In Which the Dog and I Help Each Other

A loud thunderclap sends the dog scurrying under my desk.

I’m disoriented not because this desiccated desert is suddenly dripping wet from a violent rain, but because everything else is so weird.

Fifty percent of Republicans think top Democrats run a child-sex ring. (And one-fifth of Democrats do too?)

Most voters think abortions are a doctor-patient issue, but we’ll soon be sending folks to jail.

Sixty percent of U.S. citizens think Donald Trump should face criminal charges, and he’s the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.

Sometimes I try to imagine contemporary events involving past political figures. Dwight David Eisenhower fawning over Vladimir Putin. George H.W. Bush or Jimmy Carter demanding a state election official find 11,000 votes, then spending the next two years trying to get Clinton’s election undone. Kennedy or Nixon, or even Ronald Reagan, inciting a bunch of angry clowns to try to scare the senate and vice-president by threats of violence, then sitting back munching gummy bears as it unfolded on TV.

The dog bumps the chair arm with her nose, to suggest a better use for hands than tapping little plastic squares on a keyboard.

The dog has a point. Imagine being a weekly newspaper columnist and trying to figure out what to write. Some weeks, everything you write is so obvious it feels stupid to put it on paper, but it’s anathema (or “lies”) to a significant minority of readers.

Talking about guns recently, some opponents of gun-safety legislation said it all came down to families not raising their kids right. I agreed that many parents don’t raise their kids right. (I did suggest that while we improve child-raising and mental health services, which will take years to affect 18-year-olds, we might want to make it harder right now for irresponsible people to get guns, to help until our other efforts solve the problem.)

But they were talking about families not raising their kids as Christians, and about defining family as a biologically male father and a biologically female mother. And about making sure kids know the rules and follow them. I’ve seen kids badly scarred by all kinds of families, including “Christian” ones; and we know religion doesn’t prevent sexual abuse of children.

I’ve also seen many families in which two men or two women raise their children with love, care, and humor. I know people who are transgender, or don’t wish to be identified by a gender, who are wonderful people.

Religion is great for some families, but it’s a horror for others. (That’s partly ‘cause folks turn it to their own purposes or needs, without adequate attention to the actual teachings.)

Ultimately, what matters is love; some amount of trust and honesty; probably mutual respect, with parents telling kids the rules (even showing them, by living those rules), but not overbearingly, maybe even discussing why they make sense. (Sadly, too many parents feel threatened by that kind of conversation.) And you also need some luck.

The dog finally lies down, having made her point. I contemplate how much I admire her for having survived some pretty tough situations, including the mental illness of the person she took care of before taking care of us. A friend recently looked into her big brown eyes and remarked, “Dogs are put here to remind us how to love – and they do a damned good job.”

When in doubt, pet a dog.

                                         – 30 --

 

[The above column appeared this morning, Sunday, 26 June 2022, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, as well as on the newspaper's website and KRWG's website. A related radio commentary will air during the week on KRWG (90.7 FM) and on KTAL (101.5 FM / http://www.lccommunityradio.org/) and be available on both station’s websites.]

[I sent in this column the day before the Supreme Court announced that, as expected, it was overruling a half-century of previous cases to let states criminalize abortion. In a fit of disgust, I immediately wrote next week’s column. I grew up when the U.S. Constitution worked because it was a living document. Brown v. Board of Education, Griswold v. Connecticut, Miranda: as the world grew more complicated, as we learned (or admitted) more about human nature and the natural world, as we recognized more and more classes of people (Blacks, women, immigrants, and folks whose sexuality never appeared on Ozzie and Harriet) as fully legitimate, autonomous, and equal persons, the general language of freedom expressed in the U.S. Constitution accommodated their needs to. The Constitution didn’t mention women (and heard no women’s voices in the Constitutional Convention) or gays, and mentioned Blacks only as enslaved folks whose owners had to be compromised with. Now, that’s over – unless the subject is guns, which case the Court is discovering new and better ways to let anyone carry anywhere, or [Christian] religion, which the Court is now favoring in 85% of its decisions, as opposed to less than 50% in the Warren era and just above 50% in the Burger and Rehnquist eras. The reservation of unspecified rights to the states “OR THE PEOPLE” and the rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness have been informally amended to eliminate “or the people” and append “in forms of which the far-right justices approve.” ]

[The spirit of liberty our Founders nourished and filled the Constitution with is in eclipse. If Republicans prevail in 2022 and 2024, through the anti-democratic set-up of the U.S. Senate and the Electoral College, that eclipse may last a lot longer than many of us do. They were mostly good men, asserting the liberty of individual men against the historical despots they knew, kings and emperors. They obviously did not think about the rights and needs of women, per se, or of Black citizens; and if any of them thought about gay rights, they wisely kept silent. Our country has grown, and part of its success has been the contributions of its immigrants, ethnic and religious minorities, and women; and part of its appeal to the best from other lands has been our love of freedom, our tolerance of dissent. No mas!]