CSotD: Flashback Edition
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Reply All gives me flashbacks to my days covering local real estate, which included a weekly breakfast of some 300 Realtors and title people, mortgage lenders, movers and such.
There were times when the guest speaker actually addressed real estate issues, but, more often, they were motivational speakers of one sort or another.
People in sales eat that stuff up, and, having sold the Kirby Classic, I was pretty hard to appall, particularly since, while they often made us hug, they never made us sing.
But, boy, did they want us to set goals and write down those goals and read them out loud every day, and, since they were generically inspirational and not specific to any particular kind of sales, their suggested goals, like Lizzie's, tended to be aspirational and squooshy and faux-zennish.
"Faux-zennish" in the sense that they focused on productivity and not inner peace. Nobody ever suggested our goals include "Abandon the creeping meatball" or "Cut the soles off my shoes, sit in a tree and learn to play the flute."
Though I'd have been willing to try that last one every morning if I thought repeating it would make it happen.
Sooner.
As soon as I was empty-nested, my focus shifted completely towards that goal, and I love the fact that Lizzie is at the stage where she knows it's all a crock but fears that maybe she just isn't doing it right. As the Master said, "Knowing is half the battle."
Which, returning to the actual Master, reminds me of one of my favorite Confucian passages:
Tzu-kung said, "What I do not want others to do to me,
I have no desire to do to others."
The Master laughed, "Oh Ssu! You have not quite got to that point yet."
Keep walking on the rice paper*, Lizzie. We'll talk about snatching the pebble later.
* If you have to look back, Grasshopper, you 're still not there.
Speaking of getting to the goal
The New Hampshire primaries on February 9 will be the first in which we are required to present photo IDs in order to vote, and Tom Toles nails the "Voter Fraud" issue fairly well.
Here, the experience varies slightly, because we're a rural state. So, for instance, they can't play musical chairs with the polling places because, in most New Hampshire towns, there aren't that many places to move them to and no place at all where you can hide them.
But the ID issue itself is very much in play, and moreso here than in the cities.
When this war-on-the-poor gambit was first proposed, people without ID would have to pay to get a non-drivers-license ID from Motor Vehicles.
Cooler heads prevailed, however, and now you can get the card for free. Hooray, democracy!
Except that we don't have Department of Motor Vehicle offices everywhere and we don't have intercity public transit, either.
I'm in a small but relatively important city, and, shortly after I moved here in 2008, they closed down our DMV office to save money. In order to do in-person business with them, I have to drive about 50 miles round-trip, which isn't bad — some places, you'd have to go nearly twice that far.
So I just jump in my car … oh, right. If you have a driver's license, you don't need the ID card.
And there's no bus or train, even if you could afford the ticket.
But here's the Alice's Restaurant solution:
(c)(1) If the voter does not have a valid photo identification, the ballot clerk shall inform the voter that he or she may execute a challenged voter affidavit. The voter shall receive an explanatory document prepared by the secretary of state explaining the proof of identity requirements. If the voter executes a challenged voter affidavit, the ballot clerk shall mark the checklist in accordance with uniform procedures developed by the secretary of state.
Notice that it doesn't say that the ballot clerk is permitted to search you to see if, in fact, you do have valid photo identification.
And every one of those affidavits has to be individually examined and verified.
Can you imagine — Can you imagine — 50 people at each polling place, walking in and requesting a challenged voter affidavit and executing it and then voting?
Friends, they may think it's a Movement!
And here's another 60s flashback
Darrin Bell notes the caution-caution platform that made America what it is today, even among those who claim to carry the torch of what it was yesterday, and to uphold the legacy of all that idealistic, unrealistic, impractical stuff Kennedy said.
Though it's hardly fair to hold Hillary up to all that.
It was Bernie, not Hillary, who heard the speech about asking not what your country can do for you, and the one about dreaming things that never were and asking "Why not?", and, as Bell notes, the one about doing things "not because they are easy, but because they are hard," and went out and joined the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and demonstrated against segregation.
Hillary's response, after JFK was dead, was to volunteer for the Goldwater campaign.
As that link says, she got over it. Sort of. Eventually. "She also met Bill Clinton, and in 1972 joined him in Austin, Texas, where they both worked for George McGovern’s campaign" isn't exactly a feminist manifesto, but okay.
Whatever her leanings, however, they are leanings, not commitments.
And, if she has no plans to restore the Kennedy legacy, she's at least restored the meaning of "Liberal" that I learned in them-thar days.
Here's an updated version of Phil's classic, by a Hampshire College alum. I would point out that Hampshire College, despite the name, is actually in Massachusetts, so they won't get to vote in our primary.
But they will get to vote.
Here's a personal goal you should write down and recite each morning:
"Get out of the new road if you can't lend a hand."
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