The Washington Tragedy

 This post is by Roger Carlton, newspaper columnist, and my former writing student. We appreciate him sharing this column from last week's Graham Star Newspaper with us.

The best way to start a conversation is to make sure that both parties understand the keywords that will be used. Let's start with "demonstration." This means that people like environmentalist Greta Thunberg gather people together peacefully to call government to action. The second word is "protest." This means that people gather together peacefully or violently to oppose a governmental action. The Black Lives Matter protests come to mind. 

The third word is "insurrection." This means that a group of people gather with the purpose of stopping or overturning a governmental process. Insurrections are always violent. They are incited by someone or some group who want power or who have power and want to keep it. A fourth word is "incite." This means that through word or deed someone motivates a group to do something. Incite has a negative connotation usually tied to motivating a mob. 

The insurrection that happened in Washington last week was a blatant attempt to overthrow a lawful election validated by the courts. The final effort by our President to stay in power was to incite a mob to go to the Capitol to stop Congress from accepting the vote of the Electoral College. Words can be powerful and in this case, the power threatened our democracy. It doesn't take much to motivate an angry crowd to become a violent mob. The result was destruction and death in the Capitol of the greatest democracy ever known to mankind.

Who is at fault and what should be done?

Impeachment is a process that requires more time than the few days left for this president. Congress seems to be thinking bipartisan for the first time in years so why blow the opportunity that this presents for incoming President Biden to solve our many problems. The 25th Amendment requires that the Vice President and the majority of the Cabinet members vote to remove the President who can then appeal to Congress to get his/her job back. Again, a spineless Cabinet would have to vote and the President would probably want to force Congress to vote. Not worth the further divisiveness that would result.

The best approach would be for Congress to censure the President in his final days in office. It would require a quick vote on a simple question. Senator and Representative, do you vote for censuring the President for his actions to stop the Congressional vote on validating the decision of the Electoral College? A simple yes or no without equivocation. We all deserve to know where our elected officials stand on this issue. 

There are so many other issues to address.

Blaming the mob for not protesting peacefully is an excuse for ignoring the President's incitement. This is called transference which means that your own failure is someone else's fault. The role of social media in broadcasting the incitement raises the need for separating First Amendment protections for individual speech from the spreading of that speech by profit-making corporations. 

The utter failure of the various agencies to protect the Capitol raises issues that need investigation. The role of the media during the storming of the Capitol was very questionable. Reporters are supposed to report the facts without emotion. That did not happen. It was not helpful to have reporters a few years out of journalism school talking about the demise of democracy or the need to impeach the President.

Our democracy will survive. Will the whirling dervishes like Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, and Mitch McConnell who have gone from blind support to condemnation be held accountable? Was this past week a violent catharsis that will be repeated or do the tragic events call for the beginning of a reunification process? That depends on how much poison is left in the system.

 

 

An Interesting and informative night at Writers Night Out Friday evening

Writer’s Night Out was held on Zoom Friday evening, January 8 and 16 participants enjoyed the poetry by Karen Luke Jackson from her book, Grit.  Carroll Taylor hosted the event.

Grit, published by Finishing Line Press, is a tribute to and a memoir about Karen’s sister, Janis Luke Roberts who became a professional clown. The illustrations in the book are perfect for the story, for Janis’ voice. Janis entertained in children’s hospitals and in prominent venues around the country. But she also visited schools and other places where she uplifted children.

After an elementary school visit, she had a phone call from a young boy who asked to speak to Clancey the Clown. The child asked if he could live with Clancey in a town created by Janis Roberts for a book she wrote. She learned that the child needed to escape his abusive home. This incident made Janis aware of how important her work was as a clown. This phone call opened the door for the little boy to receive help.

Karen Jackson gave a terrific presentation that could be a lesson to all poets. She held her audience close with every word she spoke. The narrative poems grabbed me by the heartstrings. As Joseph Bathanti said recently at WNO, using narrative poems for a reading draws the listener in. We heard poems in several voices which made the collection even more interesting.

 Whether you are a poet, normally like or dislike poetry, you will be pleased you read Grit. Contact Karen Luke Jackson at https://www.karenlukejackson.com/about

Karen Luke Jackson will be featured on Writers' Night Out

Join us Friday evening, 7:00 PM, January 8 online for Writer's Night Out.

You know you will be home all comfy and warm. 

Click on Zoom and meet Karen, a writer of prose and poetry. Her work has been widely published. She did not let the pandemic slow her down. Karen has made appearances online all over the state of North Carolina. She read on Six Minute Stories.

Karen Luke Jackson is the author of Grit a poetry book that tells the story of her sister's life as Clancy the Clown. Two worlds coexist in GRIT, a poetry chapbook with photographs chronicling the life of Janis Luke Roberts and her alter ego, Clancey the Clown. From imaginary friends and childhood fantasies to fans grieving at her funeral, these poems explore how courage and imagination helped one woman overcome dyslexia and depression to become an award-winning performer.

An oral history tradition, contemplative practices, and clown escapades provide scaffolding for Karen Luke Jackson’s work. Whether crafting a poem, teaching a class, or serving as an Anam Cara, Karen searches for life-giving “role/soul” connections and helps others do the same. Stories, she says, provide an opening. They allow us to explore the core of our human experience and capture snippets of sacred mystery in everyday life.

Being a grandmother and living in a cottage adjoining a goat pasture in Western North Carolina are two of Karen’s greatest joys. When she’s not writing or companioning people on their spiritual journeys, she enjoys sitting on a porch nestled between pines and listening to bird song.

Read an award-winning poem by Karen Jackson here. https://www.karenlukejackson.com/a-triptych-on-the-first-anniversary

Join us on Zoom. All members of Netwest will receive an invitation. To read at Open Mic, email glendabeall@msn.com to be put on the list. Include a sentence about yourself or your writing for your introduction.

If you are not a member of NCWN, email me and introduce yourself if you want to attend WNO.

How to make a better year happen

Thanks to Roger Carlton for his informative and interesting articles this past year. He is a columnist for the Graham Star Newspaper.

This has been a difficult year for most folks. The only good news to some is that the year is nearly over.

In a few days, we move on to 2021. We tend to segment time and history into decades. The Fabulous Fifties and the Roaring Twenties come to mind. What historians and pundits will call the last decade will be interesting. How do you find a phrase that melds hope with despair? That will be the challenge.

This column is about moving forward in a positive manner that will allow us to find emotional peace in difficult times.

Here are a few thoughts that help me to be positive and maintain a sense of balance:

 

• Who cares if the glass is half-full or half-empty? The key is which direction it is going. Try to keep the glass filling up.
• History and its impact on our lives is like a pendulum on a well-wound clock. The pendulum can only go so far to the right or left until it swings back to the center. The key is to keep the clock wound up and not let it run down.
• Always tell the truth. Then you don't have to remember what you said.
• Follow the wisdom of our new Secretary of the Interior Designee Deb Haaland regarding the environment in which we live. Think of the world in terms of the Seven Generation rule. Make all decisions with the next seven generations in mind. What we do today will impact our descendants whom we will never know.
• Don't try to eat elephants. It can't be done.
• Turn off your devices and news feeds for at least 30 minutes in the morning, afternoon, and evening. Use the time to think and chill a bit. Whatever riled you up may not be as important later or may change more to your satisfaction in the time it took to relax.  
• Schedule only what you can accomplish each day. Not everything can be finished in one day, but progress can be made. Jot down what you haven't finished at the end of the day and walk away. There is no need to obsess over the undone if it is on your "To Do" list for the next morning.
• Learn from the past but don't live in it.
• Read Carlos Castaneda's Journey to Ixtlan. He profoundly writes "We either make ourselves miserable or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same."   
• Listen to the Bee Gees wonderful song Words if your challenges seem insurmountable. "This world has lost its glory. Let's start a brand new story. Now my love, right now. There'll be no other time. And I can show you how my love." We all need to start a brand new story in some way. 

This columnist would be remiss if he did not thank his wife Beth for her editorial insights. Further thanks go to Glenda Beall for her being the muse who helped me learn what "Creative Non-fiction" was all about. Thanks also to Kim Hainge and Jim Kreiner. Their dedication to the natural wonders of the world in which we live is an inspiration. Finally, thanks to David Brown, Kevin Hensley and the Graham Star staff for keeping our local paper alive and remembering that sunshine is always the best disinfectant.

   

Celebrate Christmas 2020

Last Christmas, 2019, I was attending a book party at the Morings.

On this Christmas Eve, I want to wish all my subscribers and my readers a Wonderful Christmas. 

If you are with loved ones tomorrow, I hope all are careful about the virus. If you are alone as many are, celebrate this special day as you wish.

I am with my sister, Gay, and her husband, Stu, who always celebrate Christmas by decorating the house, putting up a beautiful tree, and by attending church services. This year we will attend by watching the service from Alpharetta Presbyterian Church on TV. I will open the emails from my pastor who sends out the liturgy to members of our very small church in Hayesville. He also gives us a link to beautiful and moving music.

Two family members plan to take part in live nativity scenes even though the weather is dreadful.

Gay and I will skip the drive-through for this event because we hear that the rain we have had all day could become black ice tonight. 

My greatest hope is that 2021 will be a year of healing for all of us. Love thy neighbor even if you have different beliefs, different opinions, and different lifestyles. 

To help the healing, please follow all the guidelines that are proven to prevent COVID 19. Remember your family, your friends, and your neighbors need your protection. Be sure to get vaccinated when the opportunity comes. I know I will.

I look forward to taking more online writing courses and teaching online in January. No matter how much we think we know, we can always learn more.

My best wishes to you for a healthy and happy new year.

Gay makes Mother's banana pudding. Looks good, doesn't it?

The power to pardon

 By Roger Carlton

The purpose of a Presidential pardon is to restore civil rights and other privileges of full citizenship such as the right to carry a gun to felons convicted of federal offenses.

The power to pardon is provided in Article II Section 2 of the U..S. Constitution. The process is that an application must be made to the Office of the Pardon Attorney in the Department of Justice. There are criteria for the pardons to be recommended by this Office. The President has no mandate to follow those criteria.

 President Franklin Roosevelt issued 2,819 pardons during his four terms. President Barack Obama issued 212 pardons. Some pardons have been controversial like President Gerald Ford pardoning former President Richard Nixon. This columnist believes that a deal was brokered by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in order to guarantee Nixon that no prosecution would occur if he resigned. If so, that was a fair trade-off that eventually cost Gerald Ford the next election. 

 We are now in unchartered territory regarding pardons. There is much speculation that President Trump will pardon himself, family members and other associates as a pre-emptory strike against prosecution after he is out of office. With the Justice Department in shambles in the waning days of the current term, this could happen. It would be a miscarriage of justice and violative of the Rule of Law upon which our democracy is based. 

When the Framers of the Constitution wrote the document that both grants and limits the powers of government, they specifically excluded the power of a President to grant a pardon to avoid impeachment. They foresaw a lot of things but did not predict that massive political cash contributions, for example, would be the justification for a pardon.

George Mason was one of the Framers. He worried that the power of the pardon might be abused. Simply stated he worried that "someone of sound character and high intelligence" might not always be elected to the highest office in the land. 

Mason argued that "the President ought not have the power of pardoning, because he may frequently pardon crimes that were advised by himself. It may happen, at some future day, that he will establish a monarchy, and destroy the republic. If he has the power of granting pardons before indictment, or conviction, may he not stop inquiry and prevent detection?" 

Another Framer, James Madison, argued that Presidential abuse could be met with impeachment. True, but that nuclear option has not worked in the 233 years since the Framers framed. 

The next few weeks will be very telling as we learn who will be pardoned. There will no doubt be a hue and a cry over many of the pardons. The journalistic investigations won't be done until after President Trump is out of office. Attorney General Barr is already leaking that he is considering resigning. He has many reasons to do that most of which were self-imposed. Let's be patient as the final weeks of President Trump's extraordinary term run down and hope that any damage done to the Rule of Law can be reversed in the next four years.

 

 

Do we need the Electoral College?

Roger Carlton, newspaper columnist

This article first appeared in the Cherokee Scout newspaper published weekly in Murphy, NC/

The debates are debated. The conventions have convened. The election is over. The canvassing boards have canvassed. Frivolous litigation has been adjudicated. Yet we still don’t have a final decision on who our next President will be. Something is wrong with this picture and it is not Hillary’s e-mails or President Trump’s unwillingness to accept reality.

What is wrong is an anachronism that our Founders named the Electoral College.

The Electoral College is made up of 538 members. With the exception of Maine and Nebraska, each state is a winner takes all situation. Whoever wins in the general election gets all the votes for that state. To win in the Electoral College, 270 votes are needed. The vote will be held December 14, 2020. That is eight days after the deadline for the states to certify their elections and more than a month with a lame duck POTUS. If a state doesn’t certify, the decision goes to Congress so states always meet the deadline to certify.

The Electoral College origins come from fear by the Founders that the big population states would overcome the smaller less populous rural states. That theory certainly bombed in 2016 when some bad strategy on the part of Hillary Clinton led her to ignore some of the smaller states and she ended up winning the general election and losing the Electoral College vote. Winning one and losing the other is not like eating a box of Cracker Jacks. There is no guaranteed prize for the loser of the Electoral College vote.

The big population fear was compounded when the Founders compromised on the slavery issue. Slaves were counted in the population of the southern states but only 40 percent of the actual number of 400,000 slaves were included in the count at the time the Founders worked on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. That number had grown to nearly 3.5 million by the time the Civil War ended.

There was great concern that if the slaves were freed and allowed to vote in the future, the numbers would shift in a popular election to give more power to the South. 

To avoid this potential from happening, the Electoral College was originally created to balance the popular election outcome with an elite process wherein the voters were a small number of hand-picked folks. After all, why should we trust the unwashed masses to vote for their President? Let’s control the rabble by setting up a second-tier process with voters whose numbers and loyalties reflect the distribution of U.S. Senators and Representatives.

We need to do away with the Electoral College and let the plurality of votes be the end of the $14 billion dollar exercise in the democracy we call the 2020 Presidential election. That is what was spent on the 2020 election. That number is appalling.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will win the Electoral College with 306 votes which is the same number President Trump got in 2016. We already know the outcome, so why waste the time and money? Let’s move on with bringing our country back together and regaining our leadership role in world events. There is too much to do to wait even one unnecessary day.

Places to submit prose and poetry now

Denton Loving has posted a list of places to submit your writing, prose and poetry. 

https://dentonlovingblog.wordpress.com/2020/12/08/submission-calls-for-writers-12-8-2020/?fbclid=IwAR1iGS2I7wILiqEYtElQr2PDbuGEQYxvVDJHtrw8Yl9wWcQxlDKTpiLol-s

This is one we, who live in Appalachia, should try.
Rattle’s Tribute to Appalachian Poets

Our Summer 2021 issue will be dedicated to Appalachian Poets. The poems may be any subject, style, or length, but must be written by poets who themselves identify with Appalachia and were born or have lived in the region for a large portion of their lives. The poems need not be about Appalachia—our goal is to honor these poets by sharing the diverse creative work that they’re producing. Deadline: January 16, 2021.

https://rattle.submittable.com/submit/34382/tribute-to-appalachian-poets