Month: September 2012

Perhaps the Boomers Have Grown Up – The Convention

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A brief personal take on the Republican Convention.

I’m uncomfortable with sentimentality and had papers to grade, so I let it run in the background – but, the melody began to command notice; slowly the harmony became familiar. The melody was old and lovely. It interweaves family, friends, faith – the tribal, the communal, the sacred. Proportions vary as all join the vocational, the work we love because it is purposeful. That wasn’t just Romney nor Ryan – it was Martinez and Rubio, Rice and Christie, speaker after speaker.

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Creators Day

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We should have an annual Creators Day as a national holiday. We have a “Labor Day” to celebrate workers paid salaries and wages. That is fine, and there are historical reasons for it. But it is not enough. We also need a national day celebrating the people who make those jobs possible and bring them into existence in the first place. Otherwise the day appears to be a glorification of “workers” in opposition to a faceless someone or something that signs the paychecks, some unnamed “other” that is not “the people” but nameless bag of money. That is morally and factually wrong and needs to be rectified. It is long past time to celebrate the people who necessarily come first in the economic process, the people who create the jobs, the people who sign the paychecks, the people who risk their effort and time and capital, the people whose ideas and drive and commitment make the paychecks possible. Without risk-takes, innovators, creators, adventurers, entrepreneurs — no jobs, no wages, no salaries, no employees, no workers, no labor, no nothin’.

Americans need to celebrate these unsung people, our fellow citizens and neighbors, with an annual, national holiday recognizing the fundamental importance and greatness of their contribution to our national life.

This is an idea whose time has come.

Around Chicago September 2012

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Recently I wrote about my excitement (not kidding) at getting a local Wal-Mart in the River North neighborhood. However, this is not the type of advertising I think they were looking for… a photo in an article about recent overnight shootings shows off their logo next to police cruisers and police tape by a crime scene along with their store here.

I was coming up the escalator on the “L” when I saw these two buttons on the back of some student’s backpack. I wonder what the correlation between having only buttons of Che Guevara and Leon Trotsky on your personal effects and the likelihood of you defaulting on your student loans? Probably pretty damn near 100%. Here is a crazy link – the head of the US anti-drug authority is Trotsky’s great-grand daughter, Nora Volkow. They had an interview with her on “60 minutes” and it was very interesting and highly recommended.

What is the official term for a group of kayakers? A gaggle?

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September 1, 1939

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On September 1, 1939, Germany launched a massive assault on Poland, thereby igniting the Second World War.

Britain and France were both bound by treaty to come to Poland’s assistance. On September 2, Neville Chamberlain’s government sent a message to Germany proposing that hostilities should cease and that there should be an immediate conference among Britain, France, Poland, Germany, and Italy..and that the British government would be bound to take action unless German forces were withdrawn from Poland. “If the German Government should agree to withdraw their forces, then His Majesty’s Government would be willing to regard the position as being the same as it was before the German forces crossed the Polish frontier.”

According to General Edward Spears, who was then a member of Parliament, the assembly had been expecting a declaration of war. Few were happy with this temporizing by the Chamberlain government. Spears describes the scene:

Arthur Greenwood got up, tall, lanky, his dank, fair hair hanging to either side of his forehead. He swayed a little as he clutched at the box in front of him and gazed through his glasses at Chamberlain sitting opposite him, bolt-upright as usual. There was a moment’s silence, then something very astonishing happened.

Leo Amery, sitting in the corner seat of the third bench below the gangway on the government side, voiced in three words his own pent-up anguish and fury, as well as the repudiation by the whole House of a policy of surrender. Standing up he shouted across to Greenwood: “Speak for England!” It was clear that this great patriot sought at this crucial moment to proclaim that no loyalty had any meaning if it was in conflict with the country’s honour. What in effect he said was: “The Prime Minister has not spoken for Britain, then let the socialists do so. Let the lead go to anyone who will.” That shout was a cry of defiance. It meant that the house and the country would neither surrender nor accept a leader who might be prepared to trifle with the nation’s pledged word.

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