Sticks and Stones

Published Sept. 21, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     I walked into the post office the other day to pick up my mail and received a new bile aperture in the process, which some of you doubtless think I deserve.

           

     “I’ve been reading your articles,” the younger woman started carefully, realizing she’d just been handed the opportunity she’d been dreaming of:  telling me face to face what she thought.  It turns out she’s a Trump supporter and was offended by my anti-Trump sentiments being expressed in print.  "I don’t think you should say those things in the paper.” she continued.  “Everyone knows you're a liberal already.  You don’t have the right.”

           

     She grew angry as she developed her argument, and shaky as a result.  I could empathize, since the same thing happens to me when I suddenly have the opportunity to express my discontent to the person I think is causing it.  As we left the post office, she ended her testimony with a string of expletives about the presidential candidate she assumes I am supporting, all unprintable even as a quotation.  As we parted, she told me her name, which I think was Patricia, although, to be honest, her name disappeared as I digested what she had spoken.

           

     People are entitled to their opinions.  People are entitled to express their opinions in print, so long as they are identified as opinions and not a news article or a factual report.  There are other limiting criteria as well, like profanity and libel, for instance.  But as long as the speaker/writer claims his/her words as their opinion, the hearer/reader can keep opinion separate from fact.  The airwaves are kept free, and it maintains equality in a way:  each of us is entitled.

           

     Equality can be damaged by the presentation of opinion as fact:  it sets up a kind of authority that is unearned.  Reporters and even researchers sometimes slip their opinions into so-called factual writings, and detecting those becomes the art of critical thinking.  It is a painful art to practice because it leaves a person at odds with the promoters of these “facts,” as well as those who have bought into them as truth.  But without critical thinking we are simply sheep on the way to being shorn.

     Which brings me to the subject of name-calling.  I don’t know if kids these days still hurl this little saying around the playground, but when I was young we truly believed the rhyme “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.”  On the east coast or in previous generations, they might have said “harm me,” but we used the word “hurt.”  The truth is, that was a lie.  Being called a name over and over again, especially a name that demeans, can cause long-lasting harm which can take decades to mend, far longer than it takes bones.

     And that’s what I’ve got against your candidate, Patricia.  He name-calls.  He name-calls over and over again until people start to believe it because nobody’s made him stop.  It’s libelous, what he’s done with “Crooked Hillary” and all the other disparaging names he made up for his Republican rivals.  It’s also juvenile.  It reflects an unwillingness to debate the facts, which he also avoids by spouting “facts” that he’s made up just for the fun of watching otherwise serious people scramble to identify the false portions of his half-truths, the most serious one being the promise that he’s on your side.

     It’s a con job, friend.  If you-all elect him, it’s going to be a rude awakening and a serious disappointment when his policies take you to the cleaners along with the rest of the country, while his rich friends (and himself) get richer.

           

     In my never-very-humble opinion (and that I admit,) Donald Trump is a name-caller.  And in order not to get hurt in this election, we’ve got to remember what we learned on the playground:  how to avoid being hurt by name-callers.  The lesson is simple in principle, but difficult in practice:  don’t listen. 

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Trudy Wischemann is a rural resident writer who still has to practice what she preaches.  Thanks to Patricia for speaking to me directly.  You can send your anti-name-caller experiences c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

The Party of Lincoln

Published in edited form May 11, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     It’s been an unquiet week in my adopted home town, and anywhere else the television or radio has been on, thanks to the Donald and his band of happy followers.  Pundits, blue and red alike, have been swarming the microphones like bees whose hive has been hauled down the freeway in the middle of the afternoon, leaving them behind:  lost, and making lots of unhappy buzzing sounds.

     I don’t know about you, but I haven’t heard very much that makes sense to me.  I’m sure it’s my lack of political acumen, whatever that is.  But whatever the Republicans or the Democrats are going to do as a result of the unspeakable prospect of the current presumptive Republican nominee winning the Presidency, it seems unlikely to make more sense.  The Republicans have been out-Republicaned; the Tea Party’s stash of tea has been dumped over the side of their ship.  The bullies in Washington have been out-bullied, and if the show must go on, it’s going to take some anti-bullying expertise, plain and simple, not a review of conservative values or party unification (except perhaps in performing a “bullying” intervention.)

           

     Speaking of conservative values, over the last few months I have noticed several Republican speakers referring to their party as “the party of Lincoln.”  I associate Lincoln and his presidency with far more liberal values, not to mention sensibilities of the common folk, than we see expressed regularly in either party today.  I found substance for that belief in Stephen Natoli’s book, Liberally Speaking (2015.)  After noting that the Republican Party “was founded in direct response to the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which threatened to allow the extension of slavery into new Northern territories,” Natoli wrote:

“The Republican Party of those days was the more liberal party.  It stood for human rights over property rights, standing as it did for the restriction of slavery.  It stood for the precedence of nationally guaranteed human rights over the idea that ‘state’s rights’ permitted localities to nullify national laws or void human freedoms when and where they wished.  It stood for nationally-encouraged economic modernization and development that helped the people.”

           

     The creation of the Party of Lincoln was preceded by the creation of a third party called the Free Soil Party after the Wilmot Proviso, which would have prohibited slavery in the southwestern territories acquired from Mexico (including California,) was defeated in Congress:

           

“Disappointed by the ambivalent position of the Whig Party toward slavery, ‘Conscience’ Whigs held a convention in August 1848 at Buffalo, N.Y.  There they were joined by delegates from 17 states drawn from the Liberty Party and the antislavery faction of the New York Democrats, known as ‘Barnburners.’  The Free-Soilers’ historic slogan calling for ‘free soil, free speech, free labor and free men’ attracted small farmers, debtors, village merchants, and household and mill workers....  In 1854 the disorganized remnants of the party were absorbed into the newly formed Republican Party, which carrie54 the disorganized remnants of the party were absorbed into the newly formed Republican Party, which carrigh several party memd the Free-Soil idea of opposing the expansion of slavery one step further by condemning slavery as a moral evil as well.”  (“Free Soil Party,”Encyclopedia Britannica, online.)

     We might ask “Are we at a similar moment now, where dissatisfaction with the status quo in Washington could lead to the creation of a new party?”  I don’t think so, but maybe it’s just my lack of political acumen again.

     I watched the supporters behind the Donald on tv this morning, one holding a sign that read “The silent majority stands with Donald Trump.”  I think about them often, that silent majority.  I think they’ve fallen in love with someone who can speak his mind, even if that mind is like a sailboat with no rudder.  They stand with him because they cannot stand up for themselves.  And I worry for them because, from years past I know how it feels to discover that the one you fell so hard for, hoping to be redeemed, doesn’t really see you and has been using you all along to bolster his fragile (if bombastic) ego, that his words were lightly filled balloons barely tied.  It always feels bad, but the result can be good.  I just hope that therapeutic and truly redemptive moment happens before November.

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Trudy Wischemann is an apolitical pundit who writes in Lindsay.  You can send her your opinions on this election c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.