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Friday, November 19, 2010

Happy 2nd Birthday August!

Happy 2nd Birthday August!



From the stage of infancy you have evolved,
A mighty two-year old you’ve become!

Terrible your age is often defined,
Irrepressible may explain more operably!

Look out world, here you come!
Ever adding refinement to what you do and say.

We can’t hold you back for long,
Cuz your blood lines are deep and strong!

You’re part of an expanding family circle,
That’s poised to support and nourish you.

Your existence offers meaning and hope
Of a purer, better and more united world.

I love you in ways that are unfathomable,
Adding spice to my advancing years.

Grandpa Bender (aka Papa Nate)

Poem by Jake Trapp

Great Spirit, whose voice is heard in the stillness,
Whose breath gives life to all,
We come before you as children
Needing the help of your strength and wisdom.

Give us to walk in beauty,
Seeing the uncommon in the common,
Aware of the great stream of wonder
In which we and all things move.

Give us to see more deeply
Into the great things of our heritage,
And the simple yet sublime truths
Hidden in every leaf and every rock.

May our hands treat with respect
The things you have created,
May we walk with our fellow creatures
As sharing with them the one life that flows from you.

Jacob (Jake) Trapp, (Unitarian Universalist Minister)

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Burnt Biscuits (Unknown source)

When I was a kid, my mom liked to make breakfast food for
dinner every now and then.
And I remember one night in particular when she made
breakfast instead of dinner after a long, hard day at work.

On that evening so long ago, my mom placed a plate of eggs,
sausage and extremely burned biscuits in front of my dad. I remember
waiting to see if anyone noticed! Yet all my dad did was reach for his
biscuit, smile at my mom, and ask me how my day was at school. I don't
remember what I told him that night, but I do remember watching him smear
butter and jelly on that biscuit and eat every bite!

When I got up from the table that evening, I remember
hearing my mom apologize to my dad for burning the biscuits. And I'll never
forget what he said: "Honey I love burned biscuits."

Later that night, I went to kiss Daddy good night and I
asked him if he really liked his biscuits burned. He wrapped me in his arms
and said, "Your Momma put in a hard day at work today and she's real tired.
And besides - a little burnt biscuit never hurt anyone!"

You know, life is full of imperfect things... and imperfect
people. I'm not the best at hardly anything, and I forget birthdays and
anniversaries just like everyone else. What I've learned over the years is
that learning to accept each others faults - and choosing to celebrate each
others differences - is one of the most important keys to creating a
healthy, growing, and lasting relationship.

That's my prayer for you today . . . That you will learn to
take the good, the bad, and the difficult parts of your life and lay them at
the feet of God. Because in the end, He's the only One who will be able to
give you a relationship where a burned biscuit isn't a deal-breaker! We
could extend this to any relationship. In fact, understanding is the base
of any relationship, be it a husband-wife or parent-child or friendship!

"Don't put the key to your happiness in someone else's
pocket - keep it in your own." So please pass me a biscuit, and yes, the
burned one will do just fine! And please pass this along to someone who has
enriched your life... I just did. Life is too short to wake up with
regrets. Love the people who treat you right and forget about the ones who
don't.

You Cannot Fail (Poem from unknown author)

Though winds may roar and night betray
You’re captain of your destiny;
With head erect, you’ll see the way •••
To victory.

Thought blinded by the pitch of night,
Though groping through the wind and gale,
Your pilot is the love of Right •••
You cannot fail.

Though chance may cause your your way to shift,
Though maddening waves about you roll,
Yet thank the Master for his gift •••
A fearless soul!

(Hung on wall of Sandra's parents' house)

Sunday, November 14, 2010

CHOCOLATE SINGS

One day I had lunch with some friends. Jim, a short, balding golfer type about 80 years old,
came along with them---all in all, a pleasant bunch.

When the menus were presented, we ordered salads, sandwiches, and soups, except for Jim
who said, "Ice Cream, please. Two scoops, chocolate." I wasn't sure my ears heard right,
and the others were aghast. "Along with heated apple pie," Jim added, completely unabashed.

We tried to act quite nonchalant, as if people did this all the time.........But when our orders
were brought out, I didn't enjoy mine.

I couldn't take my eyes off Jim as his pie a-la-mode went down. The other guys couldn't believe it.
They ate their lunches silently and grinned.

The next time I went out to eat, I called and invited Jim. I lunched on white meat tuna.
He ordered a parfait. I smiled.

He asked if he amused me.

I answered, "Yes, you do, but also you confuse me. How come you order rich desserts,
while I feel I must be sensible?"

He laughed and said, "I'm tasting all that is possible."

I try to eat the food I need, and do the things I should. But life's so short, my friend,
I hate missing out on something good.

This year I realized how old I am... "I haven't been this old before. So, before I die, I've
got to try those things that for years I have ignored."

I haven't smelled all the flowers yet. There are too many trout streams I haven't fished.

There's more fudge sundaes to wolf down and kites to be flown overhead. There are too
many golf courses I haven't played.

I've not laughed at all the jokes. I've missed a lot of sporting events, potato chips and cokes.

I want to wade again in water and feel ocean spray on my face. I want to sit in a country
church once more and thank God for His grace.

I want peanut butter every day spread on my morning toast. I want un-timed long
distance calls to the folks I love the most.

I haven't cried at all the movies yet, or walked in the morning rain. I need to feel wind
on my face. I want to be in love again.

So, if I choose to have dessert, instead of having dinner, and then should I die before
night fall, I'd say I died a winner, because I missed out on nothing.

I filled my heart's desire. I had that final chocolate mousse before my life expired.........

"With that, I called the waitress over. "I've changed my mind," I said. "I want what he
is having, only add some more whipped cream!"

This is my gift to you -
Live well, love much & laugh often -
Be happy.
Be mindful that happiness isn't based on possessions, power, or prestige, but on
relationships with people we like and respect.

Remember that while money talks, CHOCOLATE ICE CREAM SINGS!

Post-Tea-Party Nation by David Frum

November 12, 2010

Republicans lost the presidency in 2008 in large part because of the worst economic crisis since World War II. Republicans have now regained the House of Representatives for the same reason. In the interval, Republicans ferociously attacked the Obama administration’s economic remedies, and there certainly was a lot to attack. But the impulse to attack, it must be recognized, was based on more than ideology; it also served important psychological imperatives. Not since Jimmy Carter handed the office to Ronald Reagan — arguably not since Herbert Hoover yielded to Franklin Roosevelt — had a president of one party bequeathed a successor from another party so utter an economic disaster as George W. Bushbequeathed to Barack Obama. And while the Bush administration took wise and bold steps to correct the disaster, the unpopularity of its Troubled Asset Relief Program bequeathed the Obama administration a political disaster alongside the economic disaster.

It’s an uncomfortable memory, and until now Republicans have coped with it by changing the subject and hurling accusations. Those are not good enough responses from a party again entrusted with legislative power. If Republicans are to act effectively and responsibly, we need to learn more positive and productive lessons from the crisis.

Lesson 1: The danger of closed information systems. Well before the crash of 2008, the U.S. economy was sending ominous warning signals. Median incomes were stagnating. Home prices rose beyond their rental values. Consumer indebtedness was soaring. Instead, conservatives preferred to focus on positive signals — job numbers, for example — to describe the Bush economy as “the greatest story never told.”

Too often, conservatives dupe themselves. They wrap themselves in closed information systems based upon pretend information. In this closed information system, banks can collapse without injuring the rest of the economy, tax cuts always pay for themselves and Congressional earmarks cause the federal budget deficit. Even the market collapse has not shaken some conservatives out of their closed information system. It enfolded them more closely within it. This is how to understand the Glenn Beck phenomenon. Every day, Beck offers alternative knowledge — an alternative history of the United States and the world, an alternative system of economics, an alternative reality. As corporate profits soar, the closed information system insists that the free-enterprise system is under assault. As prices slump, we are warned of imminent hyperinflation. As black Americans are crushed under Depression-level unemployment, the administration’s policies are condemned by some conservatives as an outburst of Kenyan racial revenge against the white overlord.

Meanwhile, Republican officeholders who want to explain why they acted to prevent the collapse of the U.S. banking system can get no hearing from voters seized with certainty that a bank collapse would have done no harm to ordinary people. Support for TARP has become a career-ender for Republican incumbents, and we shall see what it does to Mitt Romney, the one national Republican figure who still defends TARP.

The same vulnerability to closed information systems exists on the liberal side of U.S. politics as well, of course. But the fact that my neighbor is blind in one eye is no excuse for blinding myself in both.

Lesson 2: “The market” (the whole free-market system) must be distinguished from “the markets” (the trading markets for financial assets). Perhaps it’s because the most influential conservative voice on economic affairs is The Wall Street Journal. Perhaps it’s because conservatism disproportionately draws support from retirees who store their savings in traded financial assets. Perhaps it’s because a booming financial sector is uniquely generous with its campaign contributions. Whatever the reason, the intellectual right accords a deference to the wants and wishes of the financial industry that is seldom accorded to agriculture, manufacturing, transport or retailing.

But it’s not always true that what’s good for Goldman Sachs is good for the economy, or vice versa. Nor is what “the markets” want the same as what free-market economics require. Finance plays with other people’s money: financial disasters damage people and businesses who never participated in the fatal transaction. For that reason, financial firms are justly regulated in ways that other firms are not. And yet nearly 80 years after the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, influential conservatives — including The Wall Street Journal editorial board — argued that trillions of dollars of derivatives trading should be exempt from regulation.

Lesson 3: The economy is more important than the budget. During the recession of 1981-82, Democratic politicians demanded that a Republican president set a balanced budget as his top priority. Ronald Reagan disregarded this advice. He held firm to his tax cuts: once the economy returned to prosperity, there would be time then to deal with the deficit.

Today, the positions are reversed. The big Republican idea of 2010 was Congressman Paul Ryan’s budget road map, which offered a serious plan to address Social Security andMedicare shortfalls. But what’s the most striking fact about Ryan’s budget plan is precisely that it is a budget plan — it’s a document concerned with government finance, not the crisis in the economy. How will balancing the budget in the 2020s and 2030s, which is when the plan has most of its impact, create jobs and save homes in the here and now? This was the kind of problem that preoccupied the supply-siders of the 1980s and should again preoccupy Republicans today.

If Republicans reject Obama-style fiscal stimulus, what do they advocate instead? A monetarist might recommend more money creation, even at the risk of inflation: “quantitative easing,” as it’s called. Yet leading voices in the Republican Party have convinced themselves that the country is on the verge of hyperinflation — a Weimar moment, says Glenn Beck. But if fiscal stimulus leads to socialism, and quantitative easing leads to Nazism, what on earth are we supposed to do? Cut the budget? But we won’t do that either! On Sean Hannity’s radio show, the Republican House leader John Boehner announced just before the election that one of his first priorities would be the repeal of the Obama Medicare cuts.

Lesson 4: Even from a conservative point of view, the welfare state is not all bad. G. K. Chesterton observed that you should never take a fence down until you understand why it had been put up. We should remember why the immediate post-Depression generations created so many social-welfare programs. They were not motivated only — or even primarily — by “compassion.” They were motivated as well by the desire for stability.

Social Security, unemployment insurance and other benefits were designed as anti-Depression defenses, “automatic stabilizers” as economists called them. When people lost their jobs, their incomes did not drop by 100 percent, but by 30 percent or 40 percent: they could continue to pay rent, buy food and sustain society’s overall level of demand for goods and services. State pensions created a segment of society whose primary incomes remained stable regardless of economic conditions. The growth of the higher-education sector and of health care had a similar effect.

This shift to a more welfare-oriented economy helps explain why business cycles in the second half of the 20th century were so much less volatile than they were in the 19th century. And fortunately enough, this shift put a floor under the economic collapse of 2008-09. Retirees who lost their savings had to cut back painfully. But at least their Social Security checks continued to arrive. People who lost their jobs might lose their homes. But they continued to buy food and clothing. And the industries that sold those basic necessities continued to function — unlike in 1929-33, when the whole economy collapsed upon itself.

Those who denounce unemployment insurance as an invitation to idleness in an economy where there are at least five job seekers for every available job are not just hardening their hearts against distress. They are rejecting the teachings of Milton Friedman, who emphasized the value of automatic stabilizers fully as much as John Maynard Keynes ever did. Conservatives should want a smaller welfare state than liberals in order to uphold maximum feasible individual liberty and responsibility. But the conservative ideal is not the abolition of the modern welfare state, and we should be careful of speaking in ways that communicate a more radical social ideal than that which we actually uphold and intend.

Lesson 5: Listen to the people — but beware of populism. Listen to the people and politicians who gather under the label “the Tea Party,” and you are overwhelmed by the militant egalitarianism of their message, the distrust of elites, the assertion that the Tea Party speaks for ordinary Americans against a privileged ruling class.

Non-Tea Party Americans may marvel that any group can think of itself as egalitarian when its main political goals are to cut off government assistance to the poorest and reduce taxes for the richest. But American populism has almost always concentrated its anger against the educated rather than the wealthy. So much so that you might describe contemporary American politics as a class struggle between those with more education than money against those with more money than education: Jon Stewart’s America versusBill O’Reilly’s, Barack Obama versus Sarah Palin.

For that reason, conservatives in recent years have ridden populist waves more successfully than liberals have done. Yet conservatives will not find it much easier than liberals to govern a society where so many people feel themselves cheated — and where so many refuse to believe that the so-called experts care for the interests of anyone beyond their narrow coterie and class. In the face of such disbelief, how to champion free trade? How to reduce America’s very high corporate income tax? How to lower the trajectory of health care spending? How to sustain international commitments? How to upgrade educational standards?

The U.S. political system is not a parliamentary system. Power is usually divided. The system is sustained by habits of cooperation, accepted limits on the use of power, implicit restraints on the use of rhetoric. In recent years, however, those restraints have faded and the system has delivered one failure after another, from the intelligence failures detailed in the 9/11 report to the stimulus that failed to adequately reduce unemployment, through frustrating wars and a financial crash. The message we hear from some Republicans — “this is no time for compromise” — threatens to extend the failures of governance for at least two more years. These failures serve nobody’s interest, and the national interest least of all.


David Frum is the editor of Frumforum.com.

Thursday, November 11, 2010

“Just a Common Soldier” by A. Lawrence Vaincourt

He was getting old and paunchy and his hair was falling fast,
And he sat around the Legion, telling stories of the past.
Of a war that he had fought in and the deeds that he had done,
In his exploits with his buddies; they were heroes, every one.
And tho’ sometimes, to his neighbors, his tales became a joke,
All his Legion buddies listened, for they knew whereof he spoke.
But we’ll hear his tales no longer for old Bill has passed away,
And the world’s a little poorer, for a soldier died today.
He will not be mourned by many, just his children and his wife,
For he lived an ordinary and quite uneventful life.
Held a job and raised a family, quietly going his own way,
And the world won’t note his passing, though a soldier died today.
If we cannot do him honor while he’s here to hear the praise,
Then at least let’s give him homage at the ending of his days.
Perhaps just a simple headline in a paper that would say,
Our country is in mourning, for a soldier died today.

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Kindness of a Stranger That Still Resonates

Kirk Irwin for The New York Times
Ted Gup, Mr. Stone’s grandson, spoke Friday with Helen Palm at a program in Canton, Ohio, for those who received gifts from B. Virdot and their families.
By CHRISTOPHER MAAG
Published: November 7, 2010

CANTON, Ohio — The event was a reunion for people who were never supposed to meet, commemorating an act of charity that succeeded because it happened in secret.

Kirk Irwin for The New York Times
Canton is having tough times once again.
Helen Palm sat in her wheelchair on the stage of the Palace Theater and read her plea for help, the one she wrote in the depths of the Great Depression to an anonymous stranger who called himself B. Virdot.

“I am writing this because I need clothing,” Ms. Palm, 90, read aloud on Friday evening. “And sometimes we run out of food.”

Ms. Palm was one of hundreds who responded to an advertisement that appeared Dec. 17, 1933, in The Canton Repository newspaper. A donor using the pseudonym B. Virdot offered modest cash gifts to families in need. His only request: Letters from the struggling people describing their financial troubles and how they hoped to spend the money. The donor promised to keep letter writers’ identities secret “until the very end.”

That end came last week at the city’s famed 84-year-old Palace Theater, at a reunion for families of B. Virdot’s recipients. About 400 people attended. For the older people, it was a chance to remember the hard times. For relatives of the letter writers, it was a time to hear how the small gifts, in the bleakest winter of the Depression, meant more than money. They buoyed the spirits of an entire city that was beginning to lose hope.

Of the 150 people in Canton who received checks, most for as little as $5, from B. Virdot, Ms. Palm is the only one still alive, and the only one to learn the anonymous donor’s true identity. “I thought about B. Virdot a lot” in the years after 1933, Ms. Palm said. “I was really surprised when I learned his real name.”

His secret lasted 75 years. Then, in 2008, a Canton native named Ted Gup received a suitcase stuffed with his late grandfather’s papers, including letters addressed to one B. Virdot.

Mr. Gup, an investigative journalist formerly with The Washington Post, discovered that B. Virdot was his grandfather, Samuel J. Stone, who escaped poverty and persecution as a Jew in Romania to build a successful chain of clothing stores in the United States. He created the name B. Virdot by combining the names of his daughters, Barbara, Dorothy and Mr. Gup’s mother, Virginia.

Mr. Gup used the letters as the basis for a book, “A Secret Gift,” just published by Penguin Press. Relying on newspaper archives and government documents over the last two years, he found and interviewed more than 500 descendants of the letter writers.

Taken together, the letters from families struggling through the Great Depression create a larger story of a city and a nation struggling to accept a new notion: that without help they might not survive, no matter how hard they worked.

“In many cases these were individuals with their backs against the wall, watching their children go hungry every night,” Mr. Gup said in a phone interview last week.

At a time when accepting charity was seen as a moral failure, Mr. Stone’s promise of anonymity shielded the letter writers from shame. An unemployed woman caring for her sick daughter and disabled sister wrote to Mr. Stone, “If I thought this would be printed in the papers I would rather die of hunger first.”

Kenneth Richards was dumbfounded when Mr. Gup tracked him down to his home outside Canton and told him that his mother, Mattie Richards, had received a check from B. Virdot.

“I really didn’t believe him because my mother just wouldn’t ever ask anybody for help,” Mr. Richards, 72, said. “Here was a woman I never knew.”

The stigma against handouts continues in Canton, once a thriving manufacturing city that spent the last three decades watching factories close. James Macey lost his job as a waiter last month when the restaurant he was working at, Cheeseburger in Paradise, closed. He applied for more than 15 jobs before requesting unemployment assistance on Friday.

“I waited two weeks because I didn’t want to apply for unemployment,” Mr. Macey, 25, said. “It’s embarrassing.”

Canton’s tradition of charity continues, too. Mr. Macey’s pastor at Cathedral of Life Church offered him $250 to scrub the church’s floors. Insisting that was too much money for four hours of work, Mr. Macey requested $100. The pastor, M. Dana Gammill, asked him to accept $150.

Many people need such help in Canton. More than half the city’s children live below the federal poverty line, according to the Census Bureau, up from 38 percent in 2008. More than 3,000 people called the United Way for help in October, a 33 percent increase over last year, the agency said.

Frustration over 10.4 percent unemployment in surrounding Stark County has caused more political instability than Canton has known in generations. John Boccieri, a conservative Democrat, won the seat in Congress from the local district in 2008, only to lose to Jim Renacci, a Republican, last week. “People are scared,” said David B. Cohen, a political scientist at the University of Akron. “When the economy is bad, the party in power gets punished.”

In 1933, the fear was visceral. J. L. White, father of seven children, wrote in his thank-you note to B. Virdot that he was considering suicide just before he received the gift.

For other families, Mr. Stone’s gift provided the only holiday cheer that bleak winter. Olive Hillman used the $5 check to buy her 8-year-old daughter a doll with a porcelain face and leather arms.

“I was thrilled to get it,” said the daughter, Geraldine Hillman Fry, now 85. “It really was the only doll that I ever had in my life, so it meant a lot to me.”

At Friday’s reunion, people talked about how Mr. Stone’s example of generosity resonates today.

“I think there’s a message here that people in Canton know how to get through the hard times by pulling together,” Mr. Gup said.

Days before Christmas 1933, with Mr. Stone’s gift in hand, Edith May took her 4-year-old daughter Felice to a five-and-dime store and bought her a wooden horse.

Seventy-seven years later, Felice May Dunn owns two farms and 17 Welsh ponies.

“In my life it made a big difference,” Ms. Dunn, 80, recalled. “It was my favorite toy.”