By Edwin Cooney
I think I’m getting old. I must be. It isn’t that I don’t like to argue. It’s just that old arguments get exceedingly boring after awhile.
A few days ago, someone sent me a piece called “Conservatives vs. Liberals,” which I sat down and answered with the idea that I’d use the answers to that commentary as this week’s column. The problem is, I just don’t have the heart for it. Don’t misunderstand me, I can answer these charges with the force of a political blowtorch, it’s just that it really doesn’t matter. It only convinces the convinced. Articles such as the one sent me and responses such as the ones I gave only reinforce. They don’t inform and, even worse, they don’t even come close to teaching. They’re designed to do one of two things: encourage or hurt. That’s all they do.
Okay! Here’s what the Conservatives are saying about Liberals in this piece. I’ve rewritten the complaints here in rather mild form:
Liberals don’t merely dislike guns, they don’t want other people to have them.
Liberal vegetarians want to ban all meat and meat products.
Liberals don’t stand up to foreign enemies, they surrender to them while pretending otherwise.
Homosexual Liberals demand government legitimization as a substitute for self- acceptance.
Liberal blacks and Hispanics want government to protect them rather than standing up on their own.
The Liberal poor expect others to take care of them.
Liberals want to ban talk show hosts they don’t like.
Liberal nonbelievers want to silence believers rather than just letting them alone.
Conservatives insist that they strongly disapprove of government as a solution to any socio/economic problem. Liberals, on the other hand, see government as a legitimate tool for the solving of socio/economic injustices. Ah! But so do Conservatives.
Conservatives want government to:
Put prayer back in the public schools.
Keep marijuana and prostitution out of the “free” market place.
Ban gay and lesbian marriages while at the same time providing economic benefits to traditional marriages.
Provide tax money through the voucher system to private and religious schools (especially Christian schools).
Build lots of prisons as long as they are not in their neighborhoods.
Provide sufficient federal money to large corporations for national defense research and weapons development.
Deregulate Wall Street and all banking operations.
Regulate smut and porn in movies and magazines.
Replace income taxes with a consumer or value-added tax.
Remove restrictions from the acquisition and sale of all guns.
Allow people to make their own choices as to whom to hire, to fire, to associate with or live next to.
In other words, Conservatives, like their Liberal cousins, demand that government reinforce their personal agendas. I remember a time when the federal government’s “top cop” was a Conservative icon. His name was J. Edgar Hoover. Also, I can’t help wondering what 1960 Conservatives would have said had Senator John F. Kennedy suggested giving federal aid to Catholic schools. The major difference between most Conservatives and most Liberals is whether individuals or whether the government should have the greater influence over America’s treasury. In other words, the strategy for Conservative problem solving is privately financed social pressure while the strategy for Liberal problem solving tends to be publicly funded laws.
While most of our “Founding Fathers” were reasonably well off for their time, Patrick Henry and a few others were the exception. Through The Enlightenment they successfully warded off monarchy. The Divine Right of Kings was substituted for the divinity of the people, but for the upper crust of the people (or, if you prefer, of society) that’s the way it was. It hardly could have been otherwise. It wasn’t intentionally exploitive, although there was plenty of exploitation of both slave and free labor from the onset of our republic.
Since FDR, another force has risen. Liberals, most of whom came from the working class, lack the monetary leverage Conservatives traditionally possess for their self-protection and upward mobility. Thus Liberals seek government-backed social affirmation for their inclusive agenda. Conservatives on the other hand utilize private pressure and money in the form of unspoken and unwritten but powerful rules devised to exclude the “riffraff” and sustain the status quo.
Here’s the bottom line. If America is about liberty and justice under law, when are we going to begin to be concerned about the liberty of those who disagree with us at least half as much as we insist on our own self-righteousness? If we insist that someone else is on the “radical” left, then where’s the “near” left? If we insist that someone is on the “wacko” right, where’s the “sane” right? Don’t we, after all is said and done, have an obligation to make ourselves come to grips with this whole idea that what we think is always right and that what someone else thinks is always wrong or, even worse, immoral?
Tell you what. I have the response I had intended to offer right here. If you’d like to see it, all you’ve got to do is ask.
Did I suggest at the outset that I was getting too old for some things? That’s certainly way beyond debate!
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
Monday, October 26, 2009
Monday, October 12, 2009
DISCOVERING THE GREAT DISCOVERER
By Edwin Cooney
CHRISTOPHER WHO?
It’s all a part of our modern befuddlement! First it was “Spiro who?” Then it was “Jimmy who?” However, for the last five hundred years or so, for many Americans it has been “Christopher Columbus who?”
COLUMBUS DAY—JUST ANOTHER DAY?
I don’t know about you, but for me, Columbus Day, when I was growing up, was just another day!
Halloween was much more fun!
On Thanksgiving Day, one ate turkey with all the trimmings.
On Christmas Day, there was baby Jesus and neat presents (except for the clothes, of course).
Valentine’s Day meant cards and candy and maybe a kiss from a sweet little classmate.
George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were bigger men than your daddy, which was why we celebrated their birthdays. Both George and Abe, after all, were born in log cabins which they helped their fathers build.
I mean, they were real folks!
Easter was about resurrection, rabbits, and candy.
Memorial Day and Fourth of July were about soldiers and firecrackers, marshmallows and watermelons.
Labor Day was the last fun picnic day before school.
As for Columbus Day, there were parades, but you very seldom got the day off from school—and besides, who was Christopher Columbus anyway?
In the fall of 1792, about the time President Washington was reluctantly seeking re-election, the New York City Society of St. Tammany celebrated the 300th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America. Not until 1866 and 1869 did the Italian-American communities of New York and San Francisco, respectively, celebrate the man whose name is spelled and pronounced Cristoforo Colombo in Italian and Cristóbal Colón in Spanish.
In 1892, it was just good politics for President Benjamin Harrison to issue a proclamation honoring the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s first great discovery. (Not that it helped much: Harrison lost his bid for a second term to Grover Cleveland, the man he’d beaten four years before.)
In 1905, the state of Colorado began celebrating Columbus Day as a holiday. By 1920, October 12th was annually celebrated just about everywhere as Columbus Day. In 1937, FDR made October 12th a federal holiday. Always seeking to do things bigger and better, in 1968, LBJ made Columbus Day the second Monday in October so that federal workers might use that extra day as part of a long weekend vacation.
WHO WAS CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS?
Sometime between August 26th and October 31st 1451, Christopher Columbus was born the eldest son of Domenico and Susanna Fontanarossa Columbus. He would eventually have three younger brothers, Bartolomeo, to whom he was closest, Giovanni Pellegrino, Giacomo, and a sister Bianchinetta. Most historians believe he was born and raised in Genoa, Italy where his father was a woolen merchant. Christopher and brother Bartolomeo were interested in sailing and fascinated by cartography, the study of maps and charts. It was this fascination that eventually took both Columbus brothers to Portugal which, in the late 1470s, was the world leader in oceanic exploration. While there he met and married Doña Felipa Perestrello e Moniz, the daughter of a wealthy merchant seaman who had sailed with Prince Henry the Navigator. As part of his marriage dowry, Columbus received his late father-in-law’s oceanic maps and ocean current charts. It should be noted that the Columbus brothers had little formal education and had taught themselves Italian, Latin, Greek, Spanish and Portuguese.
The couple was married in 1479 and had their only son Diego in January 1480. By 1485, Felipa was dead. Later that year, rather than merely sticking the five-year-old in a convent, Columbus took Diego to Spain. There, Columbus met Beatriz Enriquez, an orphan who was a weaver, and became her lifelong mate. Although the couple never married, Columbus taught young Diego to think of Beatriz as his mother. In 1488, Christopher and Beatriz had a son Ferdinand. Ferdinand and Diego both became pages to Prince Juan of Spain, son of Ferdinand and Isabella. It was Isabella who would partially finance his four voyages (in 1492, 1493, 1498 and 1502) to the New World.
Although Columbus could be vain, ambitious, and cruel, it is still reasonable to believe that he was usually responsive to the needs and vulnerabilities of those around him. By the time he left Palos, Spain on August 3, 1492 for what he believed would be East Asia, he was typical of the young upwardly-mobile professional of his time.
WHAT DID HE DO?
Although Leif Ericsson and Thorfinn Karlesefni, two Viking explorers, preceded Columbus to the New World by nearly half a millennium, it was timing that made what Christopher Columbus did matter. Columbus’s first voyage began the continuum of exploration that resulted in our comfortable occupancy of 2005 America.
During his first voyage, it is generally acknowledged there was no mistreatment of the native population. He agreed with Queen Isabella that Christian love rather than coercion was the best way to treat the Arawak natives who greeted him on Watling Island, one of the Bahamian Islands, that October 12th 1492. Columbus renamed Watling Island San Salvador. Cuba and Hispaniola were his final two ports of call during his first voyage. Native artifacts, some gold, and even some Indians were the souvenirs which Columbus brought back as gifts for Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand. The queen fell in love with the natives and dressed them in clothes made of the softest velvet!
On his second journey to the New World, Columbus discovered that the thirty-nine men he had left behind at the settlement called Navidad had been killed by the natives for assaulting their women. It may well have been this episode that brought out the harsh side of Christopher Columbus for it was during this second voyage that he became tough on both his own men and the native populations he visited.
Near the close of his third voyage, which began in 1498, the king and queen sent a governor to Hispaniola who was authorized to arrest Columbus and return him to Spain in chains. There were reports of native enslavement as well as physical abuse against both the Spaniards and natives. There is documentation that Columbus ordered some of the enslaved natives to mine for gold under the threat of having their hands chopped off if they were unsuccessful. Finally, there is documentation of sexual enslavement of the native population.
By the time he returned to Spain in November 1504 from his fourth and final voyage, Christopher Columbus had fallen from royal favor. He was no longer Admiral of the Oceans and Seas or Governor of the lands he had visited. This was in part due to complaints about him as an administrator, but there were other factors.
First of all, he was no longer unique. Other explorers had visited the New World on behalf of Spain, Portugal, and England. Maps of the northern and eastern parts of South America had by then revealed that Columbus had not reached the riches of eastern Asia as he had claimed. One of those explorers was an Italian mapmaker named Amerigos Vespucci. It was he and not Christopher Columbus for whom the two American continents would be named.
CELEBRATING CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS!
In evaluating whether or not Columbus’s clear mistreatment of Native Americans or indigenous people should bring about his removal as one of our national heroes, three things should be considered. These are:
(1.) Was his treatment of Native Americans unusual for his time?
(2.) Was his treatment of Native Americans a part of a pattern of treatment followed by others at his specific recommendation?
(3.) Was his accomplishment enough of an historical turning point to make him uniquely significant?
For me, the answer to the first question is, that as horrible and reprehensible as his mistreatment of Native Americans was and as difficult as it is for our modern consciences to stomach, it is instructive to take the following into account:
Great empires such as those of Alexander the Great, Genghis Kahn, the Ottoman Turks, as well as Spain, France, and England advanced via their militaries rather than by their physical and social scientists;
Also, one should consider how Spain, France, and England treated their own people; Columbus’s last voyage was over by 1505 and Britain’s Henry the Eighth hadn’t even begun his thirty-eight year Reign of Terror in England yet; The Catholic Church and the governments of France and Spain hadn’t even begun to draw, quarter, hang, behead or burn any of their political opponents and religious heretics in Columbus’s lifetime; Therefore, why single out Columbus for special condemnation?
The answer to question two is a slam-dunk. Columbus as much as anyone else you want to name is singularly accountable for his own actions and absolutely no one else’s. He didn’t direct or command the actions of either Cortes or Pizzarro. Of course, Columbus’s cruelties are a part of the record of his life, but so are the practices of the religious, political and social mores of the 15th and 16th centuries which most certainly had their effect on his behavior. The days in which Columbus lived were a combination of religion tinged by superstition along with social and political institutions that demanded the absolute submission of the poor and those who were different. This explanation does not excuse Columbus; it includes him in a time that is much beyond our comprehension.
Finally, it was Christopher Columbus who, with his brother Bartolomeo and his two friends Martin and Vicente Pinzo, were ready to command the Santa Maria, the Pinta and the Nina respectively, before anyone else was ready to sail for any other country. Thus began a continuum, not of immorality but of discovery. That is what we celebrate.
By all accounts Christopher Columbus was an excellent father, a considerate and faithful lover, a marvelous brother, and a loyal friend. On top of all that, he was one hell of an explorer.
No way, however, would he ever get my vote for governor!
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
CHRISTOPHER WHO?
It’s all a part of our modern befuddlement! First it was “Spiro who?” Then it was “Jimmy who?” However, for the last five hundred years or so, for many Americans it has been “Christopher Columbus who?”
COLUMBUS DAY—JUST ANOTHER DAY?
I don’t know about you, but for me, Columbus Day, when I was growing up, was just another day!
Halloween was much more fun!
On Thanksgiving Day, one ate turkey with all the trimmings.
On Christmas Day, there was baby Jesus and neat presents (except for the clothes, of course).
Valentine’s Day meant cards and candy and maybe a kiss from a sweet little classmate.
George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were bigger men than your daddy, which was why we celebrated their birthdays. Both George and Abe, after all, were born in log cabins which they helped their fathers build.
I mean, they were real folks!
Easter was about resurrection, rabbits, and candy.
Memorial Day and Fourth of July were about soldiers and firecrackers, marshmallows and watermelons.
Labor Day was the last fun picnic day before school.
As for Columbus Day, there were parades, but you very seldom got the day off from school—and besides, who was Christopher Columbus anyway?
In the fall of 1792, about the time President Washington was reluctantly seeking re-election, the New York City Society of St. Tammany celebrated the 300th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America. Not until 1866 and 1869 did the Italian-American communities of New York and San Francisco, respectively, celebrate the man whose name is spelled and pronounced Cristoforo Colombo in Italian and Cristóbal Colón in Spanish.
In 1892, it was just good politics for President Benjamin Harrison to issue a proclamation honoring the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s first great discovery. (Not that it helped much: Harrison lost his bid for a second term to Grover Cleveland, the man he’d beaten four years before.)
In 1905, the state of Colorado began celebrating Columbus Day as a holiday. By 1920, October 12th was annually celebrated just about everywhere as Columbus Day. In 1937, FDR made October 12th a federal holiday. Always seeking to do things bigger and better, in 1968, LBJ made Columbus Day the second Monday in October so that federal workers might use that extra day as part of a long weekend vacation.
WHO WAS CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS?
Sometime between August 26th and October 31st 1451, Christopher Columbus was born the eldest son of Domenico and Susanna Fontanarossa Columbus. He would eventually have three younger brothers, Bartolomeo, to whom he was closest, Giovanni Pellegrino, Giacomo, and a sister Bianchinetta. Most historians believe he was born and raised in Genoa, Italy where his father was a woolen merchant. Christopher and brother Bartolomeo were interested in sailing and fascinated by cartography, the study of maps and charts. It was this fascination that eventually took both Columbus brothers to Portugal which, in the late 1470s, was the world leader in oceanic exploration. While there he met and married Doña Felipa Perestrello e Moniz, the daughter of a wealthy merchant seaman who had sailed with Prince Henry the Navigator. As part of his marriage dowry, Columbus received his late father-in-law’s oceanic maps and ocean current charts. It should be noted that the Columbus brothers had little formal education and had taught themselves Italian, Latin, Greek, Spanish and Portuguese.
The couple was married in 1479 and had their only son Diego in January 1480. By 1485, Felipa was dead. Later that year, rather than merely sticking the five-year-old in a convent, Columbus took Diego to Spain. There, Columbus met Beatriz Enriquez, an orphan who was a weaver, and became her lifelong mate. Although the couple never married, Columbus taught young Diego to think of Beatriz as his mother. In 1488, Christopher and Beatriz had a son Ferdinand. Ferdinand and Diego both became pages to Prince Juan of Spain, son of Ferdinand and Isabella. It was Isabella who would partially finance his four voyages (in 1492, 1493, 1498 and 1502) to the New World.
Although Columbus could be vain, ambitious, and cruel, it is still reasonable to believe that he was usually responsive to the needs and vulnerabilities of those around him. By the time he left Palos, Spain on August 3, 1492 for what he believed would be East Asia, he was typical of the young upwardly-mobile professional of his time.
WHAT DID HE DO?
Although Leif Ericsson and Thorfinn Karlesefni, two Viking explorers, preceded Columbus to the New World by nearly half a millennium, it was timing that made what Christopher Columbus did matter. Columbus’s first voyage began the continuum of exploration that resulted in our comfortable occupancy of 2005 America.
During his first voyage, it is generally acknowledged there was no mistreatment of the native population. He agreed with Queen Isabella that Christian love rather than coercion was the best way to treat the Arawak natives who greeted him on Watling Island, one of the Bahamian Islands, that October 12th 1492. Columbus renamed Watling Island San Salvador. Cuba and Hispaniola were his final two ports of call during his first voyage. Native artifacts, some gold, and even some Indians were the souvenirs which Columbus brought back as gifts for Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand. The queen fell in love with the natives and dressed them in clothes made of the softest velvet!
On his second journey to the New World, Columbus discovered that the thirty-nine men he had left behind at the settlement called Navidad had been killed by the natives for assaulting their women. It may well have been this episode that brought out the harsh side of Christopher Columbus for it was during this second voyage that he became tough on both his own men and the native populations he visited.
Near the close of his third voyage, which began in 1498, the king and queen sent a governor to Hispaniola who was authorized to arrest Columbus and return him to Spain in chains. There were reports of native enslavement as well as physical abuse against both the Spaniards and natives. There is documentation that Columbus ordered some of the enslaved natives to mine for gold under the threat of having their hands chopped off if they were unsuccessful. Finally, there is documentation of sexual enslavement of the native population.
By the time he returned to Spain in November 1504 from his fourth and final voyage, Christopher Columbus had fallen from royal favor. He was no longer Admiral of the Oceans and Seas or Governor of the lands he had visited. This was in part due to complaints about him as an administrator, but there were other factors.
First of all, he was no longer unique. Other explorers had visited the New World on behalf of Spain, Portugal, and England. Maps of the northern and eastern parts of South America had by then revealed that Columbus had not reached the riches of eastern Asia as he had claimed. One of those explorers was an Italian mapmaker named Amerigos Vespucci. It was he and not Christopher Columbus for whom the two American continents would be named.
CELEBRATING CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS!
In evaluating whether or not Columbus’s clear mistreatment of Native Americans or indigenous people should bring about his removal as one of our national heroes, three things should be considered. These are:
(1.) Was his treatment of Native Americans unusual for his time?
(2.) Was his treatment of Native Americans a part of a pattern of treatment followed by others at his specific recommendation?
(3.) Was his accomplishment enough of an historical turning point to make him uniquely significant?
For me, the answer to the first question is, that as horrible and reprehensible as his mistreatment of Native Americans was and as difficult as it is for our modern consciences to stomach, it is instructive to take the following into account:
Great empires such as those of Alexander the Great, Genghis Kahn, the Ottoman Turks, as well as Spain, France, and England advanced via their militaries rather than by their physical and social scientists;
Also, one should consider how Spain, France, and England treated their own people; Columbus’s last voyage was over by 1505 and Britain’s Henry the Eighth hadn’t even begun his thirty-eight year Reign of Terror in England yet; The Catholic Church and the governments of France and Spain hadn’t even begun to draw, quarter, hang, behead or burn any of their political opponents and religious heretics in Columbus’s lifetime; Therefore, why single out Columbus for special condemnation?
The answer to question two is a slam-dunk. Columbus as much as anyone else you want to name is singularly accountable for his own actions and absolutely no one else’s. He didn’t direct or command the actions of either Cortes or Pizzarro. Of course, Columbus’s cruelties are a part of the record of his life, but so are the practices of the religious, political and social mores of the 15th and 16th centuries which most certainly had their effect on his behavior. The days in which Columbus lived were a combination of religion tinged by superstition along with social and political institutions that demanded the absolute submission of the poor and those who were different. This explanation does not excuse Columbus; it includes him in a time that is much beyond our comprehension.
Finally, it was Christopher Columbus who, with his brother Bartolomeo and his two friends Martin and Vicente Pinzo, were ready to command the Santa Maria, the Pinta and the Nina respectively, before anyone else was ready to sail for any other country. Thus began a continuum, not of immorality but of discovery. That is what we celebrate.
By all accounts Christopher Columbus was an excellent father, a considerate and faithful lover, a marvelous brother, and a loyal friend. On top of all that, he was one hell of an explorer.
No way, however, would he ever get my vote for governor!
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
Monday, October 5, 2009
AH! HERE’S OCTOBER!
By Edwin Cooney
In the midst of controversial and momentous national decisions and events, sometimes it’s refreshing to be frivolous. So, here goes!
I really like it when October rolls around. Even though Thanksgiving (my favorite annual holiday), Christmas, and New Year’s Day all loom with promises of happy gatherings and gifts of love and mutual goodwill, October remains for me the happiest time of the year. The reason is simple: October is for me a month of eventful anticipation. October is crammed full of enjoyable events, zesty tastes and smells, crispy sounds, and stimulating textures along with the anticipation of the happy holidays in November, December and January that are just ahead.
What better feeling is there than happy anticipation? Anticipation, as I see it, is that invigorating force that energizes the mind and spirit sufficiently enabling you and me to derive meaning from our lives. Additionally, October is the first really serious month of the Fall season. September is gentle, but in October, fall gets brisker without giving in to winter. In the Northeast and upper Midwest there is the fall foliage. Canadians celebrate their Thanksgiving Day holiday the second Monday in October and all of North America celebrates throughout the month with hayrides, October fests and, finally, Halloween.
Six American presidents have October birthdays, more than in any other month:
Jimmy Carter was born on October 1, 1924 -- the first president born in a hospital;
Rutherford B. Hayes was born on October 4, 1822 -- the second president born in Ohio;
Chester Alan Arthur was born on October 5, 1829 -- although Arthur was born in Fairfield, Vermont, his American place of birth was as controversial as President Obama’s is with political opponents;
Dwight D. (Ike) Eisenhower was born on October 14, 1890 -- the first president born in Texas (sorry, LBJ!);
Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt was born on October 27, 1858 -- the only president born in New York City);
John Adams was born on October 30, 1735 -- the first president born in Massachusetts.
October means shakedown time for NFL upstarts, the opening of the basketball and hockey seasons, and, of course, the baseball playoffs and World Series. Of course, the “World Series” has never really been a “world” series except the times when Canada’s Toronto Blue Jays played and won the 1992 and 1993 World Series over Atlanta and Philadelphia respectively.
Like every other month, October has had its momentous occasions. In 1964, the Soviet Politburo wrenched power from Nikita Khrushchev sending him into forced retirement and replacing him with Leonid Brezhnev. That same October of 1964, the Chinese government exploded its first atomic bomb while, in Britain, Labor Party leader Harold Wilson defeated Conservative Party leader Sir Alec Douglas-Holme thus becoming Labor’s second Prime Minister.
On Friday, October 4, 1957, while the attention of most Americans was focused on the New York Yankees/Milwaukee Braves World Series (which that day was tied at one game apiece), Russia seemed to rock the soul of America by beating her into space with the launching of Sputnik One. Much of the population was suffering from an “Asian flu” epidemic at the time, but that was no excuse. Not even President Eisenhower, popular as he was, could convince most Americans that Russia’s success in space wasn’t as serious to our national security as many feared. Of course, Ike knew we were spying on the Soviets with the CIA’s U-2 flight program, but naturally, “mum” had to be the word on that!
Of course, every month has something to offer. April showers do bring May flowers and June is the month for brides and grooms. The Ides of March still hold drama and mystery for those on the verge of making big decisions, especially political or life-changing ones. January is always new and February is the month for candy and Valentine’s Day hugs and kisses. July is our national birthday and August is vacation month for many. September brings the new school year and television season, while November and December provide festivals of gratitude to nature and nature’s God for our many blessings.
For me, however, it’s October that stands head and shoulders above all other months on the calendar. October sweeps away the past and invites the future. The senses, sounds and smells of October are crisp as if to awaken us sufficiently to grapple with Jack Frost who will soon be making his entrance.
Mostly, however, there is that invigorating sense of anticipation which assures me that there exists a sufficient supply of strength, energy and wisdom to carry you, me and all we cherish through to those beckoning Octobers yet to come.
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
In the midst of controversial and momentous national decisions and events, sometimes it’s refreshing to be frivolous. So, here goes!
I really like it when October rolls around. Even though Thanksgiving (my favorite annual holiday), Christmas, and New Year’s Day all loom with promises of happy gatherings and gifts of love and mutual goodwill, October remains for me the happiest time of the year. The reason is simple: October is for me a month of eventful anticipation. October is crammed full of enjoyable events, zesty tastes and smells, crispy sounds, and stimulating textures along with the anticipation of the happy holidays in November, December and January that are just ahead.
What better feeling is there than happy anticipation? Anticipation, as I see it, is that invigorating force that energizes the mind and spirit sufficiently enabling you and me to derive meaning from our lives. Additionally, October is the first really serious month of the Fall season. September is gentle, but in October, fall gets brisker without giving in to winter. In the Northeast and upper Midwest there is the fall foliage. Canadians celebrate their Thanksgiving Day holiday the second Monday in October and all of North America celebrates throughout the month with hayrides, October fests and, finally, Halloween.
Six American presidents have October birthdays, more than in any other month:
Jimmy Carter was born on October 1, 1924 -- the first president born in a hospital;
Rutherford B. Hayes was born on October 4, 1822 -- the second president born in Ohio;
Chester Alan Arthur was born on October 5, 1829 -- although Arthur was born in Fairfield, Vermont, his American place of birth was as controversial as President Obama’s is with political opponents;
Dwight D. (Ike) Eisenhower was born on October 14, 1890 -- the first president born in Texas (sorry, LBJ!);
Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt was born on October 27, 1858 -- the only president born in New York City);
John Adams was born on October 30, 1735 -- the first president born in Massachusetts.
October means shakedown time for NFL upstarts, the opening of the basketball and hockey seasons, and, of course, the baseball playoffs and World Series. Of course, the “World Series” has never really been a “world” series except the times when Canada’s Toronto Blue Jays played and won the 1992 and 1993 World Series over Atlanta and Philadelphia respectively.
Like every other month, October has had its momentous occasions. In 1964, the Soviet Politburo wrenched power from Nikita Khrushchev sending him into forced retirement and replacing him with Leonid Brezhnev. That same October of 1964, the Chinese government exploded its first atomic bomb while, in Britain, Labor Party leader Harold Wilson defeated Conservative Party leader Sir Alec Douglas-Holme thus becoming Labor’s second Prime Minister.
On Friday, October 4, 1957, while the attention of most Americans was focused on the New York Yankees/Milwaukee Braves World Series (which that day was tied at one game apiece), Russia seemed to rock the soul of America by beating her into space with the launching of Sputnik One. Much of the population was suffering from an “Asian flu” epidemic at the time, but that was no excuse. Not even President Eisenhower, popular as he was, could convince most Americans that Russia’s success in space wasn’t as serious to our national security as many feared. Of course, Ike knew we were spying on the Soviets with the CIA’s U-2 flight program, but naturally, “mum” had to be the word on that!
Of course, every month has something to offer. April showers do bring May flowers and June is the month for brides and grooms. The Ides of March still hold drama and mystery for those on the verge of making big decisions, especially political or life-changing ones. January is always new and February is the month for candy and Valentine’s Day hugs and kisses. July is our national birthday and August is vacation month for many. September brings the new school year and television season, while November and December provide festivals of gratitude to nature and nature’s God for our many blessings.
For me, however, it’s October that stands head and shoulders above all other months on the calendar. October sweeps away the past and invites the future. The senses, sounds and smells of October are crisp as if to awaken us sufficiently to grapple with Jack Frost who will soon be making his entrance.
Mostly, however, there is that invigorating sense of anticipation which assures me that there exists a sufficient supply of strength, energy and wisdom to carry you, me and all we cherish through to those beckoning Octobers yet to come.
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
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