A Quote

I ran across the following quote:

“I cannot think that we are useless or God would not have created us. There is one God looking down on us all. We are all the children of one God. The sun, the darkness, the winds are all listening to what we have to say.”

Sounds familiar and friendly. Yet in the first sentence there’s the suggestion of persecution. Then after declaring a belief in one God who is parent to all, it ends with a mystical quality.

Among other things, the speaker had a ruthless side. When his group was without, he thought it proper to raid others for food and supplies. And this was considered proper among his people. He was also a great warrior, applying guerrilla techniques successfully against superior forces. This could describe many who we’ve read about. Geronimo, an American of the Apache tribe, was the speaker.

The quote and the background combine into a complex personality. Aren't we all?

Technorati Tags:geronimo, indian, native american, warrior

Voting Machines

My last voting experience was both fun and scary. I saw the touch screens as soon as I walked in.

At first there was a sinking feeling because the punch cards were gone. There was something solid and dependable about pushing on that pin until the chad finally gave way. Then Florida had problems and we learned that chads could be pregnant and might even hang. I never worried about the pregnancies because I’ve always rammed the pin to the hilt. But knowing that they might hang caused me to start looking in the hole to see if the chad fell. I could never tell. No more worrying about chads with the touch screens.

So I approached the table with a sense of relief. Then the first poll worker asked for my ID. My ID pictures have always looked like caricatures of Charley Weaver so I thought for sure that security would be called. I passed and was feeling good again. But the worker at the end of the table handed me something that looked like a credit card and declared, to my puzzled look, that I had used it before—I missed the primary but couldn’t bring myself to admit it to the worker. So now I had to figure out which edge goes in first and which side is the business side—it usually takes me the full four tries at a new card reader.

It turned out that I wasted my time in line figuring out how to hold the card. Rather, I should have been watching where the voters ahead of me inserted their cards. All of the gas pumps and ATMs have the slider or slot in some immediately obvious place. Not these machines though and I almost panicked. There was nothing that looked like a place for the card anywhere in sight. If I left the line, people behind me would rush to fill the hole and I would face the wrath of the unhappy worker who gave me the card. If I looked around, they would think I was cheating. But, without moving my head, I did look. No good, everyone was already voting. So I tried laying the card on various surfaces, again, no good. Finally, I saw it. It was at the extreme-right-back of the machine and down in a hole. This design must have been outsourced to a country that never holds elections!

With the card inserted, the voting when well. All the selections were understandable and I was done in no time. But there was one final concern. While in line, I noticed that the last machine was plugged into the next to the last machine and so on. The first machine was then plugged into the wall with the cord strung across the path I needed to walk to return the card. If I tripped over that cord, the whole precinct would go down and all those lawyers waiting to pounce would blame me.
Whew! I made it past the cord, turned in my card like an old pro and headed for the car.

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voting machines

A Special Veterans' Day

This Veterans’ Day was special. My dad, an old soldier of the Greatest Generation faded into history.


Born in a time foreign to me, he came of age in an era of upheaval and uncertainty. He was raised on stories of the First great-war, during a time when the country was growing by leaps and bounds and approaching a very dark period of soup lines and joblessness. This is a life I’ve never known and have only caught glimpses through the tales of others.

He was a tender fourteen when Black Tuesday ushered in a period so terrible, discouraging and tenacious that only the Second great-war would bring it to an end. Dad had dropped out of school by that time worked as he could to help the family.

Three years into the Great Depression, a desperate nation gave FDR a landslide victory. The Civilian Conservation Corps was instituted during the first “Hundred Days”. That same year, he started the Fireside Chats. Both had a profound effect on dad. He never tired of telling us of both. The Fireside Chats delivered encouragement. The CCC delivered hope by enlisting thousands of unemployed youth to combat the problem of soil erosion and declining timber. They were eventually credited with planting three billion trees. Dad signed onto the CCC effort and headed west. These were the years and events that brought him to manhood.

He was married and just above draft age when we knew that we would become entangled in the war. Driven by his commitments and beliefs, he enlisted in the Army. He became a combat medic and served with the 692nd Tank Destroyer Battalion in the Northeast Europe Campaign. I can’t imagine the terrors of combat—daily seeing and facing death. Dad didn’t talk of the war for a good twenty years. When he did start, he told us of acts of kindness of both civilians and combatants. Later, we started to hear some of the grimmer tales. How these events must have shaped these members of the Greatest Generation. These men and women changed our society after the war. They went to college in record numbers, spearheaded businesses and became an energetic and productive force in all facets of our society. These few years in combat affected them for life.

Dad’s path wasn’t through college or as a captain of business. Rather he trained to become a masseur and also became a rubber worker. He worked both of those jobs until he retired at 65. Retirement ended up just meaning that he no longer made tires. Massage was his devotion until his first stroke at 89.

His optimism and continual encouragement affected hundreds. During the funeral service many of these people, young and old, told of his bright and encouraging spirit. Gads (one of his favorite expressions), what an example for all of us to follow.

Bye dad.

What's in a Name?

Our recent trip out west made me think about the name “Indian”. From Rapid City, South Dakota through New Mexico and Arizona, I didn’t see much of the term “Native American”. Our tour guides, the Trading Posts and the Crazy Horse Memorial’s Indian Museum of North America overwhelmingly used the term Indian. It got me to thinking: what’s this all about?

This problem isn’t entirely new to me. Until my first trip to Canada, I glibly referred to myself as an American. That ended when I paused at the Canadian border gate and asked the attendant where I could convert my American money. He pulled out some Canadian bills and informed me that “this” was American money too. Wow, now I was nervous about what to call the money in my pockets. I quickly settled on “US money”.

With that settled, I started doubting all of it. Should I now think of myself as a “US-er"? It’s just not fair. All the other countries in this hemisphere have sensible names like Mexico and Argentina. What in the world were our founders thinking? They must have been so concerned about life, liberty and the pursuit… that they paid no attention to the name. We ended up with great founding documents and a clumsy name.

It all started innocently enough. We start with a collection of names like Virginia and New York and yearn for the simplicity of calling the whole group by one name. Well, I guess the United States was a functional start—must have been an engineer or a German. We then realize that there may be other “United States” in the world so we quickly add that this group is in the Americas (I’m surprised we didn’t go for the United States of North America). Since none of us like to say too many words when referring to something, it was quickly abbreviated to America. And there you have it—the problem.

A similar thing seems to have happened to the American Indian—although this one’s somewhat reversed. Legend has it that Christopher Columbus coined the description. He had no idea that he’d just met people divided into many tribes throughout the Americas. This could have been a quite handy mistake for the rest of us. Had he known that he’d just met members of the Taino tribe and then had gone on to become of aware of the Tekesta and the Jeaga and so on, he may have come up with a Rube Goldberg concoction like the US of A. So serendipity simplified things for us right at the beginning.

But there were problems. The real Indians, from India, started moving to the Americas to run motels and become physicians. So now we have a problem. How do we distinguish between these two peoples? And that’s only the beginning because some Indians are from the East Indies, the West Indies and even the Indian Union. Columbus started out doing us a favor but only if he had come up with some name that wasn’t already in use! I understand that the Australians (who always beat us out of the Cup*) are so glad that some Indian sailing south to get to Russia didn’t accidentally discover the Aborigines. They would have been dubbed Russians. The upside is that, like us, the Aussies may have been too busy to pay any attention to the Cup.

Growing up as a US-er, I heard of the Indians-of-the-Americas first. Therefore they were the real ones. When I heard of the others I knew we were in trouble. But later, the learned among us came up with “Native American” and I thought that we had a solution. The learned then told us that not only was this convenient but that we must change our ways because the term Indian was pejorative and that the Choctaw and the others didn’t want to be called Indians.

With this new term, US of A became comprised of the Native Americans, the Indians and the rest of us. But the learned went on to tell us that we all had to become “something American”. This meant we had Native Americans, Indian Americans, Bhutan Americans and so on. Oh no, now we’re back to complicating. Everyone has two names and the Native Americans might end up with two different “something American” names. To make it even more complicated, we find that the Native Americans aren’t native at all but had simply come here before everyone else. I don’t know where they came from, maybe Siberia. If so how do we distinguish the Siberian Americans (formerly Indians) from the real Siberian Americans. Have we come full circle?

Oh and to make a short story long, I found a Hong Kong Canadian who exchanged my money.

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* Coincidence? The rise of Political Correctness and the Australian upset in the America’s Cup was both in the early 1980s.