Peace, Freedom, and Justice Redux

When a nation goes to war, the first casualty is, of course, Peace. The second is the Freedom of its citizens. And the third is Justice. Peace, Freedom, and Justice are so dear to us that I wonder why we give them up in order to make war. ~ The Rev. Nicholas L. Temple, sermon of March 10th, 2002

In the weeks and months following the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, my critical (suspicious? paranoid?) mind went into high gear. In other words, I was thunkin'. My primary question was:

What is the truth about and Who benefits (cui bono ) from the 9/11 attacks, the War on Terrorism, and The Patriot Act?

My answers, of course, led to more questions, the majority of which have not and may never be answered.

• The most frightening of these was a recognition was that the only ones who really benefited from the 9/11 attacks are the extreme right-wing proponents of a powerful, autocratic government in the United States.
• The War on Terrorism has engaged the United States in a war that probably cannot be won and will last not years, but generations.
• The Patriot Act provided the right wing with almost all of the police powers limiting personal freedom and civil liberties that they have been seeking for many years.

For a long time I believe that I was alone in asking these questions. The citizens of the United States, baited by the fear mongering of the Bush/Chaney administration, seemed to frightened to ask probing questions. It has only been in recent months that I have realized that others have been asking the same questions and reaching similar conclusions:

Many adherents of the 9/11 Truth movement suspect that United States government insiders played a part in the attacks, or at the very least knew they were coming and let them occur anyway.

Those within the movement who argue that insiders within the United States government were directly responsible for the September 11 attacks, often allege that the attacks were planned and executed in order to provide the U.S. with a pretext for going to war in the Middle East and, by extension, as a means of consolidating and extending the power of the Bush Administration. According to these allegations, this would have given the Bush administration the justification to clamp down on civil liberties and invade Afghanistan and Iraq to ensure future supplies of oil. In some cases, hawks in the White House, especially former Vice President Dick Cheney , and members of the PNAMC, a neoconservative think tank, have been accused of involvement in or awareness of the alleged plot. ~ Wikipedia, 9/11 Truth movement

We may never truly know what was behind the 9/11 attacks. Perhaps Attorney General Eric Holder 's decision to bring Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other accused terrorists to justice in a New York federal court rather than behind closed doors of a military tribunal may give us some insights into the truth. Perhaps that's why the right-wing is so opposed to a public trial. I don't know.

I do know that history attests that Peace, Freedom and Justice have always been casualties of the War. History also teaches that once a people have surrendered to the state, it is very difficult win them back. 

Please

Why Do We Seem to Always Elect Millionaires to the Presidency? (redux)

Several months ago I returned to a question that has bothered me since I first studied American history: “We do we Americans elect primarily wealthy men to be our president?” I have been some research for several months and eventually found a website that gave me some surprising answers. (Had I thought about the question and the potential resources for the answer, I would have gone there first: Forbes Magazine online).

Pondering the information that I obtained, I have a probable answer to my question: We elect wealthy men as president because we have always elected wealthy men as our president, beginning with George Washington!

Our first president was also probably the richest (in relative terms) of all of our presidents and perhaps the only commander-in-chief who would have been listed on the Forbes 400 Richest in America. Not only did he inherit money and plantations from his father, but he married Martha Dandridge Custis, the “richest widow in the colonies.” When Washington died, his estate was valued in excess of $500,000.00—that is almost $15,000,000,000 in today’s dollars.

Moving right along, our third president—we skip John Adams, who was a lawyer and a farmer and had to earn his money the “old fashioned way”—Thomas Jefferson (1801-09), like Washington, also inherited wealth and Virginia plantations. He was born into one of the Virginia’s wealthiest families. Forbes reports than “only one man in Albemarle County, where he lived at Monticello, owned more slaves than he did.” Like John Adams, Jefferson was also a practicing lawyer; however, his clients were exclusively the wealthiest folks in America. Although “his income as a lawyer in the 1770s fluctuated between $1,000 and $1,800 a year," that’s still between $262,000.00 and $471,600.00 when compared with the unskilled wage earners between 1800 and 2005.

Chronologically, Andrew Jackson(1829-37)—considered to be a 

“commoner and back- woodsman” and “the common man’s president”—was the next millionaire we elected. In fact, Old Hickory was “one of the richest presidents of the 19th century.” Unlike Washington and Jefferson, Jackson didn’t inherit the bulk of his wealth. He made his millions via land speculation and from plantations he owned west of the Appalachian Mountains. Like Washington, Jackson was an army general; like Jefferson he was an attorney. According to Andrew Burstein, author of The Passions of Andrew Jackson, the real basis of his fortune were land deals that came to him in his capacity as a U.S. Army general. He and his army buddies were involved in negotiating the cession of land by Indians. "Then they went about [buying and] developing those lands," Burstein says.

Another army general who became a millionaire president was Zachary Taylor (1849-50). The son of a Kentucky planter, his family was extremely wealthy and had extensive landholdings in Mississippi, Louisiana and Kentucky. I may add that Taylor owned a plantation in Louisville and my Aunt Lill owned a house on land that was once a part of that plantation. Her house was located between the old Taylor Plantation house and the place where Zackary Taylor is buried in the Zachary Taylor National Cemetery. Though he was a career army officer and a hero of the Mexican War, he also attended to his cotton plantations. Taylor was fascinated by questions of credit and finance and came to be a master of money management. His wealth increased steadily; by the time he returned from the Mexican War his wealth was estimated conservatively at between $135,000 and $140,000. Most fortune was in slaves, valued at about $50,000. At the time of his sudden death in the White House in 1850, he was worth about $200,000—about in $973,000 2005 dollars.

Like Washington and Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt (1901-09) inherited his wealth: his grandfather Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt was one of the wealthiest merchants and bankers in New York City. According to Forbes, his inheritance allowed him a substantial income of $8,000 ($4,823,155.86 in 2005 buying power) per year, enough to support a large home and servants, but not enough for a townhouse in Manhattan. Roosevelt lost much of his fortune before he was president in an imprudent ranching endeavor in the Dakota Territories. After his presidency, Teddy wrote brooks in order to pay his bills.

Herbert Hoover (1929-33) could have easily spoken the line of made famous by his presidential predecessor, Calvin Coolidge, “the business of America is business,” since Hoover was probably the most successful businessman among the presidents—and one of the wealthiest. He made his money as a mining consultant and then by investing in mining operations. By 1908, he was earning $100,000 ($12,307,616.57 in 2005 dollars) per year and by the time he was forty, his estimated worth was between $1,000,000 and $5,000,000 ($123,076,165.72 to $615,380,828.62 in 2005 dollars). Hoover never took a salary as president: a humanitarian and philanthropist, he donated his salary to charity.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1933-45) was another president who inherited his millions. A distant cousin of Theodore, FDR also came from an old money New York family: his father was an extremely wealthy investor and his mother was the heir to a China trade fortune. Because his mother lived until 1941, FDR never controlled the family fortune; however he was certainly able to spend it: during his years as president he spent an estimated $175,000 annually from his own funds above his presidential salary and allowances just to run the White House. When Roosevelt died at age 63 in 1945, his personal estate valued at only a bit over $1,000,000 (about $25,000,000 in 2005 dollars).

Another president who inherited wealth was John F. Kennedy (1961-63). My father always said that that the Kennedy fortune came from bootlegging during Prohibition; but since my dad was a Republican, I have always taken that with a grain of salt. Actually, Kennedy's father, Joseph, was the son of a successful bar owner and sometimes banker who became one of the U.S.’s richest men. Like Herbert Hoover, JFK never accepted a salary for being president and donated it to charity. Because his parents were alive when he was assassinated in 1963, John Kennedy never inherited even any of the family fortune, which was estimated to be about $850,000,000 in 1990.

Kennedy’s vice president and successor, Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-69), made his millions from TV and radio stations and Texas real estate, all after he entered politics at age 23. By the time Johnson succeeded Kennedy in 1963, his wealth was reported as $14,000,000 ($34,982,903.51 in 2005 dollars).

George Herbert Walker Bush inherited from his millionaire father and increased his fortune through Texas oil. In 1980 he reported an estimated wealth of $1.4 million ($4,798,788.08 in 2005 dollars). I have been unable to locate any estimate of George H. W. Bush’s wealth since 1980.

George W. Bush (2001-present), son of George Herbert Walker Bush, inherited family wealth and added to it through oil and investments, primarily in the Texas Rangers baseball team. He was much wealthier than his father was when elected president, primarily due to the $15,000,000 he made by selling his shares in the Texas Rangers (his initial investment: $605,000).

Who were the poorest presidents? I’ve not yet researched that question; however, from what I have discovered while researching the richest, our least wealthy president was Harry Truman. Even Abraham Lincoln, born in a log cabin (which wasn’t that unusual in the Kentucky of those days). Fifteen years before Lincoln became president, he was reported to have $120,000 “at work for interest.”

Some links you may find interesting:

The Wealth of Presidents

Measuring Wealth Calculator

The Richest U.S. Presidents

A BRIEF HISTORY OF MONEY IN POLITICS: How Americans Have Financed Elections in the Past

PLEASE

I ain't no millionaire!

A Story & Two Questions

I wrote and first published this post in March of 2009.

Photographs of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 1943:

There is a story I was told by a Jewish (Reform) Rabbi while I was in seminary. The story takes place in the Warsaw ghetto in the final days of the Jews uprising against the Nazis, just prior to its complete destruction by German troops.

As the story goes, literally every Jew in the ghetto was in some way involved in the uprising except a group of extremely Orthodox Jews and their students who, rather than taking up arms, making or throwing Molotov cocktails, or tending to the wounded, continually prayed.

When the freedom fighters begged for their arms and legs to fight the Nazis, their leader responded, “God will save us.” This continued until approximately 16,000 Jews were killed by the Nazis in the ghetto and most the remaining 50,000 residents were captured and shipped to German concentration and extermination camps. Among these were the Orthodox rabbis and their students.

When I first heard this story, I was furious—furious with God for abandoning the people to the evil of Nazi Germany; furious with the Orthodox rabbis and the students for not taking up arms. As the Reform Rabbi continued the story, I began to see what happened in a different frame of reference. The freedom fighters had been abandoned by literally everyone: their fellow Poles, who did nothing to assist them in their insurrection; the Allies, who had the potential of offering some aid but didn’t; the Christian churches, including the Vatican, who turned a blind eye on what was happening. Two days after the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, the Jewish Labor Union leader, Szmul Zygielbojm, who was a member of the National Council of the Polish government in exile, committed suicide in London in protest, citing a lack of assistance for the insurgents on the part of Western governments:

I cannot continue to live and to be silent while the remnants of Polish Jewry, whose representative I am, are being murdered. My comrades in the Warsaw ghetto fell with arms in their hands in the last heroic battle. I was not permitted to fall like them, together with them, but I belong with them, to their mass grave. By my death, I wish to give expression to my most profound protest against the inaction in which the world watches and permits the destruction of the Jewish people.

This story raised—and continues to raise—two ethical and moral questions:

• As a peacemaker, I have claimed that I would rather die than kill another human being. Is that always a valid ethic, even when the others are taking the lives of numerous innocent human beings?
• As a Christian, especially as an ordained clergyperson, I believe in the power of pray. Is their a time when prayer must be replaced by action in order to promote the greatest good?

I have no unconditional answer for either question. So, I ask you these two above questions and look forward to your comments.

• Peace has to be created, in order to be maintained. It is the product of Faith, Strength, Energy, Will, Sympathy, Justice, Imagination, and the triumph of principle. It will never be achieved by passivity and quietism. ~ Dorothy Thompson
• We make war that we may live in peace. ~ Aristotle
• Everyone's a pacifist between wars. It's like being a vegetarian between meals. ~ Colman McCarthy
• I believe that to meet the challenges of our times, human beings will have to develop a greater sense of universal responsibility. Each of us must learn to work not just for oneself, one's own family or nation, but for the benefit of all humankind. Universal responsibility is the key to human survival. It is the best foundation for world peace. ~ H. H. Dalai Lama
• You can't shake hands with a clenched fist. ~ Indira Gandhi
• A just man, even a peace-loving one, will find it impossible to live in peace with injustice, oppression, and undeniable evil. ~ Author Unknown
• We tend to think the problem is human beings have this natural tendency to kill, and yet in the middle of a hot war, WWII, a "good war," as it were, the US army was astonished to learn that at least three out of every four riflemen who were trained to kill and commanded to kill, could not bring themselves to pull the trigger when they could see the person they were ordered to kill. And that inner resistance to violence is a well kept secret. ~ William Ury

Once upon a time there was a young knight...

Once upon a time there was a young knight who had just graduated from dragon slaying school. He donned his new armor, picked up his shield, sword, and lance and mounted his beautiful warhorse. He then went looking for damsels to rescue and dragons to slay. 

He came over a hill and below him in the valley he saw a beautiful, young (almost naked) damsel, chained to a rock, with a fire-breathing dragon on the ground before her.

The knight was filled with compassion for this damsel in distress, pull down the visor on his helmet, and charged the dragon. Now, this dragon just happened to have been drinking a bit too much mead... 

so before long the knight was dismounted from his warhorse, and having laid down his shield, stood with one foot on the dragon’s neck and his huge sword raised above his head ready to decapitate the beast. 

Then, before he could strike, something hit the knight on the back of the head and he toppled to the ground. And there, standing over the knight holding his shield (with which she had just brained him) was the unchained damsel in distress. 

She put down shield and said to the dragon, “Look, Boopsie, if you can’t do better than this I’ll just have to get myself another dragon."

The lesson? As the drama triangle of Victim, Persecutor, and Rescuer plays itself to the end, each player ends up in a different role, as with the story above. In the beginning:

Dragon = Persecutor

Damsel = Victim

Knight = Rescuer

By the middle of the story (game) the roles have changed, so that:

Knight = Persecutor

Dragon = Victim

Damsel = Rescuer

By the end, the Knight has become the victim of the damsel. 

The moral: Rescuers usually end the game as Victims.

However, rescuers-become-victims can themselves be rescued, sometimes in unique ways (its in their karma):

Unfortunately this story has played out in my life many times. One could suggest—and they have—that that I refrain from taking on dragons. However, as the Apostle Paul wrote, “I cannot not preach the gospel.” Myself, I just cannot turn my back on people I perceive as being persecuted, even though at times it has cost me dearly, financially and emotionally. 

For more about the psychology/theology of the above, may I suggest:

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The Wisdom of Black Elk Redux

re•dux (rɪˈdʌks)

adj.(used postpositively) brought back; resurgent: the Victorian morality redux.[1650–60; < Latin: returning (as from war or exile), n. derivative (with pass. sense) of redūcere to bring backre•dux (rɪˈdʌks)

About thirty or so years ago, I first read Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux. I was so impressed with the wisdom found in the book that I then purchased an abridged audio cassette and played it as I was driving from appointment to appointment. Through the years I forgot about Black and his wisdom until about ten days ago when I rediscovered my old, worn copy of the book.

I gleaned much wisdom in the words of Black Elk, just a bit of which I share below:

"The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit, and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us." ~ Black Elk, Oglala Sioux


"My friend, I am going to tell you the story of my life, as you wish; and if it were only the story of my life I think I would not tell it; for what is one man that he should make much of his winters, even when they bend him like a heavy snow?" ~ Black Elk, Oglala Sioux

"Sometimes dreams are wiser than waking." ~ Black Elk, Oglala Sioux

"...while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being." ~ Black Elk, Oglala Sioux

“The Holy Land is everywhere” ~ Black Elk, Oglala Sioux

“You have noticed that the truth comes into this world with two faces. One is sad with suffering, and the other laughs; but it is the same face, laughing or weeping. When people are already in despair, maybe the laughing face is better for them; and when they feel too good and are too sure of being safe, maybe the weeping face is better for them to see.” ~ Black Elk, Oglala Sioux  

“Crazy Horse dreamed and went into the world where there is nothing but the spirits of all things. That is the real world that is behind this one, and everything we see here is something like a shadow from that one.” ~ Black Elk, Oglala Sioux  

"Grown men can learn from very little children for the hearts of little children are pure. Therefore, the Great Spirit may show to them many things which older people miss." ~ Black Elk, Oglala Sioux

"I think I have told you, but if I have not, you must have understood, that a man who has a vision is not able to use the power of it until after he has performed the vision on earth for the people to see." ~ Black Elk, Oglala Sioux

“Know the Power that is Peace.” ~ Black Elk, Oglala Sioux

"There can never be peace between nations until there is first known that true peace which is within the souls of men." ~ Black Elk, Oglala Sioux

“Peace will come to the hearts of men when they realize their oneness with the universe, It is every where.” ~ Black Elk, Oglala Sioux

“Behold this day. It is yours to make.” ~ Black Elk, Oglala Sioux

Oglala Sioux shaman

Black Elk Speaks, book and play:

Related books: