Politics – Page 2

Errant negotiations

June 8, 2015 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

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 than in brokenness.

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

I Am Not Charlie

January 12, 2015 by Billy Coffey 9 Comments

Je suis Charlie.

I’ve seen that over and over these last days, that rallying cry in response to the dozen people killed at the Charlie Hebdo newspaper offices in Paris.

This one feels different somehow, doesn’t it? No shopping mall or landmark or school, but a place even more sinister. This feels like a declaration of war not upon a government or a people, but upon the very foundation of Western civilization. The right to freely express one’s views in whatever manner one wishes is a pillar upon which all freedom is based, a right that transcends the rule of man and approaches the realm of the holy. And so I mourned those deaths even as I cheered the protests that followed, those untold thousands who raised not candles in remembrance of the lost, but pens. Chanting, nearly singing as the call filled the air:

Je suis Charlie. I am Charlie.

I’ve spent a lot of time doing something else these past days. I’ve been pondering what it is I do as well. It seems a silly thing on the face of it, scribbling words onto a page. But if the news has shown us anything of late, it is that art wields a power unequaled by politics and guns. Unequaled, even, by terror.

And that’s exactly what writers are. And cartoonists and actors and poets. Painters and composers and musicians. We are artists. Even me. You’ll likely never catch me saying that again. “I’m an artist” sounds a little too fancy for my tastes, a little too conceited. But it’s true. We create. We explore. We tell the world’s stories.

That is why those dozen people were killed.

I hadn’t heard of Charlie Hebdo until this all happened. In the wake of the violence and death, I wanted to see what sort of art could drive people to murder in the name of their God. I went online and looked at a few of their past covers, knowing all the while that the newspaper was an equal opportunity offender — not just Muslims, but Jews and Christians and politicians as well. I stopped when I found a cover cartoon depicting God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit engaging in anal sex.

I suppose a publication devoted to such things becoming the banner for freedom would touch a wrong chord in some. Soon after Je suis Charlie became popular, another name began being chanted — Je suis Ahmed. As in Ahmed Merabet, the Paris policeman shot in front of the Charlie Hebdo headquarters as the attack began. Ahmed Merabet, a Muslim who sacrificed his life for the right of others to mock what he held most dear.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Ahmed, too. About how noble his death was, and how terrible. “We vomit on all these people who suddenly say they are our friends,” said a cartoonist for the paper. I wonder if they would vomit on Ahmed, too.

I don’t know how I feel about any of this. There are times when I sit with pen in hand and shut myself off as the words flow. Not so this time. This time, every stroke and thought has been an agony. Voltaire famously said, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” As a writer — as a human being — I have always adopted that philosophy and always will, just as I find inspiration in the words of Charlie Hebdo’s publisher, Stephane Charbonnier, who said before his death, “I’d rather die standing than live on my knees.”

But I am not Charlie Hebdo.

If I am indeed an artist, then I am the sort who believes art should not shock, but inspire. It should not tear apart, but bring together. I am the sort who revels in the liberty to speak and write and will fight for that liberty until my dying breath, but I am also the sort who believes with that liberty comes a responsibility to use it wisely and with great love. Yes, I am free. But there lays within that freedom limits that should be imposed not by the rule of man, but the rule of decency. Having the right to do a thing is not the same as being right in doing it.

We live too much by impulse and the desires to entice and confound. We would do better to live more by the heart.

Errant negotiations

June 24, 2013 by Billy Coffey 2 Comments

My children are arguing.

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.

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!).

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 than in brokenness.

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

The heart of this land

November 8, 2012 by Billy Coffey 14 Comments

I don’t know how you spent the day after the election. Chances are you were either celebrating or in mourning, depending upon whether you call yourself blue or red. In either case, this one seemed more emotional than usual, didn’t it? We’ve either gained so much or lost so much, brightened our future or darkened it. There seems to be little middle ground, and there are a great many among us who believe our country close to some fundamental unraveling by the zealots on the right or the liberals on the left. Strange as it may be, this seems to be the one thing we can all agree on.

Me, I neither cheered nor mourned. I instead spent the day after the election at a funeral for my grandmother in-law. She closed her eyes to one world and opened them to another last Sunday at the age of 95.

We gathered along the mountain slopes at a small Baptist church with a graveyard pocked by tiny Confederate flags that marked the resting places of the Civil War’s fallen.

A hundred of us, more or less, half of which were family and the other half friends, all of us united in celebrating that one life. One life that you may believe was wholly insignificant, given the fact that she spent most of it on a 200-acre farm at the base of the mountain.

She was a quiet soul, my grandmother in-law. Born at the beginning of World War I, married during the Great Depression and married still sixty-four years later, when her husband passed. In between she’d given birth to ten children, was a grandmother to more than I can count, great-grandmother to my own children, and great-great grandmother to more. At her service, five generations were in attendance.

Think about that.

Her life was built upon three guiding principles: faith, family, and farm. She loved her God, loved her husband and children, and loved the tiny plot of Earth she’d been given. Of all the accolades I heard in her name yesterday, my favorite were her hands. They weren’t smoothed or polished or wrinkle-free, but calloused and scarred from years of labor, most of which was spent near the woodstove upon which she cooked her family’s meals. That was her thing. Neither electricity or gas would do when it came to supper. Food tastes better when it’s cooked over a fire. I know this for a fact.

The picture you see to the right is the view from her graveside. My faith and hers says she is in a far better place just this moment, but I expect there is also no small measure of comfort in knowing her earthly body rests in view of the mountains by her farm. The very ones she would watch from the porch swing on all those calm, silent days.

I share her with you because sometimes I listen to the buzzing too much. I watch the pundits and read the columnists and hear their screaming, telling me all is lost and everything has changed and we are all heading toward an end from which we cannot turn away.

Hear me plain: Don’t listen to them.

Because the heart of this country does not beat in Washington, DC, nor does its soul lie in a seat of power, nor does its destiny lie in which party occupies which section of government.

No, those things all lie with people like my grandmother in-law, people like you and me, people who get up and go to work and love their tiny plot of Earth and whose hands are rough and hardened by loving and giving.

Thoughts on the election

November 5, 2012 by Billy Coffey 3 Comments

A few rambling thoughts on the upcoming election:

I’m sure I’ll be just as happy as you to put this election behind us. I’m weary of it all. They (“they” being those unfortunate enough to make politics their profession) say Virginia is a battleground state. I think that’s code for getting a box full of junk mail and half a dozen vote-for-me phone calls every day.

But it feels different this time, doesn’t it? If I’ve counted right, this makes the fifth presidential election in which I’ll take part. All of them were important, of course. This one seems more so. I’ve spoken with a lot of people from a lot of different backgrounds of late, but all agree that there is a sense of things coming undone. Of unraveling. It’s scary, they tell me. I agree.

I also can’t remember an election so divisive. I’ve seen people on Twitter and Facebook vow violence if a certain candidate wins or loses. Read stories of voter fraud and vandalism. It’s as though we’re all in high school again, like the older we get, the younger we act.

Lately, this has all been about women. Women, they (there’s that word again) say, will decide this election. And since it’s become all about women, it’s also become all about abortion. Call me ignorant, but I don’t really understand that. Aren’t women just as worried as men about where they’ll find work or whether they’re going to put gas in the car or groceries in the cabinet (because nowadays, it’s tough to do both)?

Speaking of which: There have been some otherwise fairly intelligent men saying some very unintelligent things about that subject lately, haven’t there? All pounced upon and analyzed and ridiculed. I would imagine it’s tough for a victim of rape to hear that the child she carries was God’s will (and do you think it is God’s will? That question’s been bouncing around in my mind of late). I think I’d like to hear the story of a rape victim who carried her child to term, loved that baby, watched it grow. I’d like to hear that child say he or she is thankful to be alive. Because certainly there are some, yes?

Let’s get this out of the way—there is not a politician in Washington who speaks for “the common man.” I don’t think any of those people understand what any of us have to go through.

I overheard a student say this the other day: “We gotta do all we can to get Obama re-elected. I gotta have my money.” I wish I would’ve asked what she meant by that. I didn’t. Partly because that’s the sort of conversation I really don’t like to have. Mostly because I was afraid of her answer. Either way, it’s sad that someone her age would think the only possible way she will ever get by is if the government pitches in to help her.

A house across town sports a Don’t Tread on Me flag, three Romney signs, and an empty chair in the front yard (Clint Eastwood style). It’s a beautiful Cape Cod, a very friendly elderly couple. Both of whom are transplants from up North. Both of whom are black. Those Tea Party people, they’re not all racist rednecks.

Just a few more days of all of this, then it’ll be over. Hopefully.

Stemming the tide

September 26, 2012 by Billy Coffey 2 Comments

You could call Jimmy Henderson a lot of things—and many people have—but everyone agrees that above all, he is prepared. And in his mind we all should be, given the evil that lurks about.

Jimmy keeps an eye on all that malevolence. Drive by his house, and you’ll see no less than four newspaper boxes. His magazine interests range from the far left of the political arena to the far right, including such publications as Field and Stream and Backwoods Living. “Just in case,” he says. “Because you know they’re coming eventually. They’re coming for us all.”

In Jimmy’s case, <em>They</em> is the government (or some secret shadow puppet government, I can’t really remember which). He weathered the Carter administration well enough and barely got through eight years of Clinton, but Jimmy thinks he’s met his match with the current resident of the White House. He’s seen the documentaries and read the books, and he’s genuinely scared. So much so that Jimmy’s starting to worry that his Tea Party membership and flying one of those “Don’t Tread on Me” flags in front of his house just won’t be enough to stem the tide.

And he’s not alone. Lots of people are scared now. Bad times breed bad thoughts, and sometimes we see monsters where only shadows lie. For every person like Jimmy who’s convinced President Obama is about to bring down the country, there is another who thought the same about President Bush. There is an inherent distaste for government in most people. It isn’t easy for us to trust those in power, and I think there’s good cause for that. I also think the reason why our country has been so important for so long is because that inherent distrust was shared by the very men who created it.

But to be in power doesn’t necessarily mean to be in charge, and I think that’s where Jimmy’s confused. And I think his fear was born from a sense of powerlessness that can creep up on everyone when we begin to feel as though the world is crashing down. What frightens Jimmy more than black helicopters and government conspiracies is the simple fact that he thinks his voice doesn’t matter anymore. It’s being drowned in the deluge of spin and the shouting in the public square between parties.

It isn’t very often that I delve into the political in the things I write. It’s a subject that’s too touchy, and rarely is there anything of worth that can come of it. But I’ll make an exception in Jimmy’s case, if only because it’s something applicable to anyone, whether liberal or conservative or independent.

It is this:

In this country we have neither king nor queen, merely representatives of our own wills who must abide by the very laws we adhere to. Their jobs are just as dependent upon us as our jobs are upon their policies and committees.

If there is a tide that must be stemmed, it cannot be done through fear and anger or accusations and snipe. It is instead done in the privacy of the voting booth and in the sacredness of our homes. It is done in the raising of our children and the desire to end each day as better people than we were at the start of it.

Because what is true for Jimmy is true for me and for you—in the end, the future of our country doesn’t depend upon what goes on in the White House, but what goes on in our houses.

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