We can defeat stigma, day by day

Inspired by the late Alan Reich, the first person to address the general assembly of the United Nations from a wheelchair, 1981 was designated The Year of the Disabled Person.  It recognized that millions of blind, deaf, paralyzed, and mentally challenged men, women and children in developing nations were shunned by their governments, ignored by their neighbors, and often abandoned by their families.

      In the United States at that time, a White House Conference on The Disabled Person, designed and directed by persons with disabilities, addressed issues of parity in education and employment.  It recommended workplace accommodations, such as audio instruction for the blind and visual instruction for the deaf, to enable qualified persons with disabilities to be employed in factories, shops and offices. 

      Reich, a brilliant scholar fluent in several languages, including Russian, had been an All American track star at Dartmouth.   He became quadriplegic from an accident while picnicking with his family.  He’d been a corporate executive, but after rehabilitation formed the National Organization on Disability and devoted his life to helping other persons with disabilities.

      But it would take another decade of unceasing effort to pass the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), and even today, compliance with its provisions often meets with resistance.  

      Progress has come slowly, with no easy victories.  Twelve years after passage of the ADA, James D. Wolfensohn, then president of the World Bank and former board chairman of the International Federation of Multiple Sclerosis Societies, said the lives of 400 million persons with disabilities in developing countries were further burdened by poverty, isolation and despair.  “Stigma prohibits them from going to school, finding work or even being visible in their own neighborhoods,” he said. 

     Vaccines available in industrialized nations prevent childhood diseases, such as measles and polio, but those diseases continue to plague children in developing countries.  A partnership between Rotary International and The World Health Organization has greatly reduced polio cases throughout the world, but polio still disables thousands of children every year who have not received vaccines.  Sadly, misinformation plays a role.  Some parents have been conditioned to fear vaccines and prohibit their children from receiving them.

      Stigma has burdened persons with disabilities generation after generation.  Sometimes with brutal consequences. In Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, the Third Reich systematically murdered thousands upon thousands of helpless disabled persons.  In less barbaric form, stigma is always deeply hurtful and demeaning.

     On the Mid Shore, an Anti-Stigma Coalition has held annual events for many years to reduce stigma and open doors for persons with disabilities.  The disAbility Coalition of Talbot County is a staunch advocate for improving public transportation and accessibility.  The Hugh Gregory Gallagher Motivational Theatre dramatizes real life experiences to educate the public through entertainment.  All of these efforts are commendable and deserve support. 

        But stigma is a daily burden that cannot be addressed by occasional exposure to those who suffer from it.  Their lives are restricted in ways able-bodied persons could not imagine.  So a constant drum-beat is needed to defeat stigma’s presence.  The words we use when we speak of persons with disabilities, the acceptance we demonstrate, the employment opportunities we provide, and the personal responsibility we assume for making sure a neighbor or fellow parishioner with a disability can get to church, attend the theatre, or dine out is important.  It’s a matter of reducing stigma person to person, day by day.  

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Carlton E. Spitzer

Yes, we have come a long way, baby

Franklin Roosevelt’s long cigarette holder held the same lethal cancer-causing cigarettes as the ones inhaled by the man on the street.  Tobacco has always been an equal opportunity destroyer.

     Consumption of booze and smokes increased in the 1930s as prohibition vanished and the economic depression worsened.  But even then, in the midst of rampant unemployment, malnutrition and homelessness, addiction to nicotine and its effects on the human body were questioned by medical researchers.

     It wasn’t a new concern.  Although King James 1^st in the 16^th century thought tobacco, “loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, and dangerous to the lungs,” it became the mainstay of Virginia and Maryland economy in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, and has been strongly identified with the history of the Chesapeake Bay.  Profits have often collided with principles in the development of our nation.  Slavery was a lucrative business.  So was growing tobacco.

      Research reports of the 1930s, indicating that smoking caused a decline in physical and mental efficiency, were largely ignored.  But researchers labored on during the war years and into the 1950s, confirming statistical relationships of smoking to lung cancer, bronchitis, emphysema and heart disease.   

     The public, however, was captivated by cigarette advertisements featuring fearless cowboys, handsome men in uniform, and beautiful women at the seashore, personified by the Virginia Slims Cigarette girl celebrating women’s right to smoke, “We’ve come a long way, baby.”

      Smoking was accepted.  Thousands of physicians smoked.  And during the war, hometown newspapers often sent cigarettes to men and women in uniform, provided by tobacco companies.   It seemed the nation was addicted to nicotine, and that most citizens viewed smoking as a harmless, social habit; some even thought it a bit glamorous.

     Surgeon General Leroy E. Burney’s report in 1957 that the U.S. Public Health Service had evidence of a causal relationship between smoking and lung cancer was denounced as alarmist by Tobacco companies.  Its executives blamed the rising rate of lung cancer and emphysema on asbestos contamination, air pollution, and most anything but cigarette smoking.  Their denials persisted for decades, culminating in the spectacle of tobacco company presidents assuring a congressional committee in unison that they had never been made aware of nicotine’s harm to those who smoked. 

     Persistent efforts of a coalition in 1961, headed by the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association, the National Tuberculosis Association, and the American Public Health Association, persuaded President John Kennedy to convene a national commission on smoking.  Surgeon General Luther L. Terry invited the Tobacco Institute, the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, and the American Medical Society to join the effort.  Ten representatives from diverse fields were named to the commission.  None had publicly stated their views on tobacco use.  They included experts from pharmacology and medicine, but not psychology. 

      Consultants helped the commission review more than 7,000 scientific articles and studies between 1962 through 1964.   Knowing the report would stir the political pot and upset the tobacco industry, Terry selected a Saturday to announce the commission’s findings to minimize the immediate effect on the stock market.

      Smoking and Health: Report of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General, was front page news and the lead story on radio and television. It said cigarette smoking was responsible for a 70 percent increase in the mortality of smokers over non-smokers, and that smokers were at high-risk of developing lung cancer, emphysema, chronic bronchitis and coronary heart disease

      The public paid heed.  Gallup compared its poll in 1958, when only 44 percent of the people believed smoking caused cancer, to its 1968 poll,  when 78 percent believed it.  Angered rather than chastised, the tobacco industry applied enormous pressure on elected representatives from tobacco-growing states, as well as the White House.  Scientists were paid handsome sums to write articles questioning the commission’s conclusions.

      When John W. Gardner, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare,  sought support from the White House for placing warning labels on cigarettes, President Johnson put a big arm around Gardner’s shoulder as he escorted him from the Oval Office, “Now, John, howd’ya feel if your pappy was a tobacca farmer?” 

        Postmaster General Larry O’Brien made silly excuses for failing to place a public service banner on Postal vehicles that read, “100,000 doctors have stopped smoking.”  Tobacco companies remained in denial, even as warning labels on cigarette packages were finally approved: “Smoking may be dangerous to your health.”  They responded  by stepping up marketing efforts to recruit young smokers and paid celebrities huge fees for touting their products, and producers for using them on stage and in films. 

       Yes, graphic, disturbing photos of tobacco’s devastating consequences will appear on cigarette packages this year.  They will present a realistic picture for the first time, affirming that King James’ assessment was spot on centuries ago, and fulfilling the Virginia Slims girl’s proclamation in a way she could not have imagined: we have come a long way, baby.

                  

                                                            ***

Carlton E. Spitzer

     

     

She forgave him a bumpy flight over Niagara Falls

She was four years old when her mother died of pneumonia, the third of four children and only girl.  Her handsome father, a young attorney making his mark in New York, cried through the night, holding his children close in their Tarrytown apartment, the baby only a year old.  Their maternal grandmother came to live with them.

When her father was named general counsel for Liberty Mutual Insurance at 10 Rockefeller Plaza, the family moved to an apartment adjacent to Fort Tryon Park in upper Manhattan, across from Mother Cabrini’s Shrine, to shorten his commute.  St. Elizabeth Hospital was at the corner, where years later three of her seven children would be born. 

Her father, John Patrick Smith, was born in Buffalo, a single child whose father died when he was a boy.  He was a good student, graduating from Canisius College in 1918.  He met lively Honora “Norine” McNamara in the “Big Apple” during World War I, where he served as an Army private in chemical warfare.  Norine had come from Selby, England to live with cousins working in Vaudeville. 

John’s “barrack” was a nicely furnished apartment he shared with two Army buddies in the Theatre District, “loaned to the war effort” by a generous actress.  The lass from North Yorkshire lived across the street and fell in love with the lad from Buffalo. 

When the “war to end all wars” was over, John attended Fordham Law School, courting Norine until he graduated and they could marry. Kevin was first born, then Don and Joan.  Jimmy was the baby.

Joan was 16, helping her grandmother prepare dinner when her grandmother suddenly collapsed, sliding to the floor.  She died a day later.  With World
War II raging in Europe and the Pacific, and her older brothers in military service, Joan and Jimmy were enrolled in boarding schools. 

Joan graduated from Ladycliffe on the Hudson, dating boys from West Point Academy nearby, and was attending Good Counsel College  in White Plains when she met her future husband in June, 1945 while visiting cousins near Buffalo.  She didn’t like the guy one bit.  He was home on hospital leave from the Army and eyed her girlfriend as he sipped his beer.

When she visited in July and August, 1946,  he was flying every day at an airfield 35 miles east and didn’t ask for a date until summer’s end when she was packing to return to college.  Nor did she react kindly to their first real date in 1947, a bumpy flight in a small plane over Niagara Falls.  But romance blossomed.   They were engaged during her Christmas visit, on her birthday, December 31.  And married in Buffalo on July 15, 1948.  Unpretentious and private, with a lovely smile and big, beautiful, expressive eyes, Joan has been her husband’s pride and joy, the center of his life.

Joan was devastated by the premature birth and death of their first child on April 3, 1949.  He would have been named Michael.  A holiday in Mexico failed to lift her spirits.  A doctor in Rochester told her she would never conceive again.  Her husband always intended to look him up as years passed and their family grew: Kathryn, Nancy, Mary, Susan, Patricia, and John were born between 1951 and 1957.   Thomas lived just a half day on February 6, 1960, born with acute respiratory failure.  Amy’s arrival on March 30, 1966 was a joyful surprise.

Joan never complained that seven years passed in the 1950s before the family could take an overnight holiday in the Adirondacks.  Her husband worked two jobs to make ends meet.

She rejoiced when her father retired from the law in 1961 and studied for the priesthood at Beta College for late vocations in Rome.  Ordained in 1965 at age 69, he was chaplain for a retirement community near Buffalo for 17 years.  When he visited his daughter and son-in-law, he celebrated mass at their dining room table.  Father John died in 1985, the year Joan and her husband visited the small room he’d occupied for four years at Beta College. 

Patient and loving, Joan shouldered most of the burden of the terrible teen years while her husband’s work, first with government, then with an international company, kept him away days at a time.   He often tells her there’s no way to express his gratitude  and appreciation for her strength and wisdom.  She’s buoyed family spirits through numerous address changes and adjustments to new schools; through illnesses and keen disappointments, broken hearts and broken bones. 

She’s as unassuming today as she was in 1948, now 14 times a grandmother, and 13 times a great grandmother.  Her children call daily to chat about their lives, get advice and comfort, and express their love. 

Life changed on May 20, 2010 when she suffered a left brain stroke and was airlifted from her home on Maryland’s Eastern Shore to a medical center in Baltimore where she remained in intensive care a full week.  She returned to the acute rehabilitation center at Memorial Hospital in Easton, just minutes from her home, where she was treated for three weeks before moving on to continuing rehabilitation at William Hill Manor in Easton for another five weeks.

She has made good progress, uses a walker only when she leaves the apartment, but still receives speech and hand therapies in the hope more recovery is possible.  Although she sometimes gropes for familiar words and forgets what she has read, she is in remarkably good spirits.  Her husband is chef, housekeeper and grocery shopper. 

Joan is still a very private person who may not be overjoyed I have written this column.  But I wanted to tell her once again, as we approach our 63^rd wedding anniversary, how much I love her, admire her, and respect her, and how grateful I am she forgave me that bumpy flight over Niagara Falls in 1947.

                                                          ***

Carlton E. Spitzer

Close your eyes while you shave

My father, Rudy, said he never felt old except when he looked in the mirror.  Asked what he did about that, he said he closed his eyes while shaving.

The wide-eyed boy who arrived from Austria-Hungary in 1905 before his 12^th birthday, helped to found the Buffalo Eye Bank and Research Society at age 54.  He modified a Thermos jug to transport eyes, donated after death, to surgeons who performed corneal transplant surgery.  He managed the eye bank until he was 79.  Rudy was also a founder and board member of the Eye Bank Association of America.  His four sons proudly attended annual dinners where former blind persons stood to be recognized, their sight having been restored through corneal transplantation.

Rudy’s second son died in 1977.  He grieved deeply, asking why it could not have been him, rather than Bob, only 55, who left a loving wife and seven children, the youngest only 12.  Rudy’s Irish “Dolly,” our mother Margaret, had died in 1974.

Rudy’s buddies visited almost daily to play nine-ball on his well-used pool table.  It was around that table he would tell his sons about the old days as they lined up shots.  If you sat him in a chair and asked questions he wouldn’t say much.   Playing pool was the time to listen carefully.

Rudy’s sudden interest in church organ music tipped us off to a change in his life in 1976.  Other than boarding school as a very young boy in Hatszeg, Austria, where religious instruction was mandatory, Rudy’s visits to places of worship had been confined to weddings and funerals. 

Tall, stately, smartly dressed Loma, widow of  a minister, was the recipient of both the organ music recordings and Rudy’s affection.  A dozen years younger than Rudy, Loma had married very young when her older husband was already well established in his ministry.  He and Rudy were fellow members of the Kenmore Lions Club. 

Loma was shy and reserved, loving and gentle.  Rudy, 84, sought the approval of his sons to marry Loma, a kid of 71.  They were happy together, and his sons were happy for them. 

In October, 1981, Loma, who had a chronic heart problem, was taken to the local hospital by ambulance.  Rudy followed in his car, anxious and upset.  Medics hospitalized him as well.  Rudy’s anxiety attack passed quickly and he returned home the following day.  Loma never came home again.  Cancer was discovered.  She was moved to The General Hospital in Buffalo.  Rudy visited every day.  She suffered so much for three months that we offered a prayer of thanksgiving when she died in January. 

There was a new look in Rudy’s eye; not only grieving, at almost 89, but an awareness that life was running out and he would finish his years alone.  He still lived in the same house where his sons had grown up.

His sons decided to celebrate Rudy’s 90^th birthday a little early, in October,  1982, rather than February, 1983, since few people welcomed invitations to Buffalo in the winter.  Rudy put a Post-it over the October date on his kitchen calendar: “The big party.” 

I found Rudy dead in his bed on the eve of the party.  He has passed peacefully in his sleep.  Family and friends who’d arrived from all parts of the country to celebrate his birthday celebrated his life.  Rudy never knew an annual award had been established in his name by the Buffalo Eye Bank and Research Society.  That was to have been a surprise announcement at his birthday party. 

Only a month before Rudy died, I asked him the secret of his active life, positive attitude and good humor.  “Don’t worry about yesterday,” he said, looking up from the pool table.  “And always have something important to do tomorrow morning.”  Then he lined up his cue and made one of his incredible bank shots.

                                                     ***

Carlton E. Spitzer

Leave when they want you to stay

Twelve-year-old Rezso from Austria-Hungary became Rudolph with the scratch of an immigration officer’s pen at Weehawken, New Jersey in January, 1905.  His little brother Bela became Albert, and his beautiful older sister Eugenia became Jenny.  Welcome to America!

Everybody called him Rudy, even his children and grandchildren, for almost 90 years.  Except, of course, his wife’s relatives, who called him Billy.  But I get ahead of my story.

Rudy’s parents sold almost all they owned to move to the new world.  Rudy recalled the voyage as an uncomfortable adventure: his first train ride, north to Germany, with stone-face soldiers coming aboard to haul off young men seeking to escape forced conscription; of using a flush toilet for the first time, and sailing rough seas for twelve days in bitter cold.

Friends who had preceded them from Europe took them in to their cramped apartment in snow-bound Niagara Falls, New York.  Rudy’s mother, Rosa, cried herself to sleep.  His father, Sigmund, lost his smile and grew quiet.   Niagara Falls was nothing like beautiful Totesd, a hamlet surrounded by verdant pastures on the Banat Highway where Rosa and Sigmund had operated a roadside inn.  At Totesd there was singing and dancing , good food and good cheer, and a covered outdoor bowling alley to pass the time.

Rudy, Albert and Jenny struggled to learn English at a public school.  They learned well.  In later years Rudy became a proficient writer of informative, humorous newsletters for his beloved Kenmore Lions Club and Buffalo Eye Bank & Research Society, affiliated with the University of Buffalo’s Medical School.

In the 1930s, with the United States in the midst of a devastating depression and all of Europe fearing war, letter’s from Rosa’s sister ceased.  In their grief for the unknown fate of relatives, Rudy’s parents never again debated their decision to come to America.

Rudy named himself Billy to make himself more American to a beautiful Irish girl, Margaret Carney from nearby Lewiston, a picturesque village on the Niagara River below the famous falls.  Rudy had discovered his artistic talents and was designing window displays and lettering signs for a drugstore chain.  Margaret worked as a secretary.  The photo taken on their wedding day in 1914 shows a pretty girl with a tiny waist, dark hair and big eyes smiling happily next to a really handsome guy with hair.  Rudy didn’t keep the hair for long.

The name Billy stuck with the Irish side of the house.  Rudy’s four sons accepted the fact that on Sunday’s with the Clark, Maloney and Carney clan their father was Billy, and on alternate Sundays with the Spitzer, Sauber, Singer and Simon families he was Rudy.  It worked out just fine for a lifetime.  He was addressed by both names with equal affection.

Rudy was fun to be with.  He did funny things accidentally.  He loved golf and swung from the left.  When a local municipal course was opened, Rudy was elected president.  His honor was to drive the first ball from the first tee, then retire to the clubhouse for refreshments with the mayor and fellow members.  Rudy hit a long drive and started down the fairway, never looking back, leaving the mayor, his pals and a local reporter speechless as he took his second shot toward the green.

During the Great Depression, Rudy had no money to buy Christmas presents for his sons, so he built things with his hands: a huge fort with drawbridge, a Ping Pong table, and a 21-foot bowling alley in the basement with a return rack for leaded croquet balls used to knock down duck pins.  The basement became a neighborhood social hall.  The backyard was a neighborhood playground.  A blade of grass never had a chance.  Rudy built a big swing, and a slide wide enough and steep enough to sled down in the winter when snow was packed solid for weeks around Buffalo.

Rudy could kick a football 50 yards, left-footed, and beat almost anyone at Ping Pong.  He bowled lefty, with a wicked hook.  He was a smiling competitor who rarely lost his temper, but liked to win and could be stubborn.  But his good cheer was overwhelming.  Rudy worked through illness, sometimes sitting up half the night bent over a steaming pail of water with a blanket over his head to curb his asthma, then go off to work early in the morning.  Snap shots show him painting vertical letters on a 200-foot smokestack, and dangling off the stern of a freighter, lettering the ship’s name.  His sons never heard him complain, and he spent time with doctors reluctantly.

During World War II he worked in a defense plant and hated it.  But was grateful for the job and knew he was contributing to the war’s end.  Three of his sons were in military service.  To surprise them, he build a recreation room in the basement.  A pool table was the main attraction, with a cushioned Pin Pong table that fit over the top.

Hi passions were his family, golf, bowling, shooting pool, the Lions Club, eye research and sight restoration, and having fun.  He wrote funny newsletters, right-handed,  He made people laugh.  He made them happy.  It was such a natural talent that it wasn’t until Rudy was well into his 80s that his sons fully appreciated the precious gift he had bestowed all his life.

After Margaret died, he visited his sons as often as possible.  When he packed to go home his grandchildren would beg him to stay.  “If I stay they’ll want me to go,” he would laugh,  “Better that I go while they want me to stay.” 

                                                        ***

Carlton E. Spitzer

(I want to tell you more about Rudy, my father.  So I’ll do a second column in a day or so.)

Why do we incarcerate 2.5 million people?

We close mental hospitals and shutter schools but find money to build new prisons.  Our nation now incarcerates 2.5 million men and women, chiefly for nonviolent crimes dealing with the use of illegal drugs.  Eighty percent are black or Hispanic, although multiple studies affirm that drug usage among ethnic groups is roughly the same.   That’s why the racial disparity in our prisons is deeply troubling.  And why many law enforcement officers believe we need to examine our policies and priorities.

     Until President Richard Nixon’s “War on Drugs,” people arrested for smoking pot would serve a few days in jail, at most, and be put on probation.   Michelle Alexander, a former ACLU attorney and author of, The New Jim Crow, says the escalating rate of incarcerations in the past 30 years has created both a humanitarian and a racial crisis. 

       Indeed, it took a Supreme Court decision to force California to release tens of thousands of inmates from prisons that were so dangerously overcrowded they spawned chronic violence and disease.  Investigators said prison conditions constituted, “cruel and unusual punishment.”

       But the high court’s 5-4 decision was based on economics, not humanitarian concerns.  California was broke and couldn’t build more prisons.  Had money been available, prisoners would still be serving time. 

       While many wardens provide drug rehabilitation and counseling during incarceration, which greatly reduces recidivism, the staggering number of drug users sentenced to long terms overwhelms resources within the prison system.

        The release of California’s inmates generated fears that “dangerous people” might suddenly descend upon peaceful neighborhoods.  But these former neighbors were never violent.  

         In fact, the former inmates have the most to fear.  They face legal, economic and social discrimination: shunned by most employers, barred from public housing and denied many public benefits.  One wonders if our society really wants to rehabilitate offenders and give them a second chance.  And if a truly commensurate effort is being made to curb drug traffickers and the devastating violence they bring to communities bordering Mexico. 

       “If we abided by the rate of incarceration in the 1970s, we would have to release four out of every five people now behind bars, “ says Alexander.  Today, the “War on Drugs” commonly catches the person who buys a small quantity for personal use while the big fish who control distribution swim away on plea bargains negotiated by high-priced lawyers. 

        Neill Franklin, a law enforcement officer 33 years, including service as a narcotics officer for the Maryland State Police, is executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP).  LEAP’s members believe the fundamental error has been trying to curb drug use by focusing on supply rather than demand.  “We believe that by eliminating prohibition of all drugs for adults and establishing appropriate regulation and standards for distribution and use, law enforcement could focus more on crimes of violence, and stop sending people to jail for non-violent personal drug use,” Franklin says.

        LEAP’s membership includes judges, prosecutors, wardens, and FBI agents.  Its partner organizations include the Drug Policy Alliance and the Marijuana Policy Project.  Franklin says the 40 year “War on Drugs” has not achieved results and that legalization is a legitimate subject for debate.

        Frank Lawlor of Royal Oak, who has a degree in theology and a doctorate in science education, agrees a new approach is desired.  “Only Russia incarcerates more of its people than we do.”  

        Davis Bobrow of St. Michaels, a former University of Pittsburgh professor, observes that financial pressures may create opportunities for unlikely alliances, as was the case in California.  “But racial injustice in sentencing is the most troubling aspect of the problem,” he added.

        One thing is clear: a new approach is necessary, with all options on the table for debate.

                                                        ***

Carlton E. Spitzer

The boy who was almost Jesse James

He would have been named Jesse James if his maternal grandmother hadn’t attended his birth on the front seat of a Chevy van in Fairbanks, Alaska.

Fortunately, the van had just pulled into the driveway of a midwife that August morning in 1987.  The midwife, who had delivered other Blakeway children, quickly draped the van’s windows with sheets and calmly helped Nancy bring Jesse into the world as family members watched.

His proud father, James, beamed.  Grandma Joan prayed.  Jesse’s three slack-jawed, wide-eyed sisters, Vanessa, Mariah and Caitlin, were speechless.

A bouncing baby boy.  He’ll be named after me, “ dad exclaimed.  “Jesse James Blakeway.” Nancy moaned.  Grandma grimaced. 

They had driven the 110 miles up Parks Highway at a leisurely pace the previous day from their home on the Nenana River near Healy to pick up grandma at the airport.  After dinner they drove back, although grandma cautioned that Nancy’s time was near and there was no midwife in Healy, a tiny railroad crossing 25 miles north of Denali Park. 

Nancy announced she was in labor the following morning.  Jim hurried the three girls and grandma into the back of the Chevy van, eased Nancy up front, and put his foot on the accelerator.

“Jim, I’m not sure I can make it,” Nancy gasped halfway to Fairbanks.   The second time she said it he stopped by the side of the road.  “Go, go, I’ll be okay,” she said tightly.  He set a speed record the final 40 miles, grandma holding on with eyes closed.  Nancy couldn’t move when they pulled into the midwife’s driveway. So she got curb service. 

It wasn’t until Jesse had been examined by a physician and declared healthy in every way that the family checked into a motel for the night.   That’s when the discussion got a bit heated about the baby’s name.  “Jesse James, that’s it,” dad insisted.  “Jesse, yes, James, no,” the women protested

“You want to name that sweet little boy for an outlaw who robbed and murdered?” Nancy argued.

“I want to name him for me. We agreed to name him Jesse, that’s why his middle name should be James,” said dad. 

“You would name your son for a gangster who had a price on his head and was murdered by one of his own men?” Grandma pushed on.

Two against one.  Jim never had a chance.

Actually, I voted with my son-in-law for Jesse James, a man of action, a Robin Hood of his time, legend has it.  More like myth, I fear.  Mostly I voted for the name Jesse James to support his dad.  Never mind that other guy, Jesse Woodson James of Nebraska, who stormed  around breaking the law in 1866. But I wasn’t there by Jim’s side, and my telephone vote didn’t count.

“Well . . . ladies . . . what name do you suggest . . . if mine . . .  won’t do?” Jim bit off each word.

“Why not his place of birth?”, Grandma Joan suggested.

“What, Jesse Fairbanks Blakeway?” Dad said scornfully. 

“No, no, his place of birth,” Joan insisted, “Jesse Scottsdale Blakeway.”

Scottsdale was the name of the Chevrolet Van.  Big joke, grandma.  Ha ha.

The next day Nancy and Joan went grocery shopping before the family started for home, grandma holding Jesse.  “What a sweet little face,” a woman shopper purred.  “How old is the baby?” “Let’s see,” Joan paused, “just about 22 hours.” The woman mumbled something and disappeared. 

The real shocker for Jim was when he picked up a copy of the August 5 Fairbanks Miner.  There on page one was a story about Jesse’s arrival in the midwife’s driveway the previous day: Jesse Scottsdale Blakeway, fourth child of James and Nancy Blakeway of Healy.

Six foot tall, 215-pound Jesse visited us last Christmas, enroute to his new Coast Guard station at Newport, Rhode Island. He’s got a voracious appetite and the same winning smile he had as a boy, not at all like the stern-faced photos of Jesse Woodson James, the bad guy chased by Pinkerton detectives long ago.  Grandma Joan was right, as she usually is: Scottsdale fits the young giant very nicely. 

“How do you answer when asked about your middle name?,” Joan asked.

Jesse grinned. “Why grandma, I tell them I come from a very exclusive Scottsdale clan . . . movers and shakers on my grandmother’s side of the family.”

                                                        ***

Carlton E. Spitzer

Thin line between aggressor and defender nation

   The lessons of World War II convinced Democrat and Republican leaders to build the most powerful and sophisticated military defense system the world had ever known.   What had been the War Department became the Defense Department.  And defense industries flourished in peacetime, a mainstay of our economy.

    But as the military-industrial complex strengthened and technology produced ever more lethal weapons of war, the line between aggressor and defender nation thinned, and eventually became blurred.   Militarism was evident in foreign policy decisions, and in protecting commercial interests  throughout the world.  American values were applied selectively.  Partnerships with despots who could supply oil and others who permitted us to locate military bases in their countries were tolerated in the cause of a secure national defense.

    A half-century of military build-up, of tensions with Russia throughout the long and rocky cold war, and the infiltration of military thinking in our state department and CIA, changed fundamental attitudes about our nation’s role in the world.   Even the horrific blunder in Vietnam did not bring about the sober reflection one might have expected from elected representatives in House and Senate. 

      We could not wait for United Nations arms inspectors to complete their work to determine if Saddam Hussein actually had weapons of mass destruction, and invaded Iraqi in 2003 with a display of military shock and awe but no plan for occupation.  We are still there, having created a terrorist training ground that continues to take American lives.

      We invaded Afghanistan to find Osama bin Laden.  We found him in Pakistan nine years later and killed him.  But our troops are still in Afghanistan, on an ever-changing mission. 

      Now we are militarily engaged in Libya where citizens’ demand freedom from decades of dictatorship.  But we’re not engaged in Syria where citizens’ protests are also met with gunfire from entrenched authorities.  We are selective based on harsh political realities.  But it would seem we are in a perpetual state of war.

      Can’t be avoided, leaders tell us, because the world is in chaos.  Trouble brews everywhere.  And the United States must be the world’s policeman.

      This past weekend we paid tribute to men and women who gave their lives in the cause of freedom.  We are humbled by their courage and sacrifice and grieve especially for lives lost in wars that might have been avoided.

      We also grieve for thousands of wounded men and women who have lost limbs, wear colostomy bags, and struggle with brain injuries, the signature wound of the Iraqi and Afghan wars.  Post traumatic stress has shattered marriages, devastated children, and increased suicides among returning veterans.  We honor their sacrifices as well.

      The hope is to end perpetual war, to focus on adequate defense and reduce military expansion, to increase intelligence gathering and eliminate unnecessary military expenditures.  Savings would reduce our nation’s debt and help to shore up Social Security and Medicare.

      Kudos to defense secretary Gates for insisting that only necessary weapons be funded by congress.  But his caution that a smaller military, no matter how superb, would be able to go fewer places and do fewer things, may in fact be the goal that he and our nation should pursue.

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 Carlton E. Spitzer   

Can torture be justified?

     From the moment of Osama bin Laden’s death May 1, advocates of torture have claimed his hideaway in Pakistan was revealed by captives our interrogators waterboarded, deprived of sleep and humiliated sexually.  But CIA and State Department analysts say information was pieced together over time from many sources.

     Might some useful data have come from prisoners who were tortured?  Yes.  Would confirmation of that possibility justify use of torture?  I posed that question to two local combat veterans, a clinical psychologist and a former chairman of the House Science Committee who entered Congress with John McCain in 1983.

      “It may seem incongruous that I have killed people in battle but do not abide by the use of torture,” said Bob Frank, West Point 1965, who was wounded in Vietnam.  “I hold that torture is immoral and that we undermine our nation’s values and forfeit our moral standing if we employ it.  Its alleged effectiveness is beside the point.  If that were the standard, so many of the choices we face as a nation could easily come down on the side of the ‘easier wrong’.”

       Former Marine Frank Spillman served two combat tours in Vietnam and still receives counseling for post traumatic stress.  He visited Vietnam as a tourist in 2008 with a fellow veteran, and again in 2010 with his wife, Joyce Wise, an elementary school teacher in Secretary, to try to erase horrific memories.

       “Use of torture by our guys in Iraq amazed me.  At Marine boot camp at Parris Island in 1966, we were drilled on the Geneva Conventions and told we’d be in severe trouble if we ignored them,” Spillman remembers.  “During my visit to Vietnam in 2010 I learned that the French routinely tortured the Vietnamese from 1896 to 1954 in a prison called Ho Lo.  You might say torture was a learned behavior, which the Vietnamese applied to American captives, including John McCain in that very same prison, known as Ha Noi Hilton.” 

         McCain suffered traumatic abuse in the Ha Noi Hilton, and has said many times that a person subjected to excruciating pain will say anything they believe torturers want to hear.  He believes interrogations in accord with the Geneva Conventions elicit more reliable information. 

        Former congressman Sherwood Boehlert retired in 2007, at the close of the 106^th Congress.  “John McCain knows about torture from personal experience, while Don Rumsfeld and other former high level officials  speculate about it,” Boehlert says. “What don’t they understand about our basic values and commitment to human decency?”

         From the Spanish Inquisition through the Third Reich’s mass murder of its own citizens, to Japan’s sadistic prisoner death marches in World War II, torture has dehumanized and debased its users.    

       Few Americans can forget photos of smiling guards at Abu Ghraib Prison, stacking naked prisoners in pyramids while they forced other captives to simulate sexual acts and crawl like animals with leashes around their necks.  Those photos, circulated around the world, deflated a lot of pious talk about American values and provided a recruiting poster for terrorists.

     Abu Ghraib was said to be an aberration, a stupid breach of human decency by a few low-level guards on the night shift.  In fact, those atrocious abuses resulted from high-level permissiveness that gave license to depraved behavior by poorly-trained personnel.

     That psychologists were retained by the defense department to design methods of torture has deeply troubled clinical psychologist Stephen Radis of Easton.   “We should never have abandoned the Geneva Conventions and tried to justify torture,” he said. “I’d rather not argue about the productivity of torture techniques; to me it is cruel, inhumane, and can’t be condoned.”

       Perhaps Senator John McCain summed it up best: “Torture is unnecessary and unproductive, and more important, it is a moral issue, not a utilitarian debate.  It is about who we are as a people.”

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Carlton E. Spitzer