CHANGING CIRCUMSTANCES—EQUALLY TRUE AND EQUALLY TRAGIC

Updating an essay from December 3, 2007

By Edwin Cooney

His whole name is Raymond Charles Bunde—although it’s a good bet that his La Vernia, Texas friends call him Ray.  He’s eighty-three years old and to many in south Texas he’s quite a hero these days.

Last September 28^th—a Friday—around one thirty p.m., Ray Bunde heard a loud noise at the home of his next door neighbor.  Knowing his neighbor was at work, Ray Bunde decided it would only be the neighborly thing to do to investigate the goings on at his neighbor’s abode.

Taking along his 12 gauge shotgun, Ray got into his vehicle and drove around to his neighbor’s house.  Upon arrival, he noticed two things immediately:  there was a strange vehicle in the driveway and his neighbor’s front door was kicked in.  Blocking the strange vehicle with his own, Ray Bunde alighted from his car with his trusty 12 gauge.  Next, he shouted for those who were inside to come out.  They complied.

One of the two men, twenty-four-year-old Steven Christopher Muniz, ran.  The other, twenty-three-year-old Dustin Brandon Houston—according to Ray Bunde—got into his vehicle and tried to run Bunde down.

Mr. Bunde discharged his 12 gauge just once and the shot found its mark hitting Houston in the head and killing him instantly.  Muniz was picked up later that evening at his San Antonio home.  Authorities found stolen goods—presumably at the homes of both Muniz and the now late Dustin Houston.  Wilson County Sheriff Joe Tackitt Jr. said that, according to friends, Houston and Muniz had bragged earlier that day that they would spend the day doing burglaries in Wilson County.  Hence, it appeared that with a single shot, eighty-three-year-old Raymond Charles Bunde had made his neighbors in and around La Vernia and Wilson County, Texas at least temporarily free from the tyranny of marauders.

Under Texas law, Raymond Charles Bunde will not be charged with the death of Dustin Brandon Houston.

So, is Ray Bunde a hero?  Sure he is… but can we afford to rely on heroics for our safety and security? Whatever differences you and I may have—as friend to friend or budding columnist to reader—I’m sure that we do not disagree over whether such a crime ought to be prevented or punished.  Nor would you and I disagree as to the cruelty, stupidity or selfishness of those who have committed crimes such as those described above.

The question therefore is:  who should do the “crime prevention” and who should do the punishing once a crime is committed?

It’s hard to be against people being safe and it’s even harder to be anything less than outraged by the utterly selfish and cruel methods of the mugger or the burglar.  Any person who indulges in thievery or deadly intimidation of any kind has a twisted idea of right and wrong and ought to be severely punished via separation from society.

When I was growing up, I believed (because I thought this belief was held by most of the responsible adults I knew) that if anyone invaded one’s home for the purpose of burglary or for any other reason, the occupant of that home had the right to kill that individual—no questions asked.  Such an idea seemed perfectly reasonable to me then. After all, I reasoned, if I’m going to invade someone’s home to rob or intimidate them, can I reasonably expect not to be confronted by deadly force?

I even remember hearing former President Eisenhower assert that if he caught someone invading his house “I feel I gotta go after ‘em.  It’s called hot pursuit—that’s what it is,” said Ike.

Only later did I hear people asking such questions as:

Since when was theft or burglary punishable by death?

What does it say about us if we insist that material possessions are equally as valuable as someone’s life?

If citizens are given the right to kill robbers or burglars, why bother having a police force?

As was the case with the supposed right to kill an uninvited home invader bent on robbery or physical mayhem, the above three questions also seemed reasonable to me when I heard them.

I don’t like guns any better than I like gas chambers, electric chairs, gallows or deadly needles and I’m definitely of the opinion that the National Rifle Association is far more interested in selling fire arms than in protecting my safety or your liberty.  Having said that, it’s impossible for me to tell homeowners or renters that they must face a home invader’s deadly weapon armed only with the victim’s plea for mercy.

I strongly sympathize with people’s outrage over the violation of their homes and personhood by the twisted ideas of twisted legitimacy.  However, I’m not sure I like vigilante justice either.

On March 31^st, 2006, I wrote a column making my opposition to capital punishment very clear.  However, I allowed that there is one justification for killing.  That justification, I asserted, was the prevention of the taking of an innocent life that was immediately being threatened.  Hence my sympathy—with some serious reservations—about citizen concealed gun carrying permit laws.  Here are a few of those reservations.

Isn’t it just possible that more guns in the hands of more people will be costly beyond our expectations?  I’m at a local restaurant, my trusty little hand gun in a shoulder holster under my coat.  I see a man proceed to the cash register and pull something silver from his pocket.  Even though it’s only his key ring, or perhaps a silver calculator or cell phone, I decide it’s his trusty little hand gun.  My first shot misses him and enters the chest of the sweet little lady behind the register passing through her spinal column.  My second shot hits its target in the chest as the man with the keys turns to look toward the direction from where he heard my first shot.  My intention was to prevent a robbery, but I end up killing the man with the keys and perhaps permanently paralyzing the cashier.  Meanwhile, the brother of the gentleman I just shot is still seated at his table with his powerful little piece and he immediately takes care of me.  Next to me sits my son and he’s now got a score to settle.  His first shot hits a little two-year-old and his second shot gets the guy who got me.  The two-year-old’s daddy of course now has a sad score to settle and he’s equipped to settle it.  The score after all the shooting is done is five dead, one paralyzed with no robbery ever intended.

Those sure of the justice of these new laws will of course say the above is absurd and extremely unlikely.  They might keep two things in mind, however.  More guns inevitably mean more gunplay and the more gunplay, the more likely gunplay tragedy will occur.

Many years ago, when I lived in Attica, New York, a prison town, I occasionally rode the bus from nearby Batavia to Rochester with men just released from Attica State Prison.  One day, a newly released prisoner told me, as our bus headed eastward toward Rochester, that he’d been in prison for robbery.  He also told me that while most robbers carry “pieces,” those “pieces” were very often not loaded.  “The last thing most of us want,” he told me, “is to get shot or to add murder to the crime we’ve decided to commit.”

Well, that made sense to me, too.  However, my seatmate was obviously willing to use intimidation to his advantage.  So, therein lies the problem.  Who gets to intimidate and how effective is intimidation?  Are trained personnel or is the average John Doe better qualified to effectively counter criminal intimidation?

Finally, proponents of expanded gun ownership insist that more guns in the hands of law abiding people will “send a message” to potential lawbreakers that they’ll face greater deadly force should they persist with “gun play.”  This force is supposed to deter such potential evil.  I don’t believe that most potential lawbreakers are capable of understanding such messages.  Meanwhile, the public’s safety may well be endangered far more by would-be law enforcers than by determined self-indulgent criminals.

Here’s something else to consider in the wake of an ever increasing insistence on the part of some that more arms will increase public safety.  How many lousy drivers do you see on the road every day?  Would you or I really be safer if even half of those drivers are armed?  Even trained law enforcement personnel often miss their targets.  How accurate do you suppose a lousy driver is likely to be with a gun?  Wow! What would road rage be like then?  Irresponsible drivers are dangerous enough!  Imagine a freeway full of armed school teachers and college professors on their way to work!!  True, such a proposition may well terrorize a terrorist but we’d all be insane if such a condition doesn’t terrorize the rest of us.

The assumption that lawbreakers only break laws because they think they can get away with it, I believe, is unintentionally misleading.  It’s my experience—secondhand of course—that law breakers, like the lovelorn, consider themselves the helpless or entrapped victims of fate or personal injustice.  Hence, driven to their desperation by what they perceive as outrageous fortune, they believe that any behavior that relieves their emotional tension is justifiable.

So, you ask, where does this information take us?  Unfortunately, to the realization of how little we are capable of comprehending one another’s anxieties or needs.  Obviously, the public sees no advantage to digging deeper into the minds of societal losers and those very losers are incapable of understanding anyone’s pain but their own.

Therefore, despite our righteous and everlasting outrage, we’re all left with the status quo.  In life, even when we change our approach, so much is risky, equally true—sadly, equally tragic.

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY

‘TIS THE SEASON!

By Edwin Cooney

Deck the halls with boughs of holly, Fa la la la la, la la la la,

Tis the season to be jolly, Fa la la la la, la la la la

It’s that time again—and I love it.  Perhaps a little of the magic dwindles over the years, but only the tiniest bit of it.

I don’t anticipate where Santa might be at any hour on Christmas Eve anymore -- but I know he’s surely somewhere.

Mary, Joseph and the Christ child, Christmas carols, Santa Claus, stockings, Christmas cookies with hot chocolate or fruit juice are as much a part of my boyhood as the turkey on Thanksgiving, Jack O’Lanterns, doughnuts and apple cider on Halloween, and the importance of the baseball World Series. So since I believe that the history of a nation is the sum of all of our life experiences, I thought it might be entertaining as well as instructive to visit, however sketchily, the history of Christmas in America.

Most of us like to think that Christmas is as American as Christopher Columbus (who isn’t at all American), the Pilgrims, Ben Franklin and George Washington. However, such is not the case!

As you’ll recall, Massachusetts was settled first by the Pilgrims or Separatists (who wanted to separate totally from the Anglican Church) and then by the Puritans whose aim was to purify rather than leave the Anglican Church.

The Puritans, who became dominant in Massachusetts over the Separatists, eventually took over in England under Oliver Cromwell during the 1650s. They banned the celebration of Christmas partly because it was practiced by the former royalists and partly because they considered it a symbol of Popery, a leading characteristic of the much unreconstructed and therefore maligned Roman Catholic Church of that day.

By the 1660s, the Puritans had lost power in London and throughout the rest of England, but they were very much in power in Boston as well as throughout the rest of Massachusetts.  Thus, Christmas was officially banned in Boston between 1659 and 1681.  It should be noted however that while Christmas was banned in Massachusetts, it was celebrated in both the Virginia and the New York colonies.

After the British monarchy was restored, Christmas was once again celebrated in England although its restoration in Massachusetts took another twenty-one years.  Once William and Mary took over as more or less equal partners as British monarchs in 1688 and Catholicism was on the decline there, Christmas began to be practiced in a more secular way in Britain.

One of the casualties of our Revolutionary War at the hands of our founding fathers, incidentally, was Christmas.  Christmas in the era of Patrick Henry, Ben Franklin, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, et al, was considered an English holiday and was, publicly at least, unwelcome in the hallowed halls of liberty until the mid-nineteenth century.

Three writers, Washington Irving and Clement Clarke Moore -- both Americans -- and Charles Dickens -- an Englishman -- were primarily responsible for introducing Christmas as a family holiday to the American people.

Washington Irving, who traveled and wrote extensively from both Europe and Britain, published short Christmas stories in “The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon” as well as a story entitled “Old Christmas” during the late 1820s and early 1830s.

Most significant was the 1822 poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” attributed to Clement Clarke Moore and Charles Dickens’ 1842 story “A Christmas Carol.”

Americans, with their eternal love of the underdog and sympathy for the reformed, fell hard for Mr. Dickens’ Bob Crachit and the crippled Tiny Tim, and readily forgave old Ebenezer Scrooge once he’d seen the error of his ways and showered the Crachit family with gifts and plenty of Christmas cheer.

As for Clement Moore’s Santa Claus, everyone could identify with a little old white bearded man whose little round belly “shook when he laughed” and whose pipe smoke “encircled his head like a wreath” as he joyfully delivered toys to little children.

Santa was everyone’s idea of Grandpa!

By the 1850s, German and Irish immigration had changed the face of America’s largest cities and had, most notably, tapped the strongest American incentive: the profit motive.

Thus, Christmas was truly on its way in America -- led, of course, by Santa Claus!

Information describing how American presidents historically have celebrated Christmas is a bit sketchy.  Apparently, Thomas Jefferson, despite his contempt for Britain and all its institutions and traditions (including Christmas) did privately celebrate Christmas at the White House in 1805.  Andrew Jackson was said to have held private family Christmas celebrations as well.

The first president to set up a Christmas tree in the White House was Franklin Pierce.  Franklin Pierce, the once handsome and energetic Democratic presidential candidate known as “Young Hickory of the Granite Hills” (after the great Democrat Andrew Jackson) was by then a listless, defensive, melancholy and defeated incumbent President.  The year was 1856.  Franklin and Jane Pierce were spending their last unhappy months in the White House.  Tragically childless by now and heavily burdened by political and administrative misjudgments, President Pierce purchased the first White House Christmas tree for the children of his Sunday school class.

Christmas was declared a federal holiday in 1870.  It would be hard to imagine that President Ulysses S. Grant didn’t have something to say about that, but so far I haven’t found any reference to President Grant in the accounts of the establishment of Christmas as a federal holiday.

In 1889, President Benjamin Harrison installed a tree lit with candles on the second floor of the White House.  He also purchased turkeys and gloves for members of the White House staff.

In 1895, First Lady Frances Cleveland attached the first electric lights to the White House Christmas tree.

In 1923, President Calvin Coolidge began the tradition of a National Christmas tree on the White House lawn.  The following year, sadness prevailed at the White House despite President Coolidge’s re-election, due to the death from blood poisoning of President and Mrs. Coolidge’s sixteen-year-old son Calvin Jr. the previous July.  Nevertheless, the ceremony was held with the participation of Calvin and Grace Coolidge.

Jacqueline Kennedy began the Christmas theme for the National Christmas tree in 1961 by decorating it with figures from Tchaikovsky’s ballet “The Nutcracker”.

In 2001, Laura Bush’s theme was “Home For the Holidays” which used replicas of the homes of previous presidents.

What do you suppose this all means? What do the forces of religion, politics and commercialism say about what we do?  Which one of these forces has had the greatest beneficial effect on our celebration of Christmas?  Which one of these forces has had the most detrimental effect?

The answers to the above questions I’ll leave up to you.  However, I’ll close this week’s effort with my favorite presidential Christmas story.

It was December of 1921 and President Warren G. Harding faced a dilemma, a struggle between his conscience and his need to be politically effective.  A small town Republican, he was sensitive to and even shared the suspicions of his fellow townsmen of what might be called foreign ideologies.

As president, possessing the pardoning power as he did, Warren Harding had received pleas for the release of Socialist party presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs from federal prison.  Debs had been convicted during the “Great War” of sedition for public opposition to the war once it had been declared by Congress and signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson.

Now the war was over.  Since the League of Nations had been rejected by the Senate in 1919 and again in 1920, the U.S. government under the direction of Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes had negotiated a separate peace treaty with Germany which President Harding had signed during a golf game the previous July.

Thus, Mr. Debs was no longer a threat to America’s national security.  However, many of the president’s closest friends and political advisors were dead set against any sympathy for Debs whom they strongly believed had deliberately undermined the patriotic efforts of those who had made the “supreme sacrifice” in France during the war.  To them, Debs as a labor leader was little more than a life long troublemaker inspired lately by foreign ideologies and interests.  One of those who drove home that point most vigorously was the president’s personal hometown buddy Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty.  (Note:  Mr. Daugherty himself would need presidential tolerance within a few years once he was indicted in the Teapot Dome scandal).

For President Harding, however, the question was whether or not justice would be further served by keeping a 66-year-old pacifist in jail or whether the spirit of Christmas required him to be charitable.  Earlier in 1921, outgoing President Woodrow Wilson had bitterly rejected pleas for Debs’ pardon.

Christmas was on a Sunday in 1921 thereby giving the celebration of the birth of Christ a special intensity.  About the 20^th of December, President Harding had made up his mind.  Attorney General Daugherty was called in and told to prepare the necessary papers.  They were prepared and sent to the federal prison in Atlanta.

By lunchtime on Friday, December 23^rd, Eugene Victor Debs was in President Harding’s office.  Shortly thereafter, Mr. Debs was home.

When asked why he had pardoned Debs, the President is said to have replied in words similar to these:  “At Christmas time, a peaceful man ought to be home with his wife.”

While it is true that the pardon didn’t reinstate Mr. Debs’ citizenship to allow him to vote or seek public office as before, he could act as a political consultant, write, and lecture.  Most significant, thanks to the conscience and humanity of Warren Gamaliel Harding, Eugene Victor Debs was once again a free man.

If any president has given a gift more noble and worthy of the spirit of Christmas, I haven’t heard of it.

Christmas, wow! What a season!!!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY

MY IDEAL 2016 PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE

By Edwin Cooney

As those of you who regularly read these pages know, I’m an unapologetic Barack Obama man!  He’d be my candidate in 2016, even with his imperfections, were he eligible for re-election.  As I see it, his accomplishments, fundamental in nature, far outweigh his misjudgments and his mistakes.

Like most of my fellow citizens, I’m not looking for an idealist as much as I’m looking for a problem solver.  The fundamental problem with our national leadership today is that it is so wrapped up in political ideology, that it has lost touch with what the people worry about most.  Hence, the political path to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. is wide open to candidates such as Donald J. Trump and Dr. Ben Carson.  Here are the problems and solutions my candidate will tackle and apply once in the White House.

Let’s begin with ISIL.  We have two legitimate concerns in the Middle East.  The first concern is the safety and security of the state of Israel.  The continuous availability of oil is the second.  ISIL is an international problem, not merely an American problem.  President Obama is right about that!  My candidate will insist that we reassure Israel that anyone who seeks to “push her into the sea” will be so pushed by us.  At the same time, Israel needs to start living up to her faith and be treating Palestinian refugees the way she knows in her heart that they ought to be treated.  As for ISIL, my candidate will keep American troops out of the area and act, as FDR once did for a time, as the arsenal of Democracy.  More to the point, let “bad Vlad Putin” handle ISIL.  A number of Muslims in the former Soviet Republics have more scores to settle with Mr. Putin and his warmed-over Communism than they do with us.  As Teddy Roosevelt suggested long ago, Americans ought to “…speak softly and carry a big stick.”

Here at home, the problem of gun ownership is going from bad to worse.  Let’s stop fooling around with gun ownership.  Let anyone who wants to own a gun own one.  However, let’s start treating the ownership of guns as we do the ownership of cigarettes and tobacco products and tax the hell out of their sales.  How about a one thousand dollar tax on every handgun and a five thousand dollar tax on every rifle and shotgun?  What will be interesting to watch is the response many conservatives have to such a proposal.  After all, many of those same conservatives joined liberals in support of banning public smoking.  If public smoking is dangerous, isn’t public gunfire downright catastrophic?

The issue of immigration is largely an educational one.  Most Americans don’t distinguish between immigrants and refugees (although they should).  Even worse, too many Americans apply religious tests depending on the color and culture of the immigrant or of the refugee.  Historically, Muslims aren’t any more dangerous to our unity and security than Baptists.  (In case you want to look it up, the gravest historical threat to our national unity was not led by Muslims. The Confederate States of America was led by Protestants who demonstrated in more ways than one that they were more Confederate than they were religious.)  Even more to the point, I don’t recall any demand to deny the admission of Protestants or Catholics to the United States during the Irish/British terrorism of the 1970s through the 1990s.  My candidate will recognize that ISIL is a gang of international criminals.  He/she will work to dampen down the public fears rather than exploiting them as we have seen just lately.

As for national healthcare, it’s time that we institute a full single payer system as they have in Europe.  No one should be denied medical care because they can’t afford it.  If we are willing to pay for weapons systems we will never need, as we have in the past, it is downright immoral not to pay for medical assistance even for the least of us.  Come to think of it, I never heard a political advocate of a strong national defense assert that the poorest and weakest among us shouldn’t be protected by the B-1 bomber or the MX missile. So, if it is legitimate to protect the poorest or least productive of us from foreign nuclear destruction, why isn’t it equally both moral and essential to protect the least of us from catastrophic illness?

There you have a taste of my ideal candidate’s approach to issues both domestic and foreign.  Now, where might I find that candidate?

I looked under my bed this morning and he/she wasn’t there!  Who might that candidate be?

Perhaps it ought to be you!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY

A TIMELY RETROSPECT

By Edwin Cooney

If I had a nickel, perhaps even a penny, for the number of times I’ve heard or read someone assert that our December 8th, 1941 entrance into World War II was the last “war declared by Congress that united the nation,” I think I’d be rather wealthy!

Today, December 7th, 2015, is the 74th anniversary of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and the last time we went to war as prescribed by the Constitution of the United States.  A glance backward definitely leaves the immediate impression that we were united, which we were temporarily, but that unity was only surface deep.  For example, the war didn’t make Republicans unsay all of those nasty things they were saying about President Franklin Roosevelt. Nor did World War II address either civil rights or civil liberty issues.  The internment of Japanese Americans in fact violated Americans’ civil liberties almost as much as had slavery and the Jim Crow South. The fact that the government almost totally ran the economy providing subsidies to large industries thus bringing about an end to the Great Depression didn’t bring about peace between management and labor or among powerful elements that foster domestic political division in the United States.

True, the isolationists led by Charles A. Lindbergh, Senators Robert Taft, Burton K. Wheeler, and William Borah were effectively silenced in the face of the Pearl Harbor emergency, but after the war the isolationists would stir up trouble for both Presidents Truman and Eisenhower as they cast nasty interpretations on FDR’s political and personal legacy. Thus, the 74th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor comes at a time when much of America is experiencing both uncertainty and panic in the face of ISIS’s seemingly ever-increasing barbarism.  The most immediate question that comes to mind is: what lesson did we learn from the attack on Pearl Harbor that might assist us in our present crisis?

The first lesson must come from the recognition that FDR’s biggest mistake, dominated as his thinking was by the war in Europe, was not paying sufficient attention to what was really happening in Japanese politics.  Despite our oil and armaments embargo, Prime Minister Prince Fumimaro Konoe, genuinely wanted to avoid Japanese American conflict.  On Sunday, September 6th, 1941, he was given until Saturday, October 18th to broker a peace settlement with Washington.  If he was unsuccessful, then a military solution would probably be sought.  FDR mistakenly thought he had time to let the Japanese dangle.  Thus the administration was shocked when Konoe was sacked on the 18th of October to be replaced by Hideki Tojo who, as some put it, “smelled of gun smoke.”  Every society has hardliners and “softliners” within their structure over a period of time just as the Japanese government did in 1941.  So lesson number one is that all presidents should be aware of any potential enemy’s inside politics.

Another lesson from Pearl Harbor days is that it is dangerous to show contempt for the racial make up of a potential enemy.  The fact was that the United States had shown less respect for the Japanese government and people ever since Teddy Roosevelt denied territory the Japanese government had won on the battlefield as he negotiated the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1905 between Russia and Japan which resulted in his winning the Nobel Peace Prize.  Then came the passage of a bill in California in 1913 denying the right of Japanese citizens to own land in that state.  After that, in 1924 all Japanese immigration into the United States was banned.  Finally, in 1932, the United States government gave in to lobbying by Chinese interests to prevent Japan from claiming territory it had won on the battlefield with China over Manchuria although it was behaving no differently in the Far East than Britain, France or the United States.

All of these little incidents, understandable and fixable as they individually were, drove Japan into its Axis treaty with Italy and Germany.

What has been lacking too often in American foreign policy since perhaps Korea, is sufficient knowledge of our opponents and, specifically, the forces that have an effect on the decisions they make.  During World War II, we knew pretty well who was most likely qualified to replace Hitler in Germany, and Mussolini in Italy. As for Japan, fortunately we realized that whatever we did, we would be strengthened by the presence of Emperor Hirohito as we pacified and democratized postwar Japan.

What we know seventy-four years after the fact is that the attack on Pearl Harbor was not inevitable.  We also know unity rather than chronic and quarrelsome debate will bring victory over terrorism no matter who it is.

As for those who suggested that the losses at Pearl Harbor were calculated by FDR as an excuse for him to take us into World War II, do they think we wouldn’t have gone to war with Japan had we been prepared enough to successfully defend Pearl Harbor?

Important as it is to know our potential enemies, it’s also essential that we clearly understand what we ourselves are willing and capable of sacrificing and thus achieving. It’s called self-realization!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY