It is up to us to fulfill the American promise

GEORGE TEMPLETON: COMMENTARY

Billie Holiday

Inventing Myself

“Is it better to have equality at the price of poverty or well-being at the price of inequality?”  Winston Churchill

We get objective reality mixed up with subjective meaning.  We know what we are, but youth will determine what we will be.  They have a shared desire to improve the world, but they have to find the meaning of their lives and the courage to be.  That comes from the inner person.

Unequal Sharing of Blessings

When you are a student, you choose to live a life of poverty.  You put your education first.  This is not the case for the students and parents implicated in the recent Ivy League college admission scandal.  Is education only about jumping through hoops?  Do you win when you lie and cheat?  These students will carry the shame of their parents for the rest of their lives.  There is more integrity in failure than fraud.  Billie Holiday had it right when she sang, “Rich relations give crusts of bread and such.  You can help yourself but don’t take too much.  Mama may have, papa may have, but God bless the child that’s got his own”.

Equal Sharing of Misery

Our Republican legislature wants young people to learn how to work.  Perhaps they are marching to the drumbeat of the Goldwater Institute, the Chamber of Commerce, and the Arizona Free Enterprise Club.  Perhaps they are on the side of the money instead of the people.  A cartoon argued that people just want “free stuff”, but voters approved a minimum wage in 2016.  People would rather live in poverty than in a community where there is no work.  Work gives life a purpose.

HB2523, unanimously approved by the House Republicans, allows businesses to pay less than the minimum wage to part-time workers who are full-time students.  More young people would be hired and get work experience because businesses could pay them less.  It would also create a lower class employee who would compete with the poorest adults in our society.

Churchill apparently saw an interaction between blessings and misery that our legislature seems to not understand.  Their hubris gets in the way of continuous improvement.  It chants “USA, USA” instead of understanding its deficiencies.

Growing Up in the Placid Fifties

My mother died bringing me into the world.  I was raised by my grandparents.  Their doctors ordered them to come to Arizona because of my grandmother’s health, but it was my grandfather who unexpectedly died when I was 12 years old.  His last words to me, as he entered the taxi to go to the hospital were, “Now you will be the man around the house”.  I was stunned.  We had no idea of what was coming down.

Growing up young was typical of earlier generations.  Their youth was before electricity, cars, airplanes, and radio.  Teddy Roosevelt was their idea of the greatest president and the Civil War was not long ago.  My grandfather, a retired policeman, had only a fourth grade education.  He had a library, but could not multiply or divide.  My grandmother was the academic in our family, having completed an eighth grade education.  She was crippled because of a broken hip.  Strokes blinded one eye and twisted her foot.  She had hemorrhaging ulcers and repeated heart attacks.  I bought the groceries, did the laundry, lawn, housecleaning, and everything that took mobility or strength.  There was no one else.   I was her caregiver and she became my mother.

My grandmother had good advice:  “Get a job”, but I wanted to go to college.  Government and private enterprise created accelerated high school courses and summer institutes for teachers.  The world was changing and education was necessary to keep America great.  I lived in Arizona from 1948 and attended Arizona schools continuously.  My grandparents owned property beginning in 1950, but it turns out I was not legally an Arizona resident and would have to pay out of state tuition.  That would make college impossible.  My high school English teacher saw something in me.  One of her students was a lawyer.  She referred me to him, and pro bono, he got me classified as a resident.  Objective law denied amnesty.  But the subjective nature of my situation suggested otherwise.

Time to Strive

We should not be surprised or upset because we have to have to struggle with the frustrations in life.  It’s all in the game.

I learned how to work in the onion and melon seasons.  I remember picking cotton by hand.  We worked seven days a week, typically longer than 12 hour days, and sometimes as much as 18 hour days.  Those jobs paid about half the minimum wage of the time, without overtime or benefits, but a young person who lived at home, not needing to pay room and board, could do well.  I liked the hard physical work and was grateful to get it.

It was too hot outdoors in the summer, but we worked outside anyway.  I remember, all alone, digging up the shed sewer line.  They did not have heavy equipment in those days.  The trench was about fifty yards long, ran through the dirt parking lot, and deeper than I was tall.  I had a hose to help break up the hard soil.  But the objective reality of the trench is not what was significant.  It was the subjective experience that mattered.  I was covered with mud from head to foot from digging the trench and I met a girl I knew.  She was adorned in high heels and fine clothing.  It was clear to me, that I was not a bird of her feather.  It was helping me to learn who I was and what I was.

I started college at age 17 and did well, but I lost my grandmother, my room and my board in the second semester of my first year.  There was no money and I was broke.  I became 21 years old on paper, because I had to.

Lacking parental supervision there would be no scholarship for me even though my grades supported one.  So, my immediate problem became paying for tuition, room, board, and books.  Because of the Vietnam War, full-time school was mandatory.  Part-time work was almost non-existent.   Businesses not involved in interstate commerce paid far less than the minimum wage. With employees’ mandatory meals and uniform cleaning fees, the take-home pay was actually about one third of the minimum wage.  So, this meant running into financial problems the second semester of every school year.

My grandparents taught me to never use credit.  At first, I had a small bank account but that ran out quickly.  I tried to borrow twenty dollars, but I had no collateral.  Fortunately, they had not yet invented predatory friendly loans.  Unfortunately, I overdrew my bank account by two cents.  The police came to investigate me, but all they could find was a 1930 typewriter.  The bank fined me.  They could not understand why I did not want an account anymore.  Paying the fine took all my income for two weeks, so I lived on only peanut butter and bread, 3 meals a day, during that entire interval. 

So another solution was to work full time while attending school full time.  That led to 3 hours of sleep per night, permanently.  I was free and independent but not as sovereign as I thought.  Friends, the Church, and teachers helped me.  An increase in the minimum wage would have been beneficial.  But it is not fairness or salary that matters.  It is opportunity. 

 Sometimes, what seems to be a disadvantage is an advantage.  My day did come.  Our government was worried about Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles.  I had a good job immediately upon graduation.  I either contributed to the defense of our nation, or to the possible destruction of the world, and I helped in the solid state revolution that changed everyone’s life.  Some people thought I was patriotic and moral.  Others thought not. 

Jesus, an Artist

Is emotion the enemy of intellect?  Winston Churchill explained, “When civilization degenerates, our morals will be gone but our maxims will remain”.

We think that science revolutionizes the world, but Joseph Campbell, the famous mythology professor, explained that artists create the future.  They understand the power of the myth.  You might feel that myths are only lies.  You should consider that Einstein worked more like an artist, by imagination and intuition, than a scientist.   

Every child learns what the colors are, but colors are what philosophers call “qualia”.  We don’t know that our child’s experience of “red” is the same as ours.  An objectivist view holds that colors are properties in the world, there to be perceived.  The subjectivist view holds that colors are mind-dependent secondary qualities.  Was Jesus objective or subjective?  We know he was sincere, compassionate, joyful, disciplined, wise, and never jealous, but these terms embody thoughts, emotions, and actions. 

A handsome, tall, bearded Nordic Jesus walked on the water along with his disciple, Donald Trump.  The picture’s caption explained that they would bring world peace.  What about the big nuclear button that Trump threatened North Korea with?  He has only 7 minutes to decide whether to launch a retaliatory strike.  To wait longer would allow our nukes to be destroyed while still on the ground.  Isn’t there something wrong with our system?  It allows this madness to continue, to grow with the new generation of smaller user friendly nuclear weapons.

It was a time and place of religious foment.  There were the Essenes, the Samaritans, the Sadducees, the Zealots, and the imminent coming of a messiah who would set things right.  Did Jesus demonize the poor stranger who came to him suffering from life’s vicissitudes?  Did he explain that he was for the Pharisee’s first and blame everyone else?

We actually don’t know a lot about Jesus.  That has made it possible for people to make up their own idea about him.  Megan Kelly, on the TV, said that Jesus was a white man.  He has been talked about as a capitalist, a socialist, a poor man, a loving friend, and a member of the Nazi party.  Our intercontinental ballistic missiles have been blessed by the clergy in the name of Jesus.  Jesus was a Jew, but not of the Old Testament kind.  He tried to reconcile the individual soul with the laws of society.

The Jesus and Trump picture, pretending to be from Jerry Falwell Jr., went viral.  But it was a fake.  Perhaps its intent was proselytization about emotional beliefs that need no science, weather man, or objective policy.  God, the mysterious unexplainable is their explanation.

Land of the Make Believe

When comfortable facts decide, we become heartless.  Emotional words change their meaning.  It is easy to change minds, hard to change hearts.  As we think in our hearts, so are we.

Many are angry because “xxxx hole” countries don’t respect us, don’t do anything for us, and are not fair to us.  Should we punish them until they are on our side?  This is about how we see ourselves, others, and the world.  No leader can fulfill the American promise.  It is up to us.