I first published at this space on March 25, 2009, four years and now-708 posts ago.

If you do the math, that’s about one post every two days – far more than I ever anticipated.

Lately, there’s been a lull in the action: 7 posts in the last 30 days; one for every four. The hiatus began with 12 days in Florida, and I haven’t quite got back in gear.

It’s not for lack of topics. In fact, the problem is that there are too many topics from which to choose. If you stop by this space once in awhile, you’ve noted I’m an eclectic sort, writing about whatever, whenever something crosses my path in which I am interested. And there are a lot of things that interest me.

I had in mind – and still do – a stand-alone post about my friend Dr. Michael Knox, a retired professor whose dream and passion is a United State Peace Memorial. I’m on his rolls as a founding member, as is my wife, Cathy. It’s $100 bucks well spent, in my opinion. “Why not you?” I ask. Or someone you know. His project is just getting a good start. Why not be a pioneer?

Michael traveled a lot in his day job, and on a trip to Washington DC noted that there are infinite monuments to War, but one is hard-pressed to find anything that relates to Peace. He’s working to change that. Getting the word out about what he is doing is the most important task.

Michael Knox, U.S. Peace Memorial Foundation March 17, 2013

Witness for Peace off Clearwater Beach FL March 15, 2013

My Florida trip included plenty of conscious opportunities to see ordinary people at work. I made a deliberate decision to go across Central Florida from Sarasota to Ft. Pierce, totally off freeway. It’s a very different Florida than the tourist brochures…. And I also decided to just watch people as they live, a grocery store clerk, etc. In our too-frantic world, we often misse the obvious.

The world – even Florida – is full of common folks just doing their best to get by. They aren’t in the news, but the country wouldn’t survive without them.

The main reason for extending the Florida trip was to attend a conference of retired teachers in Orlando, and I ended up being a presentor for a couple of sessions there. I would guess these folks averaged 35-40 years of public school teaching. I’m quite certain their main interest – apparent from attendance at the breakouts – was protecting their pensions, now vigorously under attack. They tried to plan well under the rules, then somebody decided the rules had to change. That’s the dilemma of being a, dare I say, “Public Servant”.

Retired teachers at a conference in Orlando FL March 23, 2013

Next door to them, in a much larger venue, was a current guru of “think and grow rich”, a very attractive woman who rose from homelessness to wealth, and probably gains most of her wealth from people who pay money to hear her spin tales to, as a common t-shirt said, there, “Decide Freedom”. It’s a dog-eat-dog world, go for it. She had a large attendance, no doubt. They paid good money to attend her weekend series. Sunday (below photo) seemed to emphasize young people; the previous night, older folks…. She doesn’t need my additional publicity.

There was a certain amount of dissonance, I felt, between the two conferences, next door to each other in the same hotel. Reality versus Dreams.

Maybe it was just me.

Oh, so many topics. (And there are several more in line, maybe, as time goes on.) About the time of the new Pope’s election, and the never-ending dysfunction of American politics, I heard the Canadian Consul-General speak, very diplomatically, of course, comparing the U.S. and Canada people and systems. I was there less than an hour, but what a substance filled hour it was.

Stay tuned.

Maybe the real reason for the lack of activity, though, are things happening here at home. I think I have the Commissioners of a very large county in my area nervous. I discovered something they considered routine back in December, which has taken on a life of its own. I think they have reason to be at least a little bit nervous. You can read about it here. The up-to-date news on this issue begins “below the fold” – a ways down on the page.

And in a couple of weeks I’m sponsoring a little deal on the occasion of Law Day, Wednesday, May 1. The guest speaker, arranged just yesterday, is a 93 year old gentleman who’s former President of America’s largest Association of Lawyers, the American Bar Association.

That will take a little of my time…. But learning from elders, as Mr. Brink is, is very important.

Come on over, if you’re in the Twin Cities. Access to information is at the aforementioned March 27, blog.

My sister, Mary Ann, decided to begin her retirement years by taking her skills as Nurse Practitioner to the Peace Corps.

Since early October she’s been in the south Pacific island country of Vanuatu, a remote place east of Australia that I had never heard of. Since November 10, 2012, I’ve been sharing her experiences in an ever longer blog post which you can read, here. The most recent note from her was yesterday, and it is at the very end of the post.

(click to enlarge)

Vanuatu, South Pacific

A couple of days ago came a news bulletin that the south Pacific had been hit with an 8.0 earthquake, with threat of tsunami. Vanuatu was mentioned, and I got concerned. After all, my sister now lived there, and I had just heard from her that she had just moved to a new island to do some work. It was all a routine deal, but the routine changed with the announcement of the quake.

Still, you don’t just pick up a phone and call Vanuatu. The last letter from Mary Ann took 13 days from writing to being received here. Things are different.

They’re very different than long ago, however.

She has limited opportunity to use e-mail, but she told us she was safe via an e-mail (reprinted in the aforementioned blog), and that she’d gotten the all-clear about the tsunami threat via a text message from, presumably, the home office of Peace Corps in Port Vila, Vanuatu. Her site was, she said, about 600 miles from the actual epicenter of the quake, so she was a long ways away. She didn’t even mention feeling the quake. Sea was calm.

The episode got me thinking back to WWII and that same part of the Pacific. My Uncle (and Mary Ann’s as well), Lt. George W. Busch, was a Naval Officer on a Destroyer in the Pacific Theatre, and he wrote many letters to his sweetheart, then his bride, from there. And she wrote back. And they kept all of the letters, which I had an opportunity to read a few years ago.

How terribly tense it had to be, then.

As WWII went on, people learned of the carnage at places like Tarawa beachhead, and knew their soldier or sailor was over there somewhere, but for all sorts of reasons had to endure long delays to get information about living, or dying. It was over a month, for instance, before my grandparents and Dad knew for sure that their son and brother, Frank Bernard, had been killed on the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941.

By the end of the war, the U.S. became really pretty proficient in getting information back and forth from the South Seas and other places, but, still, one could count on at least a week from the time a letter was written till it was received.

Lots can happen in a week.

Even in Vanuatu, today, Mary Ann is hooked in, and in almost an instant a single e-mail from her (there have only been two or three thus far), can be transmitted worldwide in seconds.

We can’t imagine what it must have been like years ago.

But we aren’t out of the woods, either.

Yesterdays news included a clip that the entire electronic network to which we have become virtual slaves is potentially at risk due to cyber threats from others (as, they are at risk from us – this is not a one-way game). Our convenience hangs by a rather slender thread, and if the network goes down, everything is affected. Gives cause to wonder.

Tuesday’s paper brought an interesting column about our collected data, generally. Well worth the read. Energy Inefficiency, It’s In the Cloud.

And Al Gore is in Minneapolis today, speaking on his new book The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change. I think I’ll stop over. Westminster Presbyterian Church at noon today. Free. Get there early.

A number of years ago I began receiving what I’ve come to call “forwards”. I decided to receive them, not ask to be taken off the mailing list for them, fact-check them usually through snopes.com, and respond to the sender if not always, frequently.

These forwards were uniformly false, either in fact or in implication. The rare ones that were true were simply somebody’s angry opinion. President Obama, or Democrats, or some specific lawmaker, Pelosi or Reid were favorite targets. Some of them would be considered hate mail. Others were nostalgia laced items about the good old days – the days in which I also grew up, and didn’t see quite so positively.

Their appearance seemed to spike after an announcement from Karl Rove’s operation that they were going to be spending money on advertising. Of course, I can’t prove the announcements and spikes in forwards were connected but….

I’d often respond to the sender, usually somebody I knew, with the other side of the story. Sometimes I’d get an angry retort that the responder didn’t care: he (rarely she) declared he/she was “conservative”, and that was that.

The word “conservative” came to interest me. It is very commonly used on the right, but in many ways I consider myself a conservative, and I know many people way to the left of me that are far more truly conservative than I am.

Recently, I had reason to look up Newt Gingrich’s GOPAC “100 words” from 1996 (which really are 128 words – 64 good, and 64 bad) which have been effectively used for years to label supposedly good people and bad people (apparently, people like me). For instance, “unionized” is a bad word, and I spent my whole career in or working for a union, which labels me as bad.

Interestingly, in this list, which was doubtless very carefully composed, the word “conservative” does not appear. One wonders why.

Definitions matter. And the word conservative is not owned by the angry right-wingers.

For the heck of it, I looked up conservative in my big dictionary here at home. Here are the definitions of Conservative, without further comment:

conservative, a
1) conserving or tending to conserve; preservation
2) tending to preserve old institutions, methods, customs, and the like; adhering to what is old or established; opposing of resisting change; as, a conservative political party, conservative art.
3) of or characteristic of a conservative; as conservative views
“The slow progress which Sweden has made in introducing needful reforms is owing to the conservative spirit of the nobility and the priesthood.” – Bayard Taylor.
4) moderate; prudent; safe; as a conservative estimate.
5) [Canada] pertaining to the English or Canadian Conservatives or their principles
conservative system: any physical system exemplifying the principle of the conservation of energy; any system the total energy of which is constant, whatever form or forms that energy may take.

conservative, n.
1. a person or thing tending to preserve; a preservative
2. one who wishes to preserve traditions or institutions and resists innovation or change; a conservative person.
3. [Canada] a member of the major right-wing political party of Great Britain or of the similar one in Canada.

Just interesting.

Sunday I walked in the Woodbury Days Parade with/for JoAnn Ward, local (District 53A) candidate for Minnesota State Legislature.

We were unit 48 of (I understand) over 120 units in this very long parade in the middle of a pretty sultry day.

Speaking for myself, I’d rather be many places other than on display in the middle of a city street, more or less on exhibit.

So, why walk?

(click on photos to enlarge them)

Waiting for the start. I'm the gray-beard behind the JoAnn Ward sign. JoAnn is attending to one of her grandkids.

JoAnn and a spectator getting acquainted

Being caught on local TV - Channel 18?

The parade route as seen by a parade walker

JoAnn Ward chats with husband Joe during a moment when we stopped on the route.

I was delighted when I learned some months ago that JoAnn Ward had agreed to run for the new District 53A legislative seat.

While I’ve lived in Woodbury since 2000, I had met and worked with JoAnn the previous year on a national pilot project called Community Conversations About Public Schools (CCAPS) whose participants included the United Teachers of South Washington County.

The National Education Association was initiator/funder.

I was the staff liaison from Education Minnesota at the time.

Someway or other, JoAnn learned of the project, and became involved as a citizen volunteer, along with other community members, and school district personnel.

Back then, I had one grandchild, age 13, in Littleton Co. Today there are nine, two of them returning to South Washington County schools next week; six others in school in South St. Paul and Rosemount-Apple Valley.

Back in 1999, the Woodbury area community members – all of them, including JoAnn – stood out as really caring about public education in Woodbury and the other towns of ISD #833.

Our purpose, then, was very simple: to help communities practice a process of civil conversation about public education. The project also took place in a number of other school districts around the United States.

I thought of this 1999 event recently when Woodbury resident Kelly DeBrine publicized a community conversation on Taxes in Woodbury.

I attended that meeting as well.

In 1999, CCAPS was a success.

I retired shortly after the last conversation, so I had no opportunity to follow up.

But the CCAPS file is one of the files I kept as I ended my career.

The citizens of South Washington County (Woodbury et al), including JoAnn Ward, were integral to the success of the process (which even then was not simple to initiate for all the kinds of reasons Ms DeBrine and her group doubtless experienced recently.)

Civil conversation – call it whatever one wants – is not an easy process in these politically polarized days where politics have become warfare, played by rules of war.

Even then, in 1999, there was suspicion: what do THEY want?

In reality, I’d been involved in the general initiatives leading to CCAPS for five years by then.

We thought school districts would be healthier if citizens could just talk with each other, rather than work always at dominance and control.

The key unstated word in our project was “we”.

There are never permanent winners in any war; only temporary residents on the top of whatever the hill a combatant wants to reign over.

Back then, now thirteen years ago, JoAnn Ward appeared, volunteered, and quietly worked to make a difference in her long-time town of Woodbury, and the South Washington County School District.

That’s why I support JoAnn Ward.

After the first week the conversation about the Affordable Health Care Act has (it seems) been politically narrowed down to this: “it’s a tax” (therefore it’s evil).

It is this because geniuses with words like Frank Luntz have determined that the word “tax” resonates negatively with people. It’s a ‘dog whistle’ word.

We’ve been conditioned to respond to words or images like Pavlov observed in his dogs. “Tax” is only one of those stimuli, but it is a very major one.

So, where words like “mandate”, “Premium”, “license”, “fee”, “assessment” and a host of other synonyms for “tax” could be used, “tax” it is. In fact, those alternative words are abundantly used with the current Republican majorities, including in my state, to avoid calling a tax they’ve levied what it is: a tax.

They’ve made the very word “tax” toxic.

Of course, this will be denied by the architects: We’re heavy duty into the political lie season, and it will be far, far worse than it has ever been.

It’s only just begun. If one can accept lies as truth, you’ve truly reached the newspeak of Orwells 1984.

Tax is used because it is a good hate word causing certain types of folks to almost froth at the mouth and attack like rabid dogs anyone who suggests that tax might even be good.

(A lot of these folks look a lot like me: older people who benefit by things like medicare. But they forget that medicare is not an entitlement, rather something they ‘earned’, though it was earned through a tax they and their employer paid for many years.)

So be it.

It’s time to take back the language, and each one of us can do it, one conversation at a time.

Take that word “tax” (a word hardly anybody has ever liked).

The smaller than normal Afton Parade I attended yesterday gave lots of examples, just within its units, of the word “tax”.

The military veterans who led – who always lead – the parade were, as military, public employees – consumers of taxes.

There are lots of legitimate beefs with defense expenditures, but military is one of the “taxes” that tax-haters seem to love.

Reenacting war on a sunny day.

There was a public school unit in the parade: tax. And several fire trucks: more tax. Even Vulcan’s Krewe annually rides in an old fire truck purchased by tax.

Vulcans in the Afton Parade

I got to the parade by public road: tax. There was traffic control in the town through police of assorted kinds: more tax.

Taxes is ubiquitous in our society, and the reason it is is that tax makes a civil and liveable society possible.

Everyone can pick and choose taxes that they would like to get rid of, but along will come someone else who depends on that very tax.

And which of us is not protective of our own tax benefit!?

That ambulance may be something I need sometime.

(One of the articles I noted this week was that the aging fleet that provides air support in the time of forest fires is inadequate and underfunded, just in time for the disastrous wild fires in Colorado Springs and elsewhere. I’m sure there is plenty of rationale for why those planes weren’t really necessary at the time of crisis, but living on the edge can be dangerous. You can’t turn on a dime when there are major crisis, but we seem inclined to lurch from one to the next.)

Still hate taxes? Then start by fighting to cut every thing you receive, direct or indirect, past, present or future, as some kind of benefit from taxes. You’ll change your mind quickly.

And bring back the “vision thing”.

We can be willing victims of the lies, and respond as Pavlov’s dogs did to it.

Or we can take the offensive and take it on.