I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Category: politics

  • reflecting on President Lincoln’s Thanksgiving message as we Build Back Better

    reflecting on President Lincoln’s Thanksgiving message as we Build Back Better


    I’m sure many of you received this email today from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi; but for anyone who missed it, I will happily share.

    Read, reflect, repeat.

    Dear friends,
    Again and again, I write to express my gratitude for your support to make the future better.  In that spirit, I am writing to tell you that during Thanksgiving week, the San Francisco Interfaith Council gathered to honor the 100th birthday of its founder Rita Semel, who enjoyed every moment of it.  The ceremony was a glorious one of faith and love and unity.
    A highlight of the occasion was the invoking of Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Day proclamation, which he issued On October 3rd, 1863 and states: “I do therefore invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens… and implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it… to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility, and union.”
    As always, President Lincoln’s patriotic words then are an inspiration to us now.
    I hope that your Thanksgiving was a blessed one.
    Gratefully,
    Nancy
          
    Stay safe, stay sane, get vaccinated and please stay tuned.
  • Thanks Giving: Good News Travels Fast

    Thanks Giving: Good News Travels Fast


    Seven years ago today I published this Thanksgiving post – I am still thankful for Teresa (known now to you as Pretty), our home, our family and for the recognition our relationship received in time for giving thanks in 2014. Lest we forget…

    My friend Bervin is a retired serviceman who has helped Teresa and me in our assorted yards in the houses we’ve lived in for the fourteen years we’ve been living together.  I’m not sure how old he is…my guess is he’s in his mid to late fifties.  He is divorced and doesn’t have children of his own but has tons of nieces and nephews that he loves dearly.  He took care of his father for a number of years until his dad passed away the same year my mother died.  Bervin and I talk politics and football regularly when he comes to our house to work on one of his days off from his full-time job at Wal-Mart.  He is a tall handsome African-American man with a soothing voice.

    This morning Bervin called me to say he’d seen Teresa and me on the news last night.  He called to tell us congratulations on our marriage license and added “ain’t nothing wrong with that.  No, nothing.”

    Austin is a seventeen-year-old senior at Montgomery High School in Montgomery, Texas.  He was our next-door neighbor on Worsham Street for the last year we had our house there.  Austin is a terrific baseball player and recently got a scholarship to go to Angelina College in Texas next year.  He is a scholar athlete with super good grades to go with his good looks and other talents.  He used to come visit me sometimes and often brought food that his mother Melina had cooked and sent to me.  We moved from Worsham this past April, and I miss our talks.

    Yesterday Austin sent me a text that said “hey mrs. Sheila I’m proud and happy for you and mrs. Teresa!  love you both!”

    From Bervin and Austin and our neighbors across the street on Canterbury Road to family and friends in Texas and South Carolina to cyberspace friends in Mexico, South Africa, France, the Netherlands, Australia, Canada… from friends in the USA in California on the west coast  to New York on the east coast and everywhere in between – literally from sea to shining sea… we have received incredible messages of love and support over the past two days as the State of South Carolina became the 35th (or 34th depending on who’s counting!) state to make same-sex marriage legal.  Personal translation: Teresa and I were issued a marriage license by Richland County Probate Judge Amy McCullough late yesterday afternoon in the midst of an avalanche of good wishes.

    We have been touched and overwhelmed by the media and social media response and are beyond grateful for the support.  Teresa refuses to watch the TV interviews on the internet because she was unprepared to actually go into the courthouse yesterday morning.  I was going by to pay the fee ($42.50 for anyone wondering) and she was staying in the car with the engine running to keep warm.  When Judge McCullough informed me she was able to complete our application process, she also told me Teresa had to be there to re-sign the paperwork we had signed in October.  I texted T to come in, and the media began filming when she joined me at the desk.  Teresa was horrified because she hadn’t washed her hair!

    I, on the other hand, did watch the interviews last night and realized I clearly turned into a pillar of salty tears when the reality of the moment hit me and I was asked about my feelings…my feelings?  I had no words then and not many more now. I wonder how any couple feels when they apply for a marriage license?  Excited, nervous, joyful, proud, like something good is about to happen?  I wonder how the suffragettes in South Carolina felt when they voted for the first time…I wonder what the people of color in South Carolina felt when they saw the “colored” signs coming down…I wonder what the illegal immigrants who have lived in South Carolina for decades will feel when they get a driver’s license…maybe I had those feelings or ones like them.  Regardless, this member of the “older couple” couldn’t have ever imagined a moment like this when she was a little girl who asked another little girl to marry her in the early 1950s.   Wow…was what I felt.  Jubilation T. Cornpone…was what I felt.

    One of the interesting comments made in a TV interview I watched was that Teresa and I had been “dating for fourteen years.”  Gosh, was that what we’d been doing for fourteen years?  Maybe that’s what young people call living together these days, and I know this youthful reporter was not intentionally offensive.  Or maybe this was a tiny example of why marriage equality is necessary: to say hey this isn’t dating – this is my family we’re talking about, a family that has been through the same highs and lows your family goes through except we lacked the piece of paper that your parents had to make it legal.  Dating, to me, is a trial run.  Teresa and I are already in the race together and way past the starting gate.

    To the LGBTQ activists we have worked with for the past thirty years in South Carolina and around the country – thank you for each goal we set and each victory we made happen together.  The burdens have been much easier to bear when they are shared, and we’ve had warriors with Great Spirit walking every step with us.  We admire and respect your leadership and bravery over the long haul that is the task of changing a culture and fundamentally altering the political landscape.

    I often say the battles are for those who will come after us and that the next generation will benefit from our efforts in the state, and there is truth in that.  But I also want to remember my sisters and brothers who did not live to share these celebrations with us.  Last night we went to dinner with one of my oldest friends Millie who took Teresa and me and another good friend Patti to an Italian restaurant.  Millie had made the plans a week ago so we weren’t there to celebrate the excitement of yesterday but I confess I did carry the license with me.  I wasn’t leaving home without it.

    pasta fresca pic

    The waitresses were fabulous and came to our booth to congratulate us when they realized why we were ordering champagne and snapping pictures and brought our desserts with candles to end the dinner with a bang.  Our server was a young woman with a great smile, and she drew “hearts” on our to- go box.  Really sweet.

    But Millie’s partner of fifteen years, Cindy, wasn’t with us because she had died earlier this year.  Millie said Cindy would have wanted them to be next in line to apply for the marriage license.  This was not to be for her and many of our brothers and sisters who have gone before us.  We will always honor their memories.

    One week from today we will observe my favorite holiday of the year, Thanksgiving Day.  Teresa and I will make our usual trip to the upstate to have a late evening family meal with her mother’s people in the fellowship hall of the First Baptist Church of Fingerville, South Carolina.  I always love being with her family because they are good people and because nothing is more important to me than family.

    This year I’m getting a head start on the holiday and giving thanks for the woman who loved me enough to say yes, I want to marry you.  That’s the Good News tonight.  Tell it.

    *************

  • sunday morning coming down

    sunday morning coming down


    I had what some might describe as a “brisk” walk this Sunday morning, as in brother, it’s really cold outside today – is there any way I could skip the healthy habitual morning walk when Jack Frost was nipping at my plants and my nose as the sun rose from its customary place…

    Full disclosure: I’m not a cold weather person which goes a long way to explain why I live in South Carolina. Pretty and I talked often about relocating to another state, country, world in search of politics we preferred to our state’s conservatism, but this was back in the days before our granddaughter’s appearance. Honestly, a warm climate was best for both of us. Politics be damned.

    Patriotic and Playful

    A belated Happy Veterans Day to all those who served

    in the air and everywhere

    1st. Lieutenant Glenn L. Morris with his mother before leaving to join the Army Air Corps in WWII –

    he was 18 years old

    My dad flew 32 missions over Germany when he was stationed in England with the Eighth Air Force. He never talked about that time with me, but he did instill a love of family and trees in their autumn finery when we walked those hills, those forests in rural Grimes County, Texas together.

    He still walks with me every morning.

    *********

    Stay safe, stay sane, get vaccinated and please stay tuned.

  • let’s talk infrastructure – better days ahead

    let’s talk infrastructure – better days ahead


    Life is messy, to quote a favorite Pretty-ism, and governing in a democracy of 333,600,000+ citizens is as messy as it gets. While electing 435 Representatives and 100 Senators to enact legislation that will “form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” sounds like a sensible plan, well…even the preamble to the Constitution occasionally gets lost in translation.

    President Joe Biden’s ambitious agenda reflected in a House bill called the Infrastucture Investment and Jobs Act passed in the House of Representatives by a vote of 228 yeas to 206 nays (with 13 Republicans voting yes and 6 Democrats voting no) as the clock approached midnight on November 5th., nearly three months after the Senate passed its version of the bill on August 10th. – three months of very public internal disagreements among Democrats that insured no domestic tranquility in the Congress amid plummeting poll numbers for Biden. Messy politics.

    So what’s in it for me, you ask. Why should I care?

    Hm. Raise your hand if you are tired of overcrowded interstate highways patched together with crazy glue, holding your breath in fear as you cross crumbling bridges over the rivers or angst about fires in the woods on the way to grandmother’s house for the holidays, racing to archaic airports unable to handle the traffic in the air above them or the press of the passengers scurrying to different gates for connecting flights in terminals, cringing at the idea of drinking water from your kitchen tap, worried about climate change but so overwhelmed with the concept you have no idea whether recycling is a myth, the skyrocketing price of gasoline for a car too old to be a hybrid or driving a new electric car in a frantic search for a charging port, hoping you will have WI-FI when your children attend school in cyberspace, wishing you had a mass transit system that wasn’t created in 1904, and wondering if the grid for your power will hold during surges for heat in the winter or whether you will be sitting in the dark, freezing, with thoughts of burning your tax returns for survival.

    Yes, my fellow American citizens, I see your hands raised in frustration, anger, doubt, about the intelligence and/or integrity of your elected officials who seem to be incapable of playing well together when the game is on the line. I feel your pain – my hand is raised high above the white hair on my head. Hint to elected officials: the game is on the line.

    Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy, come blow your horn. There should be joy in America tonight mixed with gratitude for legislation promising better days ahead that will propel our nation’s infrastructure into the 21st. century. President Biden’s campaign promises to improve prosperity for ourselves and our posterity haven’t struck out. Indeed, he is still at bat in the White House, and he’s swinging for the fences. You go, Joe.

    *********

    Stay safe, stay sane, get vaccinated and please stay tuned.

  • murdaugh mysteries it’s not

    murdaugh mysteries it’s not


    Regular updates on the status of the investigations for the five murders now associated with the name Murdaugh in South Carolina make news not just in our state but around the country, perhaps even reaching the far corners of the earth. Amazing the interest in this story which has made-for- movies written all over it. Ditto the shooting of the cinematographer on an actual movie set – the film called “Rust.” Regardless of who will be held responsible the idea of a movie star like Alec Baldwin pulling the trigger adds notoriety to the tragedy.

    Even my sister in Texas asked me what was going on in the Murdaugh case? Alas, I had nothing more to offer than the updates she and I both saw in the news. Alex Murdaugh, household name from the state of South Carolina.

    John Monk of The State newspaper gave an interesting update on a lesser known South Carolinian in an article that appeared in the Crime section of The State on October 28th. Paul Colbath of Fort Mill. Anyone ever heard of him?

    Paul was charged with “disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds, entering and remaining in a restricted building, disorderly conduct in a Capitol building and parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol building, according to documents filed in U.S. District Court in Columbia. Colbath was arrested after a tipster contacted the FBI National Threat Operations Center to report that he ‘had been publicly bragging to friends and family’ about participating in the riots at the Capitol.”

    According to Monk, Colbath appeared in court in Columbia on October 28th., and Judge Shiva Hodges released him on a $25,000 unsecured bond. In his FBI interview, Colbath denied an assault on the Capitol, saying instead he entered through an open door. The State article quoted court records indicating Colbath didn’t feel he’d done anything wrong but did feel guilty about his participation in the activities all of us witnessed with our own eyes live and in color that day.

    Ten other South Carolinians have also been arrested for crimes allegedly committed by them in the Capitol on January 6th of 2021: Nicholas Languerand, Andrew Hatley, John Getsinger, Jr., Stacie Hargis-Getsinger, Elias Irizarry, Elliott Bishai, William Norwood III, George Tenney III, Derek Gunby, and James W. Lollis, Jr. From the upstate in York and Anderson Counties to The Citadel in Charleston, these folks who are our neighbors, our fellow citizens have been arrested and are currently participating in a different form of accountability that is our judicial process.

    Monk’s October 28th. article continued with the following information.

    “Some 150 police were injured in the riot and one alleged rioter was killed after she attempted to climb through a smashed door window leading to the House chamber. In the 10 months since Jan. 6, more than 650 people have been arrested in nearly all 50 states for crimes related to the breach of the Capitol, including more than 190 individuals charged with assaulting or impeding law enforcement, according to the U.S. Attorney’s office in the District of Columbia. The investigation is ongoing.”

    The Alex Murdaugh murder mysteries are definitely intriguing with their twists of plot – I don’t want to miss the latest scoop. The investigations into the murder on the set of Alec Baldwin’s Rust will be international news as well, but I don’t feel anything personal when I hear the latest news reports on these cases.

    I did on January 6th and do ten months later, however, feel very personally the attack on our Capitol which hadn’t been breached in that way since 1812. I watched in horror, with disbelief as my fellow countrymen and women tried to interfere with the democratic process on that day with such violence. So when I hear the verdicts for the people from my state, I will definitely feel a sense of personal relief if they are proven innocent or profound grief mixed with anger if they are found guilty.

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    Stay safe, stay sane, get vaccinated and please stay tuned.