Pondering Alphabetic Solutions: Peace, Politics, Public Affairs, People Relations

By Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett

The author of Breakdown, Unconscionable and No Land an Island No People Apart again tackles U.S. foreign and domestic affairs in context of global relations and the inescapable nexus of act and consequence. This time Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett ponders Solutions in thought and act: America, one nation indivisible held together by (citizen) Duty; Peace, words without violence; to V- X- Y- Z, Vive la Difference from Xenophobia and Zealotry. Along with the books alphabetic textual design are centerfold imagesalso centering the authors motive and protestof people displaced from four continents (Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas), rendered homeless by tribal politics, leaders foreign and domestic policies, endless war and conflict. For the student, researcher or seeker of alternative perspectives, the book contains full and detailed reference and index sections as well as appendices of pertinent biographical material and historic documents of the United States and the United Nations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 13, 2016
• ISBN: 9781514492888

Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett

Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett is a lifelong nonfiction writer with interests in politics, public affairs and international relations. Her worldview is informed by her U.S. Peace Corps years teaching in West Africa and engaging with native peoples and multinational expatriates. Bennett's ethics and humanity are fundamentally informed by her formative years growing up with parents in the U.S. South and in later years traveling across the United States and to some countries of Western Europe. Having a belief in basic values of nonviolence, sovereignty of all nations and rights of all peoples to protections under law and universal conventions, she has become increasingly alarmed not by foreign threats but by internally-rooted threats to global society -- Americans' proud domestic and international code of violence manifest in endless wars and fighting words; their excused pandering, entrenched viciousness, and incompetence of public officials who have severely damaged America's world standing and virtually destroyed any vision of The Union. Bennett's teaching and government experience, her credentials in educational philosophy and ethics, teaching and learning theories, journalism and public affairs (Michigan State University, PhD; American University, MA) make hers the heart of an educator who delights in sharing ideas. Her major published include: Alphabetic SOLUTIONS (2016); Unconscionable: How the World Sees Us (2014); No Land an Island: No People Apart (2012); Same Ole or Something New (2010); Breakdown (2009); Women's Work and Words Altering World Order (2008); Missing News and Views in Paranoid Times (2006); No Room for Despair . . . Mary McLeod Bethune's Cold War, Integration-Era Commentary (2005); Talking Back to Today's News (2003); America's Human Connection (1994); An Annotated Bibliography of Mary McLeod Bethune's Chicago Defender Columns, 1948 -1955 (2001); and You Can Struggle without Hating, Fight without Violence (1988). Links: Xlibris dot com; Today's Insight News (http://todaysinsightnews.blogspot.com/), https://www.facebook.com/carolynladelle.bennett; authorswork@gmail or [e-mail]

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© 2016 by Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett.

Library of Congress Control Number:         2016907561

ISBN:                 Hardcover             978-1-5144-9290-1

                           Softcover               978-1-5144-9289-5

                           eBook                    978-1-5144-9288-8

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 05/12/2016

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Contents

Preface Problem

I America One Nation Indivisible

II Beyond the Status Quo

III Birthright Equality Man-made Inequality

IV Care

V Critical Consideration Causation

VI Conversation: Tool of Civil People Solving Problems

VII Duty of Citizen, Citizen Government

VIII Enemies Our Doing and Undoing

IX Ethics: Nonnegotiable Codes of Conduct with Heart

X HEW Concern with Constitutional Guarantees

Needless suffering

Refugee Photographs by permission of UN Refugee Agency

.

XI Ism Schism—Vive la Différence

XII Job: Right Not to Be Enslaved or Violent

XIII Law-Abiding Not Political Expediency

XIV Nexus

XV Peace Nonviolently: Roundtable Light of Reason, Respect, Reconciliation

XVI Power in People

XVII Qualifications Fit for Service

XVIII United Nations: Principled World Opinion Making Peace without Violence

XIX Violence Taught Untaught

Ending Solutions

Acknowledgments, Credits, and Permissions

Appendix A America: Distinguished Leaders, Related Documents

Appendix B Declaration of Independence of the American Colonies

Appendix C US Constitution

Appendix D Charter of the United Nations

Appendix E Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Notes and Further Readings

The Author

The author claims copyright in the entire text and editing excluding photographic images and directly quoted material.

Cover Photo Permission Granted by:

United Nations Photo Library, Audiovisual Services Section, News & Media Division

Department of Public Information, UN Photo Library, New York, 10017, [e-mail]

UN Human Rights Council, Geneva: A general view of participants at the 16th session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland. Photo ID 467424. 21/03/2011. Geneva, Switzerland. UN Photo/Jean-Marc Ferré. www.unmultimedia.org/photo/

Inside ECOSOC at the UN’s Headquarters in Geneva

A general view of a high-level segment of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) at the UN’s headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.

Photo ID 478929. 06/07/2011. Geneva, Switzerland. UN Photo/Jean-Marc Ferré. [www.unmultimedia.org/photo/]www.unmultimedia.org/photo/

Interior Refugee Photos Permissions Granted by:

Anne Kellner, Senior Photo Assistant, Content Production Section, and the Refugees Media Team, Refugees Media, UNHCR, www.unhcr.org (individual photographers and credits entered in acknowledgments and captioned in body of work), Case Postale 2500, CH-1211 Genève 2 Dépôt, Suisse

Extensive Quotes from Ralph J. Bunche Selected Speeches and Writings edited with an Introduction by Charles P. Henry (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press 1995). Permission Granted by Dr. Charles P. Henry, Professor Emeritus of African American Studies, University of California-Berkeley, [e-mail]

DEDICATION

To one nation indivisible

To solidarity that solves problems nonviolently

To United Nations makers of peace without violence

PREFACE

Problem

Public service . . . must be a complete dedication to the people and to the nation.

—Declaration of Conscience delivered on the floor of the US Senate June 1, 1950, by American politician Margaret Chase Smith, member of the Senate 1948-1972

(December 14, 1897-May 29, 1995, Skowhegan, Maine)

People, Partisans, Priorities

A house divided falls. Many people over the years have quoted America’s sixteenth president and the speech he made en route to the US presidency. American rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, speaking in the late 1960s and ’70s, recalled Lincoln’s House Divided speech, and in our time—more than a century and a half after Lincoln’s speech, we must remember the peril of severing and the strength of the Union.

If we could first know where we are and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do and how to do it, Lincoln said. A house divided against itself cannot stand. In a 1967 speech, Hamer said our problems in America are coast to coast and if some crumble, all crumble. It is time, she said, for America to face this and for us to work together. . . . [T]he only thing we can do, women and men, whether white or black, is to work together. To make America a better place, we must deal with politics and the history of America.

A current fundamental problem in America is US leadership in domestic and foreign affairs, the low caliber of those elected or selected to lead. The problem is so deep and pervasive that no mere shifting of seats can achieve the root-to-bough change that is imperative for the health and healing of the United States of America and world relations in which America must engage.

The officeholders, including those calling themselves independents but are not, represent political-party monopolies and ideologies. Not unlike the revolving-door nepotistic lobbyists, these independents—of the same character as self-identifying partisans—switching back and forth between two monopolizing political parties as suits their aspirations are corrupt to the core. Those seated in all branches of US government, together with their hirelings, are unfit for service, and the few who may be undeserving of this characterization wear the paint by association. These diseased by corruption spread their contagion to every sector of public office—every institution of government. Having betrayed the public trust, there is no way of righting the situation except to clean house. Deselect, recall, vote out of office, or remove officeholders, aides and staff from any position of influence that purports to serve America’s affairs, foreign and domestic, and the common good.

Some would argue that time in office equates needed and valuable experience, but this is true only to a point. When time in office becomes life, entrenchment, blunt force of a regressive status quo, or a stranglehold on progress, such occupancy—in whatever branch of government: executive, judicial, or legislative—disserves office and nation. Experience should build on and improve competence and the quality of service. However, the preponderance of officials occupying high US offices—unlike autoworkers, inventers, scientists, and teachers—are crafters and builders of nothing. They are not in the habit of improving their professional skills or performances. These officials, leaders, and followers—these order givers and order takers—are opportunists, grandstanders, and people cashing in, making themselves rich on private money.

Manipulative mass media and those manipulated like to use the catchwords the system and the government as inanimate objects, entities (or worlds) apart— as if people were separate from and not in fact the authors and embodiment of government and system. People are the government, and if the government is corrupt, the people are corrupt. As a separate entity, government is no more the problem than the environment in and of itself is the problem. People are the problem. You and I—you and I the citizenry and you and I the politicians—we are the problem. Our habits, our choices, our judgments, and our failure to take responsibility are the problem. It is easy and irresponsible to say the system is the problem. As if shifting the onus to a god, angel, or devil, we justify our inaction and do nothing about another nebulous entity—the system. This kind of thinking is flawed and not the thinking of a responsible citizen. People create and perpetuate a system of corruption, waste, incompetence, nepotism, mismanagement, and violence.

People are the system, and the people holding office are corrupt, wasteful, incompetent, nepotistic, botchers, and violent. No rational person thinking seriously about issues can possibly believe, for example, that human trafficking, drug and weapons trafficking, and terrorism would exist if it were not for some people in various sectors of society cashing in on the misery of others, making big profits through trafficking, killing, policy protection, and kickbacks. If officeholders were serious about ending human misery and promoting human advancement and eliminating poverty, sickness (drug addiction, a health problem, and returning diseases such as polio and tuberculosis), and inequality, these would have been eliminated long ago.

Solutions

There are no quick fixes, and admittedly, it is easier to cite problems than to offer solutions or solve problems. I find it so, and I expect most people do because implied in the citing of problems is the assignment of blame: they, never an I or a we. They created and perpetuated our problems. The problem rests with this or that political party, with ideologues on the left or the right or the center, or with the lazy classes or the luxury classes. However, when we take on the harder task of offering solutions, we take first-person (I or we) ownership and responsibility for both the problems and solutions. We, the citizenry, are responsible. No hit man, dictator, or head of state ever rose to power and retained impunity while abusing power without us.

Solutions are hard. They take time, attention, reflective thought, and serious concern—care not only for ourselves but also for whole societies, domestic and global. Lincoln said he did not believe the Union will fall, and I am writing because I believe in the human spirit and the innate ability of human beings to overcome themselves, take hold of their potential, set their shoulders to the wheel, and together harness human resources to make a healthier society for all people and generations. Attributed to America’s thirty-fifth president, John F. Kennedy, are the lines Our problems are man-made and may be solved by man.

Unlike monarchies, the people, the citizenry together, are America; and, risking the use of a word rarely used in contemporary parlance, the citizen has a duty (obligation by virtue of membership, which in this case is an obligation to this nation undivided) to protect and serve. And a people’s government has a complementary duty to protect and serve.

Ordinary people must take charge. Eligible American voters must educate themselves and remain forever vigilant. They must do the work of finding, appraising, fielding, and seating new public officials of solid, demonstrated moral character, not mere Ivy Leaguers, lecturers, or orators. They must seek leaders who are competent and care about convening as equals—working with others outside and away from cameras and social media. Citizens must find new public officials who have demonstrated the potential for good leadership and whose preferred method of engagement is conversation, using nonviolence while engaging others of different cultures, concerns, and ideas.

I do not recall a greater divide or deeper dissension among Americans than I have felt in recent years, but I believe if we pull together, we can, as Hamer suggests, make our nation a better nation. The people of the United States of America must stir themselves to imagine and reimagine a better world. When she viewed New York’s Liberty Enlightening the World, Fannie Lou Hamer reimagined Lady Liberty turned to face our own [American] problems. She said that instead of symbols of arrogance and violence, Lady Liberty should present a bowed head symbolic of our country’s humility and engagement in solving our own problems.

Lincoln said, I do not expect the Union to be dissolved; I do not expect the house to fall but I do expect it will cease to be divided.

Solutions begin in thought, reflection, the imagination; and while it is impossible not to name problems while offering solutions, Pondering Alphabetic Solutions tries to keep the focus on solutions. The content covers the alphabet but is not strictly alphabetical. I use the alphabet as a thinking structure; however, there is a recognizable A to Z: America to zealotry; B to U: birthright equality to UN light of many voices; C to P: conversation to peace; D to Q: duty of citizen and citizen government to qualifications for service; and E to V: enemies to violence taught untaught.

I am not so arrogant as to believe that I have answers to world problems or to US domestic problems, but I am concerned. I am deeply concerned, and I am not consoled in knowing that every generation complains about its generation. The problem is when worse becomes unbearable—so bad that people, too many people, begin to accept the unacceptable as normal and the way it should and always will be. The problem is severe when human beings lose the sense of the unacceptable and are blinded and deafened to it and their responsibility to come together and make it better. When the young are not taught, they fail to understand that they have an important contribution to make, which is helping humanity further evolve to the point where no one settles into the easy attitude of This is how it is and always will be. The present course led by officials of my country and their partners and paymasters is unbearably worse, unspeakably harmful to domestic and international relations, and it is definitely unacceptable.

As reflected in the front-cover image, I believe that together as a roundtable of human beings, equals with one another, we can properly acknowledge problems and their underlying causes and set about mending the harm of the past, solving problems of the present, and moving forward in a new spirit toward a newly progressive era for the good of all people.

I

America One Nation Indivisible

The great danger America faces is that we will cease to be one nation and become instead a collection of interest groups . . ., each seeking to satisfy private wants.

—Democratic National Convention Keynote

Address delivered July 12, 1976, New York, NY,

by American politician Barbara Charline Jordan,

member of the US Congress 1973–1979

(February 21, 1936, Houston,

Texas-January 17, 1996, Austin, Texas)

W hat I love most about my homeland are its people, its papers and songs, its potential, and its promise. Current Americans holding high office do not represent the true heart-of-America Americans. At least, I do not think so.

People

I have traveled a good deal across the country during a time and through places considered unsafe for a woman like me. I remember motoring from the Midwest to Tennessee in the 1960s and having car trouble and getting it repaired and then getting lost and the people of the mountains showing me the way out; and on I went into the night toward my destination, Georgia, arriving safe and sound. In later years, sans GPS, I was returning from an unfamiliar area east of Syracuse. Night had fallen, lighting on the road was insufficient, and I had lost my way. A police officer, seeing my confusion, kindly steered me in the right direction. All through life, I have met fellow Americans of all stripes—from the hills of Appalachia to the darkened, isolated roads of Ontario, Canada (still North America), to university campuses of the Midwest to the small towns and villages of Maine, New Jersey, New York, and North Carolina to the heavily populated cosmopolitan sectors of Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, DC.

Because of my experience of America and its people—without mentioning the beauty and richness of the land, which means we do not have to plunder, threaten, or commit violence against others—I feel no malice or separateness, as too many do. Even more important, I am convinced that in the human spirit I have observed in Americans is the great potential to right the ship of state.

Words

We hold these truths to be self-evident: all people are equal and endowed with certain rights that cannot be transferred; rights that are absolute and among them are life, liberty, and a chance at happiness. When the people have long suffered, appealed, and protested and officials in government persist in their abuses and usurpations, intent on reducing the people under absolute despotism, it is the right and duty of the people to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security. That is, of course, a slightly edited excerpt from the Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America, a declaration unanimously enacted in Congress on July 4, 1776.

In order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, we do ordain and establish this Constitution. This is from the preamble of the Constitution of the United States of America, which was drafted in Philadelphia in 1787. The first ten amendments to the Constitution (the Bill of Rights) were ratified on December 15, 1791.

Among the many lyrics and poems dedicated to America, I like the words attributed to one of America’s nineteenth-century New England poets, the teacher Katharine Lee Bates. In America the Beautiful, she seems to urge for togetherness: Crown . . . good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea. In using the term brotherhood, I believe she was referring to our union, society, kinship, or oneness—a principle proclaimed most nobly by America’s sixteenth president during his candidacy for the US Senate.

Similarly, in America’s Pledge of Allegiance, I like the original version of September 8, 1892, which was only slightly revised in 1924 and officially recognized in 1942:

I pledge allegiance to my Flag [revised to the flag of the United States of America] and the Republic for which it stands; one nation indivisible, with liberty and Justice for all.

I believe America’s thirty-fourth president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, together with the US Congress, made a big mistake in 1954. Instead of deepening our sense of union, the insertion of under God into the pledge has separated Americans. "God" is deeply subjective: a notion, an issue, or a subject of personal preference and personal interpretation. Different individuals hold different concepts of god (or no god); each individual chooses how, when, where, and for whatever reason to call on or use the name (though often, I observe, it is used in cursing or swearing) of a particular notion of deity. The institution of government of, by, and for the people—this many comprising one—in America should not insinuate itself into or intrude upon personal affairs concerning a higher source or prayer. Religion and its trappings are personal. One’s god or lack of god is personal.

Bridge Divide

A religion introduced by the government into the public sphere serves to drive a wedge into the populace, polarize people, and tragically undermine and divide the Union envisaged by America’s sixteenth president and for which he, along with many others, gave his life. This issue also distracts Americans from serious problems they need to be addressing together. Intentionally or unintentionally, President Eisenhower, a career military officer, inserted a venomous pill into the body politic. The phrase one nation under God indivisible contains ideas in opposition; one negates the other: under God cancels out one nation indivisible.

Chauvinists’ use, abuse, and expedient interpretations of religious texts have tarnished our Union. Christians promoting Merry Christmas shopping sprees seem to have missed the Christ 101 lecture that tells us to love one another. The irony has never escaped me and often leaves me to wonder at Americans who wave a flag of Christianity (or some other religion)—not unlike their tattered and worn Stars-and-Stripes waving above manicured lawns and big-box-store shopping to signify patriotism--yet these same Americans are comfortable with abuse of human rights and violation of the simple biblical principle "Thou shalt not kill."

Those who make narrow covenants, convenient rights in pursuit of narrow personal desires, have hijacked America’s union by driving wedges (e.g., gays, gods, guns, and women’s right to their bodies) into the people and instilling irrational fear reminiscent of the era of bomb shelters, Walter Winchell, and Joe McCarthy. Those who hold inordinate power, instead of moving America substantively forward from its Constitution and Declaration of Independence, have driven America backward to darker ages.

In America, the principle of religion-state (or church-state) separation should be inviolable—unchallengeable. Religion in America should be personal, not public, and the right of people to be free to or not to practice religion, however manifest, should be unconditional. Officials in government should not be in the business of proselytizing, infringing upon or limiting an individual’s sense or interpretation of a deity or a lack of deity, any more than they should interfere with a woman’s right to her body. Freedom of and from religion is beyond the purview or proper authority of the body of government.

Moreover, the body of government that is of, by, and for the same diverse people should never use the people’s money to fund religions or sectarian groups of any kind—regardless of the names by which these groups call themselves or how long government officials have ordered or acquiesced in funding them with the treasury of the people. If individuals choose to give their earnings to sectarian institutions or groups, let them do so without demanding funds from the public treasury.

As with religion and personal matters, politicians and private enterprises have maintained a war machine that whips the masses of people into a frenzy of perpetual fear-driven war, sets Americans against Americans, and criminally neglects the country and its cities and towns and its people and their health, education, and welfare. Globally, these forces have driven the world against the United States of America.

Civilize Incivility

Not in my memory have I observed America’s leaders plunging the country into a free fall of self-destruction: perpetual war, government and institutional leaders and employees displaying an unprecedented level of incivility, incompetence, deliberate ignorance, and rabid political tribalism; and inattention to the public good, all slathered with propaganda, fear-mongering, corruption, and antigovernment ties with private, vested interests. Elected officials and their partners have neglected America and set adrift the body politic.

In the 1970s, amid the Vietnam War and domestic conflicts including presidential impeachment hearings, there was a different air and attitude among members of the federal legislature. Speaking on the Democracy Now! news program in the spring of 2015, former member of Congress Pat Schroeder said there was a substantive presence in both the US Congress and in the peace movement. Over the veto of President Richard Nixon, members of Congress pushed through the War Powers Act (November 7, 1973), which restrained the president’s ability to commit US forces overseas by requiring the executive branch to consult with and report to Congress before involving US forces in foreign hostilities (Britannica). Though there were great issues being confronted, Schroeder said members of Congress, her colleagues in government, were treating each other . . . with respect and decency, and debating on the facts. Today, sadly, in place of civility among colleagues, she observed we have name-calling . . . one food fight after another. In the face of endless war and the War Powers Act being ignored, she said, none of us want to say anything; but, as President Nixon admitted in his memoirs, the peace movement really did make a big difference in ending war.

Not gods, religionists, autocrats, or proselytizers or propagandists but the people are the keepers and the future of America. Together with their sense of union, their study of civics, and their clear-headed