Thank you for sharing this, Julie. Losses like these early in life certainly form who we become later in life, I feel we never stop learning from them as long as we’re willing to revisit the memories. By sharing them, even more so.
What an interesting column story, Julie. I really feel that most Democrats have family or friends of the other persuasion...but enjoyed hearing your own story and thoughts about it...
I too have friends that are Republicans and usually politics is something we do not talk about... We do have other things we agree on, and you have to have ways to communicate with friends, family, and family that you like,even though their political stance is not yours. Thanks for telling your story! Terry M.
What is the source of the division that Trump's appeal means to our common good? How do we heal our togetherness as a society? Why do so many people feel disenfranchised? Trump appeals to the least and lost among us.
Julie, thank you for your column and personal share ... Excellent. Love your message (s). I've found it nearly impossible to have reasonable discussions with Maga folks. I have several longtime, intelligent friends who unfortunately are miss-informed by the likes of Fox News. I value our friendship and will remain so. Just need to get the people on the fence to wake up ... after all they are on the fence seeking answers!!! They are open for business ... lets get them. Come on .. we can do this ... save our institutions ... improve them ... continue to pursue Democracy!!!
I read your piece just after I watched Laura Trump's interview on State of the Union.
While I resonate with your message, I fear that in so many ways we are beyond the point for so many of not getting lost. Laura, hearing her attacks on the trial, is definitely one who is lost beyond recovery, as are so many of the MAGA crowd.
All that you said about the nature of the trial is dead-on, but the minds of the Laura Trumps of America have been sealed shut to the facts of the case and trial. They are far more ready to throw out the window the American system of justice, and with it the entire concept of American democracy, than open their minds to accepting a unanimous guilty verdict by honest and devoted jurors, some of whom have leaned politically closer to Trump, getting their news and insights form sources favorable to him, even knowing, as you pointed out, that this jury was selected by both sides of the case; the defense as well as the prosecution. The fact that the judge in the case made it abundantly clear during the paneling of the jurors that any juror who feels that they cannot serve impartially should feel free to step away with any challenge by him; and several potential jurors took him up on his offer. It mattered not to "the lost ones" that the mountain of evidence against Trump was overwhelming, including the much of the testimonies offered by witnesses who support and admire Trump.
Mark Twain noted the existence of closed minded people who, in effect, say: "My mind is made up! Don't confuse me with the facts!" Such is the case with "the Lost Ones" in America today. The great democratic experiment that has been America stands now on a very narrow precipice, with good cause to be filled with fear that it may tumble over the edge, pushed over by those who are too blind or too foolish to comprehend what would be the dire consequences of their actions, or for that matter, their inactions.
You are such an evocative writer! What a beautiful story. I am not surprised that we have lived parallel lives in so many ways. Growing up in the military in the late 40s and 50s provided many Republican mentors, heroes all, who would take time to discuss beliefs and faiths with a serious youngster who already had a ‘care for your fellow man’ core.
Yesterday I had breakfast with a staunch conservative former member. Well aware of each other’s political views, we discussed our lives and families and mutual friends. In parting we hugged and expressed our love for each other. What a gift in this age.
We don't seat Congress or Swear in the President until months later because that's how much time it took in the past when we did it that way.
We have a constant daily message about our banks, businesses, everything being hacked, but our elections, we are told, are impervious; to think otherwise is to be shamed and derided.
Like your country the way it used to be?
Go back to doing the simple task of ballot tabulation in the simple way we used to do it.
Or have immediate results to supply the voracious appetite of information and continue down this well paved road to Hell.
Thank you for this piece and for expressing memories that must be bittersweet. I just had an exchange yesterday on Facebook with an old family friend who is a die-hard Trumper. It’s difficult to stay civil when hearing FOX talking points carelessly thrown around. But old friendships must endure or we are certainly lost.
Really lovely. Those losses truly shape who we are.
I am so tempted to spend a couple of days with y'all in September, but not sure how I can spare time away from running for Iowa Senate, district 28 (against Dennis Guth of Klemme.) Maybe I can come for part?
Ooooooo……I would love to see you. I know you’ll get ideas about compelling storytelling, but understand if you need to be doorknocking. Still, who is home on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday? Smile.
This is the most moving piece of yours I've read so far, Julie. And that's saying something because you are a fine writer. We see the world through different lenses, from different perspectives, but often enough you reveal a home truth rather elegantly.
I knew a fellow like Bob. His name was Bob, though I would never have called him by that name. He was my pediatrician, Dr. Robert Stevens. He too was a Goldwater Republican. He had done his residency at Mayo. During the War he studied Japanese at Yale and never saw combat. A golfer and a Christian, on his office wall hung a framed lithograph, an Old Testament verse: Jeremiah 1:17. I did not know he was a Republican until he appeared before thousands on a stage with Goldwater and Sen. John Tower during a campaign event in the Lamar University stadium in 1964. He was introduced but did not speak. When I was older and had begun to understand the men of "the Greatest Generation" in the context of their experience, I realized that Dr. Stevens was rather absent minded and self-satisfied, not characteristics one hopes for in a physician.
You write that you hope we don't get lost. I submit that as a nation have been lost for some time.
During WWII Americans, our government, and its allies including Russians and their government, fought against fascism and won that war decisively. Our genocidal Axis enemies were forced to surrender unconditionally. Almost one half million American men, our own fathers and grandfathers, fought and died fighting genocidal fascism. More than 26 million Russians perished in that war. Today, with WWII still within living memory if only just, our own government, with total disregard for the rulings of the world's highest courts, the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, has for months been supporting and arming the genocidal slaughter of captive Palestinians, mostly defenseless women and children. Moreover, our government, a bipartisan War Party, using arrests and violent tactics including beatings by armed police officers, has turned on our children in their colleges and universities where they have dared to exercise their First Amendment rights to speech and assembly to peacefully and nonviolently protest a ghastly genocide and our nation's role it it. This is the same government that allowed the nation's schools and other public and private places to become venues for an epidemic of gun massacre murders. Clearly, in a rapidly changing world, we have serious leadership problems in government at many levels.
Americans may not be lost. The best and the brightest of our young people are not lost, but our government is lost, off in a terrible storm of its own making.
Michael, as someone who has literally driven herself crazy thinking I am singularly responsible for saving the entire planet, I eventually found this mantra helpful:
Grant me the wisdom to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
There are two choices on the ballot for president in November.
As someone who understands how privileged my life has been for countless reasons, I deeply feel so many injustices conceptually I cannot do anything about — from the white settlers who stole the land from indigenous people, to slavery, to systemic racism…If all I did was look back, and not forward, I’d find it hard to get out of bed.
Read Teresa ZILK’s column today about redlining and displacement people of color were subjected to.
Today, nationally, to Citizen’s United, unleashing corporate money in unfathomable quantities into our politics, so many injustices have been perpetrated and have enriched the lives of a very few, at the expense of the average person who needs to buy prescription drugs, find housing, childcare, pay for college making it almost impossible to dig out of a debt trap that has resulted for those who don’t have parents footing the tuition bill, to a time now when the basic right a woman had to make her own personal medical decisions around pregnancy is gone. How many women are dying because of overturning Roe V Wade? It’s happening every day in the United States of America.
Injustice isn’t a game where the magnitude of calamity is judged like a contestant on the Voice.
The question we all must ask ourselves is: what can I as a human being, and an individual, do about it?
This is the lane I’ve assumed. Writing the Potluck column, holding a writers’ retreat so folks can feel empowered to tell their stories, and founding the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. And, God knows, it is a small ripple in a vast ocean of need.
Most importantly, we gotta vote to preserve what remains of democracy.
The Serenity Prayer has been one of several prayers on which I have relied time and again since 1982. Recently, I've found Learning To Pray by James Martin, SJ to be an insightful guide, the most helpful so far of several books I've read about prayer. Mary Karr, another SE Texan and an accomplished writer who changed the way people think about autobiography and other matters, recommends it.
I founded non-profit writers organizations in Tennessee and Iowa. (The Knoxville Writers League is still going strong after more than a quarter of a century. I served as executive director of the Tennessee Writers Alliance for a year. The Iowa Organization for the Writing Arts folded after taking over the Iowa Writers Awards with the blessing of the Iowa Arts Council and administering the contest for two years.)
I wrote for a national magazine founded and edited by distinguished U.S. foreign service officers for more than 20 years. My editor there retired as chief inspector of the United States Information Agency, and my publisher retired after serving as the U.S. ambassador to Qatar. Dick and Andy, both WWII veterans and career foreign service officers, were not political appointees. In 1997, Ambassador Killgore received the Foreign Service Cup, awarded to a retired foreign service officer annually who is selected on a competitive basis by the nation-wide membership of Diplomatic and Consular Officers, Retired (DACOR).
The citation that accompanied the award read: "For impressive contributions to increased awareness and understanding of the Middle East and the many dimensions of United States’ interests in the area. His service took him from Western Europe to South Asia and beyond to the South Pacific, but it is particularly in seven Middle East posts that he acquired a deep knowledge of the complex, controversial and challenging problems of the region. His service culminated in the Emirate of Qatar as U.S. ambassador. In 1982 he became co-founder of the American Educational Trust, established in pursuit of broader knowledge and understanding of the problems of this area. This led to the publication of a periodic newsletter, the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, with very few subscribers initially. Now it has 30,000 more than the combined circulation of all other monthly magazines that focus on the region."
Dick and Andy published every piece I sent to them and edited me with a light hand. I found it an honor and a privilege to write for great men who dared to think they could change the world, and their country, for the better.
Dick and Andy were Democrats who never let domestic politics get in the way of cooperation with their work in behalf of a sane U.S.-Middle East foreign policy. They worked cooperatively with Republicans including Paul Findley, Pete McCloskey, Gene Bird (long-time diplomatic correspondent for Washington Report on Middle East Affairs) and many others.
To my way of thinking, voting for any candidate or party that has endorsed and supported the genocide of a captive people is not an option that conscience will allow. Jill Stein has done neither. I caused for Bernie twice. For six years (1984 - 1990) I studied at the oldest university in the land where my mentor and patron was a devout Reform Jew. Her husband was the vice president and general counsel of the university. Yet some have sought to smear me as an anti-Semite because I'm against war and genocide and not afraid to say so. As Dick Curtiss once observed, "Michael, you have to consider the source."
One of the things we can change, certainly the most important thing if not the only thing we can change, is the way we look at the world. For instance, we can decide that there are red lines that actually matter. Genocide is one of them. So, I agree. As you say, the choice is clear.
After all, "People who stand for nothing will fall for anything." The quote is widely attributed to Alexander Hamilton, though Malcolm X favored it too.
The quote of the week though, comes from one of our contemporaries, the late John Prine: "Kids in trouble with the cops from Israel didn't have no home." That's from Jesus, The Missing Years.
E collect arth
article!
Tragic and beautiful.
A tear-pulling work of art here from one of Iowa’s best writers.
Thanks so much, Doug
Thank you for sharing this, Julie. Losses like these early in life certainly form who we become later in life, I feel we never stop learning from them as long as we’re willing to revisit the memories. By sharing them, even more so.
Well said.
What an interesting column story, Julie. I really feel that most Democrats have family or friends of the other persuasion...but enjoyed hearing your own story and thoughts about it...
I too have friends that are Republicans and usually politics is something we do not talk about... We do have other things we agree on, and you have to have ways to communicate with friends, family, and family that you like,even though their political stance is not yours. Thanks for telling your story! Terry M.
Thanks, Terry!
What is the source of the division that Trump's appeal means to our common good? How do we heal our togetherness as a society? Why do so many people feel disenfranchised? Trump appeals to the least and lost among us.
Julie, thank you for your column and personal share ... Excellent. Love your message (s). I've found it nearly impossible to have reasonable discussions with Maga folks. I have several longtime, intelligent friends who unfortunately are miss-informed by the likes of Fox News. I value our friendship and will remain so. Just need to get the people on the fence to wake up ... after all they are on the fence seeking answers!!! They are open for business ... lets get them. Come on .. we can do this ... save our institutions ... improve them ... continue to pursue Democracy!!!
Very touching. Hard to not get lost.
Thanks, Suzanna. Your poem this week was so powerful!
I read your piece just after I watched Laura Trump's interview on State of the Union.
While I resonate with your message, I fear that in so many ways we are beyond the point for so many of not getting lost. Laura, hearing her attacks on the trial, is definitely one who is lost beyond recovery, as are so many of the MAGA crowd.
All that you said about the nature of the trial is dead-on, but the minds of the Laura Trumps of America have been sealed shut to the facts of the case and trial. They are far more ready to throw out the window the American system of justice, and with it the entire concept of American democracy, than open their minds to accepting a unanimous guilty verdict by honest and devoted jurors, some of whom have leaned politically closer to Trump, getting their news and insights form sources favorable to him, even knowing, as you pointed out, that this jury was selected by both sides of the case; the defense as well as the prosecution. The fact that the judge in the case made it abundantly clear during the paneling of the jurors that any juror who feels that they cannot serve impartially should feel free to step away with any challenge by him; and several potential jurors took him up on his offer. It mattered not to "the lost ones" that the mountain of evidence against Trump was overwhelming, including the much of the testimonies offered by witnesses who support and admire Trump.
Mark Twain noted the existence of closed minded people who, in effect, say: "My mind is made up! Don't confuse me with the facts!" Such is the case with "the Lost Ones" in America today. The great democratic experiment that has been America stands now on a very narrow precipice, with good cause to be filled with fear that it may tumble over the edge, pushed over by those who are too blind or too foolish to comprehend what would be the dire consequences of their actions, or for that matter, their inactions.
Thanks for your thoughtful comments, Henry!
You are welcome!
You are such an evocative writer! What a beautiful story. I am not surprised that we have lived parallel lives in so many ways. Growing up in the military in the late 40s and 50s provided many Republican mentors, heroes all, who would take time to discuss beliefs and faiths with a serious youngster who already had a ‘care for your fellow man’ core.
Yesterday I had breakfast with a staunch conservative former member. Well aware of each other’s political views, we discussed our lives and families and mutual friends. In parting we hugged and expressed our love for each other. What a gift in this age.
Thank you Julie for keeping this hope alive.
Thanks so much, Rick!
Nobody likes my solution.
Paper ballots, no computer tabulation.
We don't seat Congress or Swear in the President until months later because that's how much time it took in the past when we did it that way.
We have a constant daily message about our banks, businesses, everything being hacked, but our elections, we are told, are impervious; to think otherwise is to be shamed and derided.
Like your country the way it used to be?
Go back to doing the simple task of ballot tabulation in the simple way we used to do it.
Or have immediate results to supply the voracious appetite of information and continue down this well paved road to Hell.
Job well done…very well done. Much appreciation for you.
Love you, Trudy.
Thank you for this piece and for expressing memories that must be bittersweet. I just had an exchange yesterday on Facebook with an old family friend who is a die-hard Trumper. It’s difficult to stay civil when hearing FOX talking points carelessly thrown around. But old friendships must endure or we are certainly lost.
Really lovely. Those losses truly shape who we are.
I am so tempted to spend a couple of days with y'all in September, but not sure how I can spare time away from running for Iowa Senate, district 28 (against Dennis Guth of Klemme.) Maybe I can come for part?
Ooooooo……I would love to see you. I know you’ll get ideas about compelling storytelling, but understand if you need to be doorknocking. Still, who is home on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday? Smile.
Julie thank you for very personal reflection and hopeful column.
This is the most moving piece of yours I've read so far, Julie. And that's saying something because you are a fine writer. We see the world through different lenses, from different perspectives, but often enough you reveal a home truth rather elegantly.
I knew a fellow like Bob. His name was Bob, though I would never have called him by that name. He was my pediatrician, Dr. Robert Stevens. He too was a Goldwater Republican. He had done his residency at Mayo. During the War he studied Japanese at Yale and never saw combat. A golfer and a Christian, on his office wall hung a framed lithograph, an Old Testament verse: Jeremiah 1:17. I did not know he was a Republican until he appeared before thousands on a stage with Goldwater and Sen. John Tower during a campaign event in the Lamar University stadium in 1964. He was introduced but did not speak. When I was older and had begun to understand the men of "the Greatest Generation" in the context of their experience, I realized that Dr. Stevens was rather absent minded and self-satisfied, not characteristics one hopes for in a physician.
You write that you hope we don't get lost. I submit that as a nation have been lost for some time.
During WWII Americans, our government, and its allies including Russians and their government, fought against fascism and won that war decisively. Our genocidal Axis enemies were forced to surrender unconditionally. Almost one half million American men, our own fathers and grandfathers, fought and died fighting genocidal fascism. More than 26 million Russians perished in that war. Today, with WWII still within living memory if only just, our own government, with total disregard for the rulings of the world's highest courts, the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, has for months been supporting and arming the genocidal slaughter of captive Palestinians, mostly defenseless women and children. Moreover, our government, a bipartisan War Party, using arrests and violent tactics including beatings by armed police officers, has turned on our children in their colleges and universities where they have dared to exercise their First Amendment rights to speech and assembly to peacefully and nonviolently protest a ghastly genocide and our nation's role it it. This is the same government that allowed the nation's schools and other public and private places to become venues for an epidemic of gun massacre murders. Clearly, in a rapidly changing world, we have serious leadership problems in government at many levels.
Americans may not be lost. The best and the brightest of our young people are not lost, but our government is lost, off in a terrible storm of its own making.
Michael, as someone who has literally driven herself crazy thinking I am singularly responsible for saving the entire planet, I eventually found this mantra helpful:
Grant me the wisdom to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
There are two choices on the ballot for president in November.
As someone who understands how privileged my life has been for countless reasons, I deeply feel so many injustices conceptually I cannot do anything about — from the white settlers who stole the land from indigenous people, to slavery, to systemic racism…If all I did was look back, and not forward, I’d find it hard to get out of bed.
Read Teresa ZILK’s column today about redlining and displacement people of color were subjected to.
Today, nationally, to Citizen’s United, unleashing corporate money in unfathomable quantities into our politics, so many injustices have been perpetrated and have enriched the lives of a very few, at the expense of the average person who needs to buy prescription drugs, find housing, childcare, pay for college making it almost impossible to dig out of a debt trap that has resulted for those who don’t have parents footing the tuition bill, to a time now when the basic right a woman had to make her own personal medical decisions around pregnancy is gone. How many women are dying because of overturning Roe V Wade? It’s happening every day in the United States of America.
Injustice isn’t a game where the magnitude of calamity is judged like a contestant on the Voice.
The question we all must ask ourselves is: what can I as a human being, and an individual, do about it?
This is the lane I’ve assumed. Writing the Potluck column, holding a writers’ retreat so folks can feel empowered to tell their stories, and founding the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. And, God knows, it is a small ripple in a vast ocean of need.
Most importantly, we gotta vote to preserve what remains of democracy.
The choice is clear, if imperfect.
I know what you mean, Julie.
The Serenity Prayer has been one of several prayers on which I have relied time and again since 1982. Recently, I've found Learning To Pray by James Martin, SJ to be an insightful guide, the most helpful so far of several books I've read about prayer. Mary Karr, another SE Texan and an accomplished writer who changed the way people think about autobiography and other matters, recommends it.
I founded non-profit writers organizations in Tennessee and Iowa. (The Knoxville Writers League is still going strong after more than a quarter of a century. I served as executive director of the Tennessee Writers Alliance for a year. The Iowa Organization for the Writing Arts folded after taking over the Iowa Writers Awards with the blessing of the Iowa Arts Council and administering the contest for two years.)
I wrote for a national magazine founded and edited by distinguished U.S. foreign service officers for more than 20 years. My editor there retired as chief inspector of the United States Information Agency, and my publisher retired after serving as the U.S. ambassador to Qatar. Dick and Andy, both WWII veterans and career foreign service officers, were not political appointees. In 1997, Ambassador Killgore received the Foreign Service Cup, awarded to a retired foreign service officer annually who is selected on a competitive basis by the nation-wide membership of Diplomatic and Consular Officers, Retired (DACOR).
The citation that accompanied the award read: "For impressive contributions to increased awareness and understanding of the Middle East and the many dimensions of United States’ interests in the area. His service took him from Western Europe to South Asia and beyond to the South Pacific, but it is particularly in seven Middle East posts that he acquired a deep knowledge of the complex, controversial and challenging problems of the region. His service culminated in the Emirate of Qatar as U.S. ambassador. In 1982 he became co-founder of the American Educational Trust, established in pursuit of broader knowledge and understanding of the problems of this area. This led to the publication of a periodic newsletter, the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, with very few subscribers initially. Now it has 30,000 more than the combined circulation of all other monthly magazines that focus on the region."
Dick and Andy published every piece I sent to them and edited me with a light hand. I found it an honor and a privilege to write for great men who dared to think they could change the world, and their country, for the better.
Dick and Andy were Democrats who never let domestic politics get in the way of cooperation with their work in behalf of a sane U.S.-Middle East foreign policy. They worked cooperatively with Republicans including Paul Findley, Pete McCloskey, Gene Bird (long-time diplomatic correspondent for Washington Report on Middle East Affairs) and many others.
To my way of thinking, voting for any candidate or party that has endorsed and supported the genocide of a captive people is not an option that conscience will allow. Jill Stein has done neither. I caused for Bernie twice. For six years (1984 - 1990) I studied at the oldest university in the land where my mentor and patron was a devout Reform Jew. Her husband was the vice president and general counsel of the university. Yet some have sought to smear me as an anti-Semite because I'm against war and genocide and not afraid to say so. As Dick Curtiss once observed, "Michael, you have to consider the source."
One of the things we can change, certainly the most important thing if not the only thing we can change, is the way we look at the world. For instance, we can decide that there are red lines that actually matter. Genocide is one of them. So, I agree. As you say, the choice is clear.
After all, "People who stand for nothing will fall for anything." The quote is widely attributed to Alexander Hamilton, though Malcolm X favored it too.
The quote of the week though, comes from one of our contemporaries, the late John Prine: "Kids in trouble with the cops from Israel didn't have no home." That's from Jesus, The Missing Years.
Great to get to know you this way, Michael!