I contributed the following posts to the discussion that followed Women Who Want to Want – NYTimes.com by Daniel Bergner (November 24, 2009). A mediocre article generated some interesting comments. I feel sorry for some very unhappy, frustrated and confused people out there. Societal pressure is no help and often can make things worse. (more…)
December 2, 2009
Political Correctness, and Liberals and Conservatives (so-called)
I consider myself to be liberal in that I believe in freedom of thought and expression. Political Correctness hampers the thought process through the enforcement of linguistic conventions. I contributed the following post to the discussion that followed Political Correctness Revisited – NYTimes.com by Stanley Fish (November 30, 2009). The author was concerned that there are a disproportionate number of “liberals” in the liberal arts of universities and that they aren’t liberal anyhow and misuse tenure to push their own agenda. Other commentators offered explanations for why there would be relatively few conservatives in the liberal arts and relatively few liberals in business. (more…)
November 3, 2009
Conscientious Objectors, Truman, and true bravery.
May 17, 1948
“I’ll admit that it is rather difficult for me to look upon a conscientious objector with patience…While your four sons and my three nephews were risking their lives to save our government, and the things for which we stand, these people were virtually shooting them in the back. I ran across one conscientious objector (Desmond Doss) that I really believe is all man…I decorated him with a Congressional Medal of Honor….the majority with whom I came in contact were just plain cowards and shirkers.”
(from Eleanor and Harry, The Correspondence. 2002)
This letter was addressed to Eleanor Roosevelt in response to her request that he reconsider pardons for COs. Letter was saved but not sent, and he later mailed Eleanor a copy of the Attorney General’s statement regarding the report in question, including a personal note that there would be no review because the report was complete and he approved it
Doss was generally reviled during most of his military service as a medic because of his religious conscientious objection to killing. Even though there is absolutely no evidence that he ever failed to pursue his duties, he was generally considered cowardly simply on the basis of his anti-war beliefs. When he happened to be assigned a position of great danger and responded bravely, he became the public “exception.” Had his assignments kept him shipboard, he would surely have remained one of Truman’s assumed cowards.
It could be said that to hold to your principles when the world is against you is what requires the greatest bravery.
October 8, 2009
Pacifist Realism and Pacifism
Pacifist Realism holds that unless there is radical change in our understanding of, and dependence on, war in our modern technologically-advanced world, there will be wars of ever increasing severity, resulting in our eventual extinction. Pacifism is a conscientious and practical response to this threat. Removing this threat of suffering and extinction does not require that the world become pacifistic, but realistic pacifism can lead the way toward the consideration and adoption of other more accessible methods of establishing peaceful relationships.
Pacifism is the refusal, for reasons of conscience, to participate in war.
October 6, 2009
My response to The R.O.T.C. Dilemma (New York Times 10/26/09)
The following is a copy of my post on the Times website in response to R.O.T.C. Dilemma:
This article is heavily biased and in some cases badly misinformed. Please go back to some original sources of the period (not other newspaper articles). Most significantly, R.O.T.C. was never “banned” on most campuses in the 60’s. The requirement was that if R.O.T.C. was to give grades and academic credit, it must function under the academic regulations that applied to all the other academic programs of the University. Their alternative was to continue as they had been doing, but not for academic credit. This the military adamantly refused. They are a law unto themselves in higher education, and this is what we must question. My heartfelt concern is insuring educational integrity. Note that one cadet says “I have no personal opinion,” in response to a question about R.O.T.C., and the article’s author confirms that cadets are not free to express an opinion. Do we believe that this accords with the true purpose of a University education and is something we should encourage?
p.s. In my experience the folks I knew well in R.O.T.C. were fine individuals and had “chosen” to enter R.O.T.C. because they needed the scholarship money. Is this a good basis for a volunteer army? And what does it say about the value we place on education in this country?
September 22, 2009
Another of Fran’s childhood adventures
Fran recently told me the following childhood tale from when she was eight and lived in Albuquerque, NM. She (then known as Dixie, for Dixwell) had gone on a trip with some childhood friends to a Campfire Girls’ event in the mountains. Getting bored in the afternoon, she enlisted a small group of the girls to go with her on a hike. Seven or eight started out, following her up the mountain, with Dixie promising a good view of the campground from the heights above. However the trail grew progressively smaller and smaller until it was little more than a ledge. A couple of the girls turned back, and then a couple more, but Dixie pushed on with two friends following. They finally got to a height where they could indeed look down on the camp and could also hear people calling for them. Dixie had reached her intended lookout, and so she led the little contingent back down the mountain. Turns out that the girls who first returned had reported incorrectly that the group was lost, and a rescue effort was being mounted. Dixie, of course, was quite ho-hum about all the commotion when she returned. Some things never change.
Fran believes that you are never lost unless you think you are lost. She is never lost. Ask her about this. My view is that we’ve been lost so often that I’ve lost count, and so it doesn’t really matter anyhow. Is there a difference here?
Fran thinks that this is just an excuse for MY story of the time it was 10 below and I got lost on the mountain and returned just as the ski patrol was sending out a search party. Our parents do tend to worry for nothing.
September 17, 2009
A lifetime illicit drug free — it does happen.
Amazingly, almost unbelievably, I’ve never used illicit drugs and don’t feel I’ve missed anything on that account. I think much of this stems from a 1962 term paper I wrote on LSD (make that “about LSD”) while a student at Tufts. What about the elephant killed in a 1962 LSD experiment funded by the CIA and published in Science? Then there were Harvard’s Alpert and Leary, looking for participants at Tufts (LSD was legal until 1966) when their subjects had already founded a church/meditation center for the drug’s use and were known to be wacky losers. I was a serious runner then, and the athletic scene was totally different from today. Athletics were a prime motivator AWAY FROM drug use. The athlete’s diet was protein based, with carbo-loading just before a race. Performance enhancing drugs were not in the picture, and cigarettes and alcohol (the drugs of choice at the time) were known performance diminishers. There were two views regarding the relationship between drugs and sex. It helped; it didn’t help but folks were so stoned they didn’t know the difference. Without experimentation, I sided with the latter (besides, who needed the help?).
Incidentally, Alpert was a Tuft’s graduate, and I heard Leary speak at Princeton and spoke with him briefly there. So have some yogurt and chanterelles, in memory of Tusko the 7000 pound bull elephant (RIP).
p.s. Fran and I are amateur mycologists, but we avoid the psychedelic ones.
September 6, 2009
Why College Costs Rise (comment on NYTimes article)
I submitted the following Comment to the New York Times in response to their 8/5/09 article Why College Costs Rise, Even in a Recession. (more…)
August 15, 2009
Homesteading musings
I was looking at my dog-eared copies of Living the Good Life (Helen and Scott Nearing) and The Complete Homesteading Book. And thinking “what ifs.” I was doing this as a musing only, because we get one life to live and not multiples and we can’t go back anyhow. But nonetheless, “what if” Fran and I had met earlier, say in the early 70’s when we were each dissatisfied with current relationships? It’s an interesting mind game for us – who needs Sim City? (more…)
July 7, 2009
Robert McNamara is dead. What have we learned?
I once thought that Secretary of Defense McNamara was simply amoral, but after hearing him speak in the 90’s at Swarthmore, I know it’s something far worse. He claims to recognize the Vietnam War as a moral issue and “feels” for people’s loss and is “sorry” for what happened, but offers no apology for sending thousands to their death for what he knew was a lost and mistaken cause. See material below from the NYTimes obituary of July 7, 2009 and “The Fog of War” interviews of 2003. (more…)