Politics – Page 3

Defending the right to offend

September 17, 2012 by Billy Coffey 8 Comments

So all of this mess, every bit of it, is because someone took offense. That’s what the television and newspapers say. That the demonstrations and the riots, the rocket propelled grenades and the two embassies that lay in rubble—the dead—is because of a movie no one has seen. Because someone somewhere just so happened to click on some link that led to some website, and that someone showed someone else, and so on and so on, until (as these things so often do) the world is lit afire.

So they say.

It is rare that I use this space to rant and rail. Whether the object of my frustration is politics or culture or this dark world in general, I usually keep it to myself. The internet is full enough of loud people who yell and cuss and blame. If there is a prideful bone in me, it is that my tiny corner of cyberspace is free of such things. It is instead a place where you and I can gather and sit a spell. Where we can speak as friends and be well met.

This post may be an exception to that.

If the events in the Middle East this past week have shown me anything, it’s that the world is mired in a culture of offense. One that apparently has reached new heights. Because to hear the media and the government explain things, the fault lies not with the people who destroyed our embassies and paraded the dead body of our ambassador, but with some guy who made a movie. And to perhaps emphasize this point, there is talk that this filmmaker may soon face federal charges.

As someone who sees the first amendment as the vehicle for a good portion of his livelihood, hearing things like this makes me nervous. And angry. More and more, writers and artists are being governed by some perverted version of the Hippocratic Oath. Instead of First, do no harm, it is First, do not offend. Say the wrong thing, and at best you will be set upon with a relentlessness that will not yield until you have been pummeled into an apology. At worst, you will be charged with having blood on your hands.

Watch what you say, in other words. Especially now. Because sticks and stones may break our bones, but words can get you branded as a hate monger or an infidel or, worst of all, insensitive.

Like you, I haven’t seen this movie. Also like you, I have no plans to do so. A person’s faith is the most sacred thing in his life, and it should be respected. What this man did was wrong, it was stupid, it was mean, but I defend his right to do it. And lest anyone think such a thing is easy for a guy like me to say, let me remind you that I’m a white Southern conservative Christian male who spends most of his week in a blue collar job at a liberal college. Trust me, folks—something offends me about every five minutes.

My point to this rant is simple, spoken best by another Virginian some two hundred years ago—we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights. First among these is the right to stand up and speak out in whatever way we believe right. Whether that way lifts up the world or drags it down doesn’t really matter, not here. Because the right to free speech cannot be at peace with the right to never be offended.

The real one percent

May 21, 2012 by Billy Coffey 8 Comments

occupy-eve-guy-fawkes She’s gone now—back home, maybe, though with college graduates one cannot be too sure—so since I cannot obtain the necessary permissions, I’ll call her Kim. And I’ll say that Kim is a nice girl (because she really is), though one whose world is covered with that tinge of rose common to most her age. I’ve always found it strange that it’s the young who speak in absolutes and the old who tend to preface their declarations with words like “Maybe.”

Kim, she was always an absolute gal.

Into the whole college experience, too. By which I mean that studying often came after other, more important things. Like protests. Kim was a huge protestor. She told me once that she’d gotten that from her mother, who once burned her bras and marched with the blacks and staged sit-ins to bring the boys back from Vietnam.

Kim had a busy four years. There was the war to protest (both of them, Iraq and Afghanistan, plus she threw in Libya just in case). Darfur. Gay and lesbian rights. Kim went to town on the Trayvon Martin case. That whole thing really made her mad.

But for the past year or so, it’s been this whole Occupy thing. Kim doesn’t like rich people much, doesn’t care for the “privileged” or the “elite,” and I know this for a fact because she told me that, too. She said the banks were ruining this country, and we were all serfs and pawns and slaves to The Man, and she said all of these things while waving her arms wildly at me, and then I quit paying attention to her words because I saw that her armpits had more hair than my own. When a guy like me sees something like that on a girl, focusing on anything else becomes a major problem.

Always one to put actions to her words, Kim went on a humanitarian trip this spring. Three weeks, all of which was spent in Haiti, rebuilding schools and churches and helping to feed and clothe. I was really proud of her for doing that.

I saw Kim last week, three days after she’d gotten back. Our conversation was short (she had a final to take, I had mail to deliver) but informative. She said she had a wonderful time, but it had also been a hard one. Heartbreaking, really. She’d never seen so many people in so much want, never seen such squalor or such pain. And yet she said that the Haitian people are a happy people, quick to smile and slow to anger, and their hospitality was abundant.

She had so many stories to tell, but time enough to only tell me one:

They had spent all day rebuilding the home of a single mother and her five children. The father had lost his life in the earthquake, the mother could not find work, and so the family was forced to scavenge for food and water to sustain them. She had, though, managed to secure a chicken to fix them all supper. She gathered Kim and the people she was with around a barely-there wooden table fed them, then collected the scraps and chicken bones that were left behind.

These, she gave to her children.

Kim said she’d felt sick after, knowing that she’d been fed while her children hadn’t, sick enough that she thought she’d throw up. Her nausea only went away when she realized doing so would be even worse. It would mean that the family’s sacrifice would have gone to waste.

I don’t know what Kim thinks now. Maybe nothing—she’s a college graduate about to enter the real world, so I figure her plate’s pretty full. But I hope she understands now what I think a whole lot of people don’t. There’s a lot of talk about the 99 and the 1 percent in this country, about a yawning gap between the haves and have nots, the middle class getting stymied and the lower class being held down.

But ask Kim now, and I think she’d tell you the truth about all of that. She’s seen want. She’s been around hunger. She understands better what it means to be oppressed. And I bet she’d say that if you call this great land your own, then you have it better than almost anyone else in this world.

You are an American.

You are the 1 percent.

Toeing the line

February 23, 2012 by Billy Coffey 12 Comments

300px-Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-H13160,_Beim_Einmarsch_deutscher_Truppen_in_Eger The picture to your right was taken in October 1938 in the city of Eger, in what is now the Czech Republic. Germany had just invaded. Stormtroopers were marching in. I want you to particularly notice the third woman from the left.

Hitler, of course, didn’t do all of this alone. Germany was still in shambles a decade after the first World War. The Treaty of Versailles had forced the country to admit sole responsibility for causing the entire conflict. Traditional German territory was lost. A War Guilt clause was enacted, forcing Germany to repay millions of dollars in damages. Military restrictions were enabled. I would imagine it was a hard time to call oneself German. Hard to look at yourself in the mirror and call yourself a man or a woman.

So when a failed painter came along promising a strong government, full employment, civic order, and a reclamation of national pride, people flocked. When the Nazi propaganda poured forth, they cheered. And when Hitler eliminated all opposition and declared himself dictator, they pledged their allegiance.

Even now, almost seventy years after the fall of Nazi Germany, better minds than mine struggle to understand how an entire country could be brainwashed by such evil. I won’t try to add my opinion to that discussion other than to say that I suppose the fear of Hitler held just as much sway in the minds of the German people as his fiery words. Many bought into the notion of an Aryan paradise, to be sure. But many others didn’t and simply thought the prudent thing was to keep their heads down and do as they were told.

Which brings us to this picture:

It was taken in 1936 during a celebration of a ship launching in Hamburg, Germany. Hitler had been Chancellor of Germany for three years and already abolished democracy. German factories were rearming the country after a disastrous World War I. In three years, that country would invade Poland and plunge the world into the deadliest war in human history. Over fifty million people would perish.

The man circled was named August Landmesser. I don’t know much about him other than the fact that he’d already been sentenced to two years of hard labor. His crime? Marrying a Jew. You would think getting into that much trouble would change your attitude and convince you to toe the line. Not so. Because there was August, standing in a sea of Germans on that day in 1936, folding his arms in front of him while everyone else Hiel Hitlered.

I don’t know what became of August Landmesser. I like to think he outlived the evil that befell his land and lived to a happy old age with his wife. Maybe that’s exactly what happened. Maybe not. But regardless, August was my kind of guy.

He refused to bow down to fear. He held strong against public pressure. I would imagine some of the men around him in that picture bought into the evil Hitler was peddling. I would imagine some didn’t but saluted anyway. Not August.

August stood strong. Not by fighting and not by protesting, but for simply folding his arms. And for that, he has my undying admiration.

Faith has been in the news a lot lately, whether it’s the faith of a Presidential candidate or an NFL quarterback or a New York Knicks point guard. And because faith is in the news, it’s gotten mocked elsewhere. There is a swelling tide of resentment now that people should tone down the religion talk, that our differing notions of God are the cause of much of what’s wrong with the world.

That we should all tone it down. Keep our heads down. Do as we’re told.

Toe the line.

I say let them talk. Let them talk all they want. Because I for one do not want to be remembered as the unknown woman in that first picture.

I want to be remembered as August, who stood strong with arms folded.

Getting what we’re owed

November 21, 2011 by Billy Coffey 18 Comments

“Hmph” is all he says, and barely that.

Just a bit of air expelled through two tautened lips. He could say more—wants to, I’m sure—but the presence of two grandchildren in the room prevents any further commentary. That’s a shame. You’ve never fully appreciated the news until you’ve watched it alongside my father’s commentary.

The pictures on the television are the sort that’s been played and replayed for a while now—tents and marches and protest, people with microphones shouting down with this and up with that. It’s all a little too much, especially with the grandkids sitting there (right now they’re working on the Play-Doh, but I know they’re watching the screen).

I ask him if I should turn the channel. He works the chaw of Beechnut in his cheek and shakes his head. “Wanna see who won the race,” he says.

So I watch the screen and I watch him and I watch my kids and I know that I am in the middle. I’m the bridge between him and them. I’m the link to hold the chain. And I realize that it really wasn’t that long ago—if you can call twenty years long—that I was sure my father had no idea what the world was all about.

I think your teenage years are proof that the more you think you know, the dumber you really are.

My kids—his grandkids—are watching now. They’re showing a policeman pepper-spraying a young man with long hair. Dad watches, too. I’m wondering what they’re all thinking and if what they’re thinking is pretty much the same. I think so. I think when you get right down to it, crazy looks crazy no matter what age you are.

In the end (and as it should), Play-Doh wins out over the news. The kids don’t care what’s happening a thousand miles away in some city. Their world’s here in the mountains, where things are quiet and life makes more sense. But Dad, he keeps watching and working that chaw, turning it around in his mouth, thinking.

He’s been in a good mood lately. Not that he isn’t usually, just more so now. After thirty-five years of work, he has only three days left. Appropriately enough, Thanksgiving Day will be his first day of retirement.

It hasn’t been easy, those thirty-five years. The ones before it weren’t easy, either. He took the job for the same reason that many husbands and fathers do—because it paid well and offered a better life for his family. Certainly it wasn’t because he enjoyed it—who would enjoy driving a rig up and down the Southeast, being separated from family, living off greasy truck stop food?

But he did it anyway. Day in, day out, through blizzards and tornados and hurricanes and floods. As a child I would pray every night for his safety. I still do. And God’s watched over him—Dad’s driven over three million miles without an accident. Back in ’98, he had a stroke just outside of Fredericksburg. The doctors couldn’t understand how he managed to drive his rig into the terminal and back it up to the dock before falling out of the cab. I could. It was his job, simple as that.

His formal education ended at the eighth grade. He grew up in poverty and hustled pool, but the Army straightened him out. And when it came time to marry and start a family, he swore he would give his kids a better life than he had.

That’s exactly what he did.

On the television, one of the protesters says he’s there because he wants a free education. He’s owed that, he says, though he doesn’t really say why. Dad doesn’t say what he thinks of that, and I’m thankful. If he did, I’d have to write it with a lot of ampersands and exclamation points.

Because Dad and his eight-grade education knows more about the world than the people on television and their college degrees. Because he knows that no one is owed anything, and the sooner you realize that the better off you’ll be. Because you have to work and scrape and save and drive the truck.

He won’t say that only those who have stood up to work should have the right to sit down and protest. The grandkids are in the room.

So I’ll just say it for him. Because after thirty-five years, I think he’s earned it.

The post I almost didn’t write

September 12, 2011 by Billy Coffey 9 Comments

I almost didn’t write a post about 9/11 this year. That would’ve been a first for me since beginning this blog. Sometimes it was a post, sometimes a video, but it was always something. If not on 9/11, then right around that time.

But this time I thought maybe not, even though it’s been ten years now. A decade. Anyone else feel as strangely about that as I do? I’ve read that scientists are studying why it seems that time speeds up as we grow older. Something in the brain, if I remember correctly. Some chemical or a certain pattern of neurons. Regardless, I remember a time when my days seemed to stretch on into forever. Now they pass so quickly. If there is anything I miss about childhood, it’s that sense of earthly eternity—that permanence.

That’s one reason I wanted to let this 9/11 pass. It feels like only yesterday I sat on the edge of my bed and watched those towers bleed fire and ash. Watched those poor souls jump from stories high, choosing death by gravity over death by immolation. Even now I see them. Those images will haunt me for the rest of my days. But I did not see that yesterday, I saw that ten years ago, and so much has happened since.

Another reason was how politicized the commemoration of 9/11 has become, how over-the-top. I hear religious leaders are not allowed to speak at Ground Zero this year, nor firefighters, nor policemen. I don’t understand how that could be. Then again, I don’t understand much these days. Sometimes I feel as though we’re all galloping toward some final end, and the ones leading the charge are the ones who are supposed to be protecting us.

But mostly, I wanted to let this 9/11 pass because of how strongly I still feel about it. To this day I cannot see an image of those ash-covered people fleeing for their lives or hear Alan Jackson’s “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)” or be reminded of the phrase “Let’s roll” without feeling my eyes sting and my throat tighten. Ten years seems a long time to hang on to such emotions. There comes a point when the mourning must stop and time must continue on. We all must learn to let go. After all, life is a straight line. It isn’t a circle.

That’s why I didn’t want to write anything.

And yet here I am, doing just that.

Because no matter how well-intentioned the people who say it’s time to get over it and move on may be, I know I never will. There are some things that should not be whisked away into the haze of our yesterdays to fuse with other memories until it becomes more fiction than fact. There are some stories that should continue to be told and retold not out of a sense of anger, but a sense of honor.

It is human nature to want to set aside pain and cover up old wounds. It is also human nature to hold onto those things because they are a reminder of both the coldness of this world and the faith we must possess to live upon it.

I could forget. I could move on. I could bow my head each September 11 and pause, and then I could move on as if it were any other day.

But I’m afraid if I do I will also forget the men and women who ran toward those flames rather than away.

I will forget an outpouring of love and kindness, of unity, that I had never experienced in my country.

I will forget the stories I heard like the man who believes he was guided to safety by an angel and the man who chose to stay and die in the North Tower rather than abandon his wheelchair-bound friend.

I’m afraid that I will forget not only the horror, but the wonder as well.

Because on that day ten years ago I saw what evil there lurked in the souls of men, and I also saw what grace abides there, too.

Choosing stubbornness

July 18, 2011 by Billy Coffey 5 Comments

My children are arguing.

Not exactly breaking news, of course. Kids fight. It’s one of those givens in life that are about as surprising as the sun rising in the morning or a hot day in July. Blame it on summer vacation. I think they’re just tired of each other.

I’m not sure what caused the conflict; I just got home from work and caught the tail end of it. Something to do with Legos, from what I gather. Or an errant water balloon. One of those. Or maybe it was something else all together. You never can tell with kids. Kids can argue about anything.

I get caught up to speed by my wife, who doesn’t really know what the conflict is about herself. She was in the kitchen fixing dinner at the time. There was just a thump and a scream, followed by yells and accusations. That was enough for her. She sent both of the kids to their rooms to calm down.

I walk down the hallway to their bedrooms to say hello and gauge the amount of weeping and gnashing of teeth and find the Go To Your Room rule broken. My son is in my daughter’s room. She’s sitting Indian-style on the bed. He stands in front of her. Both are talking. Each have their arms crossed.

These are some serious negotiations, which is why I don’t barge in, make a Daddy Arrest, and charge them with not abiding by their mother’s wishes. It isn’t often that I have the opportunity to listen in on my children’s discussions. More often then not, they clamp up as soon as I enter the room and offer little more than, “Yes, Daddy?” I get plenty of opportunities to learn about what they think and believe in my conversations with them, but most times that seems like only half the story. What you think and say when your father or mother is around is often quite different than when it’s just you and a sibling in the room.

So I put my daughter’s bedroom wall between us and listen.

“I didn’t hit you on purpose,” my son says.

“Yes you did,” says my daughter. “You liked it. I saw it in your eyes.”

“You can’t see in my eyes. And you should have gotten out of my way.”

“I didn’t want to. It’s MY house too, you know.”

I’m not going to play anymore until you say you’re sorry.”

“Well I’M not going to play anymore until YOU say YOU’RE sorry.”

“All I was trying to do was get a Lego.”

“Well all I was trying to do is get a Lego, too.”

And on. And on and on.

Rather than interrupt, I decide to let them be. My kids will work this out, they always do. And then things will be fine until the next skirmish. I suspect my home isn’t much different than any other in that peaceful times are merely those few quiet days between wars of both opinion and blame.

In the meantime, I retire to the television and the evening news. Which, by the way, is much the same news as yesterday and the day before. Still the arguing, still the blaming. The system is broken, they say. I’m inclined to agree. Especially since the people who made the system are broken as well.

A commercial appears, one of those thirty-second spots about scooters old folk can ride around in to make themselves feel useful again (free cup holder included!).

The news is back, this time given by a pretty blond rather than a non-pretty man, as if bad news could seem a little better if she is the one telling it. She wonders aloud how we fix the problems in Washington, then poses the question to an educated man in a pair of thick glasses.

That’s when I turn the television off. I don’t need to listen to a pretty blond or an educated man to know how to fix things. I already know fixing them is pretty much impossible.

Because in the end, we’ll always prefer arguing rather than talking.

And we’ll always choose stubbornness over compromise.

We’ll always strive to reinforce our own opinions rather than admit those opinions might be wrong.

Call me pessimistic, that’s just how I see it.

Because our politicians really are representative of us all, if not in political philosophy then in brokenness.

Which means the adults we send to Washington aren’t really all that different than the kids we send to their rooms.

Last week, Jay Leno introduced the following video as a meeting between the republicans and democrats in Washington. Maybe not, but the similarities are striking:

Connect