I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Category: politics

  • PRESIDENT IMPEACHED: A LESSON IN CIVICS AND THE REST OF THE STORY


    And it came to pass in these days that President Donald J. Trump has undergone a three months long impeachment process which resulted in the preparation of two articles of impeachment approved by the House of Representatives in a majority vote along party lines last night (December 18, 2019) . The articles will be forwarded to the Senate for his trial and possible removal from office.

    For those unfamiliar with the American government, here’s a brief overview of what I learned about impeachment in my eighth grade civics class in the small southeastern Texas town of Brazoria in 1959.

    Our system of federal government has three co-equal branches as defined by the Constiution of the Unites States: legislative that makes the laws, judiciary that interprets the laws and executive that enforces the laws. All three branches operate within a constitutional framework of checks and balances to prevent any one of the three from making mistakes that endanger our national security and/or our democratic republic.

    Impeachment is one of the constitutional checks available for mistakes, really big mistakes known as high crimes and misdemeanors, made by presidents and others. Only the legislative House of Representatives can impeach a president. Impeachment does not mean the president will be removed from office for his high crimes – that can only be done by the Senate which holds a trial on the articles of impeachment approved by the House and votes to either allow the president to stay or evicts him from the Oval Office, West Wing, White House and in this case exiles him to Trump Tower or Mar-a-lago.

    President Trump is only the third out of a total of 45 presidents to have been impeached since the Consitution was adopted in 1788.  Andrew Johnson was impeached in 1868, William Jefferson Clinton was impeached in 1998, Richard M. Nixon resigned before his impeachment process could have begun in 1974.

    End of civics lesson…and now for the rest of the story.

    A few weeks ago I was invited to be a guest speaker for a senior level American history methods class  at the University of South Carolina here in Columbia. The instructor, Dr. Dave Snyder, asked me to talk with his class of 20 students about a book he assigned them to read,  Southern Perspectives on the Queer Movement: Committed to Home. The USC Press published this collection of essays by 21 grass roots organizers of the LGBTQ movement  in South Carolina from the 1980s through the state’s recognition of marriage equality in 2014.  I edited the book and also contributed an essay. I was thrilled to go but also a bit apprehensive – wondering (along with Ellen Degeneres) whether I would be “relevant” to these young college students.

    I needn’t have worried. Many of the students had actually read the book and had thoughtful questions about several individual contributors, their motivations for becoming activists, the challenging coming out experiences  during the HIV-AIDS epidemic in the 1980s for individuals in a conservative rural state like South Carolina. The discussion was lively and took up the entire 90-minute class period. I hadn’t had that much fun since the tour when the book first came out in 2018.

    “When you and the others were doing the organizing back then, did you realize you were making history?” asked one young man in the class. Hm. I really had to think about that before I answered.

    “No, I finally said, “I don’t believe we understood that at the time. We just saw injustices and wanted to make them right.”

    Unlike the original whistleblower who ignited a firestorm of events that created the impeachment process I watched on television over the past three months which culminated in the articles of impeachment against President Trump last night, I felt I was a bystander in an historical moment. I knew this was history in the making right now as I watched from my favorite recliner in the den. No doubt about it, but this time around I could only observe and hope injustices could be made right.

    The People’s House took their place in history by agreeing (1) that our president had abused the power of his office to achieve personal political gain which would disrupt our election process that is a foundation of our republic and (2) that he had showed contempt of Congress by refusing to turn over subpoenaed documents to the impeachment committees while also refusing to allow members of his administration to testify before the House.

    Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi began the House proceedings yesterday with a reminder of our pledge of allegiance we learned and memorized as children. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands. One nation, under God,  indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

    Have we ever realized our hope for liberty and justice for all? Definitely not. Are we feeling indivisible as a nation today? The answer depends on daily polls that change as often as the wind changes its course. Do we still have a republic supported by the will of we, the people? I think we must be collectively woke to make sure we keep our freedom secure.

    Neither President Andrew Johnson nor President Bill Clinton was removed from office by the Senate after their impeachment and there is little likelihood that President Trump will be either. So why bother with impeachment? Why devote we, the people’s taxpayer dollars to an expensive legal process? My answer goes back to our civics lesson today.

    No one, not even the President, is above the laws of our land. Every person, even the President, is accountable for his actions.  Our holy book, the Constitution of the United States, demands nothing less. The laws we obey keep our democracy safe and help define who we should be. Corruption at the highest level of government has a trickle down effect on lower levels of all government officials in addition to promoting self dealing in our corporate board rooms and executive suites which ignore our commitment to liberty and justice for all. The art of the deal is sometimes based on disrespect and dishonor for those who are “lesser than.”

    My dad frequently quoted a Bible verse to me about what was most important to him. A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches, he said. I can’t swear he was right because I never had great monetary riches, but I hope my legacy includes “she kept her word, spoke the truth, respected others, fought for what she believed.”I’m hoping for a President who cherishes his or her good name.

    Stay tuned.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • ROAD TRIP! GRANDBABY ON BOARD!


    Over the spirited reservations of both Papa Williams (NanaT’s father) and NanaSlo (me), NanaT (Pretty) moved full steam ahead with her plans for our granddaughter’s first car trip “up the road” as we say in our family whenever we drive to the upstate foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Landrum.  Mama Caroline gave NanaT just the encouragement she needed to override my worries about packing our grandbaby Ella who is just 11 weeks old today into the back seat of our old Toyota Camry yesterday for the wild adventures of her first road trip.

    I’m wondering what this contraption is? 

    Thank goodness I have my cap, blanket and favorite pacifier.

    My NanaT has the prettiest smile – 

    she’s so happy I’m in the back seat with NanaSlo

    our first stop was to get NanaT an iced tea for the road from Rush’s

    NanaSlo whispered to me that NanaT never went anywhere without 

    picking up an unsweet iced tea from Rush’s

    are you telling me I have to watch from the Back Seat

    and Face Backwards until I’m TWO Years old?

    If I could walk, I’d stage a protest march.

    Hey, hey, ho, ho – facing backwards has got to go.

    Papa Williams and his wife think I’m a Rock Star!

    I think Papa Williams is the Bomb – he’s focused on the Big Things…

    like milk and impeachment.

    it’s a big responsibility being the entertainment for an entire family

    Aunt Darlene thinks I’m up to the challenge, though

    all good things have to come to an end so I said goodbye to the upstate

    and got back in the car to go home.

    I tried to sleep going home but NanaT stopped the car and NanaSlo woke me

    to feed me my last bottle.

    Did somebody say Last Bottle?

    Get me outta here, Percy.

    And so we did get Baby Ella home safely last night after an awesome day with lots of smiles from everyone in the upstate. NanaT was brave to make this first trip, and I freely admit my trepidations were unnecessary. Ella is a trooper just like her NanaT. They are lucky to have each other. I predict many more trips to the upstate and look forward to sharing our love of the foothills and family with our granddaughter.

    Stay tuned.

     

     

     

  • a hard candy Christmas


    I’ll be just fine and dandy,

    Lord it’s like a hard candy Christmas.

    I’m barely getting through tomorrow,

    but still I won’t let sorrow bring me way down.

    ——  Carol Hall lyrics from the musical

    The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas

    Gosh, the hard candy Christmas has gone viral.   I thought we could keep it local with just a few hits along the holiday trail stories but nope, Newtown, Connecticut changed the name of that tune.   We Americans have a tragedy of unspeakable grief that will quickly reverberate in cyberspace around the world to a populace who will ask themselves, What is wrong with those people in America?

    I think it’s a fair question and one that we must ask ourselves.   What is wrong with us?   How do we enable and encourage this rage and senseless violence against our own?   Why do we have a Columbine in our not-too-distant history and how will these same historians record the massacres in Aurora, Colorado and at Virginia Tech?  What can possibly be written about the Sandy Hook Elementary School horror of losing twelve little girls and eight little boys and six adults who were their educators in a few minutes on a regular Friday morning at their public school.  Much will be written through the coming years, but what we do in response to these shocking events will define our culture and our country.

    To the politicians in Washington I say, You need to become statesmen and stateswomen.  You need to set aside your vitriolic verbal attacks on each other.  You are the adults in our family, and we have placed our trust in you by electing you to represent us and when what we see on our Ipads and Iphones and other high-tech gadgets as well as on our regular old television programs is bitterness and bickering and bashing each other verbally, you’re setting a bad example for your children.  You make them believe that rage is not only acceptable but necessary.   Take a deep breath.  Step back for a moment.  Look at yourselves and see what images you project for your people.   Could you please just play nice.

    To the parents who have brought children into our world and have great expectations for their futures and who now are bipolar between anger and anguish, I say I’m so sorry.    No one deserves this.   No one is being punished for removing God from Sandy Hook Elementary School.  God isn’t in this equation or else we would have to blame Him for allowing the assailant to have weapons, wouldn’t we?  Not so fast, my friend, or as my daddy and Ann Richards used to say, That old dog won’t hunt.  But what can we do?  Should we as parents insist on police protection for our children in all public schools regardless of age?   Would police protectors be able to thwart the enraged and armed assailants?  These are the questions we ask ourselves.

    Which brings me to the central dilemma of the complex  challenge of early identification and intervention for our Angry Ones and that is, of course, beyond Thunder Dome to me.  Our children are now raised in a culture of violence.  They play games with it, they sing songs about it, their heroes are violent athletes, their movie stars make action movies with so much “action” their hearing is impaired when they leave a theater, their country sends soldiers to places they have to learn to pronounce and spell like Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria…Viet Nam…Korea..and these soldiers kill other people in the name of peacekeeping.   Our children are surrounded by violence.   They may go to sleep with the sound of gunfire in their neighborhood and on their street corners.  They may wake the next morning to find a friend, cousin, uncle, father or brother has died during a battle over what?   Drugs?   Gangs?  Money?   Territory?  Aha.  There we have it.  There is no escaping the violence so why on earth would we be surprised that these children who are accustomed to violence, who have access to weapons, would shoot us when we make them mad or when we are, well, just being ourselves and they don’t like us that way?

    This is the season of hope, joy and celebration for some; the Prince of Peace and Santa Claus are the bearers of Good News and Great Gifts for many of us. But it is also a season of sadness for those who have lost family during 2012 and who will be reminded that their holiday season is different this year. The season won’t be the same – ever.  Some people will struggle to find the money to give their children what they want under the tree.   Friction and tension will make family gatherings more problematic than peaceful.  In our sense of hurry and anxiety over putting food on the table we might miss the opportunity to say: I love you today, I love you every day and you will always be special to me.

    I remember a hard candy Christmas with the disappointment of not getting what I wanted from Santa Claus but rather getting a sack of penny candy of bright different colors that tasted alternately sweet and sour but couldn’t be chewed at first because it was so hard.  Gradually though, if you waited long enough, you could bite the smaller piece in two and swallow them both.  Success.  Astonishingly delicious.

    I expected a hard candy Christmas personally this year for a number of reasons, but I wasn’t prepared for a national one.  Regardless, here it is and my hope is that America will never be the same – ever.  That our national consciousness is raised to include in our vocabulary the words kindness and reconciliation and forgiveness and a genuine passion for a better world.   We’ve waited long enough.  We have tasted both the sweet and the sour and, as Dolly Parton sings through the lyrics of Carol Hall, we won’t let our sorrows bring us down.

    Stay tuned.

    (Originally posted on December 16, 2012)

  • OK, BOOMER? let’s see what you got first


    Pretty will be the first to tell anyone that I am the world’s last to know anything about pop culture because I am not a twitterer, instagrammer, pinterester, redditer, or snapchatterer. I am not linked in, tik tokked, or tuned in or up on most days. I’m not passing judgment on any of these or the countless other social meda platforms nor am I necessarily proud of being uninformed although I remain stubbornly committed to Facebook regardless of whether anyone is bothering to influence my vote in the 2020 election. Just try. Please try. I will get you.

    I do, however, continue to watch CBS Sunday Morning faithfully because it is one show that Pretty and I can enjoy together. (Remember she continues to boycott all real news programs since the 2016 elections but instead gets her news information from Twitter.) So yesterday Pretty half watched CBS Sunday Morning by herself until I straggled in from our bedroom in a semi-conscious state thirty minutes into the broadcast. Segments came and went as I ate leftover sweet potato casserole from Thanksgiving for breakfast before taking my morning meds.

    I was shaken out of my television reverie by the Faith Salie commentary called OK, BOOMER in which she humorously described ok, boomer as a recent put down by the Gen Z (1995 – 2010) population of their aging Baby Boomer elders (1946 – 1961). Hm. What up, Gen Z?

    Apparently we the Boomers are being blamed for “rising waters, disappearing species, crippling debt and crumbling democracies.” Whaat? That’s all our fault? Easy for you to say, 48-year-old Faith Salie (Gen X 1961 – 1981).  Where were you guys when we were ruining climate change? Ho, ho, ho – and a merry old millenial (1981 – 1996) to you all for a holiday season free of guilt for any of the world’s most dangerous threats. The Boomers did it.

    Anyhow, as my now deceased Greatest Generation friend Libby Levinson used to say whenever she was about to change the subject,  Faith’s sally struck a nerve that I usually reserved for my free-floating anxiety over the current criminals in charge of the country. It was a bridge too far.

    I can’t bear to be thought of as old and irrelevant, I ranted to Pretty who was quite familiar, of course, with the OK BOOMER memes. Then I got irritated with her for not feeling disrespected because she was, after all, one of those Bad Old Boomers herself. The only person who can ever make you feel disrespected is yourself, Pretty said. Oh, sure, I said. Go ahead and quote one of my favorite Eleanor Roosevelt quotes back to me. Sigh. I could feel the air being let out of my anger. That Pretty.

    Today I sat in the pedi chair that belongs to the great pedicurist/philosopher Esther Isom who was responsible for the title of my last book: Four Ticket Ride. I couldn’t let the Ok, Boomer thing go so I was still raving about it from her chair which reminded me somewhat of a throne so I’m sure I had my proclamation tone in full force. I couldn’t believe Esther hadn’t heard of the funny haha put down from our children either, because she also was always in the cultural know, but she took it with a grain of salt.

    Tell them let’s see what you got first, she said with a laugh. Of course we won’t be around to know how they’ll do, she continued, but they’ll learn life isn’t as simple as they think it is.

    Point taken. I am not unaware of my generation’s shortcomings – we have been poor stewards of our planet, insensitive to the needs of the poor, squandered the earth’s resources to keep gasoline in our vehicles, failed at equality for people of color, elected corrupt public officials at every level of government – to name a few. I sadly recognize and confess my Baby Boomer sins.

    But hey, we’ve been on the front lines marching against the Viet Nam War, opened up amazing opportunities for women in the work force and athletics,  secured marriage equality for same sex couples, fought for civil rights; and worked, worked, worked to achieve the American Dream. We were competitive but with the spirit of a rugged individual. We were the original gangsters so… before you write me and my cohorts off as ancient and irrelevant, let’s see what you got first, kids.

    In the meantime, show some respect.

    Stay tuned.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • a pre-thanksgiving meltdown


    Pretty and I have so much to be thankful for this year I plan to do a Very Thankful Thanksgiving post in the next few days – complete with pictures of our six weeks old baby granddaughter. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday between Halloween and New Year’s Day because the traditions of family times and places on that holiday  linger in my memories alongside my hopes for the promises of a new year.

    However, I also have much for which I am not thankful as the year comes to a close. I live in a polarized country that now has the weight of an impeachment process in the Congress, the  “almost third” such process (I saw Nixon resign and walk away with his now famous V sign in 1974) in my lifetime. Nixon. Clinton. And now Trump. The public hearings that began this week gave the American people a better understanding of a president who apparently serves at and for his own pleasure. This is not a pretty picture, and as Wanda Sykes likes to say when she makes fun of white people and our free-floating guilt, it makes me sad.

    As if the impeachment process weren’t enough to make me less thankful, I find the more compelling news articles in 2019 weren’t articles of impeachment but those regarding the creation of detention centers along the southern borders of my home state ofTexas and other states to accommodate the thousands of Latino refugees seeking asylum from persecution in their own countries.

    An image forever etched in my brain is of Salvadoran Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez and his 23-month-old daughter Valeria who drowned trying to cross the Rio Grande River from Mexico to safety in the United States in June of 2019. Their story is only one of many who made the treacherous journey to the US only to find – not freedom – but incarceration in a detention system run by for-profit companies that are often more interested in what they are paid than the people in their care.

    According to The Guardian.com the number of persons living in detention centers throughout the United States totals 52,722 as of September 10, 2019. Unbelievable.

    On our way home from babysitting our grandbaby tonight, Pretty asked me to please stop being so negative about the football coach, the football team, the rainy weather, the cold weather, politics, the president and whatever else we were talking about. Evidently I had a pre-Thanksgiving meltdown right there in the car. She told me my passionate outpourings made her more worried and raised her anxiety level. When I asked her whether she didn’t share my thoughts, she said she did indeed about almost everything I’d brought up but she preferred keeping her opinions to herself and offered a suggestion to me that I do the same. I told her I felt less anxious if I spoke up and shared my worries with her.

    Hm. Maybe I should limit my negative opinions to my blogs. Now there’s an idea Pretty will support.

    Stay tuned for my Very Thankful Thanksgiving post.