MOST WERE RIGHT AND I HAVE BEEN WRONG — HISTORY IS REPEATING ITSELF

By Edwin Cooney

At least twice a month as a member of the Syracuse Host Lions Club, I pledge allegiance to the flag of “The United States of America and to the republic for which it stands…”  Sadly and most uncomfortably, we're passing through a political, social, and spiritual nightmare. This nightmare is about unity versus disunity, indivisibility versus divisibility and, saddest of all, justice versus injustice.

Back in 1787, the Continental Congress sanctioned a constitutional convention in Philadelphia because the 13 (supposedly) “United States of America” clearly had never been and weren't united. Individual states had promised to contribute to the revolutionary war effort against England but some failed to do so. (Note: During the Civil War, Confederate President Jefferson Davis quarreled with the individual states that refused to provide sufficient manpower to the Confederate Army. Under confederations, cooperation even in time of war is voluntary!)

Once our independence was declared by the 1783 Treaty of Paris, it became increasingly evident that there was little unity among the thirteen "united" states. States began arguing with each other over their separate borders, began taxing one another's products and, worst of all, seemed about to make separate alliances with European nations. States, jealous of their social, political, economic and  territorial prerogatives, were only secondarily concerned with individual human rights.

Today, primarily fearful of what a majority, especially an organized majority, of citizens might do to preserve their collective rights, many states are seeking the right in federal elections to control electors in the electoral college to suit the objectives of those already elected to statewide government. Fearful that those people who were once social and ethnic minorities will soon be legitimate majorities, too many state governments insist on regulating the electoral process. It's called "replacement theory.”

The fact of the matter is that control of government is every political party's objective. (Note: don't let conservatives tell you that they dislike government. They love government as long as they can control it and can set its agenda!)

Between 1789 and 1933, local, state and federal governments were largely controlled by a combination of economic and social forces including banks, corporations, religious institutions, police and spiritual traditions. Then came the Great Depression which literally paralyzed the social and economic factors of our society and threatened the very capacity of the country to function on behalf of "we, the people." The solution to this national paralysis was an active federal government controlled by a well-informed people.

Then, beginning in 1969, as I see it, conservatism began making its comeback.

I fear that for the second time in our history, we may be on the brink of a civil war the nature of which is far beyond and even more dangerous than anything that can take place on a battlefield.  FDR's "economic royalists” appear about to return as an all-encompassing oligarchy whose bottom line is profit.

No country can successfully function without rich and influential leaders, but healthy leadership nurtures both the poor and the rich, the ill and the healthy, the uneducated and educated and, above all, ensures the personal safety of us all.

Since 1789, freedom for all law-abiding people has been what America is all about. I can't find anything in the agenda of those who are presently being predicted to be our congressional leaders beginning in 2023 that would protect the freedom of most people. Can you? 

“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America.”

No document, including our Constitution, is perfect and beyond readjustment or amendment. It is too early in this crisis to know exactly what needs to be adjusted in our most fundamental legal document, but It appears to me that we are headed to that place we once were before everyone's well-being really and truly mattered!

If that doesn't scare you, you've got no nerves whatever!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY

THINKING ABOUT BUFFALO!

By Edwin Cooney

Saturday, May 14th's outrageously brutal attack on the Tops Supermarket in East Buffalo, New York brings forth a lot of memories and associations that are very personal.

Buffalo was founded in 1832. Its first mayor was 45-year-old Ebenezer Johnson, a Jacksonian Democrat, whose brother Elisha served as an early mayor of Rochester, New York. Situated at the western end of the newly completed Erie Canal, its location and commerce were vital to the nation's early 19th Century ever-growing prosperity.

I became aware of Buffalo as a child at school in nearby Batavia. Every spring someone, whether it was the Lions Club or members of Temple Beth Zion, would sponsor a trip to the Buffalo Zoo for all students from kindergarten through third grade. As a little boy who was then called Eddie, I enthusiastically identified with Eddie the Monkey, and I especially thrilled to the lions' roars throughout the echoey Lion’s House. Then, there was the cotton candy, peanuts and crackerjacks, along with the balloons. The best  part of it all was the anticipation. I remember one night prior to our annual visit that a boy named Jackie, in anticipation of going to the Buffalo Zoo proclaimed: “Tomorrow, we go to the Buffalo Zoo and see the lions and the bears" and from just beyond the door of our dormitory came a voice saying something like: “You’ll see a bear tonight, Jackie, if you don't be quiet!"

Buffalo was about radio to me. There was polka radio, Black radio, and “establishment” radio. WBEN was the CBS affiliate and, ultimately, there was WKBW which, in August of 1958, became what they called "Super Sonic Radio” and remained Buffalo's top rock station for the next 20 plus years.

Buffalo seemed to have greater pride in its ethnicity than any other city. People from Buffalo were more Polish, Jewish, Italian, or Black, it seemed,  than the ethnics of other communities.

A little lady who brought me into her life and family was born on Potomac Avenue in Buffalo on January 1st, 1910, living and loving for 100 years and 10 months thereafter.

What's especially sad and even revealing about the terror in Buffalo last Saturday is my own reaction — or, to put it another way — my usual mild attention to or even non-reaction to shootings in other cities. It demonstrates how parochial I can be without realizing it. All that is within me cries out as I write these words: it happened in Buffalo, New York, and it's got to stop, stop, stop!

The question is how can we stop it?  If we seek to regulate guns, we are “unconstitutionally" violating our national right to bear arms. If we seek to arm absolutely everyone, it's my guess that the more people who are armed, the more that deadly altercations will inevitably occur. 

If we can't constitutionally regulate gun manufacturers, or gun owners, we're going to have to regulate our whole selves! The only option left to us is to install sufficiently armed security personnel in all stores, shopping centers, schools, and even in churches, synagogues, and mosques. If hiring sufficiently trained marshals to protect the public safety must be our ultimate public policy, someone is going to have to pay for their training and, ultimately, their salaries as well.

The fact of the matter is that we will never be able to protect everyone against what one person is determined to do, especially if they're willing to sacrifice their freedom and, ultimately, their life in order to empty their tankful of emotions, resentments, and odd spiritual and political commitments to achieve their goals.

Most of the tragedies we read and hear about, and even see on television and through the internet are impersonal because they are happening to someone else in a distant place. What happened to ten people in Buffalo, New York also happened to more people in the Ukraine at roughly the same hour, 16 days ago. However, with all due empathy toward the Ukrainians, what happened in Buffalo was more real and especially painful to me,  because it happened here, close to home.

As President of the New York State School for the Blind Alumni Association, it felt like that terrorist attack was potentially an attack on some of my personal constituents. Insofar as I'm concerned, an attack on Blacks is also an attack on non Blacks who live in Buffalo. People named Paul, Linda, Richard, Karlene, Felecia, Judy, Terry and many others were potential victims.

Buffalo, New York, is the home of many of my fondest memories. It’s where a number of my closest friends dwell. Buffalo, New York, is deep and rich in people and institutions. Here are just a few: The Buffalo Bills, The Buffalo Sabres, The Buffalo Bisons, temporarily, the Buffalo basketball Braves, disc jockeys Dick Biondi, George Lorenz, Danny Neverth, sportscasters Stan Barron and Van Miller, newsman Irv Weinstein, and, oh, so many more. 

We'll find a solution to gun violence when we stop socially analyzing it and politically excusing it and start taking it very, very personally, rather than academically.

Oh, one more wonderful memory. I knew a guy who used to get a kick out of spelling Buffalo phonetically. It went like this: B-U-P-H-P-H-A-L-E-A-U-X!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY

OFF THE FENCE AND INTO THE FIRE!

By Edwin Cooney

I've never been completely comfortable with Roe v. Wade but I've favored it for three primary reasons. First, it limits the traditional coercive authority of narrow-minded males over their wives and daughters. (Note that the overwhelming number of state executives, legislators, judges and even lawyers are males with male predilections and interpretations.) Second, I believe in a living Constitution more than I believe in an interpreted Constitution. (That makes me a loose rather than a strict constructionist of the Constitution.) Third and most significant, my insistence on self-respect lies in the likelihood that I'd probably have been aborted had Roe v. Wade been in existence in 1945.

Roe v. Wade was decided on the basis that the 9th and the 14th Amendments were founded on implied references to human rights enumerated in those constitutional amendments.

Although no law can prevent a woman from ending her pregnancy if she's sufficiently determined, a woman's pregnancy is a moral question more than it is a legal question. Roe v. Wade, having been adjudicated rather than legislated, avoided all moral questions. Hence today, it's about to be adjudicated out of existence.

Moral questions unless written into the Constitution are inevitably vulnerable. In other words, the moral fabric of a nation is best legally and legislatively established when it is introduced from the hearts and minds of the nation's population. That’s a legislative act.

Therefore, I assert that Roe has run it's course. Roe v. Wade was decided on state prerogatives rather than on moral obligations or non obligations. As difficult as it may be, we the people have the capacity to draw distinctions between the moral and the practical and we ought to find common ground on the moral before we establish the practical. What a woman can do and ought not to do with her own body, I believe, depends on the circumstances of her relationship with other people — specifically her male sex partner. I know of a marriage that broke up because the wife got an abortion without consulting her husband. Many religious leaders insist that our individual bodies are not our own but are temples of our relationship with God. (For any religious interpretation on this topic, see your most trustworthy clergy person rather than this mere mortal!)

As for the political parades, they're coming. After all, liberals and conservatives agree on one thing: their political, social and especially their moral interpretations are absolute and ought not ever to be questioned!

As for settled law, I'd define that as law so fundamental that it ought never to be adjudicated by the Supreme Court of the United States. Only time will tell if 

Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and/or Amy Coney Barrett lied to the United States Senate by insisting that Roe v. Wade is settled law.

There are both dangers and opportunities in the debates and trials ahead. What will be the fates of same sex marriage, stem cell research, interracial marriage, and the fate of liberal voting rights as interpreted by those currently serving on the Supreme Court? Stay tuned!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY

SO, YOU'RE SURPRISED? REALLY AND TRULY? WOW!

Perhaps, because I don't have a dog in this fifty year struggle by my old, or should I say, former Republican and Conservative colleagues as well as the effort by my fellow Democrats to preserve Roe v. Wade I can afford to have a rather pompous objectivity on this whole matter.

I'll state my personal status very briefly. In 1945, had my biological mother the right to abort me, she undoubtedly would have done so since she never acknowledged my very existence. The fact is that she deliberately obliterated me by not acknowledging my birth in the family's list of significant events. Hence, my sense of self-respect requires me to be glad she didn't have that option. Ultimately, we both survived and thrived, she for 97 years and me for 77 years come next November 28th.

Moving forward to the present, this issue could have been addressed more calmly and wisely if it hadn't been so temptingly political on all sides. To sum it all up, people love being righteously angry with one another whether it be slavery vs. emancipation, the legitimacy of labor vs. the original rights of ownership of property, or the debate over how the rich got rich while the poor were born poor. There are two major factors that need consideration here.

First, there is the history of the Supreme Court. Going back to the 1790s and early 1800s, the court was essentially as much about politics as it was about law. The last thing President John Adams did before leaving office was to appoint fellow federalists to the court to counter Thomas Jefferson's likely Republican Democratic justices. Two years later, Chief Justice John Marshall ruled in Marbury v. Madison that while the court couldn't force Secretary of State Madison to give Federalist William Marbury his commission, it did have the power to judge whether laws passed by Congress were constitutional or unconstitutional because we were a government of laws and not of men. However, 54 years later, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney asserted that Dred Scott was a slave and under law had no more rights than a horse. Of course, Scott was a slave due to the wishes of men. Subsequently, Justice Taney's statement of the law couldn't prevent the Civil War. Then, in 1937, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to the chagrin of all Conservatives regardless of party, sought to "pack" the court with up to five justices to replace justices seventy years of age and older who refused to retire. The reaction was righteous outrage. However, as Harry Truman pointed out, nothing in the Constitution addresses the number of serving justices at any time. Again, the idea that we are a government of laws and not of men was preached to condemn FDR.

The second factor is the inclusion of the general public's needs by the traditionally corporate-oriented Supreme Court. Beginning in the 1950s, it was recognized that the laws perceived and passed by rich, powerful men ultimately affected the lives, liberty and property of less wealthy and  powerful men and women. Thus, the Warren Court and the Burger Court began striking down and otherwise altering laws that inhibited the well-being of the less popular among us. Conservatives began shouting that the "liberal" Court was legislating rather than adjudicating the law.

Since the issuance of Roe v. Wade on Monday, January 22nd, 1973, opposition  to Roe has been both intense and politically organized and it appears that Conservatives may well prevail. Thus, here's the ultimate reality.

Law is law however fair or unfair, workable or unworkable, practical or impractical. The alteration of law however is ultimately political. Law is conceived and enforced by men and women. Getting our undies in a bunch about the leakage of Justice Alito's draft may be of concern to Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., but whatever the effect of that leakage serves only as melodrama to the process of revoking Roe.

As a Democrat, I'm sympathetic to the idea that this whole issue could change the political dynamic next November. There is much speculation at present as to what other rights might be taken away from us. For instance, what's the future of stem cell research so essential to examining and preventing diseases? What's the future of birth control medication? Finally, how often has it historically mattered how popular a law on the statute books is? Does popularity have much to do with morality? Remember that chattel slavery, which practically everyone regards as immoral, was supported by the majority throughout the days of our historic founding. Prohibition for much of its fourteen year reign was overwhelmingly popular. Its repeal was largely due to its ultimately impractical enforcement as well as to the badly needed revenue it spawned to the benefit of state and national treasuries.

Whether we like it or not, 21st Century America is not a government of laws as much as a government of doctrinaire politics. The sad truth is that we're a government of ambitious, judgmental, self-righteous and dominant-oriented men and women. As to what effect the revocation of Roe will be, it's my guess that it won't be as effective as Conservatives hope, nor will it be as damaging as Liberals insist. As for the political and social chaos the overturning of Roe may create, that’s as American as cherry pie, is it not?

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY

FIX IT NOW, BUT THE REAL QUESTION IS FIX IT HOW?

By Edwin Cooney

Fifty or so years ago when I was in college, there were three types of majors in my student teaching class. There were history majors, sociology types, and political science theorists. History for me was the ticket as it was about chronological cause and effect. I always enjoyed sociological questions and issues, but I insisted that the problem too many sociologists had was that they didn't know enough about history. I also thought that sociology gurus were too theoretical and impractical. As for political science analysts, they seemed to me to be all about merging theory and law.

Now that my younger son is approaching 40, he's generally interested in understanding how he and his fellow citizens and voters can begin to make things work in 21st Century America.

In our tense discussions a couple of weeks ago, he made the following things plain: He doesn't care what Washington, Jefferson, or Madison did about slaves or even if they had slaves. He doesn't want to read about the Revolutionary War or Civil War or which war came first. He considers both political parties a waste of time and energy and he wants new and more representative parties. Additionally, both parties have behavioral rules. In order to be a good Republican, you've got to be a good Christian or Jew, but you damned well better not be an agnostic, atheist, or even worse, a Muslim. If you're a “good” Democrat, you may play with socialism or even Marxism, but you are suspect if you are too much of a capitalist. In short, both Republicans and Democrats have so totally sold out to money interests that they lack the capacity even to tackle the issues on which they agree.

He'd like to see multiple political party presidential candidates running against each other in a popular vote election unencumbered by an electoral college. Like many others, my younger lad is more interested in government than he is in politics.

The devil of all this is in the details. A few years ago, I was with two of my closest friends who kept insisting that it was long past time for a new Constitutional Convention. What they weren't aware of was that the first Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia over that summer of 1787 was a secret matter. The Annapolis convention that brought about that Constitutional Convention insisted that all debates and resulting conclusions be private. General Washington, the Convention's elected president, was responsible for keeping the proceedings within the walls of the Convention. Each night, Washington collected every delegate’s working papers in order to prevent leaks to a hungry press. Additionally, during the daytime, the windows of the hall were closed to prevent audible disclosure of the ongoing debates despite the intense summer heat. If that stipulation for a 2023, 2024 or 2030 convention were proposed, someone would take the stipulation to federal court on the basis that some political entity was seeking secrecy to advance its own agenda. Of course, there are dozens of issues on the table that no one knows how to solve. Climate change, homelessness, affordable medical care, our role in a continuously changing sociological, political, and economic shifting worldwide situation all exist on a scale of intensity that has never before existed. In short, most Americans know whom to blame for numerous dilemmas, but no one knows whom to trust to alleviate them.

Suppose, for example, that we were to eliminate the electoral college in the selection of our national leadership as so many have insisted. The popular election of a president doesn't eliminate the possibility of “hanky-panky” which the Donald Trump forces and other Republicans insist occurred in 2020 resulting in "the steal" that brought about the January 6th 2021 attack on Congress. Nor would the inclusion of more political parties streamline and make good government more likely.

The essence of ongoing good government is strategically arranged political coalition within a body politic. Parliamentary governments such as those that exist in Canada, Great Britain, Israel and throughout Europe are more suitable to coalitions than the federalist type of government which we have had since 1789.

Ninety years ago, we — the richest, freest people in the whole world — were suffering through a terrible depression. Along came Franklin Delano Roosevelt with a set of plans that would widen our political, legal and social functions and enable working men and women to increase the value of their working capacity along with their purchasing power to break loose from the economic and social authority of traditional capitalistic industry and mercantilism. FDR broke what he called "the unjustified terror that converts retreat into advance.” He was able to do this primarily because no one had a better idea and something just had to happen if the system wasn't to implode.

As I understand my younger son's perspective, he doesn't care how Christopher Columbus treated native Americans or whether the Confederates were guilty of treason. He doesn’t much care about Richard Nixon's insecurities or sins which brought about Watergate or sustained the Vietnam War. As he sees it, these are all distractions. What matters to him is the future of his really and truly beautiful daughter who is my really and truly beautiful granddaughter. (Note: I have two other really and truly beautiful granddaughters as well!) Social issues, with the exception of women's prerogatives (after all, his little one will one day be a gorgeous lady), and other issues have little significance to him.

My younger son is a conscientious and generous family man who generally carries an old fashioned strain of GOP orientation just as his father once did.

I know what it will take for us to get beyond our current socio and political snarls, but I'm damned if I know how to unsnarl our current set of — okay, I'll say it — “malaise” as Roosevelt did some 90 years ago!

My younger son is right in his sense of urgency about the present and the future. Where he's lacking is his sense of how important people's feelings are.

Remember Maya Angelou's observation that people may forgive you for what you did to them, but they will never forget how you made them feel.

Whatever strategy we employ to break the present combination of doubts and suspicions must be a strategy deliberately designed to encourage the hopes, dreams, and positive ambitions of all types of people.

After all, as my younger son insists, the future ultimately matters more than the past.

Goodness, am I really biting my own nails? Wow, son!  

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY