Pat Political

To the Education Committee

I sent the following email to the Vermont House Education Committee.  And I must add each of them has been most friendly to me....

Thank you for letting me share some of my thoughts on education with you.

The one-room schools of Vermont, which most of my contemporaries here attended and even taught, were able to offer very individualized attention to the pupil. But even more important was the inter-generational inter-action, older children helping teacher with the younger.

The very ‘advanced’ school to which I went in New Jersey was already shoveling children though the school system in an age group, aimed at teaching the ‘average’. I remember still some of the people in my class, but I cannot recall one other person in that school.

The people I know in Vermont all came out of their school system ready to be responsible functioning members of the community. They are the ones keeping Town Meetings and the notion of civic responsibility alive.

I see a strong correlation between this inter-generational experience and today’s young people’s lack of community involvement..

Today’s educational philosophy is too abstract, especially in its insistence that college is the preferred goal. A week or so ago we had our first major snow storm and power outages as a result. It was very clear that any line-worker was worth more to us than any quantity of CEO’s, MBA’s, computer programmers, or NASA engineers.

Finally I am deeply disturbed by how easily we have turned the mental and physical health of our children over to the marketing practices of any business which wants to make money off them.

I do hope with all my heart that you will give your support to some sort of civic education.

I see this being accomplished with the gift of the State of a book like the one I showed all of you, containing the Declaration of Independence, the Federal Constitution, and Vermont’s two State Constitutions, both the present and the first, which was of itself an extraordinary document, to every sixth grader at the start of the school year. The accompanying course would mandate a read-through of each document and testing only of the actual words, no interpretations.

I see sixth graders generally moaning and groaning at the imposition of such a course, but out of this group will come our town clerks, select board members, local and federal legislators, lawyers, as well as citizens like myself, who will indeed value such a course more the longer they live.

Thank you again for taking time out of your busy lives to read this. I hope it has contributed something for you! Sincerely, Pat Hejny

Bush Republicans and Lincoln

Listening Saturday to Aaron Copeland’s beautiful Lincoln music and Peter Fonda’s splendid rendition of Lincoln’s words, I am reminded that a century and a half later we also “cannot escape history”...

And our history today is frightening, for we have truly reached the point at which action must be taken, and within the next two years, or we will pretty much have lost everything we think we have.

Last week we heard from several members of this administration testifying before Congress about the immediate threat posed to us all by Al Qaeda. This, of course, was for budgetary purposes.

My father would at once have been reminded of Hoover, who always went to Congress with a Communist plot whenever he wanted money for the FBI.

I’ve said it before and I will say it again. Al Qaeda is not stupid. And I am sure they know that they never have to attack us here again because the Bush administration will do an excellent job of keeping us loaded with fear and spending lots of money and effort on fighting terror. As long as Bush Republicans are in power, Al Qaeda can concentrate on gaining control in other parts of the world while throwing an occasional bit of ‘chatter’ our way just to keep the fear machinery well oiled.

The Bush Republicans have decided that marketing democracy is now their best position to take. It is really a compliment to this country that they see our basic idealism as the only really good place to attack. Fear tactics like WMD’s and the looming threat of terror don’t grab enough of us to keep us in thrall. But remind us that we are a people who believe we should spread freedom and democracy like ours to the rest of the crippled world, and everyone is captured and ready to support whatever they propose.

Their promoting democracy is a lie. They are only interested in the spread of their ‘business community‘. And right here at home, the privatization of all of our community functions, which is the way they are gaining control, is proceeding unchecked. .

Enough public upset was generated by the arthritis pain killers to force them to establish a review board. But the primary evil-- that the pharmaceutical companies pay to obtain a faster initial review of a new drug-- is still with us.

We have not only allowed the ’business community’ free rein in what the pharmaceutical companies can charge our elders for medicines they need. but we have turned the health of our children over to companies that produce all the carbohydrate loaded sodas and snacks and all the sedentary TV and internet games that have created an obesity crisis for our youth.

We are very close to losing any vestige of control of our election process.

We allow corporations to make money with no responsibility to the people from whom they make their money. Property owners in every state bear the total cost of the infrastructure these corporations need. And the final gift to them is the tax write-offs and tax cuts so that many corporations and really wealthy people pay little or no tax at all. Our ‘business friendly’ attitude has burdened our young people with incredible debt.

We cannot escape this history unless we begin to take action now. We need legislators at every level of government and legislation to reverse the Bush Republicans’ privatization of government and to bring the corporate business community back to being a responsible member of each community from which it makes its money.

Chairman Howard

So Howard Dean is now Chairman of the Democratic National Party.

I thought that when he was a presidential candidate, he represented the party’s one real chance at an election victory. Now that he has this position I see him once again as the only chance the Democrats have to make themselves into a cohesive party which is truly distinctive from the present Bush Republicans.

Bush Republicans have clearly defined themselves as the party for the stock market/corporate economy and for the privatization of all community/governmental functions..

It was not Dean’s ’organizational’ skills nor his use of internet fund raising that were his strengths as a presidential candidate..

He appealed to two groups of people, neither of which contained many wealthy individuals, but both of which had many individuals ready to contribute to someone who offered them a solution and some hope.

The first group was the many young adults in this country who dislike Bush Republicans but feel no strong sympathy with the traditional worker/labor union orientation of Democrats.

The second group was people like myself, what I call real Republicans, passionately devoted to upholding the Constitution and its protection of the individual and each state against any tyranny proposed against us. We can no longer support the aims of the Bush Republican ‘business community’, and until Howard Dean began talking, felt ourselves disenfranchised by both parties.

If he is allowed to make the positions he held as a candidate the positions of the Party, the Democrats have a chance to become viable once again.

But Democrats have first got to rid themselves of all of their closet Republicans, the business allied so-called Centrists like Joe Lieberman and Bill Clinton and Senator Kerry. As much corporation sympathetic legislation was passed in the Clinton administration as in any of the Republican administrations before or after. And certainly Kerry was far too much a part of the Washington scene to be able to hold onto many of the people who were ready to support Dean.

And they had better come to understand that the Republican business community has as its mantra the power of marketing. Take any product, idea, program, or fact, its worth or its truth is unimportant. Its image and the way that image is marketed is what will make the sale. Business learned this with the great success it had in TV advertising. The whole Iraq war was marketed to us and without, as is only too obvious now, any real thought given to the practical realities of securing a successful outcome.

Whether or not Dean himself was consciously using a marketing approach in the way he presented his positions, his forceful manner and his constant repetition of a simple statement matched anything the Bush Republicans could put forward.

Will the Democrats be able to rise again but as a new party, truly representing all of the opposition to the Bush Republicans that is out there right now? The next two years will give the answer....

Defining Agriculture

I sent the following email to the Houe Committee onAgriculture in connection with their hearings on defining agriciulture....

Dear David and esteemed members of the House Agricultural Committee--

Thank you for allowing me to send you this perspective on farming and agriculture and the problems which you must resolve.

There was a time when the words ‘agriculture’ and ‘farming’ were synonymous.

Today agriculture has two components: mono-cropping (agribusiness) and traditional farming.

In this country mono-cropping began in earnest after the Civil War when many small New England farms were abandoned for a move west to much large acreages.

Mono-cropping always gives only a raw, unprocessed product-- wheat, corn, soy beans, milk.

Traditional farms are ecological units which are self-sustaining interactions between animals and people and land. Indeed traditional farmers were our first ecologists, concerned as they were with keeping their land healthy and productive so that it could be passed on to succeeding generations. Traditional farms always involve both production of raw materials and the processing of these raw materials with the men concerned traditionally with the raw materials and the women with the processing. The organic farming movement is a step back to traditional farming.

Mr. Kehler with his 27 cow herd seems to me to be running what should classify as a traditional farm on which processing of raw materials has always been a proper function. And so do most of the other ‘value added’ operations cited in news articles recently. These need fostering and protecting against the pressures of ‘development’.

We have lost sight of what farming is because here in Vermont dairy farming has moved over the past sixty years from being a part of a traditional farm where the number of cows on the farm was still in balance with the land, i.e. where the amount of manure from these cows could still be utilized by the land, to mono-cropping or agribusiness where the number of cows on a ‘farm’ generates far more manure than the farm’s acreage can absorb. Hence the water pollution problems with which you must deal.

And in dealing with the water issues, since money will have to be spent, I sincerely hope that you will join with the energy committee to combine utilizing both the energy production possible from methane and the rich, non-polluting soil which results from proper composting of the manure. The state can perhaps assist large scale operations in setting up to do this for themselves, or help the start-up of small, local businesses to do it for smaller producers.

Thanks for reading this, and I hope that perhaps I have contributed a little to the hard work you will be doing. Sincerely, Pat Hejny.

Ah, President Bush

President Bush spoke of promoting an “ownership society”. I wonder where he went to school.

We are, and have been from our country’s beginnings, an “ownership society”.

We are the government, and President Bush and all the rest of government, local, state, and federal, are the employees of us all, put there by our electoral process to work for our common good.

We have accepted too long the concept promoted by both the Republican and Democratic parties that ‘government’ is somehow separate from us, either as a blocker of individual action or an entity to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.

It is high time we take our ownership to heart and begin to act as employers.

Both public health and support for the aging are community concerns, and ownership of both issues belongs to us. Too much control of both has been handed over to business.

And now President Bush is proposing privatization of a portion of Social Security, not for us elders but for the younger worker.

In working so loudly and visibly for his proposal, he is accomplishing two objectives.

The first is to bind the younger generation as thoroughly to the stock market/corporation economy as most of us in the older generation have been bound. When I talked with young people this year, I learned that a good many are looking for ways not to be a part of t. I sincerely hope that his scare tactics will not succeed.

His second objective is more sinister.

By making so much noise about the non-issue of Social Security, he hopes to keep our attention away from elections. If we lose control of the election process, we have lost everything, for ourselves and for our young people.

And this past election has been filled with reports of really terrible problems. But probably the worst I heard was that one state, New Mexico I believe, had turned its entire election process over to a software company which conducted the elections, counted the votes, and is now keeping the records. If even the possibility of this happening doesn’t scare you, it should.

Action on the federal level is clearly necessary. One House member has proposed a bill requiring all federal elections to provide an independently verifiable paper trail. A good first step. But in addition we need in place a bill like the Civil Rights Act which would give individual citizens a clear path for redress of such individual wrongs as occurred so widely in Ohio.

I have contacted all three of Vermont’s federal legislators about the danger to our election system, and have received no answer from any one of them.

Roe v Wade anniverssary

(Sorry for the long lapse in postings...Some serious health issues needed attention!)

Saturday, January 22nd, marked the 32nd anniversary of Roe v Wade, and I have seen several web sites which have commented on it. Here’s how I feel...

One of the web sites had a very evenhanded, longish essay on the criminal implications of making abortion illegal, questioning how far we would want to go in punishing women and doctors. I am old enough to remember hearing horror stories of women who had gone to the ER because of complications from a botched abortion, being allowed to bleed to death when they would not reveal the names of their providers. I would hope that we will not return to punishment like this.

On November 8th, 2004, I posted a blog about a program I heard on SocialCrime.com, a web site that specializes in offbeat comedy. This was one of the funniest comedy routines I have ever listened to, and it was on Pro Life men! I was told very recently that this was George Carlin. His general approach was that Pro-Life men hate women, regard a fetus as important only while it is a fetus, regard the ensuing child as a societal burden until this child finally reaches the age when he/she can be a soldier, at which point he/she once more becomes important.

A pretty devastating attack-- which brings me to my next point. I wouldn’t want to accuse all Pro Life men hate women, as George Carlin suggested. But one thing is sure.

The men have been left completely out of the abortion argument. No woman gets herself pregnant. And surely every father is just as guilty as the mother of the murder involved in an abortion.

I am as anti-abortion as any Pro-Life woman I know.

I, too, would like to see the end of abortion except for health reasons.

And therefore I believe that we need to involve the men who are as responsible as any of the women for abortions since no woman becomes pregnant without the active participation of some man And men have so far been left out of the whole debate. Women who have the support of loving men do not want abortions. It is women who do not have this support who are telling us they need abortions.

If every man responsible were made to assume the twenty year financial burden of support for his child, I quite firmly believe that we would see the need for voluntary abortions disappear. And, yes, I mean even a rapist in prison who can earn some money, or a fourteen year old boy, who should have it made clear to him that not only will his future earnings be mortgaged but his parents will have to assume the immediate responsibility.

And if men cannot be persuaded to join in to pressure their sex for greater responsibility, we women should be working for a return to an approach to so-called welfare that was in place when I was a girl-- support for dependent children. If every woman left on her own knew that her community would actively support her until she was able once more to support herself and her children, I am sure we would immediately see a tremendous decrease in abortions. Indeed all working women, married or not should receive support for their dependent children when their incomes are not adequate.

For any woman in reasonably good health pregnancy immediately sends her body into a sort of high. There is a sense of excited anticipation, of wonderment that her body is making it possible for a brand new person to come into being I know that during my several pregnancies I felt better, happier, more creative, than I have ever felt at any other time in my life. .

Next to rape an abortion is the worst thing that can happen to any woman. I know from my own personal experience and from many other women’s that a natural miscarriage is devastating in its effect on a woman‘s whole being. An abortion is a deliberately induced miscarriage. .No woman would deliberately put an end to the wonderful feeling of creating and carrying life without pretty powerful reasons.