An Open letter to the United States Senate: re: Impeachment Trial

Senate Republicans have openly stated their intentions to acquit President Trump based on their assertion that the charges do not rise to the level of impeachable offenses. Thus far, they have refused to allow witnesses to be called.

Critics are correct that impeachment of any president is an awful thing. It is also understood that Republicans are fearful that removing President Trump from office will strike a blow to the advancement of his platform, as there are many political issues about which people feel strongly and were the reasons many people voted for Donald Trump in 2016.

Other than an election, however, impeachment is the only recourse available to the American people and their elected representatives, to hold accountable a president—any president—who demonstrates a willingness to set aside the principles and traditions of democracy for the advancement of his or her own personal agenda.

If either the Senate or the people choose to turn their heads, their silence amounts to tacit approval of that President’s actions. Given a free run, so to speak, is no one worried about how far this President would go?

Whether the fate of President Trump is left in the hands of the Senate or American voters, does not obviate the need for those decision-makers to have seen the full body of  evidence before casting their votes.

Since there is reason to believe that witnesses are available who might further incriminate or exonerate President Trump, it appears to this American that, in the grand scheme of things, the principles of truth and justice trump the political issues, if you will pardon the pun.

Over the life of the American republic, leaders of other nation’s must have pondered the question, “What is to prevent an American president from refusing to leave office after losing an election or after an impeachment?” One might expect that an authoritarian president—one who believes himself to be ordained to lead a nation out of crisis—might be inclined to seize and utilize any power they have been given.

Democracy and autocracy are separated by the thinnest of membranes and it is only the will of the people that preserves the former.

With respect to the Impeachment of President Donald Trump, it boils down to several questions, beginning with:

“Do the American people need to hear the evidence?” and,

“Is the United States Senate going to protect or deny their right to hear it?”

The bigger questions are:

“Can we allow this or any president to put their own interests above that of the nation, whatever we think of his or her policies?” and,

“Do we need a president who divides a nation or one who rallies the American people around a common purpose?”

Today, the battle lines have been carved so deeply into the ground it seems improbable that conservatives, moderates, and liberals can work together to solve the great challenges we face as a democratic society, in a troubled world.

Make no mistake, the outcome of this impeachment trial will determine far more than the term of a single president and survival of his administration. It will determine whether we continue to be a nation of principles and law or one governed solely by power.

Remember, always, democracy requires a balance between freedom and responsibility.

Black or White They’re Just Kids: They Need Us & We Need Them; a refrain!

The original version of this article was written two-and-half years ago but events in the intervening months suggest to me that it needs repeated; with a few updates. It will be followed by a related article on bullying and peer pressure.

It is incredibly difficult for a white person to understand what it is like to be black. Sadly, most white people are perfectly content to know as little as possible about such things. For others like my white daughter and son-in-law who are parents of a black son, it is imperative that we understand as much as we possibly can.

My wife and I have now have four grandchildren. The eldest is a little girl who was adopted by that same daughter and son-in-law. She is of Mexican descent with beautiful, thick black hair, brown eyes, and golden brown skin. The second is a little boy whose skin is a beautiful, rich brown with eyes to match and who came out of his birth mother’s womb with a natural Afro. Our youngest two grandkids are the biological offspring of my youngest daughter and her husband. The eldest (and our third) is the palest of whites, bordering on pink, and her hair is as red as her father’s beard. Our fourth, now 18 months of age, has skin not quite as pale as his big sister’s but hair every bit as red.

Each of them have magnificent smiles that light up our lives even more than the lights of the holiday season and laughter that warms us during the coldest of times. Their smiles have reminded me that throughout my whole life, whenever I have been blessed to see a child smile, I am blind to any of the other features, that for reasons that are difficult to fathom, cause some human beings to pass derisive judgment. For me the smile of any child is a source of incalculable joy that is as common to the shared universal human experience as anything else in life.

These children represent our family’s beautiful rainbow and like all grandparents we love them so much that it hurts.

When our daughter announced that they were adopting a black infant we knew he would face challenges but we did not yet grasp the whole of it. In the four-and-a-half years since the birth of this sweet child, our nation has been rocked by racial violence and hatred. We have known that the American people have been divided, politically, for decades but could we ever have imagined that the President of the United States, through his words and actions, could model such rhetoric and enmity?

It is bad enough that so many citizens could interpret our President’s words and actions as a license for the public expression of embittered hatred but are we truly so divided, ideologically, that good men and women would choose to tolerate such enmity out of hope that this President can “make America great, again.”

Is there any reason to believe that a man who builds walls, figuratively and literally; who condemns one of the world’s great religions for the radical violence of a few (as if Christians have never done a despicable deed); who provokes confrontations; calls people names; who brands the free press as liars; who challenges the legitimacy of our election process; ignores and ridicules the advice of his diplomatic, intelligence and law enforcement advisors; who rejects the research of the overwhelming majority of the world’s scientists; and, who blames others when things go wrong can be the kind of leader who will unite a culturally diverse nation? Can a bully provide the kind of inspirational, positive leadership we need, so desperately?

Through the escalation of the violence and hatred over the last four-and-a-half years we have become painfully aware of the dangers our sweet and beautiful little guy will face; not because of anything he has done but only because of the way the color of his skin will affect the attitudes of a huge population of Americans.

I have spent my entire lifetime striving to understand why our world is so full of hatred over issues as insignificant as the color of one’s skin. I still struggle to understand why differences in eye or hair color are perceived as different shades of beauty while differences in skin color produce such extremes of bitter passion.

I was blessed to be born to parents who taught that we are all children of Creation and that we were blessed to live in a country in which we are all considered to be equal under the Constitution.

I was equally fortunate to live in a neighborhood and attend an elementary school where I learned to be friends and playmates of my black classmates before I ever learned of the existence of bigotry and racism. Somehow, I never noticed that when I was playing with my black friends that my white friends were off doing something else and vice versa.

When I first witnessed the hatred that my white friends had for my black friends, I was devastated. Innocence was forever lost but I never lost my perception of diversity as something to be cherished as beautiful.

Later, at the age of 20, I was privileged to spend a summer working in a churchyard in Philadelphia, providing a place for young children to gather and play, safe from the reaches of the gangs whose territories sandwiched our little oasis. All but one of these kids were black. While I was responsible for the boys and girls between the ages of 8 and 16 who came to play in our churchyard and game room, I played with them far more than I supervised. While my job was to keep them safe, I must confess that these youngsters taught me far more than I ever could have taught them.

For the first nine years after college and the military, I worked as a juvenile probation officer where I supervised a multi-racial group of boys and girls between the ages of 9 and 17 and worked with their families. Later, I was one of the founders of a local Boys and Girls Club where, once again, I was privileged to be around and play with a diverse group of children. Later, when I decided to focus on my life-long dream of writing books, I worked part-time as a substitute teachers for my local public school district and glimpsed, first hand, the challenges that both students and teachers face.

What I learned about children during these significant chunks of my life was that whether black, white, or shades of brown; rich or poor; male or female they are all just kids.

They all laugh when they play or act silly; cry and bleed red when they get hurt; get mad when they lose; celebrate when they win; get embarrassed when they are made fun of; yawn when they get sleepy; respond to warmth and affection with warmth and affection; and, suffer egregiously when abused by their parents or society or when bullied.

These boys and girls all have the ability to learn; they are all curious about the world around them; and, they all get discouraged and feel humiliated when they fail. They all suffer great loss of self-esteem when they give up on themselves after repeated failure and no longer believe in their ability to compete.

They all deserve our respect not only as individual human beings but also as members of their unique cultural traditions. The only difference, once they arrive at school, is their level of preparation and motivation. They all deserve the best we have to offer and the very fact that so many children fail provides irrefutable evidence that what we are doing does not work for everyone.

I truly believe that, in spite of the heroic effort of our teachers, it is here, in our elementary schools that we will find the roots of the problems that beleaguer us as a nation and society. Whether we are teachers, administrators, policy-makers, or deans and professors of schools of education, educators must be willing to pull our heads from the sand and stop defending the indefensible.

The fact that so many children are failing, particularly minorities and the poor, is not a predisposition of birth or a fact of nature. That children are failing is nothing more than an outcome of a flawed system of human design. The performance gap between black and white children and other minority classmates is an outcome our traditional educational process is structured to produce. Like any other production- or service-delivery process it can be reinvented to produce the outcomes we want and need.

This flawed system is not the fault of teachers and other professional educators. Rather, the culpability of educators is that they are the people in the best position to identify the failure of this flawed educational process but they hold back as if they are afraid to act. It is critical that we understand that this lack of action is not because they are bad people or incompetent professionals rather it is because they have learned to perceive themselves as powerless.

Teachers must be challenged to accept that powerlessness and hopelessness are functions of choice.

The over-riding truth as we move deeper into this exponentially complex 21st Century is that we need each and every one of these boys and girls just as desperately as they need us. Our ability to compete in the world marketplace will require the absolute best of every single American and if we do not pull together as one beautifully diverse nation of people—the proverbial melting pot—the results will be tragic for all of our grandchildren and great-grandchildren, black or white or any of the colors of the rainbow. What we see happening, today, is a preview of the rest of this 21st Century unless we choose to act.

It is only when we have gained an understanding of the forces that impede the education of our children and accept responsibility for our outcomes that we begin to acquire the power to implement meaningful changes in policy and practice. This is what positive leadership is all about.

I invite the reader to check out my Education Model and White Paper to see one way we can reinvent the education process to produce the outcomes we need.

Light and Transient Causes, a novel – FREE, Today (3/6/17) Only!

Today, March 6, my novel, Light and Transient Causes, will be featured as the book of the day at onlinebookclub.org. The Kindle version of the book will be available at Amazon.com for free until Midnight on 3/6.

There will be multiple shares on Facebook, tweets on Twitter, and posts on LinkedIn as well as emails. Please like and share or retweet as often as you are able to as many of your contacts as you can and ask your friends and connections to do the same.
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Light and Transient Causes
It would be great if people would read the book and post a positive review on Amazon.com. Because the book is free, however, it would be nice if they download it even if they are not sure they will read it. The more the book is downloaded, the more attention it will generate.

If you do not have a Kindle you can download a free Kindle app that will allow you to download Kindle books on your smart phone and/or your computer. When you find yourself stuck somewhere it is pretty cool to be able to pull up and read a book on your smart phone.

I know this is a lot to ask of people but I believe this book is important given what is happening in the US, today. It is a story about what could go wrong if the American people became so dissatisfied with their government that they elected an authoritarian outsider as president on the basis of his promise to “restore peace and prosperity” (make America great again) at any cost. If such a president was bold enough to disparage the election process, silence the press, and discredit the judiciary and Congress, thereby weakening our system of checks and balances, they would be in a position to do great harm to democracy.

It’s the old saying: “power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

The lesson to be learned is that the Americans must participate in their own governance and remain vigilant in protecting the civil liberties of the American people, in all of our diversity.

If ever there was a time that was right for this story it is now!

Thanks so much for your help and support!