Monthly Archives: November 2015

THANKS – also means giving

tgturkeyWhen we asked a local Lovettsville resident what he was doing for Thanksgiving, he said he was going to be with his mother-in-law, and family.

Not everyone, however, is with his or her family or loved one.

The service men and women we so recently celebrated may be abroad in theaters of war and at risk. They won’t be sitting down with their family at home.

Even here on the home front, it is true we have those separated from family and friends by obligations at work, the expense of travel, perhaps illness, maybe they are in a hospital recovering, or told they shouldn’t travel, and an array of circumstances too varied to imagine or recount.

This separation doesn’t mean that they have nothing to be thankful for.

Despite time and distance and obligation and whatever has caused separation this season, they still have each other to cherish, know they are loved, draw strength and meaning from their connection, what they were for each other in the recent and distant past, and the knowledge that they will be together again.

There is another group of people we cannot overlook on Thanksgiving, who have little to be thankful for, the homeless and the hungry.

We cannot celebrate ourselves without giving these poor souls hope.

Nor can we ignore the fact that the plight of the homeless and hungry is not limited to a single day.

We should especially be aware, as the days grow cold and the morning sun burns off the frost, what the homeless and hungry shall suffer.

In the good book, in Ezekiel, we are encouraged to be “given [of our] bread to the hungry.”

We should not be prideful that we are better if we have food or a home. We should make it part of our thanks to be giving to others.

We are soon upon the season when we celebrate in an annual rite of passage a young couple that could not find a home to give birth to a small child. In this timeless story, there was no room at the inn. Matthew wrote how -“Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.” Nor do many of our sick and poor have a place to lay their heads. If you truly believe we are made in “his image,” then how can anyone not care to help the homeless? Continue reading

The abyss revisited – Vietnam

The Vietnam Memorial

The Vietnam Memorial

On Veterans’ Day, we rightly celebrate the sacrifice of our young service men and women but don’t ever speak enough about how we decided to engage in the wars that risked their lives.

This was especially the case in the Vietnam War when young men were drafted to become cannon fodder in a war that defied the wisdom of Indochina history and based on the lie that it was a war of defense.

We “60s kids” were a generation that believed the government would tell us what was true and right for the nation; Vietnam was our awakening that the government could not be trusted.

It’s instructive to re-visit how we went wrong in Vietnam because we have since repeated this questionable toxic war scenario in the Middle East.

In the late 1940s, Ho Chi Minh told the French, then occupying Vietnam, “You can kill ten of my men for everyone I kill of yours, but even at those odds, you will lose and I will win.”

Ho Chi Minh spoke of the resolve of a nation to be let alone, and his challenge was not meant for the French alone.

Ho Chi Minh succeeded. He beat the French.

An arrogant United States, however, thought to defy philosopher George Santayana’s caveat that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

We never held the high ground in the Vietnam War.

Our government lied that we needed to war in defense of American interests,

President Lyndon Johnson’s war powers relied on a manufactured pretext to go to war. Our government claimed the USS Maddox was targeted in Vietnam’s Gulf of Tonkin by communist forces. This was untrue. The USS Maddox was never at risk, there was no provocation, and former Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara, admitted as much – albeit, long after the fact.

Nevertheless, our Congress empowered the President to war against “communist aggression,” a fatal deceit that killed our young men in combat actions having nothing to do with our national defense.

The United States was complicit in the political assassination of a corrupt Vietnam head of state we had championed, ignored the sanctity of other nation states when we bombed Laos and Cambodia, and lied to the American people about kill ratios and accumulated Viet Cong deaths, and the progress of the war generally.

On January 30, 1968, on the Tet holiday, the Vietnam New Year, a combined force of 80,000 Vietcong and the People’s Army of Vietnam launched a country wide offensive against 100 towns and cities; it was an assault few observers thought was possible; support for the war evaporated; the bold attack proved the communist forces were hardly on the run in Vietnam.

By the time the last American troops left Vietnam on August 15, 1973, Presidents Johnson and Nixon dropped 4.6 million tons of bombs on Vietnam.

We lost almost 60,000 service men and women and millions of Vietnamese were killed.

I do believe that we should honor those who served in Vietnam and every other war.

But we would honor them and this nation more if we only waged righteous wars of defense that were based on what was true, rather than the bald lies, the false propaganda, that the public is urged to believe instead

Post modem post election

electionSigns2015Every election has its themes and forces that shape its outcome – that is – who will govern and implement what policies?

While there were a series of familiar campaign issues in this last election, there was an underlying concern about the character of our Loudoun County government.

We had a crowded field of experienced and inexperienced candidates offering themselves for public service.

Experienced hands enjoyed some special advantages, name recognition of course, but also incumbency, and those solidly gerrymandered election districts strewn across the Commonwealth’s electoral maps.

The greatest and most telling changes to the County’s character came, however, in several key contests for the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors.

Eugene Delgaudio, the orange-hatted incumbent Sterling Supervisor, has been attacked for years for his allegedly questionable ethical and discriminatory antics on and off the Board of Supervisors. To its credit, the Board itself recoiled from Mr. Delgaudio’s misconduct, citing a scathing special grand jury report to do so. The Republican Party members took the Republican Board to task for its modest sanctions against Mr. Delgaudio, signaling a split in the party that proved deeper than may have been first understood.

Mr. Delgaudio’s conduct prompted a bitter and abiding distaste more generally for the Board’s ethical ambiguities.

There was legitimate unease with the Board’s cronies in construction and development who contributed heavily to Board members. Continue reading

Taking its toll

i66trafficWe have high occupancy lanes on the highway, I-66, that reward those drivers inside the beltway who plan ahead and take one or more extra riders and car pool; this sensible traffic policy cuts down on highway congestion, moves cars along otherwise frozen in space and time, and contains pollution.

What’s interesting, as a matter of social engineering, is that there remain so relatively few car poolers and yet the high occupancy lanes still move faster than the congested traffic lanes.

Some might rightly think that, if requiring two riders for a high occupancy lane eases traffic flow, then why not increase the requirement to three riders? But, the plans for this innovation won’t occur until at least 2020.

Instead, we have a short-sighted controversial proposal on the table, scheduled for 2017, allowing well-heeled solo drivers to buy a faster ride, to use one high occupancy lane during peak periods of traffic — if they pay for the privilege.

The policy is a shame and a disgrace.

It’s one thing to modify personal behavior with a salutary public policy such as carpooling; it’s quite another, however, to “license” the violation of that sound policy for a fee. Continue reading