I am pleased to announce that I have been awarded the 2018 Walter J. Lemke prize by the Washington County Historical Society for my article on Jesse Gilstrap. The article will appear in the Fall edition of Flashback, the Society’s quarterly journal.
In 1852, Jesse Mumford Gilstrap settled in Washington County, Arkansas, with his wife and three children. He had ventured to the county earlier; his first child was born here in 1848. An adventurous and passionate young man, in 1850 Gilstrap had trekked westward to join the gold rush while his wife awaited him at her family home near Carthage, Missouri. Back from his adventure and a few dollars richer, he returned to Washington County where he immediately invested some of his earnings in a partnership in one of the county’s earliest mills. In 1856, took full ownership. Then as the winds of war heightened, Jesse spoke out on behalf the Union cause. In 1862, he gathered a company of fellow patriots to form the first company of the 1st Arkansas Cavalry. Jesse went on to serve in the state senate before his untimely death in 1869.
Jesse’s story tumbled out of my research for my new release, The West Fork Valley: Environs and Settlement Before 1900. As I studied early settlers, then the first mills, then the Civil War, Jesse’s name kept popping up. It was a pleasure to connect with a descendant who provided photographs and more details about this man and his family.
I consider Jesse the real winner of this award. I am only the messenger.
Riverside Park, West Fork. Perfect display of how the river has shaped the land, creating high bluffs and rich bottom land.
I moved into the West Fork Valley in 1973. I had no previous experience here except, as a child, one train ride from Fort Smith to Fayetteville circa 1952 and then passing back and forth from Fort Smith to Fayetteville during the 1950s in our 1949 Chevy (and later our 1954 Chevy). Driving Highway 71 in those days provoked high tension whether we had to pull over to wait out a driving rainstorm or creep along due to impenetrable fog or shudder as big trucks zoomed past.
Mount Gayler provoked an outcry from me and my younger sister—could we stop and have pie at Burns Gables? Could we ride the train? Only one time that I remember did the journey involve stopping for a train ride, a thrilling dash along the tracks circling the pond, wind in my hair, grinning as the high-pitched whistle blew. Another time we sat around a table at Burns Gables to savor a slab of delicious pecan pie.
The landscape of high mountains and sheer cliffs made its mark in my memory. For years my amateur drawings portrayed hills of the same height marching off into the distance in ever faded color. I never understood why it seemed mountains should look that way until, as an adult, I took another look at the profile of the Boston Mountains framing the West Fork valley.
Passing through West Fork on our way north marked the last hurdle before finally reaching Fayetteville, but the only thing that lodged in my memory about the place was the rock “tourist court” along the highway. Then the green-and-white rotating light flashed through the sky at the Fayetteville airport, a magical sight in fog or rain. In those days on that two-lane narrow highway, the trip took nearly three hours.
Imagine my surprise when, in middle age, I discovered that I had ancestors buried at Brentwood and Woolsey! After the Civil War, my dad’s grandfather, Charles McDonald Pitts, moved from Johnson County, Arkansas, to the Brentwood area along with his mother Elizabeth and several brothers and their families. Charles’ mother and his first wife Easter (Parker) and newborn daughter Tennessee are buried at Brentwood as well as a young niece Eliza. Two brothers and some of their children are buried at Woolsey. Charles would remarry there, a local girl named Linnie Mae Rose who became my great-grandmother. The Pitts family moved away by 1900 to take up residence in the western part of the county.
Now, after nearly fifty years of living here, I can almost claim to be an old timer. But fifty years is nothing compared to the two hundred years of family heritage a few of the valley’s residents can claim. I wanted to know who came here first, who built these towns, what it was like to carve out a living in this rugged land. So I started digging.
The West Fork Valley, my new release, is what I found, a history of the watershed of the West Fork of White River, its natural wonders, its past, its people through 1900. It’s my great pleasure to announce this book to the world!
Visit the book page on this site for more information and purchase link.
I’m firmly convinced that protesting the Senate’s confirmation vote to place Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court is a waste of time. Many of us saw this exact development looming back in 2016 with the election of Trump to the presidency. Putting conservative judges on the high court has been the primary goal of the far right for decades.
All manner of maneuvering has gone into saving the fetus, that pre-human internal development unique to women. The interests of corporate wealth have long since learned how to use this hot-button issue to inflame the religious right, driving voters to the polls. The result has been the increasing power of the One-Percenters to influence politics for their own gain. Thus we have Trump, a One-Percenter, appointing conservative justices who fulfill this fetus-obsessed promise.
One wonders what issue the One-Percenters will use to control the right when Roe v Wade is overturned.
The movement toward tamping down women’s rights didn’t start with the protest against Roe v Wade. It has been ongoing since well before women won the right to vote in 1920. Conservative men and women opposed voting rights for women based on strongly held beliefs which continue to echo through conservative views today.
There were several concerns that drove the anti-suffrage argument. Anti-suffragists felt that giving women the right to vote would threaten the family institution …that women’s highest duties were motherhood and its responsibilities. Some saw women’s suffrage as in opposition to God’s will. [Many opponents] shared a religiously based criticism of suffrage and believed women should be only involved with …children, kitchen and church. Some anti-suffragists didn’t want the vote because they felt it violated traditional gender norms.
There were also those who thought that women could not handle the responsibility of voting because they lacked knowledge of that beyond the domestic sphere and they feared government would be weakened by introducing this ill-informed electorate…
… Anti-suffragists claimed that they represented the “silent majority” of America who did not want to enter the public sphere by gaining the right to vote…
[After 1917], the anti-suffrage movement focused less on the issue of suffrage and began to spread fear of radical ideas and to use “conspiratorial paranoia.” Suffragists were accused of subversion of the government and treason. They were also accused of being socialists, “Bolsheviks” or “unpatriotic German sympathizers.”
Anti-suffrage movements in the American South included an appeal to conservatism and white supremacy. In Virginia, the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage chapter even linked race riots to women’s suffrage.[1]
The idea of women as flawed humans in need of male control rests at the foundation of Abrahamic religions and most early world cultures, so it’s not surprising that women’s suffrage and subsequent gains of women’s rights are painted by the same brush. It all goes back to mythological Eve and her temptation of Adam in the Garden of Eden which caused God to banish the couple to the mortal world where man would labor by the sweat of his brow and women would suffer the agonies of childbirth; “a view that women are considered as bearers of Eve’s guilt and that the woman’s conduct in the fall is the primary reason for her universal, timeless subordinate relationship to the man.”[2]
We can’t examine prehistory to unveil the root causes of such ideas about women, though many have tried. Were early tribal cultures primarily matriarchal along the same lines as other mammalian species? In this theory, subjugation of women occurred when men serving as warriors in early civilizations conquered their rulers, holding women under their control thereafter as a result of superior physical strength.[3] Possibly evolution has played a role by the forced attrition of women who rebelled against their larger, stronger male overlords and either died at men’s hands or suffered rape, abuse, and the loss of offspring in situations where the woman alone could not feed herself or her children. Thus the genetics of originally-dominant women dwindled.
Arguably, in the modern first world where men and women are educated equally and have gained, at least in theory, the right to equal treatment under the law, whatever happened in the past can be set aside in favor of a new view of all humans. Thus the fervent belief of many modern women that the U.S. Senate would hear the truth of Christine Blasey Ford in her testimony about her ill treatment at the hands of fellow high school student Brett Kavanaugh.
But such a belief would be incredibly naïve and ignores the growing rush to homeschooling and private schools where religion determines the curriculum, now encouraged by Trump’s education secretary Betsy DeVos. We haven’t come that far, not when it’s been only 100 years since women gained the right to vote and less than fifty years since women gained the legal right to determine what happens inside her own body.
Not when 4,000-plus years of civilization record the systematic suppression of women in all avenues of life, owned by men for the purpose of bearing children and keeping the home fires burning.
Not when so many women want to be owned and reject the idea of being independent.
Conservatives, by nature, want to hold onto the past. In times changing as rapidly as the 20th and now the 21st centuries – from horse and buggy and subsistence farming to cell phones, bionic limbs, and worldwide Internet – a sincere fear grows deep in the hearts of those who only want to maintain the existing order of things. It’s no surprise that something as fundamental as the subordination of women would serve as one of the guideposts of modern conservatism. It follows then that the primary outrage over women’s rise to equality would nestle in her womb, formerly the property and future of male power.
So it’s not about Kavanaugh. It’s not about Christine Blasey Ford. It’s about the last institution of the United States government that must be converted to a conservative view in order to put the genie back in the bottle. That this conversion violates the fundamental premise of the judicial branch of government flies past in the rear view mirror in this increasingly frantic need to cling to the past. Any corruption of the Founding Fathers’ intent is justified.
The problem isn’t that Ford’s testimony was brushed aside in the rush to fulfill the Republican objective. Despite the heartfelt (45-minute) justification by Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) for her vote to confirm Kavanaugh, the day will come when Kavanaugh and other conservative justices will face a case challenging Roe v Wade. Whether Collins’ belief in Kavanaugh’s statement that Roe is “established law” is proven justified remains to be seen. Of greater import will be the decisions of conservative justices, all men, in answering the question of how far women have really come.
Are women still lesser than men, unequal and incapable of making the right decision about their bodies and the potential offspring their bodies might produce? Is the reasoning of the 1973 decision still reasonable, that “criminalizing abortion in most instances violated a woman’s constitutional right of privacy, which it found to be implicit in the liberty guarantee of the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (“…nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”).”[4]
I believe Collins ignored the subtext in Kavanaugh’s statements to her about his stance on Roe being “settled law.” He made it clear there were exceptions to established law, that being “rare circumstances where a decision is ‘grievously wrong’ or ‘deeply inconsistent with the law.”[5] It doesn’t take a genius to see the enormous loophole here for Kavanaugh to vote against Roe by citing laws against “murder,” as abortion has been framed, thus seeing legal abortion as “grievously wrong.”
I take comfort in statistics about the ideology of justices which seem to show a moderating effect on initial stances resulting from experience on the high court. This parallels the experience of journalists who, as a result of working on the front lines of social upheaval, become more “liberal” in their viewpoint. Liberal, Progressive — “favoring or implementing social reform,” “moving forward or onward : advancing.” We can only hope.
Appearing on multiple extremist websites, this image purportedly from Christine Blasey Ford’s high school yearbook is meant to convince viewers this is her. It is not.
A fervent effort is now underway to discredit Dr. Christine Blasey Ford in her testimony about her sexual assault by SCOTUS nominee Brett Kavanaugh. The people involved in this smear campaign are no more interested in the background of Ford or Kavanaugh than in the price of wallpaper. Their interest is in protecting their revered lord Donald Trump and their collective agenda of shifting the nation’s highest courts to an extremist majority.
If they weren’t so pathetic, these efforts would be laughable. Consider, for example, this recent Facebook post:
Go to Google and type in ‘Dr. Ford’s high school yearbook’. The high school erased it offline Sept 17 but someone has copied and pasted the pages. It is printed in the yearbook, in her own words about how she was walking drunk down the middle of a busy highway and passed out, and the drinking games they’d play (naming them) of which she said she usually passed out and couldn’t remember things. It said she was a priviledged white girl that was racist and a sexual preditor of younger boys. She was permiscuous…
Several points bear mentioning about this particular post. Nothing is cited as “her own words.” No confirming citations are included. No matter what Dr. Ford’s sexual activity might have been, that does not mitigate Kavanaugh’s assault. She did not choose to have sex with Kavanaugh. Therefore what he did was an assault.
Secondly, the person posting this comment evidently believes anything she sees online. A blog named “USA REALLY” posted photos and quotes supposedly taken from Ford’s yearbooks. The blog post dated September 21, 2018, begins as follows:
Those accusing Kavanaugh went through his dirty laundry in order to accuse him of heavy drinking and call him “a hard-drinking party animal in high school.” “A little Princess Diana” and a lover of a “good science party” – this is how they called her, Kavanaugh’s accuser, unnecessarily pointing out she regularly goes surfing as if it adds weight to her last minute accusation. Not only did the senators appear to be skeptical about Blasey’s allegations, so did some bloggers who were resourceful enough to take a guess that those who form the group of the current resistance to Kavanaugh’s moving up the ladder will never let any ‘inappropriate’ facts from Ford’s biography come out in the media. Now, having copied some of her high school yearbook pages, we are given much food for thought.
There are no images or mention of Ford in this material.
The same person also alleged that Dr. Ford’s second entry door wasn’t added because she was afraid, but rather for rental property. In fact, she and her husband remodeled a garage into a master bedroom and added an entry door to the space under the same circumstances Dr. Ford described in her testimony. Later, the couple decided to rent out this room to Google interns, as she stated in the hearing.
In a final republishing of a series of articles on Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s High School Yearbooks, which were scrubbed from the internet via Google’s blogspot Cult of the 1st Amendment, the unknown author demonstrated the racist nature of yearbook, possibly something that the school sought to avoid just as much as they did the binge drinking and promiscuity that was laden throughout the yearbook, as well as a motor vehicle accident that could have turned deadly.
The blog focuses on allegations of racism that are so ridiculous it’s hard to read. Pop-ups on this site include a photo of a nice white man with the caption: CO-AUTHOR OF PRESIDENT TRUMP’S TAX PLAN: TRUMP WILL BE RE-ELECTED WITH 40 STATES.
Yet another site alleging misbehavior by Dr. Ford is Freedom Outpost, a blog stating that, “We are a scrappy group of God’s people networked together to see the Kingdom break open in this region and around the world. Those who are a part of this come from many different life experiences and church backgrounds. They are leaders and individuals hungry to learn how they can move in an awareness and expansion of the Kingdom of God.”
This is very important that the truth of these articles remain in the public square due to the libelous and slanderous accusations that have been leveled at Supreme Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings.
Among Freedom Outposts’ proud accomplishments in its work on God’s behalf is a post by Andrew G. Hodges, M. D.
I am a psychiatrist and forensic profiler. Utilizing my training in the unconscious mind, I read between the lines of people’s statements, speeches and written messages.
Among his other revelations, Dr. Hodges claims he mentally obtained evidence that Michelle Obama secretly confessed that her husband was an illegal president.
Consider the Shad Olsen Show website which offered “proof” of Dr. Ford’s sordid past.
As Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s rape accuser today finally reaches terms for an invited offer for Senate testimony Thursday, (after initially refusing a Monday testimony deadline, saying through her attorney that a Monday timeframe set by Republicans was quote, “arbitrary,”) the inevitable levy [apparently the author meant ‘levee’] break of background information allegedly reveals Christine Blasey-Ford as a prolific high school party girl who is alleged to have bragged to a friend of having 54 sexual partners prior to college. If true, the emergence of five high school yearbooks from exclusive college preparatory school, Holton Arms (Bethesda, Maryland) destroys Blasey-Ford’s self portrayal as an innocent coed “church mouse” taken advantage of by an aggressive sexual predator.
But I repeat myself.
Another theme of far-right lunatic responses to the Kavanaugh hearing is that Dr. Ford isn’t really a doctor, that she was an employee of the corporation that produces abortion drugs, and that she holds stock in companies that produce abortion drugs—which only goes to show the real agenda of these posts, the belief that Kavanaugh will be key to overturning Roe v Wade.
I read that she has a PhD and can teach, but she did not take the test required in CA and cannot call herself a psychologist. Like going to law school and saying you’re a lawyer without taking the bar. If this is true she lied to the Senate in her first sentence…
“If this is true…” Yet the person commenting made no effort to learn whether or not this is true. The commenter seems incapable of understanding how a person can be a psychology researcher and not a psychologist.
Accusations like this come from sources such as “Dangerous,” a website owned and operated by Milo Inc., “a 360-degree media company conceived of and founded by Milo Yiannopoulos, a far-right agitator. His profile on Wikipedia refers to his work for Breitbart news and states:
Much of the work at Breitbart which brought Yiannopoulos to national attention was inspired by the ideas of neo-Nazis and white nationalists. In October 2017, leaked emails revealed that Yiannopoulos had repeatedly solicited neo-Nazi and white supremacist figures on the alt-right for feedback and story ideas in his work for the website Breitbart.
Wikipedia’s biographical profile of Dr. Ford clarifies her professional credentials and activities.
[Dr. Ford is] a professor of psychology at Palo Alto University and a research psychologist at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Widely published in her field, she specializes in designing statistical models for research projects. During her academic career, Ford has worked as a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine Collaborative Clinical Psychology Program.
She earned an undergraduate degree in experimental psychology in 1988 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She received a master’s degree in clinical psychology from Pepperdine University in 1991. In 1996, she received a PhD in educational psychology from the University of Southern California. Her 1995 dissertation was entitled Measuring Young Children’s Coping Responses to Interpersonal Conflict. In 2009, she earned a master’s degree in epidemiology, with a focus on the subject of biostatistics, from Stanford University School of Medicine.
[In her work through]… the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology (PGSP), Ford teaches subjects including psychometrics, study methodologies, and statistics. She has also performed consulting work for multiple pharmaceutical companies. Ford worked as the director of biostatistics at Corcept Therapeutics, and collaborated with FDA statisticians. Ford is widely published within her field.
Ford “specializes in designing statistical models for research projects in order to make sure they come to accurate conclusions,” as summarized by Helena Chmura Kraemer, a Stanford professor emeritus in biostatistics who co-authored a book and several articles with Ford. Ford has written or co-written several books about psychological topics, including depression. Her other research topics published in academic journal articles have included child abuse and the September 11 attacks. In 2015, she co-authored a book entitled How Many Subjects? Statistical Power Analysis in Research…
It is the link to Corcept Therapeutics that opens Dr. Ford to accusations of having a vested interest in Kavanaugh’s potential seat on the SCOTUS. As the blog site headline at Gateway Pundit announces, “Christine Blasey Ford Published Eight studies about “Abortion Pill” and Works for Company that Produces It,” the story goes on to post information about the chemistry of mifepristone (the so-called abortion pill) and research that shows its efficacy in treating Cushing’s Syndrome, retrograde amnesia resulting from electroshock therapy, psychotic depression, and weight gain resulting from anti-psychotic medications.
So yes, Dr. Ford worked for Corcept Therapeutics and performed research on mifepristone. But none of it had to do with abortion.
Which just goes to show that a fool is born every minute, easy victims of extremists with a not-so-hidden agenda. Which is why Donald Trump is currently president.
Some of you may remember several days back when I ranted about expiring refrigerators and driver’s license issues. Turns out the driver’s license pursuit was a much bigger problem than I had imagined.
In years past, the impending expiration of a driver’s license triggered a notice from the state advising a person to go get a new one. No longer. You’re on your own now. Apparently, you’re supposed to just “know” when the four years or eight years are up on the current license. I’ll put that on my calendar for 2026.
In years past, one received notice, went to the local DMV, turned in the old license, grimaced through yet another horrible photo, and waited a bit to be handed the new one.
Well, I’ve got news for you.
When I went to DMV and took number 68, I heard them call number 6. Without hope, I glanced around the packed room and decided to follow the advice posted prominently by the stand dispensing numbers. There, a sign stated that a person could simply go online to renew a driver’s license. How genius!
Once home, I looked up the DMV website. I searched diligently, but nowhere on that site was there information about how to renew a license online. So I called. The guy said, no, no way to renew online. He thought I’d probably misread.
So okay. I explored further on the website and discovered that in Washington County, a person might visit satellite DMV offices at various places around the county. Woohoo! Aside from West Fork, the one nearest me, DMV operates at Springdale, Lowell, and Lincoln. How lovely!
Additional exploration of the website revealed that a stack of documentation would be required to renew a license. It seems Arkansas has embraced new federal rules, effective August 8, 2018, for identification cards and drivers’ licenses. As per the website: “The State of Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration will begin issuing new Driver’s License and Identification Cards in the summer of 2018. The new cards provide more security features.” and “The card with a GOLD STAR on the top right corner is an Arkansas REAL ID Driver’s License or State Identification card in compliance with Federal Real ID Act of 2005.”
Also, “Arkansas is taking part in the federal nationwide initiative to improve the security of state-issued driver’s licenses and identification cards, which will help fight terrorism and reduce identity fraud. On October 1, 2020, anyone who boards a domestic flight or enters a federal building will either need an Arkansas REAL ID driver’s license (DL) or Identification Card (ID), or will need to provide a regular identification and additional accepted forms of identification.”
Req_Doc_for_VES_color_version.pdf. A total of five documents are required, six if your name has ever changed (as in marriage): state-issued birth certificate including raised seal, secondary proof of identity, proof of name change (if any) such as a marriage license, proof of social security number, and two proofs of residency.
So I dug around in my files, collected the documents, and next morning breezed down to the address given, 222 Webber Street, West Fork. It’s the community center. Locked up tighter than a drum, no lights on. No signs on either door about DMV.
Steamed, I left early the next morning for the Fayetteville office. It was pouring rain, so surely only a few people would be there. Wrong. The place was packed. I took a number, waited a half hour, then asked someone why they advertised a West Fork office if it wasn’t open. She said, “Oh, they’re only open on Wednesday.”
Oh, is this secret insider knowledge? I didn’t even bother to ask why there wasn’t a sign on the door at West Fork stating that information. I didn’t ask why the Fayetteville office had a sign posted saying that driver’s licenses could be renewed online when they absolutely could not. I double checked the sign, just to make sure. Yes, there it was in plain English.
On Wednesday, I went to West Fork, waited for the three people ahead of me, and then went into the office where a very nice attendant explained that the new REAL ID cards were only issued at the Fayetteville office. He said he just needed my driver’s license. He asked if I wanted to renew for four or eight years. I renewed for eight.
All through the next eight years, I won’t have a REAL driver’s license. I have no idea if this means I’ll be turned away from the airport if I should decide to go somewhere, but at this point, I don’t care.
I did go back and look at the website about satellite offices. There, one line up from the bottom, appeared the information on hours. Office Hours: W 8:00a – 4:30p
I guess it was too much trouble to write WEDNESDAY only instead of just “W.”
We lived in a rent house next door to Frank and Ethyl McMillen, a nice older couple who allowed our entire family (dad, mom, me, sister, two little brothers) to tromp into their living room every Monday at 8 p.m. to watch Gunsmoke on their nice big console television. The adults sat in chairs, Frank and Ethyl in their recliners, we kids on the floor–they had carpet– and sometimes Ethyl would serve us homemade cookies but only when my mom said okay.
McMillens had a dog named Penny. Her muzzle had started to turn gray and her black-and-white body had taken on some extra weight. Little terriers like that don’t handle extra weight very well. She walked like a sausage with legs. We weren’t encouraged to pet Penny. She moved stiffly and had her own ideas about company. But she never growled or scared us.
Each day I walked to school down a long gravel alleyway that ran from beside our house (and McMillen’s house) due west to the end of the block. The route then took me across railroad tracks, then alongside the athletic field and into the north wing of Will Rogers Elementary where I attended sixth grade. When school was over, I walked home.
One day as I returned home, I heard kids shouting and screaming. I spotted a group of kids jumping around on the far side of McMillen’s house, so I ran over there. At least six kids of various ages had gathered around the flower bed where Penny and another dog were in a fight. Only Penny wasn’t fighting. The other dog, a brown boxer more than twice her size, had her by the throat and pinned down.
One little girl screamed, “He’s going to kill her.”
I saw that was true. I ran around and knocked on the McMillen’s door, but I already knew they weren’t home. I looked around for a weapon—a shovel, a stick—something I could use to pry the dogs apart. I considered reaching down to pull the boxer off Penny, but then I worried the boxer would attack me. I thought of calling for help, but everyone there had been yelling and no one had come.
I was the oldest kid there, a head taller than anyone else. Someone had to do something, and the task fell to me. I couldn’t stand there and watch Penny be killed.
So I kicked the boxer. In the head. With my saddle oxfords, big heavy shoes I had to wear with specially-made arch supports inside so I wouldn’t get fallen arches. My feet in those shoes dangled from the end of my legs like concrete blocks. It wasn’t without some serious clout that I aimed and fired with the toe of those shoes.
The boxer didn’t budge. In retrospect, I suspect my assault may have only intensified his determination. I kicked his head, careful not to also hit Penny. She had collapsed by now, resting against the red brick wall of the house and the well-tilled soil of Ethyl McMillen’s rose garden.
I kicked again and again, each time terrified I’d miss and hit Penny or that the boxer would turn and sink his teeth into my leg.
Why didn’t he let go? Why didn’t somebody come, a grown-up, someone who would know what to do? My heart pounded. Sweat poured off me. I was shaking all over.
Finally the boxer let go. Penny didn’t move. The boxer trotted away. The kids dispersed. I went home.
Two or three hours later, my dad stood outside talking to a man. My dad came back inside and asked me if I knew what I’d done. I told him what happened. He shook his head.
“That man,” he said, gesturing. “He came down here to tell me that his kids’ dog just died. In their bathtub, bleeding from his nose and ears. He said you kicked him to death.”
I stood there as all the feeling drained out of my head and chest. I couldn’t breathe. I had killed a dog. It wasn’t that my dad lectured me or seemed angry with me. He seemed bemused, unsure what to think that his oldest child had done such a thing.
The man had told him they paid fifty dollars for that dog. Did my dad have to pay him for the dog? I don’t know.
I don’t remember if my dad said I’d done something wrong. But I felt terrible anyway. No one hugged me and said they understood, that everything would be okay. No one seemed to recognize the trauma of my experience.
I think I cried later, after my sister in the twin bed next to me had gone to sleep, when no one would see or hear me.
I didn’t mean to kill a dog. I was trying to save a dog. Surely everyone understood that. Who else had any idea of what else I could have done? What anyone could have done? But it was my fault their dog died and they were mad.
Penny died, too. She would have died even if I hadn’t killed the boxer with my big heavy oxfords. My right foot.
It was their fault the boxer died, not mine. I understand this now. They had a dog who for no apparent reason invaded Penny’s home turf and attacked her. A dog like that shouldn’t have been allowed to roam loose, but in those days, leash laws didn’t exist. For all I know, the boxer may have killed other dogs in that neighborhood.
At the time, I knew none of that. I only knew that I had kicked a dog to death and its owners were mad at me and my dad was uneasy with the whole thing. I think the McMillens thanked me, but I don’t remember that part.
I remember the deep red of the brick, the soft sun-warmed dirt, the rose bushes and the big evergreen at the corner of the house. I remember the agitated neighborhood kids jumping around, yelling. I remember that boxer straddled over Penny as her big dark eyes bulged, her mouth gaping while the boxer kept his jaws firmly fastened over her throat. I remember the impact in my body of each kick, of holding myself steady for yet another carefully aimed blow to the boxer’s head.
I remember the impact of my foot against that dog’s skull. It traveled up my leg, through my hip, up my spine, and lodged in my head where memories stay forever.
Nearly two years ago, Arkansas voters passed a constitutional amendment that granted sick and dying people legal access to marijuana. Soon after, the Arkansas legislature waded in to introduce a flurry of bills whose sole intention was to throw every possible obstacle into the path of this amendment’s implementation.
Worse, even after the legislature settled back and allowed the amendment to move forward, tangled amateurish administrative and regulatory processes resulted in lawsuits, further delaying legal medical use.
The outcome has been a circus of not-so-funny setbacks for over 5,000 patients already qualified for this medicine. Now the earliest estimated date for the availability of medical marijuana is summer 2019. Even more egregious, the amendment does not allow for the use of clones from already growing plants, meaning months will elapse between the planting of seeds and any harvestable crop.
This outrageous delay and its collateral damage rests at the feet of every elected official now holding the power to jumpstart this program. Even though the amendment requires that marijuana for medical use be produced in this state, the time has come for the governor and/or legislators to introduce an emergency measure to import marijuana from any of the other 29 legal medical marijuana states in order to provide for credentialed patients until such time Arkansas can scrape its sorry act together.
Research continues to show that cannabis is effective for seizures, spasms, nausea, PTSD, and pain. A New Mexico study found that 84% of patients who received access to medical cannabis reduced their opioid prescriptions. Israeli researchers discovered that smoking cannabis improved many of the symptoms associated with Parkinson’s disease. Another study found that cannabis substituted for prescription medications in 63% of patients. [1] There’s no shortage of proof that marijuana provides relief for a variety of chronic and acute medical conditions.
What is the point of forcing Arkansas people to continue suffering?
Who among our elected leaders has the courage to provide for Arkansas people as this amendment intended?
Governor Hutchinson, do you not care about the people you pledged to protect and serve?
[Note: All images posted to this article are efforts to damage Democrats and/or progressives.]
Hardly a day goes by on my Facebook newsfeed that doesn’t include a bashing of Democrats. And this by those who consider themselves liberals or progressives. This is deeply troubling.
For one thing, what other party has a chance of stopping the Republican power play that has brought us Trump? Some of my friends who post these tirades against Democrats like to believe that the Greens, or the Democratic Socialists, or Libertarians are a viable alternative to Democrats. To that I say, what are you smoking?
No third party has won a presidential election since … uh, never –
The last third party candidate to win a state was George Wallace of the American Independent Party in 1968, while the last third party candidate to win more than 5.0% of the vote was Ross Perot, who ran as an independent and as the standard-bearer of the Reform Party in 1992 and 1996, respectively; the closest since was Gary Johnson in 2016, who gained 3.3% of the vote running as the Libertarian nominee. The most recent third party candidates to receive an electoral vote were Libertarian Ron Paul and Yankton Sioux Nation independent Faith Spotted Eagle who received a vote each from faithless electors in 2016.[1]
You’ll note that among those names of third party ‘winners,’ not one of them has become president.
Not that this bit of logic holds any sway with rabid anti-Democratic Partiers who insist on calling themselves progressives.
Note the not-so-subtle bow tie signaling the likelihood this man is gay.
Oh, I get it. We’re tired of not getting the reforms we’ve championed for a generation. Corporations have become more empowered, not cut down to subhuman status where they belong. We need universal healthcare, an end to the drug war, and foreign policies that do not involve our military in 150 countries around the world. It’s a long list of disappointments for a generation of idealists.
Never mind the advancements Democrats have achieved in reproductive rights, gender rights, labor rights, healthcare, and minority rights, to name a few.
The visceral anger voiced against Democrats seems to stem from many sources. Sadly, one of the loudest voices in that anger is that of people who see themselves as progressives, perhaps most notably those who supported the failed campaign of Bernie Sanders. An entire industry of conspiracy theories has sprung up to explain why Bernie did not win the Democratic nomination rather than Hillary Clinton. The most popular of these theories is that she and her henchwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz somehow changed votes in key states in order to cheat Bernie out of the nomination.
There has never been a shred of evidence that anyone changed votes or didn’t count votes in the Democratic primary elections which ultimately gave Clinton the nomination. Intense scrutiny by multiple interested parties has concluded that no laws were broken. The “yeah, but” claims rise from the Ever Faithful Bernie Supporters who argue that Bernie didn’t get a fair shake, no matter whether laws were broken or not.
But there’s a larger context that is more important than what happened at the DNC and is getting lost in the back and forth over joint fundraising agreements and staffing power. The Democratic Party — which is a different and more complex entity than the Democratic National Committee, and which includes elected officials and funders and activists and interest groups who are not expected to be neutral in primaries — really did favor Hillary Clinton from early in the campaign, and really did shape the race in consequential ways. ..The irony is that Sanders was a prime beneficiary of this bias, not a victim of it.The losers were potential candidates like Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Warren, or Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper — and, thus, Democratic primary voters, who ended up with few choices in 2016… [2]
A similar conclusion by the Washington Post stated:
Clinton received 3.7 million more votes than Sanders did — and it is questionable that this was due solely to the timing of debates. For this reason, there is an important difference between the DNC’s preferring one of the presidential candidates and its rigging the nomination process.
In short, two things can be true simultaneously: The DNC tried to help Clinton’s campaign, but this did not have much impact on whether Clinton won the nomination.[3]
These details and scores of other similar conclusions carry no water for the Bernie faithful. Every possible conspiracy against Bernie is held aloft as his supporters do their best to undermine the Democratic Party. “Oligarchy” is the buzz word for this angry cohort–any wealth that supports Democrats is evil.
It’s not just that the DNC subjected itself to unfavorable opinion doing what other political parties have done since the beginning of time. It’s that key figures from Clinton on down have been singled out for hate campaigns, arguably incited in part by Russian propagandists who have seized on any and all means to eviscerate the progressive movement in the U. S.
But why do otherwise intelligent liberal/progressive voters suddenly despise the Democratic Party?
It’s as if they don’t understand that the party is made up of local committees peopled by hard-working volunteers who elect local representatives to go to state conventions where decisions are made about the position of the party in that state. At the state level, delegates are elected to carry out the party’s wishes. These people then go to the national convention where they become active voters on the party’s platform and formalize the primary vote into an elected candidate.
So we’re pissed that the Democrats lost and want to blame anyone within range. That anger is directed not only to Clinton, but to party officials like Tom Perez and Democratic Congressional leaders.
Is it Bernie’s fault for taking advantage of his outsider status to undermine Clinton’s support?
Is it the DNC’s fault for allowing Bernie to run as a Democrat?
Is it Hillary’s fault for her pattern of support for big money interests and political maneuvering and being Bill’s wife and whatever you want to say about her work as Obama’s secretary of state?
Was Hillary a flawed candidate? Yes—she’s the perfect example of an empowered woman lacking the charisma that political figures must have.
Did unconscious gender bias impact her campaign? Of course it did. Women are supposed to be nurturing and submissive, not aggressive and powerful. Did this cognitive disconnect cause her to seem dishonest, i.e. not a ‘real’ woman?
Would Bernie have won the election if it weren’t for the bad acts of the DNC?
Personally, I think it’s highly unlikely. Even with the full support of the Democratic Party, Bernie would have suffered massive campaign assault for his embrace of socialism, even if it was/is ‘democratic socialism.’ It’s the word ‘socialism’ that makes this position vulnerable, not necessarily the policies it espouses. It’s too fine of a point to expect a majority of voters to understand the difference between communism, socialism, and democratic socialism.
Bernie’s continuing call for raising taxes wouldn’t have helped either. Whether his identity as a Jewish American would have been a factor remains unknown, but it is worthwhile to note that a Jew has yet to be elected to the presidency. Not to be forgotten, also, is his out-of-wedlock son and a honeymoon visit to the Soviet Union in 1988.
It’s easy to romanticize a curmudgeonly white-haired man who says all the things the left wants to hear. But it’s foolish to lose sight of the real question here. Losing sight is what put Trump in office.
Yes, the Democrats have done plenty to provoke progressive ire starting with the devastating 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago where the party’s powerbrokers allegedly encouraged Mayor Daly’s assault on protesters, undermined the candidacy of Eugene McCarthy, and defeated the anti-war effort. The result was the election of Richard Nixon.
Similar angry disenchantment with the Democratic Party came into play when Bill Clinton not only did nothing to advance progressive causes like marijuana legalization but also managed to get caught messing with an intern. Then there were Hillary’s actions as Obama’s secretary of state that caught her in the web of controversy in big money, corporate maneuvers, and foreign debacles like Benghazi. Evidently neither Clinton recognized the potential for their enemies to use such activities against them.
Which is another big complaint about the Democrats — we’re not mean enough, not vicious enough, in fighting the oligarchs/conservatives/fascists of our day.
But none of that compares to the harm caused by Republican administrations, a list that needs no repeating here.
Nothing would please our adversaries, foreign and domestic, more than to convince us not to support Democrats.
What matters is the outcome. With the help of hate toward Democrats, we now have Trump.
Two factors must rule the end game in any political contest: (1) Which is the more progressive choice and (2) Which more progressive choice has an actual chance of winning. Compromise, whether we like it or not, is the bedrock of politics.
The choice is simple–move forward toward a better future (progressive) or step backwards toward a mythical ideal past (conservative).
Immigration at the U.S. southern border from Latin America, especially Central American countries south of Mexico, exploded after Reagan’s ill-conceived intervention in local politics. His decision, heavily influenced by the CIA, provided guns and money to right wing militias in order to prevent legally-elected leftist leaders from reforming the land policies and economies of those nations.
For example, his Iran-Contra deal illegally sold guns to Iran where profits were channeled to finance Central American right wing militias. During that same time period, the CIA allegedly imported cocaine to the U.S. to raise money for the militias. The result was a blood bath of local people who only wanted their land back from multinational corporations and few wealthy despots.[1],[2]
These policies and resulting disruption brought floods of Latin American immigrants to the U.S. as refugees. Groups of El Salvadoran refugees in Los Angeles were subsequently preyed upon by local gangs which resulted in the formation of an El Salvadoran gang to protect the people. That gang became MS-13.
This is but one example of how U.S. foreign policy lies at the heart of our immigration troubles.
In an ideal world:
The U. S. President and Congress would agree to appoint a bi-partisan or non-partisan commission of policy experts to develop an entirely new immigration policy with a six-month deadline. This would replace the tangled and incomprehensible patchwork of laws currently on the books. Both the president and Congress would agree beforehand to implement the recommended policies as law within two months of the commission’s conclusion.
A separate nonpartisan commission, also with a six-month deadline, would draw up recommendations on foreign policy changes to address root causes of immigration from afflicted countries. U. S. resources currently earmarked for immigration extremes such as housing detainers and/or a ‘wall’ would be diverted to provide aid to those nations for education, U.N. observers over law enforcement and judicial process, and humanitarian aid.
Congress would create a 5-member bi-partisan committee to develop FACTS about immigration (pro and con) and mount a public education campaign to dispense those facts to the American people.
The president would encourage state and local governments to host forums where citizens could present ideas and concerns about immigration. This input would be channeled to the commission for consideration. This is not so much to expand commission information, although it is that, but mostly to engage the public as a force for proactive change.
During the commission’s study period, the president would direct an immediate suspension of I.C.E. activities regarding current U.S. residents who may be undocumented.
Sadly, there’s not currently a president or Congress capable of such action.
What’s missing from the debate about our borders? The reason why.
People don’t just pick up and leave their ancestral homes and extended families without a good reason. In so doing, they face a dangerous and expensive journey in search of a new home. Yet despite the risks and hardship, these folks feel they have no choice.
What we hear is news about brown-skinned folks mobbing our borders, crossing rivers and sneaking into the promised land. We see them standing in lines, tear-stained kids’ faces, our media swamped with shouting heads about illegal immigration. Build a wall! Trump yells.
What does any of that do to solve the problem?
Nothing.
The problem is ours. It is we who have caused this, maybe not us individually, but us as part of a Western culture’s willingness to overrun and exploit anyone weaker than us in order to enrich ourselves.
As reported on the PBS Newshour last night,[1] most of the current surge of immigration comes from three nations: Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. These are collectively among the most violent, poverty-stricken areas of the Americas. To fully understand the terrible state of affairs in these countries, one must go back several centuries to the Spanish conquest when everything of value was stolen from the people. Since then, land ownership by rich plantation owners and all-powerful foreign corporations has removed people from their traditional way of life and left them with nothing but poorly paid jobs, if that.
The role of the United States intensified during the 20th century as socialist ideals filtered into Latin America. People embraced the idea of taking back the land from foreign interests and the wealthy power brokers in their country. The U.S. took an active albeit secretive role in destroying such efforts, as described in an article in the May 2016 issue of The Nation:[2]
…the active role Washington played in the “dirty war” in El Salvador in the 1980s, which pitted a right-wing government against Marxist guerrillas. The United States sent military advisers to help the Salvadoran military fight its dirty war, as well as hundreds of millions of dollars in economic and military aid.
The United States went well beyond remaining largely silent in the face of human-rights abuses in El Salvador. The State Department and White House often sought to cover up the brutality, to protect the perpetrators of even the most heinous crimes.
In March of 1980, the much beloved and respected Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero was murdered. A voice for the poor and repressed, Romero, in his final Sunday sermon, had issued a plea to the country’s military junta that rings through the ages: “In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cries rise to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression.” The next day, he was cut down by a single bullet while he was saying a private mass…
Eight months after the assassination, a military informant gave the US embassy in El Salvador evidence that it had been plotted by Roberto D’Aubuisson, a charismatic and notorious right-wing leader. D’Aubuisson had presided over a meeting in which soldiers drew lots for the right to kill the archbishop, the informant said. While any number of right-wing death squads might have wanted to kill Romero, only a few, like D’Aubuisson’s, were “fanatical and daring” enough to actually do it, the CIA concluded in a report for the White House.
Yet, D’Aubuisson continued to be welcomed at the US embassy in El Salvador, and when Elliott Abrams, the State Department’s point man on Central America during the Reagan administration, testified before Congress, he said he would not consider D’Aubuisson an extremist. “You would have to be engaged in murder,” Abrams said, before he would call him an extremist.
But D’Aubuisson was engaged in murder, and Washington knew it. (He died of throat cancer in 1992, at the age of 48. Abrams was convicted in 1991 of misleading Congress about the shipment of arms to the anti-Sandinista forces in Nicaragua, the so-called “Iran/Contra” affair. He was pardoned by President George H.W. Bush, later served as special adviser to President George W. Bush on democracy and human rights, and is now a foreign-policy adviser to GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz.)
Then there was the murder of three nuns. The Nation’s article continues:
No act of barbarism is more emblematic of the deceit that marked Washington’s policy in El Salvador in the 1980s than the sexual assault and murder of four US churchwomen—three Roman Catholic nuns and a lay missionary—in December 1980, a month after Ronald Reagan was elected president.
The American ambassador, Robert White, who had been appointed by President Jimmy Carter, knew immediately that the Salvadoran military was responsible—even if he didn’t have the names of the perpetrators—but that was not what the incoming administration wanted to hear.
One of Reagan’s top foreign-policy advisers, Jeane Kirkpatrick, when asked if she thought the government had been involved, said, “The answer is unequivocal. No, I don’t think the government was responsible.” She then sought to besmirch the women. “The nuns were not just nuns,” she told The Tampa Tribune. “The nuns were also political activists,” with a leftist political coalition (Kirkpatrick died in 2006).
This history and the criminality of U.S. behavior in El Salvador is but one of many similar circumstances across Latin America. Our violent suppression of activists like Che Guevara and other native leaders occurs time and again. We’ve been unwilling to allow local people to reclaim their lands, now largely functioning as an extended plantation for multinational agri-business.
El Salvador has always been a largely agricultural country and despite recent shifts agriculture has continued to be a mainstay of the economy. Conflicts and peasant uprisings over the land date back more than four centuries, to the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores. Since the last 19th century, the most fertile lands have been concentrated in few hands, “An oligarchy known as las catorce (the original fourteen aristocratic families, which has later expanded in number) and used to grow coffee for export, forcing small-scale farmers onto marginal quality lands and making their subsistence increasingly precarious. In the second half of the twentieth century, an alliance of conservative civilians (dominated by las catorce) and military officers ruled the country until the late 1970s.
“A vicious circle was created whereby concentration of land by the wealthy furthered inequality, which led to land degradation and caused conflict that finally escalated into full scale civil war in 1980.” The long civil war decimated the environment, a result of the government’s “’scorched earth’ strategy designed to decimate the insurgency’s base of support in the countryside.” [3]
This destruction resulted in large-scale migration to urban areas which has placed further stress on the country’s delicate ecosystem. A long term result of the war and the ensuing shift in demography has been continuing conflicts over land and the ecological impact of its use near urban areas.
“… the real cause of the civil war in El Salvador is the issue of agrarian reform. The oligarchy tries to prevent it at all cost. The party of the landholding elite has close ties with the death squads…[4],[5]
Its topsoil depleted, its forests all but gone, its water and air polluted by chemicals, livestock, and human waste, El Salvador is a picture of where we’re headed. It’s the canary in the coal mine, a predictor of Western hemisphere futures where overpopulation, lack of environmental protections, and concentration of land ownership are allowed free rein.
Trump’s eager rallying cry against evil gangs—in particular MS-13—barely skims the surface of the real problems facing El Salvador and, by default, the rest of us.
The Mara Salvatrucha gang originated in Los Angeles, set up in the 1980s by Salvadoran immigrants in the city’s Pico-Union neighborhood who immigrated to the United States after the Central American civil wars of the 1980s.
Originally, the gang’s main purpose was to protect Salvadoran immigrants from other, more established gangs of Los Angeles, who were predominantly composed of Mexicans and African-Americans.[6]
With over 30,000 members internationally and its power concentrated in the so-called ‘Northern Triangle’ of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, MS-13 is a cautionary tale for us all. But that’s not the full picture for El Salvadorans:
The defense ministry has estimated that more than 500,000 Salvadorans are involved with gangs. (This number includes gang members’ relatives and children who have been coerced into crimes.) Turf wars between MS-13, the country’s largest gang, and its chief rivals, two factions of Barrio 18, have exacerbated what is the world’s highest homicide rate for people under the age of 19. In 2016, 540 Salvadoran minors were murdered—an average of 1.5 every day.
While a majority of El Salvador’s homicide victims are young men from poor urban areas, the gangs’ practice of explicitly targeting girls for sexual violence or coerced relationships is well known. Since 2000, the homicide rate for young women in El Salvador has also increased sharply, according to the latest data from the World Health Organization. To refuse the gangs’ demands can mean death for girls and their families.[7]
This explains why increasingly the people surging north to U. S. borders in search of safety are single young people and especially young women. It also exposes the ignorance and immorality of the Trump Administration’s recent decision to no longer accept gang violence as an adequate reason to offer sanctuary to immigrants and of its plans to reduce foreign aid to El Salvador. As further evidence of the administration’s deaf ear to the very real crisis of the region, it has reduced the immigration quota for people from the Caribbean and Latin America from 5,000 to 1,500.[8]
[4] M. Dufumier, “Reforme Agraire Au Salvador,” in Civilisations, Vol. 35, No. 2, Pour Une Conscience Lation-Americaine, Prealable A Des Rapports Sud-Sud: Centra d’Etude d l’Amerique Latine (Institute de Sociologie de l’Universite de Burxelles: 1985. 190. http://www.jstor.org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/stable/41229331.
denelecampbell 