On Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Death

When Justice Ginsburg died, her final wish was that the process for choosing her successor would be delayed until after the next inauguration. In doing so, she hoped that it would be the deliberate decision of  a body that most truly represented the wishes of the American people, rather than a ploy by one party to grab as much power as they could from the opportunity.

Instead, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, has expressed his intent to push the decision through in record time, even before the election if possible, and certainly before the next inauguration. In doing so, he has expressly ignored the last request of a dying woman who, to the last, had the best interests of the American people at heart.  

He has repudiated the same logic that he himself used in thwarting Obama's nomination of  Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. (To refresh your memory, McConnell refused to even submit the nomination to the Senate, on the grounds that it was so close to a Presidential election that it be better if the debate were held until after the next president's inauguration, to better reflect the wishes of the people.)

In expressing the intent to rush a Supreme Court nominee to Senate approval, it seems to me that the Republican Party has clearly forfeited any semblance of decency and propriety in the interests of keeping their party and its values intact as long as possible. It obviously cannot be counted on to do what is right, what is moral, what is decent. 

Is there anybody out there that can defend this as the right course of action for any reason other than to advance the aims of the Republican Party? Is there anyone who can honestly think that it's a respectful homage to a distinguished servant of the people?

I have had enough of this. I will say once again that this nation has a cancer. It is a cancer that will eat away at the nation's most vital organs: the right of citizens to a fair election process, their right to equal protection under the law, the rights accorded to all human beings under international agreements, and the proper use of government to safeguard the health of its citizens. That cancer is the Republican Party, which has fought these things tooth and nail for the past half-century.

The cancer must be stopped, or it will kill us. Instead, we must kill it. I call for the death of the Republican Party and all its mechanisms. We must root it out, every cell and every poison that it creates.

You will say that there are many Republican lawmakers and governors who are good people, and who have their constituents' best interests at heart. If that is so, let them resign the party and run as candidates of another party, or as Independents. 

You will say that there are many Republican citizens who are good people, and do not hold the values that the current GOP embraces. Very well, then, let them stop subsidizing and supporting that party. Let them vote for Independents, or as members of another party. Let them make it clear to the rest of us that the Republicans can only survive on what corporate America gives them, and corporate America seldom has as much concern for you and me as it has for its own balance sheets. 

But, in the meantime, here is something that Republican Senators can do: nothing. They can refuse to approve any nomination for the Supreme Court until after the inauguration. In fact, it may not be necessary for them to take any action at all. They can simply refuse to show up, and thus deny the Senate the quorum it needs to conduct business. (There are ways to get around that, to be sure, but they will need to be tested for their validity, and these will take time.)

But here's the thing: this will be a Litmus test. If a Republican Senator even shows up on the floor for such an appointment hearing, he or she will be advertising their support for McConnell's agenda. They will be openly declaring themselves to be on the side of the forces of repression and against the forces of liberty. Pure and simple. We may not have the evidence to convict them of treason, but we have both the right and the duty to call them out and ask them to defend their actions, and to tell them that their ride on the Congressional gravy train is at an end.

So now it's time to see if the Republican Party can re-grow some of the integrity it displayed in the past, or whether it's asking to be torn down, stone by stone, until there's nothing left. Because if it can't reform, by God, that destruction is what I'll be helping to bring about. I promise to vote for no Republican, ever. I promise to donate to the campaigns of those who would remove Republicans from power. I promise not to be silent when Republicans abuse that power for their own ends. And I encourage each of you to do the same.

Let's kill this cancer. It's war.

The Parable of the Loaves and Fishes

©2020 by John LaTorre

There are two stories in the New Testament that tell how Jesus feeds the multitudes by miraculous means. In the first instance, he feeds five thousand people with five loaves of bread and two fishes. In the second instance, he feeds four thousand with seven loaves and two fishes. In each case, there is a lot of food left over.

For those of you who have trouble accepting the veracity of the story, I suggest an alternative more in keeping with the spirit of Christianity that Jesus espoused, a spirit that so many Christians have trouble accepting. It goes like this:

As usual, Jesus and his disciples had attracted a crowd, and he was concerned about how they were going to be fed if they got hungry. Some of his followers suggested that they send the people back to town, but Jesus said that there was enough food already there, so there was no need to send them away.

He knew that most of them were intelligent people, and reasoned that they would have some food of their own on hand, since one shouldn't walk into the desert without bringing enough food to tide them over. They'd already heard that his sermons would often go on for a long time, and they came prepared.

But there are always a few who aren't so intelligent, and it was these people that Jesus was worried about. He asked his disciples how much food they had on hand.

"Well, between us, we've got a few loaves of bread, and a couple of fishes. There's no way we can feed all of them with those."

"I've got an idea," Jesus said. "There are probably a few other people who brought more than they needed. Maybe if you ask them, they'd be willing to share."

So he had his disciples go around and ask each person how much food they had. If they had more than enough for themselves, or knew they could restock their stores back at their villages when they got home, the disciples asked them to turn over what they what they didn't need. That donation went into common baskets, into which the disciples had already put the loaves and fishes they'd brought.

The disciples pointed out that the bread would go stale anyway in another day or two, and the fish would go bad. So it wasn't that big a loss for the donors, and it would be a charitable act that Jesus would certainly approve of. For Jesus had told them plenty of times that selfishness had no place in his philosophy.

On the other hand, if some people truly didn't have enough to eat, the disciple told them to take what they needed from the common baskets.

If you've ever been at a potluck, you know that there's usually more food than anybody could eat, and there would be lots of leftovers. So it was in this case. All the people were fed, and it turned out that there was a lot left over, so much that it filled many baskets. The people were amazed, since they hadn't realized how many people could be fed when everybody shared what they had brought.

So Jesus gave the people a lesson in how, by sharing what they had, they could make the world a better place. Those episodes became garbled in repeated tellings, until they took the form of a divine miracle. And that's a shame, because what would have been a beautiful story about the value of sharing was transformed into a lesson in how you didn't have to worry about going hungry, at least while Jesus was around.

In a world where there's so much food that it rots in the field, yet some people go to bed hungry, it's a miracle that we can perform all by ourselves. Jesus showed us how.

Tropical Storm Doria or My Longest Day

                                             ©2020 by John LaTorre

Two of the strangest two days of my life actually seemed like one long day, because from the morning of August  28, 1971 to the morning of August 30, I got no sleep at all. 

It happened like this. A friend of mine and I attended the Philadelphia Folk Festival that year. Judy provided the car, and I provided the tent we’d be camping in … a pair of World War II surplus shelter halves with the necessary poles, ropes, and stakes. We arrived at Schwenksville on Friday, the 27th, in time to catch a few of the acts after driving up from Baltimore that morning. Then, after a picnic supper, we went to bed, and woke up to clear skies and some sunlight … the perfect weather for attending outdoor concerts.

The perfect weather didn’t last long, though. By noon, it was clouding over, and by late afternoon the rains came. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were caught in the tail end of Tropical Storm Doria, churning its way up the Atlantic seaboard. We got some dinner somewhere, probably from one of the food vendors there, but found that the evening’s entertainment had been cancelled because of the rain. So we went back to the tent.

And it rained, and rained, and rained. The strong wind blew the rain up the slanted side of the tent and into the gap formed by the two shelter halves, so that we were getting constant drips from the peak. And before long, the water was going over the campground in rivers. I dug a shallow trench around the tent, but it was easily defeated by the rushing water. So we huddled in the tent, in our soaked sleeping bags, trying to get even a little sleep. The water-softened ground could no longer keep the tent stakes secured in the constant wind, so I would have to get up every hour or so and re-stake the tent. There would be no rest for me that night.

By morning, I got out of the tent to find that ours, as leaky as it was, turned out to be one of the very few tents that hadn’t been knocked down by the storm. The campground looked like a disaster area. The rain had stopped, but it had turned the festival grounds into a sea of mud, and we didn’t wait around for the inevitable announcement that the festival would be cancelled for the weekend. We piled all our wet clothes and sleeping gear into her MG and headed for home, stopping first for breakfast somewhere on the road, and then at a coin-op laundry where we commandeered the biggest dryers we could find. A few hours later, the sleeping bags and most of our clothing were dry again, and we were back on the road. We probably had dinner when we got back to Baltimore, and she dropped me off at my apartment at sunset.

When I opened the door, the phone was ringing. It was my friend Bill Gross, whose father owned an appliance store in Brunswick, Maryland. Brunswick is located on the banks of the Potomac River, which can be prone to flooding. This year, with the rainwater left by Doria, the river was rising to historic levels, and it looked almost certain that it would flood at least part of the town. The appliance store was a two-story structure, with almost all of the refrigerators and washing machines and televisions on the first floor; the second floor was largely vacant.

Bill was trying to recruit as many friends as he could to help him and his father move what was on the first floor up to the second floor. Could I help? I told him I would, and gave up any hope of having that nice warm shower I was looking forward to. Bill was in front of my apartment house a half an hour later, in a post-war Chevrolet pickup truck he was restoring. The front seat was already filled, so I hopped into the cargo bed, thankful that the rain had stopped by then. We drove directly to Brunswick.

By the time we had arrived, the river had already overflown its banks and reached the edge of town. Bill’s father, known to the townspeople as “Judge Gross” or, simply, the Judge (since he was also the local magistrate), was waiting for us, and I think that Bill’s brother John Lynch was there, too. We were shown a hand-operated freight elevator, with which we would move all the stock from the first to the second floor, along with all the records of the business. The operation was painfully slow—we could only load one or two appliances at a time, and then it would be a question of somebody raising the car by means of a rope and a system of many, many pulleys. With luck, we could move one load of appliances every twenty minutes. So most of our time was spent in drinking coffee and waiting for the elevator car to return to the first floor for another load.

The store was right next to the tracks of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, which had a major yard in the town at the time. So a train would rumble through every once in a while, shaking the building. The house that Bill grew up in was right next door, and I realized how it came about that he could sleep through just about anything. (Earlier that year, he told me to wake him by phone so that he could drive us into Washington to get tickets for a Vladimir Horowitz concert, and he swore that he would put the phone under his pillow. I let the phone ring for over ten minutes without effect. Now I understood why.)

And I remember that, on the first floor, the Judge had set up a service area for the televisions and radios he sold, with storage racks for more electronic tubes than I’d ever seen in one place before (except, possibly, in the electronics wholesaler’s shop where I worked two years earlier). We debated whether to add the tubes to the load in the elevator car, or just carry them up the stairs, but either Bill or the Judge had decided that they weren’t going to be damaged by the floodwaters, so it wouldn’t be worth the effort to move them. 

And that was how I spent that night: wrestling appliances and televisions into the elevator, taking my turn at hauling the rope to lift the car, and keeping the coffee pot filled. From time to time, we’d go out and check on the progress of the river, which was slowly inching toward the store. By sunrise, the entire contents of the first floor (except for the tubes) had been moved to the second floor, including all the test equipment in the service area. We had done all we could, so Bill drove us back to Baltimore. On the way home, I was able to ride in the front seat, where I could look out the window and, in the light of the dawn, see acres and acres of flooded fields. It could have been mistaken for a huge lake, had it not been for the occasional church steeple or a house or barn cupola poking up from the surface of the water. It was then that I realized the extent of the destruction of the storm.

I phoned Paul Morris, my boss at the Baltimore City Health Department, and told him that I’d be late that morning, as I needed to shower and eat breakfast. When I told him about what I’d been doing for the past forty-eight hours, he said, “Forget about coming in. We’ll cover for you. Just get some rest, and we’ll see you tomorrow.” By that time, what was left of the caffeine in my body was starting to wear off, and his words were music to my ears. I took that nice warm shower I promised myself the previous day and then hit the sack.

As it turned out, that night’s work proved to be unnecessary. The river rose to the level of the top of the store’s front steps, Bill told me later, but the first floor itself stayed dry. After a week or two, all the stock had been returned to its proper place and the store was back in business. His dad was one of the lucky ones, though. Dorian proved to be the one of the costliest storms of that year’s hurricane season, breaking countless records for rainfall and causing seven deaths and an estimated $147.6 million in damages throughout the east coast, from North Carolina to Vermont. 

And it only cost me a couple of night’s sleep, and I had a story to tell now. So I was one of the lucky ones, too.