It’s a skunk hunt!

Lately as I've been trying to filter out the real news of the day from all the background accusations, I've noticed a suspicious odor permeating the process. My Dad would have called this tendency to chase after the wrong target a skunk hunt. It seems everybody is obsessed with hunting skunks these days. There's little truth involved in the activity, but a definite smell now permeates the nation's households and newsrooms with charges and countercharges, guilt by association, and labeling with buzzwords. It dominates national talk media, sneaks into NPR, pervades The Gazette, and even creeps into the opinion page of the Big Horn County News.

This style of public rhetoric reminds me of a late night hunt back in the 50's. It was a miserable event I vowed never to repeat. Blue was our two neighbor boys' new coonhound, of the famous Blue Tick breed. He was a great dog, but young and inexperienced (like us). The moonless night darkened deeply as we four shucked our manure boots after chores and pulled on our hunting boots. We checked our 4-D-cell flashlights, ammo and 22 rifles, and lit off for the woods. It didn't take long. Blue bayed under a tree barely a hundred yards into the river bottom woods, and our lights picked out the coon eyes. My brother dropped him, one shot. We skinned the coon, marveling at the fur, "That pelt will bring at least ten bucks!"

Unfortunately, the ruckus raised the interest of our own mongrel stock dog back at the barn, and in no time he was running shotgun with Blue. We hoped the exemplary rationality of a real coonhound might heal this wretch of chasing skunks instead of coons. With heightened enthusiasm for a lucrative night, we headed off after the next baying of Blue, now suddenly out-voiced in intensity by the mongrel's yipping. Things didn't go so well this time. We saw the eyes of the animal in the tree and somebody shot. The report was still sounding when a horrendous mist descended and enveloped us all as the skunk's body came crashing down almost on our noses.

We argued about whether it was worth skinning a skunk, but recovered enough to hold our noses and just do it. Then we tied a leash on the mongrel and headed on, still hopeful. We wanted to give Blue had a second chance, with the mongrel reined in. It didn't work. He had reprogrammed Blue's story line. We learned later he was too young to have the proper story imprinted on his dog brain: "When leading hunters with guns and lights, you attack and tree coons, not skunks."

When we got home with one coonskin and too many skunk hides, our odor had already drifted to the farm buildings and into Dad's nostrils. We were halted firmly before the door, led to the well where we stripped, soaped and scrubbed, and got sprayed off with a cold hose. We threw our clothes into the cornfield by the barn. The odor wouldn't wash off. Soon the entire family was awake, cursing us and our odor. It was an important lesson to learn as a youngster.

I got similar advice from an octogenarian friend of mine years later. He was carrying on about the horrific stink of government, politicians, pundits and the elite inciting us into irrational emotion instead of hunting down real causes of corruption, cheating, waste and abuse threatening all of us. "Observe what you see. Take time to study carefully and honestly. You can head off mistakes, heartache and destruction."

He didn't know he almost quoted Thucydides, from The History of the Peloponnesian War, over 2,000 years ago, "So little pains do the shallow take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand." Let's take these lessons seriously.

Our nation's skunk hunts occupy our frenzied emotions so that we can't pay attention to reality. For example, one of our favorite arms suppliers, at a billion a year of our taxpayer money, is the Russian multinational Rosoboronexport, a primary supplier of weapons to Assad of Syria. This company just sold 36 fighter jets to Assad, capable of hitting ground targets. Fortunately, seventeen US senators last week signed a letter of protest to Secretary Panetta expressing "grave concern" over this serious policy problem. Unfortunately, only seventeen did. So this real problem will probably be ignored.

http://www.outlookseries.com/A0993/Security/3847_Cornyn_Durbin_End_Relationship_Rosoboronexport_Russian.htm

The following is not included in the Big Horn County News opinion page of March 28, 2012. More real 2012 election year crises are named with research links listed below. Follow the link at the end of my blog to post any comments.

What happens when skunk hunting gets uncovered...This from Sojo.net:

Former NSA Employee Thomas Drake and Jesselyn Radack on Whistleblower Crackdown

Amy Goodman, Video Report: Thomas Drake, National Security Agency whistle-blower. He’s the winner of the 2011 Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling and co-recipient of the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence award. Jesselyn Radack, a former ethics adviser to the United States Department of Justice. She is currently the director of National Security & Human Rights at the Government Accountability Project, the nation’s leading whistleblower organization. Her new book is called TRAITOR: The Whistleblower and the "American Taliban"
Here's a link to the book
http://www.amazon.com/TRAITOR-Whistleblower-American-Foreword-Greenwald/dp/0983992800/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC?ie=UTF8&coliid=I3FYED64DSXKF4&colid=2UL2N592BVKVD

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/3/27/healthcare_debate_as_supreme_court_hears

Affordable Care for All, known as Obamacare, is now in the hands of the Supreme Court. The impact of this decisions matters little, because it's all window dressing to a reality that writing of legislation is no longer an open transparent process. because ALEC, the American Legislative Council, does the job for our elected representatives. http://2politicaljunkies.blogspot.com/2012/03/krugman-writes-about-alec.html

ALEC most likely has already written Santoramcare, Romneycare, or who-ever-wins-care. And regardless of who wins, the basic outline of healthcare reform as written by the giant health care commercial corporations will remain the same. All the players—read hunters—have been avoiding the most productive question: How can we quit wasting hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayers' money on bureaucracies and excessive profits instead of health care benefits for citizens? Only this can reduce our price gouging in health care to a par with the rest of the world. Specifically the legal wrangling almost totally ignores the single payer option, scorned by both Obama and the Republicans. Why? Do they not know it would solve the problems of our insolvent health care system, of the individual mandate controversy, and of our need for affordable care?

My pessimist mind predicts what happens next: Medicare will become LBJ-care, social security will become Roosevelt-security, and Affordable Care for All will remain unknown in obscurity remembered only as Obamacare. And we will remain a nation ridden with hostility over our failed health care delivery system because of frenzied fears of it being structured like our socialized roads and highways, our public schools, our libraries, our parks, and our loss of prioritizing public enterprise over private enterprise. We have forgotten this economic tradition at the very heart of our American tradition of capitalism.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/nsa-whistleblower/

The country's biggest spy center is being built. Watch what you say. Notice the frenzy of paranoia cultivated by our governing elite.

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/8095-chris-hedges-%7C-totalitarian-systems-always-begin-by-rewriting-the-law Read and watch how the supreme court and our executive branch, with the collusion of our representatives in Congress, have been rewriting laws deleting or weakening some of the most sacred provisions of our constitutional form of democracy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bn-jEVYVVw0&feature=player_embedded&edufilter=alBR4_i-mntXVjn41K157g

Why would an innocent mother of five be beaten do death because she is a Muslim? Because we have allowed Christian rhetoric of intolerance to escalate into violence, a violence prone criminal mind has picked up the rhetoric and applied it to a real mother and her five children. Let's repudiate religious bigotry of any and every kind.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/26/opinion/krugman-lobbyists-guns-and-money.html?_r=1

This opinion in the New York Times explains ALEC's role in the "Stand-Your-Ground-Law" and how big money has contributed to a skunk-hunt mentality leading to the racial-profiled murder of a young teenager in Florida.

http://original.antiwar.com/paul/2012/03/22/an-administration-gone-rogue/

Here is our war in Afghanistan, assessed by Dr. Ron Paul. Any thoughts pro or con?

http://www.truth-out.org/occupying-democracy-moral-revolution-social-justice/1331912885

The center of the occupy movement is a strong repudiation of skunk hunting. This is in spite of the fringy skunk-hunter elements attracted to the movement. excellent assessment.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/opinion/why-i-am-leaving-goldman-sachs.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=general&src=me

An indictment of the whole Wall Street mentality because it has drastically changed. Is this valid? The story of Greg Smith, financier and prominent executive at Goldman Sachs.

http://www.alternet.org/story/154597/5_ways_america_is_betraying_its_best_values_in_conflicts_with_rest_of_the_world?page=entire

Compare this with Jesus in John 5: 1-16

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/03/20/1075943/-President-Obama-s-Propaganda-Wars

Obama made a call to Yemen asking them to keep a tortured journalist in custody. He was imprisoned for speaking the truth about a drone attack on a wedding party and President Sala's military campaign killing an ethnic minority of his own people with American collusion, because he has successfully labeled these poor subsistence farmers as terrorists.

http://consortiumnews.com/2012/03/22/did-the-founders-hate-government/

Connect our current anger at our American government with our American form of government. What about America is still loved in the radical right wing of American politics?

--
David Graber
Hardin, MT
graberdb@gmail.com

Bible lessons in piney woods

Many of us were outraged by the sexually explicit and racist language used by public figures to denigrate women and African Americans last week. Unfortunately, we have come to expect extreme and inaccurate characterizations of those who disagree with various political positions. However, the language used to describe Sandra Fluke and our President's mother was particularly offensive. It echoes the types of vicious rhetoric that has been used to oppress women and those of color for generations.

As a young man, I learned firsthand about the appalling nature of disrespect and disempowerment of women. In 1970 I spent an enlightening summer teaching Bible School to a group of vibrant and inspiring teenaged girls in Southern Mississippi. Initially, I wasn't impressed with the task that had been laid before me. I accompanied my father-in-law as he drove, deep into the piney woods of Harrison County. We were recruiting for summer Bible school students. I was to be the Bible school superintendent for three scattered class sites, and teacher of high school age students at one. We arrived at a clearing where smoke was rising from the tin chimney of one of three small houses set on cement blocks. A sawed-off half-barrel oaken washtub with a faded galvanized washboard sat in place near the well. A large pot steamed on the kitchen woodstove, relishing the sun shining through the open door. One faded grey outhouse near the kitchen leaned over, unusable; another with fresh rough-sawn siding stood ready. On the edge of the clearing a tethered cow grazed on remnants of grass pushing through the red sandy soil.

I was not impressed. The scene was a little too reminiscent of my grandparent's place in Oklahoma in the 1940's. Having progressed in my early teens into electric lights, flush toilets and milking machines for our dairy herd, I knew the folks who lived here were not of my class. Furthermore, I couldn't help noticing they were black, very dark skinned, and the kids were dirty. Dad walked right up to the kitchen door, hat in hand, did not knock, but called out, "I'm Reverend Orlo Kaufman wishing to speak with Ms. Betsy." An elderly black woman cheerily walked to the open door, greeting him warmly as "Mr. Orlo." After a short visit both of them looked at me. Too shy to leave the car, I simply waved. The racist attitudes I grew up with in Southern Iowa were only beginning to creep into my consciousness.

The following Monday under the spreading branches of a live oak, a picnic table provided my classroom furniture. For ten morning sessions, ten girls, all teenagers, took over the benches. We started reading the assigned Bible passage. They managed very well taking turns, helping each other as needed in writing the exercises. After midmorning recess I got out my Ebony magazine copies, acquired in bulk from the publisher, and passed them around. We read some articles, but they mostly looked at the pictures, especially family pictures. The questions flew, "Are these real people? Are the pictures painted?" They had never seen pictures of black people except their own family portraits. Life Magazine, the model for the publishers of Ebony, had just begun color photos but continued the policy of no "colored people" models. Ebony magazine had "colored people" for models, but only in black and white.

My education was just beginning. I had been warned by one of the grandmothers, "Those girls will talk you to death; shut them up and make them listen to you." Instead of shutting them down, I decided to listen. So they talked. I learned about the long history of abuse of Black women and girls in Harrison County, Miss. As I listened to their stories, I learned why the Harrison County Sheriff was the highest paid publicly elected official in the entire United States of America in 1962. He later was indicted on federal charges of tax evasion, but the illegal gambling, prostitution and hard liquor in North Gulfport remained for at least a decade.

Hideous racial, economic and gender bias was just a fact of life for these lovely young women and their families. They often used humor to cope with the racial stereotyping, sometimes at the expense of their slow-witted teacher. For example, one day they insisted on being photographed holding slices of watermelon. The set-up seemed rehearsed. They lined up, each with a slice of melon, held it in front of their faces, grinned big, and insisted I take their picture. "Why should I waste my camera on watermelon slices?" I demanded; "Put those down." They said "no, we're n… girls. And n…s love watermelons, didn't you know?" They all giggled hilariously, and finally agreed to peek around the drippy red slices.

That picture has stayed in my mind all these years. I'd like to be the kind of person who is always aware of what I do to support or detract from the dignity and worth of others. Since that day I have resolved to give no quarter, no compromise, to the moral values that built our nation. I don't believe that the views expressed by Rush Limbaugh and Judge Cebull reflect the base of the Republican party or the values of our nation as a whole. Let's be vigilant in defending our true civil, Christian, and family values and support those who are disempowered and verbally abused for the entertainment of others.

--
David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034

www.greenwoodfarmmt.org
graberdb@gmail.com