An Historic Decision That SCOTUS Dare Not Duck

We will hear oral arguments on Thursday, February 8, on one of the most important cases ever brought before the Supreme Court of the United States as it rules on the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to exclude former President Trump from the state’s Republican primary ballot. 

 

I have read two of the amicus briefs on this case, including one joined by historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat among others and another joined by historians David Blight, Jill Lepore and Drew Gilpin Faust among others.  These briefs summarily and persuasively dismiss the objections which have been made to the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision. They make it clear that Section III of the 14^th Amendment was indeed written looking not only back to the Civil War but forward to other efforts that might be undertaken in the future to overthrow our democracy.  They also convincingly debunk the argument that Trump is not an “officer” of the United States and the other argument that what he was involved in was not an “insurrection.” 

 I AM  convinced that an honest review of what the writers of Article 14 intended will result in Trump’s being disqualified.

  This will admittedly be a hugely controversial decision; it will be said by some to be too political for the Court to decide and therefore should be decided by Congress. Yet, as Conservative Judge Brett Ludwig has argued in his amicus brief, this is clearly a Constitutional matter that should be decided by our Courts. 

The reality that this decision will be politically controversial should not lead the Court to "duck..to try to find a way out" or "kick the can down the road" Disqualifying Trump will be acting in accord with the intent of the authors of the 14th  Amendment to protect our nation from a leader who sought to overturn it. It will be a decision marked forever as a stand for integrity, for doing the right thing. It will also, incidentally, save the Republican Party from not only a grievous threat to our democracy but it will stop its being co-opted by an individual who does not stand for what the Republican Party has stood for at its best.

 

 

Make Haste to Be Kind--A Story Carrying a Message to Guide Our Lives

 Friends, 

You may have read this story before. I read it for the first time yesterday. I will return to it often. It is too important not to share.

John

As she stood in front of her 5th-grade class on the very first day of school, she told the children an untruth. Like most teachers, she looked at her students and said that she loved them all the same. However, that was impossible, because there in the front row, slumped in his seat, was a little boy named Teddy Stoddard.

Mrs. Thompson had watched Teddy the year before and noticed that he did not play well with the other children, that his clothes were messy, and that he constantly needed a bath. In addition, Teddy could be unpleasant.

It got to the point where Mrs. Thompson would actually take delight in marking his papers with a broad red pen, making bold X's, and then putting a big "F" at the top of his papers.

At the school where Mrs. Thompson taught, she was required to review each child's past records and she put Teddy's off until last. However, when she reviewed his file, she was in for a surprise.

Teddy's first-grade teacher wrote, "Teddy is a bright child with a ready laugh. He does his work neatly and has good manners... he is a joy to be around.."

His second-grade teacher wrote, "Teddy is an excellent student, well-liked by his classmates, but he is troubled because his mother has a terminal illness, and life at home must be a struggle."

His third-grade teacher wrote, "His mother's death has been hard on him. He tries to do his best, but his father doesn't show much interest and his home life will soon affect him if some steps aren't taken."

Teddy's fourth-grade teacher wrote, "Teddy is withdrawn and doesn't show much interest in school. He doesn't have many friends and he sometimes sleeps in class."

By now, Mrs. Thompson realized the problem and she was ashamed of herself. She felt even worse when her students brought her Christmas presents, wrapped in beautiful ribbons and bright paper, except for Teddy's. His present was clumsily wrapped in the heavy, brown paper That he got from a grocery bag Mrs. Thompson took pains to open it in the middle of the other presents. Some of the children started to laugh when she found a rhinestone bracelet with some of the stones missing and a bottle that was one-quarter full of perfume.. But she stifled the children's laughter when she exclaimed how pretty the bracelet was, putting it on, and dabbing some of the perfume on her wrist. Teddy Stoddard stayed after school that day just long enough to say, "Mrs. Thompson, today you smelled just like my Mom used to." After the children left, she cried for at least an hour.

On that very day, she quit teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic. Instead, she began to teach children. Mrs. Thompson paid particular attention to Teddy. As she worked with him, his mind seemed to come alive. The more she encouraged him, the faster he responded. By the end of the year, Teddy had become one of the smartest children in the class and, despite her lie that she would love all the children the same, Teddy became one of her "teacher's pets.."

A year later, she found a note under her door, from Teddy, telling* her that she was still the best teacher he ever had in his whole life.

Six years went by before she got another note from Teddy. He then wrote that he had finished high school, third in his class, and she was still the best teacher he ever had in life.

Four years after that, she got another letter, saying that while things had been tough at times, he'd stayed in school, had stuck with it, and would soon graduate from college with the highest of honors. He assured Mrs. Thompson that she was still the best and favorite teacher he had ever had in his whole life.

Then four more years passed and yet another letter came. This time he explained that after he got his bachelor's degree, he decided to go a little further. The letter explained that she was still the best and favorite teacher he ever had. But now his name was a little longer.... The letter was signed, Theodore F. Stoddard, MD.

The story does not end there. You see, there was yet another letter that spring. Teddy said he had met this girl and was going to be married. He explained that his father had died a couple of years ago and he was wondering if Mrs. Thompson might agree to sit at the wedding in the place that was usually reserved for the mother of the groom.

Of course, Mrs. Thompson did. And guess what? She wore that bracelet, the one with several rhinestones missing. Moreover, she made sure she was wearing the perfume that Teddy remembered his mother wearing on their last Christmas together.

They hugged each other, and Dr. Stoddard whispered in Mrs. Thompson's ear, "Thank you Mrs. Thompson for* believing in me. Thank you so much for making me feel important and showing me that I could make a difference."

Mrs. Thompson, with tears in her eyes, whispered back. She said, "Teddy, you have it all wrong. You were the one who taught me that I could make a difference. I didn't know how to teach until I met you."

(For you that don't know, Teddy Stoddard is the Dr. at Iowa Methodist Hospital in Des Moines that has the Stoddard Cancer Wing.)

Warm someone's heart today. . . pass this along. I love this story so very much, I cry every time I read it. Just try to make a difference in someone's life today? tomorrow? Just "do it".

Random acts of kindness, I think they call it?

"Believe in Angels, then return the favor." Sent from my iPhone

A Clear and Present Danger--Former President Trump

• It is all too easy to view Trump’s campaign to regain the presidency as political theatre.  Outlandish.  So exaggerated, so filled with hyperbole to be almost humorous.  But it’s much more than that I see at this moment.  It’s a clear and present danger to the future of our nation and to the future of the world.

   

  I write this today as I would not have even a week or two weeks ago.  I believe Trump has crossed a line mentally. He is no longer rational.  His comments leap all over the place, disconnected.  The latest on Saturday had him asserting that the Civil War could have been negotiated, did not need to have been fought.  He has described the people who pled guilty, some of whom are in jail, for participating in the uprising of January 6, 2021 as “hostages” who should be released. 

   

  Former Vice-President Pence came out yesterday recommending to fellow Republicans that they support Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis for President, not Donald Trump.  If only a phalanx of fellow Republicans would stand up in unison publicly to say the same thing. 

   

  I move to the Supreme Court decision which is pending on the question of whether the State of Colorado (or any other state) can bar Trump from the primary or general election because of the article in the 14^th Amendment barring the election of any person who has participated in or supported an insurrection.  Trump clearly has done that. 

  
  

  As has been pointed out, the Supreme Court has several avenues they could pursue to overturn Colorado’s decision and, as they would say, let the voters decide.  And it is my belief that even with the electoral challenges Biden faces, Trump will be rejected.  But the brave decision on the part of the Supreme Court will be to accept the political outcry that would accompany its supporting the State of Colorado, a decision which I believe would be judicially correct. Doing this would also have the enormous benefit of eliminating even the possibility of the clear and present danger which Trump represents to our Nation and the world.

  
  
  

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How Has the US Mangaged to Survive As Well as It Has?

 Reading The History of the Republic by Alan Taylor, I’m confronted with the reality that the United States was on the edge of its very existence right from the beginning.  Not only during the Revolutionary War, which could have gone either way, but then the competition between the Federalists and the Republicans, between states’ rights and the central government, between rural America and urban America (witness the Shay’s Rebellion in Massachusetts and the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania in the late 1700s) and the animus between Jefferson and Adams and in the acceptance and rejection of immigrants.  We talk about polarization today as if we had not experienced it before.  Listening to a documentary on Mike Wallace underscores how much we have witnessed polarization before, no more than over the Vietnam War.  The protests made those we see today seem almost calm in comparison.

 

Let’s face it, like all human beings we’re contentious; we seek advantage; the rich tend to focus on preserving what they have; the poor on what they don’t have. 

 

In many ways, looking at our history, the question comes down to how, with all this inner turmoil, have we managed to survive as well as we have.  With all our frailties, how have we managed to make a good degree of progress, not uniquely, other countries have, too, but in a very special way. 

 

I think the reasons come back to a few characteristics of our nation, some of which we are endowed with, others that have grown through the make-up that our expansive land invited and made possible. 

 

Clearly, for the first centuries of our republic, we benefited from the opportunity to expand across the continent by our diplomatic adroitness and luck (Louisiana Purchase) and, yes, avaricious quest for land (Mexican and Spanish American Wars).  We were able to move across this continent with all the opportunities it provided and with all the resources that came from it. 

 

Then there is our Constitution:  engineered to foster debate, now more than ever, vitriolic debate because of gerrymandering and the polarization of news (everybody hearing what they want through segmented channels).  Then there is our diversity.  We fought against it at every step:  enslaving African-Americans and then throttling by Jim Crow.  Keeping immigrants out and belittling them for generations when they come.  Still, they have come because our country offered comparative freedom if not total freedom and the opportunity to prosper.  This diversity has provided an engine of innovation, of new ideas, that I don’t think any other nation has.  If it weren’t for the expanse of our land and the opportunity provided, we wouldn’t have had this diversity.  In an ironic and perverse way, we mightn’t have it either if we hadn’t had slavery, at least not with our African-American population, which is contributing so much today.

 

*****

The Path to Sustained Peace in Israel and Palestine: Reflections on the Best Book I Have Read on This Burning Issue

  

Sinking into the Honey Trap: The Case of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
by 

Daniel Bar-Tal,

 

John Pepper's review

Jul 22, 2023  

 

I’ve read four books now on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, each with their own strengths. However, the freshest, and in many ways the most insightful for me, has been Daniel Bar-Tal’s, Sinking into the Honey Trap: The Case of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Bar-Tal is a Professor Emeritus in the School of Education at Tel Aviv University. His research interest lies in political and social psychology. He approaches the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by tracking its social-psychological foundations. He does so in the context of other intractable conflicts (Northern Ireland, Algeria, Guatemala, etc.).

Professor Bar-Tal believes that resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—that peace—will eventually occur, even as it may well take decades, which it already has. Professor Bar-Tal’s belief is based on two realities and one conviction. The two realities lie in the demographics: the number of Palestinians is about the same number of Israelis, and the Palestinians are not simply going to move away. The other reality as Professor Bar-Tal sees it is that conflicts of this horrible dimension and long-standing character have been resolved in the past. Northern Ireland is a classic example. South Africa probably another.

As Bar-Tal views history over the long term (centuries), he sees, as I do, a movement-- albeit with fits and starts-- to a greater respect for individual human dignity and freedom. He believes this will eventually happen in Israel.

Basic to Bar-Tal’s thesis is that the current state of the conflict has been created by competing narratives which, through most of history of this conflict, have asserted that the other side has no right to even exist. Each side declares its legitimacy and it is legitimacy that cannot be shared.

This narrative and mindset, has been expressed in different ways. At a few points it as has been altered by a short commitment to peace. But not today.

Bar-Tal rightly points to mutual trust as the key determining foundation for progress. As we have always seen in every venue, trust must flow from people coming to know one another and learning they can work together to a better end. This is what makes the "Combatants for Peace" movement so very important to my mind.

Another key part of Bar-Tal’s thesis is that the resolution of this conflict will need to be led by the stronger party, i.e., Israel. At the same time, he recognizes the imperative, so long un-obtained, that Palestine establish a unified leadership credible to the Palestinians, the Israelis and the world at large. He believes the Arab nations and Israel and probably Europe need to help make that happen.

However, the most important premise in Bar-Tal’s thesis on what it will take to resolve this conflict is that it will have to come from the recognition that the failure to do this carries a greater cost to both parties, including the Israelis, than continuing with the situation as it exists today.

A clear challenge on this point is that today the majority of Israelis not only feel the current situation is right, but they’re comfortable with it. The PLO, while objecting to the current situation, also to some degree finds that the conflict gives them its right to exist. Bar-Tal’s conviction on the importance of both parties discovering it is in their interest to change necessarily means, I fear, that there is likely to be more carnage before the mindset is created to establish a new narrative.

I find enormous encouragement in the history of the last 75+ years that there have been instances that show such a shift can occur. I won’t go through nor am I even aware of all the examples. Preeminent among them for me was the impact of Anwar Sadat’s coming to Israel to make peace. Sadat saw through the conflict supporting narratives and recognized the psychological barriers which prevented a peace process between his country and Israel.

In a luminous and brave speech to the Israeli Parliament in November 1977, Sadat reflected on the factors that prevent societies involved in conflict to reach an agreement: “There remained..a wall (which) constitutes a psychological barrier between us. A barrier of suspicion. A barrier of rejection. A barrier of hallucinations around any action, deed or decision. Today, through my visit to you, I ask you: Why don’t we stretch our hands with faith and sincerity so that, together, we might destroy this barrier? Why shouldn’t ours and yours meet with faith and sincerity, so that together we might remove all suspicion of fear, betrayal and ill intentions? Why don’t we stand together with the bravery of men and the boldness of heroes who dedicate themselves to a sublime objective?”

Tragically, as we all know, several years later, Sadat was assassinated by a far-right citizen of his own nation.

It’s often claimed that the Palestinians have never acknowledged the right of Israel to exist. That is not true. It’s been that way often, but not always. At about the time of the Oslo Accords, Yasser Arafat in November 1988 proclaimed the establishment of a Palestinian state (PLO) and also recognized the state of Israel within its 1967 borders, paving the way for division of the area into two states.

Of course, that never occurred. Blame exists on both sides.

The change in mindset called for by Sadat was more than skin deep. It took place importantly in the education area. Until the 1980s, the Israeli educational system had taught an uncompromising story of Israeli victimhood and Palestinian perfidy. That changed in 1984. New instruction material published by the Ministry of Education proclaimed the “existential need” for the educational system to deal with relations between Jews and Arabs and Israel. It established that the history of the Arab nations, their culture, their art, their language and their religion would “be taught in schools and the subject of relations between Israelis and Arabs would be integrated into the educational system from Kindergarten until the end of high school.”

In 1994, the Director General of the Ministry of Education wrote that: “We should present the achievement of peace between us and our neighbors, the Palestinians and the Arab nations, as an agreed-upon goal and to explain its essential importance, its contribution to the security, the strength and the prosperity of Israel.”

Yitzhak Rabin, then Prime Minister, said this in May 1994 during the signing of the Cairo Agreement regarding the Gaza Strip and Jericho: “We are convinced that our two people can live on the same patch of territory, every man under his vine and under his fig tree, as the Prophets foretold, and bring to this country, a land of rocks and of tombstones—the taste of milk and honey that it deserves. On this day, I turn to you, the Palestinian people and say: Our Palestinian neighbors, a century of bloodshed has forged in us a core of mutual enmity…today we are both extending a hand in peace. Today, we are inaugurating a new age.”

That was about to change as the 21st century was born. There were a number of factors, perhaps most importantly the lethal Second Intifada. The narrative shifted again and it has not changed fundamentally to today. There is encouragingly a growing, stronger minority group in Israel and Palestine that sees the resolution of the conflict as the only ultimate safety ground for Israel as well as what is right for and owed to the Palestinians. While still a minority, the world must build on this. It is the only peaceful and righteous path to the future.

I am struck by how the conflict of competing narratives is reinforced by the media and by the lack of factual understanding by the public. An example. Research conducted in 2008 indicates that about 22% of Israelis thought the Arabs had been a minority in the country before the beginning of accelerated Jewish immigration. Thirty-seven percent thought they were a majority and only 23% said they were a large majority. In reality, 95% of the population were Arabs.

About 70% of Israelis did not know that the division of the country, according to the United Nations resolution in 1947, gave the Jews, who were a minority, a larger, expanse of territory than that given to the Arabs. (About 1.2 million Arabs received 43% of the country, while about 600,000 Jews received 56% of the territory.)

Looking forward, Professor Bar-Tal underscores that achieving an ultimately peaceful solution will require two fundamentally different narratives than exist today. An eventual lasting peace agreement will involve painful compromises and will need to be based on the conviction that it is better than the alternative and, from an Israeli standpoint, would not harm the security--indeed it would improve the security of the Israeli people. Needless to say, it must grant equal justice and rights to the Palestinian people.

Professor Bar-Tal summarizes his examination of other examples of conflict resolution. He repeats his thesis that they were resolved peacefully "when at least a significant part of society change the narratives they held during the conflict. This happened when a large portion of society realized that the price of the conflict was extremely detrimental to society: in human lives, in its development, in its attempt to achieve prosperity.”

“When this understanding spreads and becomes legitimate, the insight that one can speak with the opponent arises, the same opponent who has been perceived as violent, with whom one does not negotiate. In other words, in order to enable the end of the conflict, it is important to change the way one looks at the opponent in the conflict.”

Professor Bar-Tal concludes with this: “Every major societal change must begin with the construction of new narratives. Societies that wish to set their direction toward democracy, humanizing the ‘other,’ peace, morality and justice must socialize their citizens with these values from a very early age. It is our responsibility and duty to show this road to the nations.”

 

My Resolution for 2024

 Never to forget; always to honor these words of Henri Amiel:

"Life is short, and we do not have much time

to gladden the hearts of those who make the journey with us.

So, be swift to love, and make haste to be kind. 

And may the blessing of God who made us, 

who loves us and travels with us

be with me and with you now and forever"

The Centrality of LOVE

 We hear its all importance celebrated simply and singularly from two different eras:

"Love, and do as you will"--Saint Augustine.

"All you need is love"--John Lennon and Paul McCartney