Ready To Admit It Yet?

When I saw the election results last November I knew it was going to be bad, but I didn’t expect it to be this bad, this fast. Nobody I know did either, but here it is. Congressmen and senators are voting on legislation that spends trillions of our tax dollars - as well as our children’s and our grandchildren’s - without even reading it. If they’re not reading legislation, what the heck are they doing? Who writes the bills legislators don’t read? Staffers? Career civil servants? Who is in charge? Evidently, we’re being governed by nameless, faceless, socialist bureaucrats. Why isn’t the press exposing this? Are voters even aware? Will they reelect these “legislators” in 2010? Have we become a nation of wimps?

Reading a Canadian blog called Small Dead Animals the other day, I saw a link to the US Republican Party about just one of the many horrendous things Obama’s “Cap and Trade” bill would do:

The bill (H.R. 2454) requires the Secretary of Health and Human Services to provide monthly cash payments, or “energy stamps”, to low-income households for their estimated “loss in their purchasing power” resulting from the Democrats’ national energy tax. The bill establishes a national standard of eligibility (covering everyone under 150% of the poverty line). Energy stamps would reach an estimated 65 million individuals (about 20 percent of all US residents) – making it a larger program than welfare, food stamps, or even Medicaid. (H.R. 2454, American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, Sec. 431, p. 1193)

While 65 million Americans will be thrilled, 200 million will pay another huge tax and get nothing back. Remember when President Obama promised to cut taxes for 95% of Americans? I knew that was a crock because about 40% of Americans didn’t even pay federal income taxes and many got checks instead under the “Earned Income Tax Credit.” How do you cut taxes on people who don’t pay any?

Newt Gingrich mocked the president in a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) last February, saying “Let me get this straight, we’re not going to raise taxes on anybody making under $250,000 a year, unless they use electricity, [or buy gasoline, heating oil, or natural gas].”

Our only hope is that the Senate won’t pass this “piece of sh--” legislation - as described by Republican Congressman John Boehner (He evidently read it). But then, with 60 Democrats along with our two liberal “Republican” senators from Maine, it probably will.

The most ludicrous thing is: reducing carbon emissions will not affect climate change. Climate has been changing for millions of years with no humans around to influence it - and it will continue to change no matter what we do or we don’t do. Obama, Pelosi and Reid are putting us all on a bus to La-La Land.

Now comes the Democrats' national health care bill. What will it cost? $1.5 trillion? $2 trillion? Where will we get that money when neither China nor any other country wants to lend us any more? Print it, I guess.
So how is all this spending affecting our economy so far? Are we feeling stimulated? Evidently not. Unemployment is rising much faster under President Obama. All this bold New-New Deal legislation is making things worse. Now, unbelievably, Democrats are calling for a second stimulus. About that, Investor’s Business Daily says: “This is a little like a medieval barber bleeding his patients to improve their health, then bleeding them again when they fail to improve.”

If you want to see what the future holds for America under liberal Democrat policies, look at states and cities where they’ve been in power for decades. Check out Detroit for instance. Said Gingrich about that sad city: “Let’s discuss the total failure of the Detroit political system - which has taken a city of 1.8 million, which had the highest per-capita income in the United States, and has driven it into the ground so that there are today fewer than 900,000 people living there with a per-capita income that is 62nd in the United States.” Then there’s California, with the 8th largest economy in the world - bankrupt, paying employees with IOUs banks refuse to accept, and watching entrepreneurs move out of state.

I’m noticing bumper stickers that are signs of the times: One says: “Don’t tell Obama what comes after a trillion” and the other asks: “Ready to admit Obama was a mistake?”

Out of Touch Again

Barack Obama’s inauguration did not thrill me. Michael Jackson’s death did not cause me grief. Could this mean I’m out of touch with my fellow Americans? I’m feeling that way more and more lately, but it started when Elvis Presley died in August of 1977. I’d just moved to Maine and I noticed people were shook up. “The King is Dead” declared headlines in local media. “Hmm,” I thought. His music never did much for me and Elvis was considered a has-been where I’d come from in Massachusetts. Having known many who ruined their lives with drugs and/or alcohol, I looked at his death as simply another in a long line. Thirty years ago “The King” died, and last week “The King of Pop” met his maker.

I felt it again twenty years after Elvis’s demise when Princess Diana died. I looked at her death as just another traffic accident that killed someone I didn’t know, but people around me were profoundly affected. When I noticed a neighbor had been crying, I asked what was wrong. “I watched Princess Di’s funeral this morning,” she said, and I figured there was little I could do for her. I wrote a column about how alienated I felt while witnessing the prolonged, melodramatic hand-wringing of those around me. It wasn’t well received, and it’s likely this one won’t be either. Oh well.

When I saw images of Reverend Al Sharpton doing the bump and grind during a memorial service for Michael Jackson the other day, I had to turn away. This is the guy ran for president looking like a washed-out Elvis impersonator. According to a CBS New report: “[Sharpton] and Director Spike Lee urged the audience to revel in Jackson accomplishments and disregard what they characterized as negative news coverage of the star.”

Yes, ignore the bizarre surgeries, the evidence that Jackson was a transgendered child molester. He was a king. Although we crave a king or a princess to look up to, we can turn on him or her if we perceive flaws. The ancient Irish would only accept as a king or queen someone who was physically unblemished. Maybe it was easier to believe the king really was perfect if he looked that way. People wouldn’t perceive his peccadilloes when he posed in royal robes. But if he should lose a fingertip or scar himself, the illusion would melt away, he would be dumped, and a “perfect” leader put in his place.

About six years into his administration, Americans focused on George Bush’s blemishes and there were more than a few. Eight years in, his flaws were being magnified daily and people started believing that if we could only find the perfect king, our economy and everything else would be fine again. That was certainly true on the first Tuesday of November last year when we elected Barack Obama president. He posed as the rightful king who would put things right and 53% of us believed him.

Returning to my original question - am I out of touch with American culture? Yes - large swathes of it at least, and I don’t want to adapt myself either. That I’m “in it, but not of it” describes my position best, I think. I’ll never be part of the collective hand-wringing or keening that goes on around me when some iconic celebrity dies prematurely. I won’t join the starry-eyed, hero-worshiping throngs enthralled with the new king either. Am I cold? Unfeeling? I don’t think so. Instead, I’m thinking too many people around me are immature, easily manipulated, reluctant to grow up - and that segment of our population has temporarily become the majority.

Some portion of them, however, will mature when they realize their newly-elected perfect king cannot put everything right again, that it was childish to think he could, and that he’s making things vastly worse instead. It will be a heartbreak to face up to this, but recognizing it and dealing with disappointment forces us to grow up, right? That’s the hope and change I’m waiting for.

Though I try to avoid it, saturation coverage of Michael Jackson is all around me, and there’s still his funeral to deal with Friday. Guess it doesn’t matter that our economy is sinking fast in spite of the trillions we’re borrowing and printing to stimulate it, that Iran is in revolt against its Islamofascist terrorist government, that North Korea is trying to touch off another war, that the dollar is collapsing, that communist Cuba’s ally Venezuela is threatening militarily action in Honduras, that Congress is trying to deepen our bankruptcy with socialized medicine and an energy bill to fight a non-existent climate threat. None of that is as important as the death of a cultural/sexual/racial freak.

Yeah, I’m out of touch. It’s the only way to be these days.

Buzzards

Out for a drive on our Friday night date last week, the wife and I went down a woods road in Sweden, Maine. Several turkey buzzards flew across the road in front of the pickup. They're huge birds, especially when seen up close, which is rare. We usually see them soaring high up with their fingered feathers splayed out to make them distinguishable from more noble birds like eagles and hawks.

As more flew out of the woods, I pulled over and rolled down the driver's window. The death smell was strong. I wrinkled my nose and looked over at the wife but she hadn't smelled it yet. Then I noticed two ugly buzzards sitting on a limb. I was glad I'd purchased an 18-270mm zoom a few months before. In slow motion, I brought the camera up and focused on them, hoping they wouldn't fly before I could get a shot. You wouldn't think so, but buzzards are quite shy. It's as if they sense human disdain.
I figured those two were the hungriest ones - reluctant to leave the supper table. As I inched the truck toward them they finally bolted, so I got out to see what they'd been dining on. The smell got stronger and I noticed some red cloth a little ways down the banking. That scared me because I considered it might be a human body they'd been eating. Once in a while, murderers from more populated areas to our south would dump a victim up here in the woods thinking it would never be found. Thankfully, the red cloth was just a rag. Further on I was relieved to see the remains of a fat porcupine, which I did not photograph.

That Old Summer Feeling

Didn’t set my alarm this Tuesday morning, but I was still up at five. Except for one summer project, teaching is all done for me until September. Having worked in the same community for thirty-two years, people I meet every day know my primary profession. “On vacation now?” they say.

“From one thing,” I answer. Most don’t know I’ve always worked other jobs because I couldn’t raise a family on just a teacher salary. Now that my children are grown and gone I could live on it, but I’ve come to like my sidelines too and I don’t want to give them up. I haven’t had a whole summer off since before I started a paper route in grammar school, but I have a more flexible schedule during summer and I do get away more often.

This year I’m heading to Cape Breton Island for a week with my wife. I’ve never been to Nova Scotia and I’m looking forward to it. She’ll walk the beaches while I explore the island. There’s a local Maine history angle there in the sieges of Fortress Louisbourg during the 18th century. Joseph Frye, founder of Fryeburg, fought there with other members of his family and one was killed. British forces later destroyed the stone fortification but it’s been rebuilt by the Canadian government. It’s said to have rivaled Gibraltar in it’s time. I’ve been reading about it for years and I’m anxious to take it in. That should consume a day or two. Another thing that interests me about Cape Breton is the Celtic flavor there. Settlers from the Scottish Highlands came in the early 1800s and Irish from Newfoundland a bit later. That mix and its relative isolation since has incubated interesting blends of music and dance, and I want to take in as much of both as I can. The land itself is wild and beautiful coming down to the sea sharply as it does, and that should inspire lots of photographs.
One of my best hours last summer was spent photographing Arctic Terns flying and diving for their lunch in Georgetown, Maine with my then brand-new Nikon D-60. Looking at those shots brings me right back there.

In August, I’ll visit Cape Cod for a week in Osterville. Haven’t been there for many years and I want to see what’s changed. I’ve never been to Nantucket and I’ll take a ferry there for a day. Been reading much about whaling the last few years and I feel like I know the island already - as it was in the 19th century anyway. I wonder how much of that remains. Haven’t been to Provincetown for forty-two years and I know that’s changed a lot. Do I dare go? Maybe.
In the interim, I’ll be talking to a group of people in Bridgton about my columns. I’m told to expect both friend and foe at a “brown bag lunch” in the Bridgton Municipal Building on Wednesday, July 29th. Should be fun.

Whenever I can fit it in, I want to explore locations where Indians settled in Lovell and North Fryeburg via kayak. It’s an old interest and I’ve been doing more research on it lately. I found my first arrowhead a couple of weeks ago, and with all the rain we’ve had this spring I may find a few more along the banks - now that I know better where to look.

Then there are the hills of western Maine which are endlessly fascinating. There are still some to the north and east I haven’t explored, but I’ve been studying maps of old settlements there within 20-25 miles of Lovell. There’s hostility to ATVs on back roads to the south of Lovell, but not so much to the north. I have leg problems and I need to use a 4-wheeler to get back into abandoned neighborhoods which abound in the hills of northern New England.

Then there’s the honey-do list - rather short this year, thank God. I’ve finally reached a point in life where I don’t think I have to do everything myself anymore. Now I actually hire people for the bigger projects and do only the little ones that take a day or two. I had to force myself to have fun last summer and it was difficult at the beginning. This year it’s coming easier. School is out and I’m remembering how I used to feel as a boy with time to play.

It feels good.

"Help" Thy Neighbor

If I’m going to help my neighbor, I want it to be my idea. If he’s gotten sick or injured and needs assistance to recover I’d be glad to help out - and I would feel good doing so. I’d know I could count on him to help me if I need it. Friendships develop this way and community is strengthened.

Maybe another of my neighbors has been doing stupid things and I don’t want to help him. Perhaps I think it’s best that he suffer the consequences of his actions. If my government forces me to help out my boneheaded neighbor when I would not otherwise choose to, I’d resent that as most would. That resentment would be contagious and would weaken communities - may even destroy them ultimately.

Our country was founded on the idea that we’re endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights including: “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” We need government to safeguard our right to life by hiring sheriffs, creating courts and prisons for those who might take our lives - and to raise a military that would protect against foreign invaders.

We also need a constitution that protects us from that government because it’s the biggest threat to our liberty. The founding fathers recognized this and structured our constitution to limit government power. We don’t have the right to happiness - only the right to pursue it. Whether we catch any or not is strictly up to us.

That’s how we started out in these United States. However, Americans in the mid to late twentieth century started believing they had a right to free food, housing, health care, a college education, a pension, and they didn’t even believe they should have to pursue it. It should be given to them whether they work for it or not and - there are enough of them to influence elections at all levels - federal, state and local. Now both the White House and Congress are under the firm control of the “redistributionists.”

How did we get here? How did we go from the land of opportunity to the land of entitlement? The government we made to safeguard our God-given rights has grown so big it’s bestowing “rights” not mentioned in the Declaration of Independence or in the Constitution. It’s granting those “rights” to some groups of Americans and forcing others to pay for them. Americans who pay their own mortgages now have to help pay for those who don’t.

Charles Kesler, editor of the Claremont Review of Books, suggests we got here through what he calls the “grand liberal project” begun during the Progressive Era, continuing during the New Deal, the Great Society, and culminating in the Obama Administration, whatever it may come to be called. Hopenchange? Maybe.”

President Wilson believed ours is a “living Constitution” which could be changed when “progressives” deemed it necessary without the cumbersome and time-consuming amendment process outlined in Article V. President Roosevelt tried to pack the Supreme Court with judges who would rubber-stamp his stretching of the Constitution to provide his new “Economic Bill of Rights.

With President Johnson’s “War on Poverty” in the 1960s, government grew even bigger. President Obama is growing it so big it’ll soon outweigh the private sector. With national health care a possibility this summer, government spending will be at about 49% of our Gross Domestic Product - well within the realm of socialism by anyone’s measure. As columnist Mark Steyn wrote on Monday, “Once big government’s in place, it’s very hard to go back.”

We all know a neighbor or a brother-in-law who’s been using his equity as an ATM machine and is now in danger of foreclosure. None of us are going to be happy about picking up part of his mortgage payment under Obama’s mortgage bailout program. As Patrick.net puts it, it’s a “plan to reward debtors at the expense of savers.” President Obama can make as many speeches as he wants about “unscrupulous” lenders who “forced” our irresponsible relatives and neighbors to borrow money, but we know better. A fool and his money are soon parted.

Democrats are struggling to prop up housing prices that have to drop. They’re patching the housing bubble with trillions of our grandchildren’s dollars. Before long that bubble and the Democrat bubble will burst simultaneously and the rest of us will have to pick up the pieces if we can.

Debate About Personhood

We’ve never suffered a shortage of fanatics who believe they know what’s best for the rest of us, who would impose their will whether we like it or not. One was John Brown - anti-slavery fanatic who in 1856 hacked five pro-slavery men to death with broadswords in Kansas. I was struck by the coincidence that anti-abortion activist Scott Roeder shot abortionist George Tiller to death last week in Kansas too. The murders were 100 miles and 150 years apart.


John Brown was hanged for raiding an arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia three years later. To many anti-slavery activists, Brown was a hero. Henry David Thoreau praised him. Ralph Waldo Emerson compared him to Jesus Christ.

Abraham Lincoln, as we might expect, took a longer view of Brown’s hanging, saying: “We cannot object, even though he agreed with us in thinking slavery wrong. That cannot excuse violence. It can avail him nothing that he think himself right.”

That would sum up my view if Roeder should be executed.

I haven’t heard anti-abortion activists call Scott Roeder a hero though. Instead, they’ve roundly condemned what he did. Nonetheless, pro-abortion activists blame them for firing up Roeder. They blamed anti-abortion activists for Paul Hill too, a minister who killed an abortionist in Florida fifteen years ago and got the death penalty for doing so. Fanatic to the end, Hill went to his death confident he had done the right thing.

In The Atlantic last week, Megan McArdle wrote:

Listening to the debates about abortion, it seems to me that really broad swathes of the pro-choice movement seem to genuinely not understand that this is a debate about personhood, which is why you get moronic statements like ‘If you think abortions are wrong, don't have one!’ If you think a fetus is a person, it is not useful to be told that you, personally, are not required to commit murder, as long as you leave the neighbors alone while they do it.

Would it have done any good to tell John Brown “If you think slavery is wrong, don’t buy one!”? Slavery was legal in 1856 Kansas, just as abortion is now, but John Brown thought that irrelevant. Slavery and abortion are both about personhood as McArdle claims. If Africans were not persons, but organisms somewhere down the evolutionary scale between humans and animals - as so many slave-holders believed, then it was all right to enslave them. But if they were persons, as John Brown believed, then slavery was evil. So it naturally followed that he would, as he put it, “consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery.” Murder, in Brown’s mind, was justified on his mission.

It’s justified in Scott Roeder’s mind too because he believes unborn babies are persons just as slaves were. George Tiller killed 60,000 of them, making millions in the process. Many were partial-birth abortions, in which Tiller would pull out a baby by its legs, leaving it’s head inside the mother. Then he would make a hole in the base of the baby’s skull, insert a vacuum tube, and suck out its brains. As long as the head was still inside, it was a fetus with no right to life - not a person, legally. If its head were a few inches south, the baby would be a person in the eyes of the law and Tiller would be a murderer, a particularly gruesome murderer at that.

Instead, Tiller is a hero - a martyr to the “women’s rights” movement. Feminists held vigils for him in Portland and Boston and dozens of other cities across the US and Canada. President Obama, our most pro-abortion president ever, took time out of his Sunday to say he was “shocked and outraged” by the killing. The next day, a radical Muslim shot two American soldiers in Arkansas, killing one. There wasn’t a word from the White House about that for three days, after which the president said he was “saddened.”

As an Illinois state senator, Obama voted against the “Born Alive Infant Protection Act.” He would rather leave babies born alive after unsuccessful abortions to die on a shelf in another room, alone and unattended, because to recognize them as persons would threaten the legality of abortion itself. Explaining his vote, Obama said, “I mean, it - it would essentially bar abortions, because the equal protection clause does not allow somebody to kill a child, and if this is a child, then this would be an antiabortion statute.”

Asked later when human life begins, Obama said he didn’t know, that it was "above my pay grade." If life doesn’t begin at birth, Mr. President, when does it begin? This is the guy who said that if his daughters get pregnant, “I don’t want them punished with a baby.” Not exactly a fanatic view, but pretty far out there nonetheless.

Ironically, President Obama and President Lincoln both came from Illinois, but that’s where the comparison ends.

Taking the Pulse

The first I ever heard of “Electro-Magnetic Pulse” or EMP was twenty years ago when the Pentagon wanted to build a series of low-frequency AM radio towers - one of them a few miles from my house in the cornfields of North Fryeburg, Maine. In case our enemies exploded a nuclear device high in our atmosphere and fried all electronic communications, the towers would survive and allow our forces to orchestrate a counterattack. The Pentagon called the system “GWEN,” or Ground Wave Emergency Network.

At the time, I was still transitioning from liberal to conservative and reflexively questioned the wisdom of expenditures on anything related to nuclear warfare. I knew nothing about AM radio waves except that they faded out while driving under a bridge. Twenty years hence, that’s still about the extent of my knowledge, except that I now listen regularly to conservative talk radio on that band. No tower went up in North Fryeburg, but the GWEN system was built in the rest of the country.

In an informative article about the EMP threat, Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy quoted a congressionally-mandated report that a small nuke, detonated high above the USA, would have a “high likelihood of damaging electrical power systems, electronics, and information systems upon which American society depends. Their effects on dependent systems and infrastructures could be sufficient to qualify as catastrophic to the nation.”

Catastrophic. They didn’t overstate it. Right now, I’m near the end of a novel by William R. Forstchen called “One Second After,” and it’s scaring me. Forstchen specializes in military history and the history of technology, and he paints a bleak picture of a post-EMP America.

There would be no electronic communication. Information would travel by word of mouth, just like in the 18th century. There would be no electricity. Cars, trucks, trains would just stop. Only antique vehicles would run - those built before electronic ignition systems. Planes would fall out of the sky. There would be no refrigeration, no freezers. After a week or so, food not canned or dried would spoil. Animals dependent on grain trucked in would starve too. America’s abundant food supply could not be distributed without trucks or trains. People would have to make due with what they had stored up. Hog farms without grain shipments would have a lot of dead hogs or the surrounding area would have a lot of wild ones.

Pacemakers would stop. Diabetics would run out of insulin. People on anti-depressants or anti-psychotics would run out of meds. Hospitals and nursing homes couldn’t function. Within a couple of months, there would be huge die-offs. Refugees would roam and compete for dwindling food supplies. State and federal government could not function. Prisons would have to either execute their inmates or release them. All government would be local, and would likely rule by martial law if there were any law at all.

With a forward by former US House Speaker Newt Gingrich, “One Second After” makes the plausible case that, after an EMP, America would be sent back to the Middle Ages. How vulnerable is the United States to EMP? The present nuclear nations would be unlikely to attack this way because we would hit right back and they’re as vulnerable as we are. So where would a threat likely come from?

Let’s see. There are at least two whack-jobs running countries today, and they both hate the United States. Both are developing nuclear weapons and long-range missiles to deliver them. The first is Kim Jong Il of North Korea. According to a Salon.com article from 2003:

Kim Jong Il likes Daffy Duck and fast cars, and before he became North Korea's dictator he wanted to be a film producer. He was born on the peak of a sacred mountain, he says, and his birth was attended by thunder and lightning. . . . While his famine-starved people eat tree bark to ease their hunger, he dines on steak and cognac in the company of the "Pleasure Squad" -- a variety pack of imported blondes and Asian beauties.

A 2000 Time article echoes those claims. Last week Kim successfully tested a nuke bigger than the one that destroyed Hiroshima, and he’s been regularly test-firing missiles capable of delivering it.

The second whack-job is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. At two speeches to the UN General Assembly, he invoked the “Mahdi” whom Allah has been keeping alive in an Iranian well for over a 1000 years. Radical Shiites believe Ahmadinejad can bring the Mahdi out of the well by causing chaos on earth, and that’s what he’s planning to do. While we have Fourth of July parades here, in Iran they chant “Death to America” and flog themselves bloody with chains.

Meanwhile, President Obama spends trillions on social welfare and “infrastructure,” much of it electronic. Then he cut funding for anti-missile defense systems which could prevent just such an EMP attack by rogue nations like North Korea and Iran. Soon, each will have the capability of wiping out all that new infrastructure, and more, in one second - if they don’t have it already.

Evan's Notch Road Beeches

I love the lime-green color of new beech leaves and try to capture it every spring. My shots are never as beautiful as the scene itself, but here's a recent attempt driving up through Evan's Notch on the Maine/New Hampshire line:


The above is on my computer's desktop for a few weeks. Browsing my photos from last fall, I came upon the following image I'd taken from the same perspective, but forgotten about. Stopping so often to shoot pictures can bug my wife, but she tries to be patient with me. Must be something about that spot in the road.

The road was a CCC project during the Depression. It isn't plowed in winter. Only snowmobilers want to go from Stow to Gilead Maine in winter.

My First Arrowhead

Found my first arrowhead yesterday. It was in a general area where there has been at least four thousand years of Indian activity. I've been researching it lately for a project. It's a translucent stone. Could be quartz which is ubiquitous around here, or it could be Ramah chert from Labrador, artifacts of which have been found hereabouts, though very rarely. If it is, the implications are extremely interesting. I have to investigate it a bit further.

Most adults I've talked to have found an arrowhead sometime in their lives, but I hadn't until yesterday. Naturally, this called for a celebration.


Googling "Ramah Chert," I learned a fluted point made of the material was discovered twenty years ago in Vermont, but only recently determined to have come from Northern Labrador and dated at 10,000 years old. That boggles the mind. Here's are images of that point from Dr. Stephen Loring:

Artifacts of a Vermont chert have been found locally, as well as some made of materials from New Hampshire, New York State, and Mount Kineo on Moosehead Lake in Maine. I'll post more on this in summer sometime, after I've had a chance to do more research. This is how history geeks like me recreate.

Thought Police Tribunals

Gay “marriage” doesn’t disturb me as much as “hate crime” laws. Both are driven by pressure groups such as Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAD), the Human Rights Campaign, and countless others pushing the Homosexual Agenda. All swear there’s no such agenda, of course, but then the first item on it is to claim it doesn’t exist. When activists pushed “gay rights” and opponents like this writer said gay “marriage” is next, they called it fear-mongering. So what’s next on the Homosexual Agenda?

State and Federal Hate Crime Laws, that’s what. Unleash the Thought Police.

Let’s say J. Edgar Hoover walked into the room wearing a dress. Would we call him “her”? Evidently, Hoover and his lover/assistant Clyde Tolson attended secret parties dressed as a woman and liked to be called “Mary.” Fine for him, but must the rest of us pretend also? If someone thinks he’s Napoleon, we don’t have to call him “Emperor” do we? It’s one thing to wink and play along, but quite another to accept neurotic/psychotic behavior as normal. If we do, aren’t we crazy too? Better not say anything though. With “hate crime” laws, you could go to jail.

After Bruce Freeman of Lewiston, Maine started calling himself “Brianna” and wearing women’s clothes, he used the ladies’ room in a public restaurant. According to the Bangor Daily News, “Another customer complained to the manager about sharing a public restroom with a man . . . ‘The customer was very upset, was irate, had threatened to call police [said the manager]. A few days later, management decided that it would be in the best interest of Denny’s to ask [Freeman] to use the men’s room until sex reassignment surgery.’”

Throughout, the Bangor Daily News referred to Bruce/Brianna as “she” or “her” or “woman.” The lead was: “The Maine Human Rights Commission decided Monday that a transgender woman was discriminated against at a Denny’s restaurant in Auburn when management would not let her use the ladies room until she had sex reassignment surgery.”

If I write an opinion that the plaintiff is a neurotic about to mutilate himself surgically, could I be found guilty of “hate speech” by government entities like the Maine Human Rights Commission (MHRC)? Maybe I already have by calling the plaintiff “he” and “him.” Could it be ruled “harassment” by the MHRC if he files a complaint? Did the BDN play along because it was afraid Bruce/Brianna would sue?

GLAD’s website quotes Maine Law on this: “As a general matter, if a person has filed with the MHRC, completed the process there, and later files his or her case in court, then a full range of compensatory and injunctive relief is available.”

So Bruce/Brianna can sue now. Will he?

A spokesman for the homosexual activist group “Equality Maine,” arguing for Bruce/Brianna before the MHRC, said: “This company needs diversity training to understand what it means to be gender-nonconforming.” Denny’s has already paid legal fees defending itself unsuccessfully. Will it have to pay for “diversity training” too? Will it have to pay Bruce/Brianna for pain and suffering? Will it be forced to build new bathrooms in its restaurants? What will their final cost be for telling a man to stay out of the ladies’ room?

All this has a chilling effect on others who think the world is going crazy and want to speak up about it - and that’s what “gay rights” laws are meant to do. According to the GLAD website again: “The definition of sexual orientation in the [Maine Gay Rights] law includes a person’s ‘actual or perceived…gender identity or expression.’” Gender expression? Anyone can be a man one day and a woman the next and we all have to adjust. You think that’s crazy? You’re worried that any man now has the right to put on a dress, hang out in the ladies’ room, and wait there for your ten-year-old daughter? If you say anything, you’re a bigot, and you better have a good lawyer and deep pockets. The “gender non-conforming” don’t have a problem. You do.

You think the Maine ruling is no big deal? A similar so-called “Human Rights Commission” in Alberta, Canada ordered a minister to pay thousands to homosexual activists for writing a letter to the editor outlining the Christian case against homosexuality and purportedly causing them “pain and suffering.” They further ordered Minister Stephen Boisson to apologize and: “[C]ease publishing in newspapers, by email, on the radio, in public speeches, or on the internet, in future, disparaging remarks about gays and homosexuals.”

The Canadian government ordered a Christian minister to shut up. That’s chilling.

Can’t happen here you say? The First Amendment would protect us? Well, consider this: President Obama vows to appoint judges like Breyer and Ginsburg to the Supreme Court - judges who look to foreign law for guidance and believe our Constitution should be an “evolving document.” Both voted to overturn “Bowers vs Hardwick” because they believe sodomy is a constitutional right. Now he’s appointed Sotomayor, who believes “policy is made” in our courts. Will liberal judges uphold radical-leftist “human rights” tribunals who dictate who can and cannot speak and what they can or cannot say?

As Justice Antonin Scalia puts it: “If [an evolving Constitution] is to mean whatever the current society wants it to mean, sometimes it will give you more liberties, sometimes it will take away liberties.”

Got us out of the Depression? Uh-uh

For thirty years, I’ve sent out students to interview elderly people here in the mountains of western Maine. One question is: “Who was the best president during your lifetime and why?” Every year, Franklin Roosevelt is cited most because “He got us out of the Depression.” True or not, people believe it. Growing up a Boston-Irish-Catholic-Democrat whose father and uncles who worked in Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, it was unquestionable. Now that I’m a history teacher and a former Democrat, I don’t believe it anymore. Roosevelt’s big-government intervention prolonged the Great Depression.

Much I’m seeing and reading persuades me. I watch what big government does to public schools. I watch the Obama Administration take over the economy and ignore the rule of contract law. My changing view makes me an anomaly with fellow teachers and New Englanders, both increasingly left-of-center and enthralled with interventionist policies of Presidents Roosevelt, Johnson, and Obama.

A few recent books may help to change public perception of Roosevelt’s New Deal. One is “The Forgotten Man” by Amity Shlaes. Published a year before the 2008 financial crisis that Obama rode into the White House, it’s haunting how Shlaes lays out the mistakes of the New Deal now being magnified by President Obama and Congress in their haste to “spread the wealth around.”

Describing Coolidge’s America, she writes: “Compared to the private sector, the federal government was a pygmy. It’s size was less than 2% of the national economy.”

According to usgovernmentspending.com, federal spending is over 40% of GDP in 2009.

Shlaes describes Vice President Coolidge’s lesson that doing nothing is usually best: “During the Harding administration, recession had hit, and the downturn had been hard: one in ten men lost his job. But struggling firms had cut costs by reducing wages, and the country bounced back fast. By 1923, it was hard to find an unemployed man.”

Unemployment is still below 10% in this recession, but Obama is virtually taking over the economy, even dictating what should be printed on a Cheerios box.

In an interview, Shlaes described how she got the title “Forgotten Man” from 19th century Yale economist William Graham Sumner:

Sumner said A wants to help X, with X being the man at the bottom. And B wants to help X too. That’s our philanthropic impulse, we want to help. There’s nothing wrong with that. We all have that impulse to provide charity. It becomes a problem when A and B get together and pass a perhaps-dubious law that coerces C into funding their maybe-good project for X. In Sumner’s original version, C is the forgotten man, the man who pays, the man who prays, the man who is not thought of.

Though it’s a necessary evil, there’s nothing government does better than the private sector. Government takes the Yankee aphorism: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and changes it to: “If it ain’t broke, we’ll keep fixing it ‘til it is.” During thirty-four years in the classroom, I’ve seen fairly competent, relatively efficient local schools “fixed” by big government. Unfunded federal mandates suck up local tax money and turn teachers into bureaucrats who pack filing cabinets with paperwork. Other bureaucrats check it to make sure locals do only what the feds want them to whether it works or not. Meanwhile American kids barely keep up with students in Slovakia.

Endlessly invoking the New Deal, President Obama believes “only government” can shake us out of recession. In February he said, “The federal government is the only entity left with the resources to jolt our economy back into life.” Rahm Emmanuel and Hillary Clinton say “never waste a good crisis” that enables federal government to increase power and influence. The president and Congress borrow and print trillions of “stimulus” dollars funding Democrat boondoggles.

What will America will look like in four years? Look at California today. That formerly golden state is an exemplar for the same leftist-interventionist policies Obama, Pelosi and Reid ram through Congress. According to Realclearmarkets.com: social spending in California is “about 70 percent more per capita than the national average.”

California happens when an over-regulating welfare state with open borders overtaxes the productive and endlessly expands government. Though it has the world’s 8th largest economy, it’s bankrupt. During the 20th century, entrepreneurs brought their ideas to California. In the 21st century, they’re leaving.

Another book persuading me is Mark Levin’s “Liberty and Tyranny.” On the back, Levin quotes Abraham Lincoln:

We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others, the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name - liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names - liberty and tyranny.

Myths die hard. The myth that the New Deal saved us is driving economic policy today - driving us right into bankruptcy. If we “forgotten men” out here don’t exercise what liberty we still have to shatter the myth, that liberty will be gone.

McDonnell Roots

This column didn’t run for two weeks last month because I went back to Ireland to find the cottage where my great-grandmother, Kate McDonnell, lived. Traveling with me were my wife, my mother, Mary (Haggerty) McLaughlin (84) and her brother - my Uncle Joe Haggerty (90). They knew Kate - their grandmother - when she was an old woman and they were children.

My mother and uncle are spry, but I suspected the red-eye flight from Boston would wear them out. We landed in Shannon at 6:30 am Irish time and, figuring they would need to rest, I arranged an early check-in at a B&B in nearby Doolin so they could lay down while my wife and I toured the Burren and the Cliffs of Moher. Instead, they opted to come with us. We toured County Clare all day and came back to O’Connor’s Pub in Doolin that night. After dinner and a couple of pints of Guinness, I was nodding off and I had to drag the two senior citizens out of the pub so I could go to bed. They had more staying power than I did.

The next morning, we took a ferry to the Aran Islands. Weather was unusually good and Joe said it was the best day of his life. Aran natives speak Irish (Gaelic) as a first language, but switched to English as they graciously answered our questions. The next day, we toured Connemara in County Galway. Day four, we toured County Mayo, then went to a pub while my wife climbed Croagh Patrick in the drizzle - a mountain that looks just like Baldface in Chatham, NH. On day five we arrived in Crossmolina.

Great Grandmother Kate McDonnell left a village near Crossmolina in County Mayo and emigrated to Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania somewhere around 1880-85. If people from northern Mayo went to America, that’s where they tended to go because they’d know people who’d gone over before them. I’ve had to reconstruct Kate’s story because a great-aunt’s detailed records were lost in a flood. From what I’ve gathered, Kate wasn’t born in Crossmolina but her father moved the family there “from the south.” South Mayo? South Ireland? We don’t know. The McDonnells went to Crossmolina with another family - the Haggertys or “Hegartys” as they spell it there. Were they poor? Hungry? Politically oppressed? All three? We don’t know. Peter Hegarty evidently wanted Kate McDonnell, but something took him to Donegal. When he returned, he learned Kate had gone to Pennsylvania. He followed her there and married her when she was sixteen. We could think of that as a nice love story, but there’s another version: When Peter went to Donegal, Kate emigrated to avoid an arranged marriage. He pursued her to America and called in the obligation. I’d prefer the first story were true, but who knows? Kate didn’t talk about Ireland. Whatever happened, their first child was my grandfather, John Haggerty, born around 1886. I knew him. He died when I was six.

As was the case last summer when I was in County Donegal looking for Great-Grandfather James McLaughlin’s farm, Mayo people went out of their way to help us find Kate McDonnell’s cottage. Another relative had visited there thirty years ago and found it, but her directions weren’t specific except that it was in a hamlet called “Rathkell” near Crossmolina. There are lots of McDonnells and Hegartys thereabouts, but I couldn’t use the local records because neither Kate nor Peter had been born there, hadn’t died there, hadn’t married there, and didn’t have children there. Also, they left nearly a hundred thirty years ago. However, we found what we believe to be the ruins of her cottage.

The McDonnells and Haggertys interest me because, unlike every other branch of my family, there’s no apparent history of alcoholism. Kate’s father, Mark, had been a schoolmaster banned from teaching, and that jives with Irish history I’ve studied. In their efforts to Anglicize Ireland, British conquerors passed laws prohibiting many aspects of Irish culture such as speaking Gaelic, practicing Roman Catholicism, or teaching Irish history. Most of these “Penal Laws” were repealed by the early 1800s, but discrimination lingered all over Ireland into the early 20th century, and in Ulster into the 21st.

Mark McDonnell taught his own children however, and a good education was unusual in a poor Irish immigrant girl like Kate among Wilkes Barre’s coal-mining families. When her husband, Peter, died at forty of black lung disease in the mines, Kate took her family to Boston so my grandfather wouldn’t follow him into the hole. She placed a high value on education for her children too, and my grandfather was the only one who didn’t go to college. He apprenticed as a cigar roller - a trade that went the way of buggy whip makers. The McDonnell/Haggerty branch of my ancestors were “lace-curtain” Irish, whereas the rest were “shanty” Irish I hate to say, but the more research I do the more that notion is reinforced.

Next I’ll research the Sullivans and the Fitzgeralds, both from the south of Ireland somewhere. Great-grandfather Eugene Sullivan became a cop in Cambridge while Great-grandfather John Fitzgerald played piano in Boston barrooms. Both were known to be over-fond of whiskey. Should be interesting.