates). I think all this electronic playing with photos is helping us as a society to become less trustful - just what we needed. What is fake? What is real? Pretty soon there is no truth and a culture is more and more subverted from reality
Well as neither an optimist nor or a pessimist, but one who believes in realpolitik, I can’t change the world but I can join what I hope will be a chorus of cheering wildlife photographers who know the cost of reality and call out the fakers and phonies. To pursue the subject, see the website Photo Tampering Throughout History .
(Ron Keeshan for a trustworthy and creative world.))
Rumblings In The Hustings
It seems to me that whatever level of the political map you look at, there is far more discontent than I can remember in three fourths of a century in America. I confess it may be just me, but I hunch not. The Democrats are their usual fear-driven selves. The Republicans, emerging from eight years of financial slumbers, have awakened with a vengeance on the issue. Suddenly all kinds of financial hawks are zooming in from every direction. Problem is, everyone wants to sacrifice someone else’s prize morsel. Now Republicans have joined Democrat liberals in saying, a pox on both your houses. Time after time, I have thought that Congress was part of the problem, not part of the solution.
And the boiling discontent isn’t just limited to the national government. You don’t have to look very far to see an anti-government storm brewing. Locally we seem to have stumbled confusedly through the storm water issue, becoming a serious player in the real estate market, (well, not altogether really advertised), zooming in and out of trash disposal sites like it was the newest auto crash video game, paving and repaving roads, where all else fails pass a new regulation, etc., etc, etc. Then to add insult to injury the winter ferry schedule looked like someone put departure times on a dart board across the room. As all this plays out I would just say watch out for the wild card.
In short, I have lived to see a very volatile time. The ground seems to be shifting under our very feet. I see profoundly difficult choices ahead for all of us. The old saw, “It’s always worked out before and so will this.” will die of a thousand cuts. It’s a different time. The glib will not inherit the earth. Those who have a vision and the strength to carry it out will.
For many years I have been a fan of Gerry Spence, the trial lawyer who won the Karen Silkwood case. In 1998 he published a book, Give Me Liberty. Fed up with a Congress that was, as someone put it, the best Congress money could buy, Spence articulated a proposal that at the time I said to myself, “Ah Gerry, only in our dreams.” I have been thinking a lot more about it recently. In short, what he called for was a “pancake democracy”; you make good pancakes the same way you make good democracy - with your own ingredients, not what you buy packaged. Your name goes in a lottery and if your name is drawn you will go to the House of Representatives. Whether a farmer, doctor or saleswoman, you will be recompensed. Those selected in each state will gather to select seven of their own to, in turn, select the “two best people” in the state to be Senators. The House will also nominate a couple of dozen of the “best” people they know to become President. The two highest in votes have a runoff and the winner is President.
This is a simplified version of his program and not without its own bumps. But I think it comes from a heartfelt frustration many of us feel. I have long been angry at the likes of the pork and farm bills. They are an insult. But when the bailouts came along I went over the cliff. I don’t know what changes may come along, but the current system is broken. Something new is aching to be born. I hope it will be creative and non-violent. In the possibilities that lie ahead of us there are a number of forks in the road. Some are very, very dark. I hope we don’t go there but I won’t bet against it. Other forks show creative thought and hopes. If we choose the latter we had better get after it or the times will get after us.
Ron Keeshan - for a change that will sustain “the last best hope.”
Caution
Beware of debt. Perhaps I feel that way as a child of the Depression and as the survivor of several recessions when I was in business. Now, not all debt is bad. I certainly borrowed but only when the economy was strong.
Those of us who raise substantive questions about county spending at different times are dismissed as “the usual suspects” who always complain about spending. As a liberal with a solid streak of financial conservatism I choose NOT to be stereotyped. If you bet on where I would come down you would lose.
For example, I saw red when I saw Senator Ranker’s letter stating that he would attempt to place funding for the Nichols Street project in the State budget. My project here is not to argue the problems (manifold) with this Nichols Street project. I am deeply impressed with those who have, I think, raised multiple substantive questions about it. I have found the answers to be vague and express wishful thinking. The very thought of using State funds for the Nichols Street project is part of the whole process of denial of where we (County, State and Federal) find ourselves.
The last I heard Washington State is trying to close a two billion dollar deficit. The United States is borrowing two billion dollars a day just to keep the government running. As I understand it our Governor is very reluctantly putting a number of child services and educational programs on the chopping block. Given the deplorable state of pork on all levels of government, perhaps Senator Ranker will get the Nichols Street pork. I can’t begin to comprehend the moral thought process that would place the remodeling of this building ahead of child services and education.
OK, now put it in this perspective. Anytime there is federal or state money coming in think of it in terms of a check written in red ink or at least that dreadful feeling you get when a check comes back stamped Insufficient Funds. Man, I hated that. But that in reality is what it is. A statement I abhor is, “Somebody is going to get the funds, it might as well be us.” Right now, putting the words politicians and courage in the same sentence is impossible. When have you heard a politician say to local constituents, “There is no money for that project. Sorry.”?
Now I’ll put it in another perspective. This is very chilling for me. When our seriously challenged Secretary of the Treasury addressed a group of students in China, he said he wanted to assure them that America’s debt to China was safe. This was met with laughter. Does that frighten you? It does me. What if the lenders stop lending? In oil transactions, the world is already shifting way from the dollar. In other words what happens internationally, nationally and in the state does reverberate right down to the local level. The continuance of financial profligacy has long been unsustainable. There will be a day of reckoning. Now needs to be the time for caution.
Ron Keeshan: In pixilated moments he wishes he had majored in school in consulting.
Arctic Musings
Standing on the beach below a bluff three billion years old is a humbling experience. Describing you is like trying in vain to describe the indescribable, the incomprehensible. What you have seen. History, I guess is not even a word that could do justice to all you have seen come and go. You’ve seen it all-when it began and most likely how much of what we know will be gone. Yet you endure, annually sprouting patches of green to tell us, yes, you too know about seasons in this beautiful and austere place. I watch a small herd of musk oxen grazing high on your flank. From my spot far below I wonder what sustenance can come from that forbidding looking ground. How powerful we think we are but yet we return to the sea only watering your feet. You mentor me in this brief place. I am insignificant before you. Human power is powerless next to you. It is of a moment. You are of eternity.
A small Arctic village. Soon you will be totally ice-bound for the winter. Is that really what it means to walk on water? You are new to this particular place. You were picked up and dumped here when a great power needed your historic home to make an airbase in order to fight a great war. What is it like to be rooted out of a land your ancestors inhabited for so long? Gone are the stories, the myths, and the land that gives meaning to a culture. Is it possible to be a culture when the reference points that constitute that culture have been robbed from you? Perhaps there is an irony that the ice surrounding you will be the water that produces billions of refugees constantly on the move, losing the cultural identity that has defined them for so long.
Then too, this village lives with an old nightmarish issue. In 1968 a B-52 bomber carrying 4 hydrogen bombs crashed in Greenland. Three were recovered. Both Denmark and the US have agreed that the fourth hydrogen bomb plus an unspecified amount of plutonium remains missing. About a thousand people who worked on the crash cleanup have died of cancer and more than that have fallen ill. Seals and muskoxen have been found deformed. So, in a harsh, austere, sparsely inhabited, remote corner of the world, technology has left a Halloween surprise. I was left pondering this ongoing tragedy, plus, if this bomb cannot be found what else is there that we cannot detect? I found a cold, Arctic blast running up and down my spine. Even here, we are so connected that a remote people pay a terrible price. And then my mind jumped to the Russians dumping nuclear waste off their coast. We are all connected in a vast, global neighborhood aren’t we?
In a different village I also see the clash of the new century and traditional lifestyles. Personally I am a poor tourist. I seldom buy anything. I will buy a baseball hat. When I picked up a hat at Pond Inlet I had to laugh: “Made in China”. It was on a shelf next to traditional carvings made by local villagers. And then the local café served French fries and hamburgers. They are shipped in frozen. They are trying to improve their economy by introducing trophy hunting. They want to attract trophy hunters but are angry that countries they would come from disallow the entry of trophies. One person’s concept of a trophy is another person’s attitude towards the unsustainable. Welcome to the 21st century.
The Arctic Flowers. It almost sounds like an oxymoron. For me there is no place like walking on the tundra. This was no exception. There, in vast desolation, lay the beauty of the earth. Twelve inches high, beautiful yellow Arctic poppies. Then nearby, just an inch high, blueberry plants, yes and bearing. No way could I pick one. The polar bears need every single one they can get. Goodness, there is Arctic cotton! I was awestruck. There on a cold, windswept beach, life in all its wonder and beauty forced its way through ancient rocks to shout a miracle. All I can do is honor you for the struggle you have had producing such riches in this silent drama of the Arctic.
It is fall in the Arctic. Many of my wildlife cousins have moved on. But there are some riches to be plumbed. A few purple sandpipers show up eating and drinking fresh water. I was excited to remember that years ago I had seen members of their family in Cape May, New Jersey, feeding on the spring bounty before continuing their long journey to the Arctic. But then, more. The Common Ring-necked plover is a true gem to see. His fall journey will take him across to the British Isles and south to Africa. What a miraculous journey.
The Greenland Ice Sheet. Ah yes, covering some 80% of Greenland, a mile to two miles thick, it seems now the scientific communities focus on global meltdown. To stand on the shore and for 180 degrees see the enormity of this phenomenon was breathtaking. This is far and away the most overwhelming sight I have ever seen. Overwhelming doesn’t begin to do it justice. What soon struck me was that here I am, standing underneath the top of the thing that may very well be the agent of a geological age change. Some think an earthquake could hasten its destruction, others a volcanic eruption. I wondered about a nuclear explosion. At any rate her glaciers are melting faster and faster. Icebergs calved from the glaciers move along in the beautiful and dangerous sea ice, leaving me with the sense of being a Lilliputian dwarfed by powerful forces. I simply flowed along with it, awed by its power and beauty.
(Ron Keeshan and Liz, who faithfully edits and collaborates on all my writing, especially this one.)
Stories
The walls in our house are hung from floor to ceiling with pictures. Bears, birds, family outings and spectacular places we have been privileged to see adorn all walls. Many of them are slightly crooked which drives compulsive types crazy. We do not even see the crookedness. All the pictures tell us a story.
We can sit in any room and recount the story the photos tell us. Most are about the journey we traveled learning about bear behavior, like how a mother grizzly safeguarded her triplets or how our new son-in-law fell slightly behind the group going uphill and was left alone when a grizzly emerged from tall grass grazing five yards to his right. Slowly moving up hill to us he stammered out that perhaps next year we would go to Disneyland. By the end of the trip John was a devoted bear fanatic. Every room is a living memory of almost 35 years of a journey to understanding, captured in photographic stories.
Not so long ago our neighbor kindly gave us a book of special meaning to her, Ferry Boats Boats in Idaho, by her father James L. Huntley. It is essentially stories of the use of ferries in Idaho from construction by Indian tribes to the almost complete demise of ferries when the bridges came. It is a treasure of memories to my neighbor on many levels and brought back many wonderful Idaho memories for me.
For me, life resides in stories. The memory of those stories builds a history and that history informs us, individually or collectively as a nation. I think this is why all my adult life I have been a student of African-American and Jewish stories told biographically or autobiographically. There is much pain, tragedy and courage but they are for me always gripping.
I think every individual, society and nation has a story to tell from which we can learn.
The way I read history is that America wrote her story on manifest destiny. It is the only story any of us still alive remembers. I feel that is part of where we currently find ourselves. We have been living like this was a story that would endlessly go on. We are hence confused about what has been happening to us. We keep thinking we’ll win one of these wars and that will reestablish our continuing story. We keep flinging ourselves abroad with bad results (for everyone). Suddenly we have found ourselves economically battered and frustrated about how to deal with that. It appears that out of nowhere the pages of our story have gone blank.
Like it or not, and few even want to acknowledge it, we are at a crisis point in our nation’s story. This is a time when a society must face up to reality. Financially we are funding wars, projects and everything else like we own the bank. We don’t. The bank is in the mid-east and the Orient. Study up on Islam and Confucius. Listening to local, state and national politicians you would think we are living in the 1950s. Huh?
Do you have a clue, a single clue what the world moving off the dollar in oil transactions means!?
OK, I am not going to belabor that we borrow a couple of billion every day just to keep the government running. Nor will I belabor that we borrow every day just to import one and a half million barrels of oil every day. I am in pain to think we have lost our story as a people. We had better begin to find it.
Now I am going to tell you I have never been a flag waver or a flag burner. That clarified, I am going to state unequivocally that I absolutely believe America, for all its problems, warts and tragedy-inflicting stories is, as the man said, “the last best hope on earth”.
I do so because I have spent my life sweeping the world looking at alternatives. It isn’t pretty. But America has it because she has an ideal (that she has yet to live up to) that is nowhere matched: A Bill Of Rights and a Constitution unmatched anywhere. I want to go out believing she can still persevere in her story. It will take a people demanding leadership. It will take leadership calling her people to sacrifice in ways they never dreamed could happen. It will take people coming together rather than dividing into more and more rigid camps: thus will be written an ending or a continuing story.
(Ron Keeshan, a story lover)
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