Why Living Responsibly Is Important

For many people the term sustainable is just another buzz word that will soon fall from favor. For some of those who hold conservative political views, it is a liberal-socialist conspiracy sponsored by the U.N. to deny individual American property rights. But on-the-ground evidence argues against both views. The National Security Agency, CIA, and the U.S. Defense Department regard sustainability as a critical national security issue. Consequently, the DoD has directed every branch of the military to actively address those concerns. In addition, over the past several decades, local, state, and federal agencies as well as private businesses have worked independently and often together to shape development patterns, identify constraints and opportunities, and create workable plans to assure critical sustainability needs will be addressed and cities will be able to revitalize themselves in ways that are more environmentally, socially, and economically responsible.

The most common definition of sustainable development is “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” That definition was prepared in 1987 by the UN Brundtland Commission and recognizes that continuation of today’s status quo of maximizing economic production and ignoring other critical factors could lead to environmental catastrophe and socioeconomic collapse. The principal insight of the Brundtland Commission was that economic production must be integrated with ecological goals to protect natural environments and equity goals to minimize poverty and injustice. Thus, sustainable development weaves together the three strands of economy, environment, and justice to confront the challenges of out of control growth and unjust social conditions while stabilizing and enhancing the environment on which all life depends.

At first glance, the sustainable development concept seems simple enough. But even people who think sustainability is a good thing do not agree on how it can be transformed into real world actions.

Skeptics like me, who intensely dislike the term sustainable, point out that most advocates for the concept ignore the real and very difficult to resolve conflicts between the three goals: resource conflicts between economic development and environmental protection; property conflicts between social justice and economic development; and economic development conflicts between environmental protection and social justice. They wonder how those conflicts will be resolved in a world where neither species/habitats nor poor people contribute to election campaigns or have seats at the tables where critical political decisions are made. Not to be cynical, but politicians the world over take special care of those who put them in power and slip money into their pockets.

Many activists maintain that the goals of social justice and environment will always be the weak links in the sustainability chain, honored by flowery verbiage but unsupported by meaningful actions. They point out that society has failed in the past to address equality or to protect the environment. And today, millions of political conservatives regard liberty as having far greater moral-ethical value than equality and believe that humans have every reason to exploit nature to the fullest since that is our “God-given” right.

Others, and I count myself in this group, characterize the term as vague rhetoric that can be twisted and molded to meet the needs of powerful groups that hold opposing views of sustainability, such as conservation organizations and natural resource corporations. Still others question inclusion of the environment as a goal of equal standing, demanding to know which environment is indicated: today’s highly damaged, human-modified landscape or some earlier, and presumably more pristine, example? In other words, what is it that gets sustained?

Perhaps one of the sharpest criticisms of sustainability points to the many difficulties of pretending we know what will be important for future generations. After all, did the people living in 1913 know with any certainty the challenges facing people living in 2013? So, how can we say we know what people in 2113 will need to have productive and fulfilling lives? Plus, who knows what marvelous technological innovations lay just over the horizon that could make the lives of future generations easier and more fulfilling than ours. And thus entirely change the meaning of sustainability and making present actions meaningless or, worse, counter-productive.

Despite the many valid criticism of the sustainability concept, we live in a world where species are becoming extinct faster than at any time in recorded history, the warming climate is resulting in drought estimated to last many decades, the oceans are acidifying at truly dizzying rates, and water resources are shrinking while human population is projected to grow to about ten billion by 2100 with concomitant demands on food and energy resources. Therefore, being able to make sure human culture extends into the future has become a challenge people ignore at their peril.

Call it what you wish, only by implementing national policies and enforcing regulations that aggressively address our profligate, consumption-driven way of life that has resulted in widespread pollution (including CO2), sharply reduced natural habitat, and the loss of biodiversity will we have taken steps in the right direction. The time to start those actions was before the turn of the century, but, if we start now and work hard to live responsibly, our Western culture might have a chance of surviving. If we don’t start now, it’s a real crap-shoot.

English Is Soooo Strange

I was born in the City of St. Louis and learned to speak English at my mother's knee. From a very early age I learned to love reading and writing and took to my native tongue as a fish does to water. But, as an adult I came to realize that English is one truly wacky language. I didn't fully realize how wacky until I studied Spanish in college and found out in the first class that each individual letter of the Spanish alphabet is always pronounced the same way. Over the years that observation became increasingly important as I thought more and more about American English.

 As an example, what about the way certain letters, like “i” and “y”, are pronounced: ally, by, lie, and sky? It may be easy for Americans but what about the poor folks learning English as a second language? As soon as they figure out what’s going on someone asks them to pronounce the “y” in actually, crazy, happy, and only. So, why isn’t the “y” in “by” or “sky” pronounced like the “y” in “actually” and “only”? And what about those always strange homonyms like cite (to refer to), sight (vision), site (location) or bough (branch), bow (violin), bow (gesture) or eye, aye (agreement), and I? You can almost hear the desperate cries: “Please, can someone make sense of this dumb shit language?”

That process of reflection eventually led (or is it lead?) me to wonder about strange English words and the way we use them. I’m not talking about obscure words, like rheology or tergiversation. Nor do I mean foreign words that have been bootlegged into English, like hors d'oeuvres or weltschmerz.

I mean words we use in everyday situations but seldom, if ever, consider their essential strangeness. Words like reckless. I mean, what is a reck and how do you do without it to become reckless? That brings to mind another question. If you’ve never had a car accident, does that mean your driving record is wreck-less? And if you are listening to that conversation how are you to know the difference between wreck-less and reckless in terms of driving? And while we're on the topic of pronunciation, why isn't gone pronounced like bone? That’s strange English in action.

Did you ever wonder why Americans say vis-i-ted or start-ed but then say park'd and smil'd? Why do some people say be-lov'd and others be-lov-ed? Which is right and why is the “e” before the “d” silent in so many cases? Confusing is the English word for it. For sake of brevity I’m not even thinking about discussing all those silent letters in English, as in climb, hour, business, and island. That’s another column.

Just about now you may feel nonplussed, which means bewildered and unsure how to respond. That word theoretically comes from “not plussed” although “plussed” itself is not a recognized English word. It's almost enough to make you feel unruly, which means wild or uncontrolled. Supposedly, ruly means neat and orderly but in all my years I've never seen it used that way or spoken in a sentence. “One look at his desk tells you he's a ruly sort.” No way, or as my younger friends would put it, NFW.

If you know someone who's learning English as a second language you've certainly heard the complaint: Does this *&%#$^@ language have rules or do you have to memorize every single blinkety-blank word? But at least one thing's for sure. If my granddaughter's English teacher tells her one more time that it's pronounced drown'd instead of drown-ed I'm going to give him an up close and personal demonstration in the nearest swimming pool.

Legacy of the Founding Presidents

For the purposes of this essay and in recognition of the formative roles they played in American history, let’s call the first five Presidents of the United States the Founding Presidents: George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe. It may surprise some that John Adams was the only Founding President who never owned human beings. The other four owned slaves before, during, and after they served as President. Of the four, only Washington set his slaves free upon his death, or slightly thereafter in accordance with his will.

It is safe to say that the Founding Presidents personally regarded the “peculiar” institution of slavery as troubling for moral and political reasons. But Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe are thought of by many today as hypocrites because they worshiped at the altar of liberty and equality while owning black people and never publicly acknowledged the humanity of blacks or the immoral contradictions of slavery in a country dedicated to freedom. Although they recognized the conflicts generated by white ownership of black slaves with respect to public/political rights expressed in the Declaration of Independence (“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”), they purposely turned their backs on resolving those conflicts. So much for self-evident truths and the courage of their convictions.

For four of the five Founding Presidents the public rights of all to liberty were trumped by individual white property rights, wealth, self-interest, and status. Because the very existence of their world and their personal fortunes depended on enslaving blacks, they elevated money over morality. In contrast to the actions of those four Founding Presidents, John Adams, John Hancock, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Rush, and Aaron Burr were politically very active in creating the new nation, never owned slaves, and opposed slavery.

Monroe, Jefferson, and Madison even favored an “out of sight out of mind” approach of ridding the nation of its moral-political problem through endorsing the shipping of emancipated slaves to Africa. In other words, they wanted emancipation to equal deportation. They most likely missed the irony of “repatriating” people to areas they had never been since by that time all or almost all blacks, slave or free, had been born in America and knew next to nothing about Africa. Those three Presidents may also have missed the hypocrisy of deporting blacks who were legally free while they personally owned slaves.

Today, Americans are faced with a perplexing dilemma. How do we celebrate the many contributions of our Founding Presidents in creating the country in which we now live and fail to acknowledge that their hypocrisy and morally flawed judgment led to enormous social costs, including 625,000 Civil War deaths and the many hundreds of thousand blacks who died enslaved?

Contrary to what some historians today propose in their attempts to gild the Founding Presidents’ reputations, it wasn't enough for them to believe in private that slavery was intrinsically evil. Jefferson, Monroe, and Madison proved thought itself is ineffective by continuing to own slaves until they died and by refusing to free them in their wills. What those Founding Presidents did was to enforce the principle that property rights and self-interest were far more important than morality and human rights. To paraphrase Mathew 7:16: You shall know them by their actions.

America, Land of Immigrants

We had a death in the family this year. My wife’s uncle had been the last of his generation. His death at age 88 made me think about our often tenuous links to the past. That reflection sent me to my file cabinet and a folder labeled Ernst-Cundiff Genealogy.

I found the information sadly incomplete and that day started tracking my family roots. Among the things I found were dates of births, marriages, and deaths. But, thanks to my younger brother, who had done a yeoman’s job tracing the German side of our family tree before he died, I also found some fascinating material.

Our great-great grandparents, George and Franziska Ernst, emigrated to the U.S. from Baden-Baden, Germany, in the mid-1840s. They arrived in St. Louis around 1847. By the 1870s, George’s occupation was listed as laborer and porter. Records show that the couple lived with other German immigrants in the 1300 and 1400 blocks of North 12th Street in various boarding houses that must have been modest indeed. Later U.S. Census Bureau records show that the buildings in that area were without toilets and indoor plumbing. The occupations of their sons were laborer, carpenter, machinist, painter, and barber, indicating those apples did not fall far from the tree.

Those humble beginnings led me to think about the immigrant experience in America. Like nearly all immigrants, my great-great grandparents wanted to improve their lives. They also were brave and adventurous, leaving their homeland for a country where the language was unlike their own, little else was familiar, and no family was around to cushion their falls when they stumbled.

My grandfather told me how difficult life was for our immigrant ancestors, partly because their English was heavily accented and partly because they came to this country with few skills and distinctly minor financial resources. But opportunity was there and make the most of it they did.

The struggle for other immigrants was even harder. Asians were treated very harshly and fought for generations to become accepted. Asian-American students now score so well on ACTs and SATs that annually a lop-sided number qualifies for admission to top-ranked universities. The language and culture of Jewish immigrants in the late 1800s were so foreign to Americans that they were at first thought to be mentally inferior and suffered considerable discrimination. Today, Jewish Americans are disproportionately represented in the ranks of scientists, medical doctors, attorneys, and businessmen.

Although many politicians pander to nativist sentiments, we must never forget that America is a great country solely because of hard working immigrants with names like Hakeem Olajuwon (NBA star born in Nigeria), Cesar Millan (the Dog Whisperer born in Mexico), Madeleine Albright (U.S. Secretary of State born in Czechoslovakia), I. M. Pei (world famous architect born in China), and Subranhmanyan Chandrasekhar (Nobel Prize-winning physicist born in India).

It turns out that my son taught me a great deal about the immigrant experience. He has been in the restaurant business for nearly twenty-five years. Today he is a regional manager for a national restaurant chain. From him I learned all the kitchen workers in restaurants he manages are Hispanic and nearly every one of them works two full-time jobs; several also work additional eight hour shifts on Saturdays and Sundays. Like their brothers and sisters who are migrant farm workers, they work eighty to 100 hours each and every week doing arduous jobs for modest wages. How many natural-born Americans can match that fierce drive to succeed?

Naturally, we want people who emigrate to the U.S. to fulfill the legal requirements. But how do we treat fairly those who came here out of desperation to gain a better life through hard work and determination even though they came illegally? How do we acknowledge their dignity and essential contributions to this country?

My immigrant ancestors fled Germany and Ireland because they were determined to improve their lives. America opened its doors of opportunity to them. Surely, we can find a way to open that door to the current wave of hard-working immigrants and their children, even if they are here illegally.

Paula Deen Is Getting Railroaded

Make no mistake, my spirited defense of Paula Deen has nothing to do with accepting racial or ethnic or sexual pejoratives as appropriate. They obviously are not. Period. My problem is with the questions she was asked and the knee-jerk responses her probably honest replies have generated.

Last month, when questioned under oath by an attorney she was asked if she had used the N-word. “Yes, of course,” Deen replied, and then added, “It's been a very long time.”

Her answer should have been, “Hell, yes!” Could any white or black person over age sixty deny saying the word, nigger? Get real. While in elementary school every one of the kids I knew recited the very same counting rhyme to choose a person to be "it" for games. Please note that the rhyme below is 100 percent accurate.

Eeny, meeny, miny, moe,
Catch a nigger by the toe.
If he hollers, make him pay
Fifty dollars every day.
Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.

In high school we were required to read Mark Twain’s, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and were also required to discuss in class his use of the term “nigger Jim” and his liberal use of that heavily freighted word throughout the book. In college English Lit we were required to read Joseph Conrad's, The Nigger of the 'Narcissus': A Tale of the Sea. Think none of us in that class ever said “nigger” aloud during those discussions? And what about reciting your favorite rap lyrics while driving alone in your car? Think the nigger word never appears in those lyrics? Or maybe you've never listened to and discussed with your friends Richard Prior's great records, like That Nigger's Crazy and Bicentennial Nigger, or his stand-up routines in which he used the nigger word countless times. And what about the famous hip-hop, gansta rappers NWA? Don't tell me white persons never said their name: Niggaz Wit Attitudes. Please, please, please don't bullshit a bullshitter.

Deen should have told the lawyer she could not respond to such an obvious and open-ended trap without clarification or without being able to provide context in her answer. How was the word used and when it was used could be of tremendous importance. When she said that it had been “a very long time” did she mean five years or fifty-five years? Context in her case is critical. But not to the attorney who asked the question or to people calling for her head.

I personally do not know if Deen is a closet racist, overt racist, repentant racist, recovering racist, or never was a racist in the first place. And if she is of the repentant variety why is she being persecuted for past sins? Who out there can cast the first stone? Step forward, please. What I do know is she has been shamelessly railroaded.

What most white people have to come to grips with is we all, almost without exception, have been adversely affected by racism. Whether we fell under its pernicious influence or struggled against it throughout our lives is a critical question. It's also a question Deen was never asked and thus was never able to answer.

As an old white guy, I have said the word, nigger, many times in 70 plus years of life in a great many contexts. But never once did I use it to disparage a black person. Never once in my presence have I tolerated its use as a pejorative. I actively detest racial pejoratives in ordinary conversation. But, if I had been asked the same questions as Deen, I might have responded the same way even though the contexts in which the usage occurred were innocent. Should I be condemned for my use of the word?

Paula Deen has been.

Seeing the Future vs. Living with Uncertainty

Many people imagine they would give almost anything to see what the future holds. For some that means knowing what would happen to them and to those they love. For others it means learning what would happen to the world, the U.S., or places in which they have lived. And a lot of people fantasize about the potential to make a fortune by using knowledge of the future to reap financial windfalls.

I happen to believe we are wonderfully blessed not to have that facility.

For certain, most people’s futures aren't the stuff of Hollywood films. We won’t be discovered by a famous movie director or become the next Lady Gaga or Michael Phelps. Neither will we win the mega-lottery and live a life of luxury. Nor will we make billions by inventing a miracle drug to cure cancer or a robot that walks and talks like a real person and plays better chess than Bobby Fisher.

The truth is many of us have lives that are ordinary and maybe even a little boring. But it is the uncertainty of the future that has driven us to become what we were not at a certain point in our lives. To paraphrase a famous saying, “Uncertainty is the mother of invention.” The problem of knowing the details of our personal future is that if we possessed that knowledge few of us would put out the effort needed to make that future reality.

In the case of my family, our mother never finished high school but our father graduated with a degree in accounting and business from St. Louis University in the heart of the Great Depression. The uncertainty of the future that they had faced became a force in the lives of their children, all three of whom attended college, graduating with bachelors’ and masters’ degrees. In addition, my older brother and I earned PhDs and became university professors and were successful in both public and private sectors. The uncertain future that we lived with as children made us all the more determined to succeed.

For most people, seeing the future would be a curse. It would rob their present of hope, spontaneity, promise, and choice. It would stifle determination and the drive for self-improvement. If we knew the future we would have nothing to dream about, nothing to strive for, and, in a critical way, nothing to live for.

I am convinced that we are much better people as a result of that particular type of blindness. It is because we can’t see the future that ordinary people are driven to become the world’s great success stories. Like Joanne Rowling, who as a single-parent on welfare was diagnosed with clinical depression and contemplated suicide in the months before her manuscript for the first Harry Potter book was finally accepted after being rejected by a dozen publishers. Or William Morris, a college drop-out truck driver who became Dale Chihuly's chief assistant and then a world famous glass artist due to his own tremendous talent. Or Paul Crutzen, who did so poorly on his college entrance exam (due to high fever and illness on exam day) that he was forced to attend a three-year technical institute instead of a four-year university but became a renown atmospheric scientist and was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry. Or Wilma Rudolph, who as a child was afflicted with polio and told by her doctor she would never walk normally and became one of America’s great sprinters, winning three Olympic Gold Medals. Not to mention the countless unsung heroes who struggled against daunting odds to become the successful teachers, firefighters, journalists, nurses, lawyers, electricians, accountants, and engineers among the many others who play essential roles in our lives.

In a critical way, we create a world of enormous possibility because we cannot see the future. And for that blindness we should be thankful.

Why I Disliked Margaret Thatcher

Perhaps a good place to start is Thatcher’s labeling Nelson Mandela a “terrorist” and calling Mandela’s party, the African National Congress, “a typical terrorist organization.” Hard to believe, but true. Add to that tidbit, Thatcher refused to join the worldwide crusade against the racist apartheid regime that ruled the Republic of South Africa with an iron white fist. Those two items should be enough to deflate the bloated balloon that is the current Thatcher mania. Even worse, though, was her support for the Khmer Rouge, a political movement of monsters who murdered somewhere between one and two million Cambodians.

But not all the bad press Thatcher garnered over her lifetime was associated with her role as Prime Minister. When she was Education Secretary she eliminated the school milk program for elementary school children aged seven to eleven and was awarded her first nickname, “Thatcher the Milk Snatcher.” Needless to say, the milk program was intended to improve the nutritional condition of poor children.

Thatcher also instituted what was widely known in England as the poll tax—a tax to fund local government—that resulted in shifting the tax burden from the upper-income toward lower-income Brits  Also among her most unpopular measures was when she was instrumental in cutting the highest individual income tax rate from 83 to 60 percent while raising the lowest rate from 25 to 30 percent. To pay for those cuts, Thatcher nearly doubled the value-added tax, raising it from eight percent to 15 percent, a move that even British conservatives disliked intensely.

Here are two things you should never forget about Thatcher. She was kicked out of office by her own Conservative Party because her policies were unpalatable and unsupportable, even for conservatives. And after Thatcher was booted out of office, she became a paid consultant to Philip Morris, the tobacco company, earning $250,000 per year topped by an annual contribution from Philip Morris of $250,000 to her foundation. A fitting end to her career.