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I was wrong about the Ramseys

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 08:58:20 -0500

Jon Benet Ramsey was killed by someone other than a family member.

New DNA evidence has led the prosecutor to write a letter to her father, John, that completely exonerates him and everyone else in her immediate family. They didn’t do it. Unfortunately, the news comes two years after Ramsey’s wife, Patsy, died of ovarian cancer.

No doubt prejudiced by the footage of JonBenet prancing around pageant stages, I believed almost from the beginning that either John, Patsy, or their son, Burke, was guilty of the crime. The Ramseys were easy to condemn because, yes, circumstantial evidence pointed to them, but also because they were raising JonBenet in a way I would not raise my own daughters and in a way that many parents would not raise theirs. No six-year-old should be on stage in a bikini.

But that didn’t make the Ramseys murderers or even bad parents. Were she alive today, JonBenet might be a frustrated beauty queen wannabe, but she might just as easily be a well-adjusted college student or be taking another path entirely.

The Ramseys’ innocence became pretty obvious a couple of years ago, but Patsy had already died. We’ll never know if the strain of a decade of suspicion contributed to her illness, but it couldn’t have helped. I wish her husband and her son a happy life.

American values; a dictator’s values

Mon, 7 Jul 2008 08:28:00 -0500

When war protestors interrupted President Bush’s Independence Day speech to soon-to-be American citizens at Thomas Jefferson’s home, Bush responded as any American president should: by embracing their right to express their opinion. “To my fellow citizens to be, we believe in free speech in the United States of America,” he said to applause.

Such a scene would not have happened in Zimbabwe, where an 84-year-old dictator with an Adolph Hitler mustache, Robert Mugabe, clings to his power with a gnarled and withering fist.

Zimbabwe was once a British colony, Rhodesia, and its colonial legacy had left that nation’s wealth unequally distributed. There were so many ways to address that historical injustice, but Mugabe chose the most selfish: He capitalized on lingering bitterness, seized farms owned by white farmers, and distributed them to his supporters. His actions deprived his nation of some of its most efficient food producers and turned it into yet another Third World country unable to feed itself. When his party lost an election March 29 and he faced a runoff with an opponent, Morgan Tsvangirai, who won more votes than he, Mugabe began a campaign of escalating violence. According to the Washington Post, he and his planners brazenly named the operation “CIBD,” which stood for Coercion, Intimidation, Beating, Displacement.

And that’s exactly what they did, along with an “M” – Murder. The government’s actions were so brutal that Tsvangirai eventually boycotted the election. Many were beaten and some were killed. One of the opposition’s top leaders has been put on trial for treason under penalty of death.

Needless to say, no one in Zimbabwe will be heckling Mugabe. And that’s one more reason to celebrate our Independence Day.

Click here for the Washington Post story.

Time agrees: High gas prices can be good

Wed, 2 Jul 2008 16:55:16 -0500

An article at Time.com points out 10 ways that higher gas prices are good for America. You can read the story here. These include the return of jobs outsourced overseas because now it’s cheaper to manufacture some goods at home; less sprawl because people are starting to live closer to their work; and less pollution and traffic deaths because Americans are driving less. It might even curb obesity. Curiously, the article left out what I think will be one of the ultimate benefits: No more wars over oil because we’ll find alternative energy sources.

No one denies that high gas prices cause short-term pain. So does the end of any bad habit. If you smoke, quitting can be traumatic. If you consume too much caffeine, quitting will give you headaches. And if you base your economy on a dirty, nonrenewable resource controlled by corrupt oil sheiks and dictators, well, basing your economy on something else won’t be easy.

I don’t like paying $4 for a gallon of gas any more than you do - at the moment I pay it. But high gas prices are changing the way we live and the way we manage our economy. And I like that.

Poll reminds that sacrifice not shared

Tue, 1 Jul 2008 18:51:25 -0500

A new Associated Press - Yahoo survey finds that many more Americans say rising gas prices are extremely important to them personally than say the same about the war in Iraq.

Forty-three percent of respondents said the war in Iraq is “extremely important” to them personally, and 35 percent said “very important.” The remaining 22 percent, who should be beaten with a stick, said it is either “moderately important,” “slightly important” or “not at all important.”

Meanwhile, 66 percent said rising gas prices are extremely important to them personally, and 21 percent said they are very important.

It’s unthinkable that American civilians during World War II would have listed their personal hardships as “extremely important” while rating the war as somewhat less so. I can only hope that respondents were simply answering the question honestly, which is that while gas prices affect them personally, most of us are not personally affected by the Iraq War. We have not been asked to register for an active draft, or buy war bonds, or collect scrap iron, or shop with a ration card. Instead, we were given checks from the government that our grandchildren will pay for. Our president has asked a few hundred thousand Americans to sacrifice everything. The rest of us? We’ve been told to go shopping.

No more wars where a few sacrifice for the good of the many, and the many are allowed to pretend like nothing is happening.

Good riddance to cheap oil

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 15:40:27 -0500

Many drug addicts will not really commit to overcoming their problem until they have hit rock bottom and must choose between the certain path of destroying themselves and the hard, uncertain path of change.

That’s the way it is with America’s own addiction - its addiction to oil. Since World War II, oil has fueled our industrial economy, and for several decades we’ve known it was bad for us – bad because it pollutes the environment; bad because it forces us to rely on corrupt oil sheiks and tinhorn dictators; bad because oil is nonrenewable and, someday, there is not going to be any more of it.

But for a long time, those “bads” have been overridden by three “goods” – oil was relatively cheap; it helped us meet our short-term needs and wants; and it was the status quo, which meant we didn’t have to change.

The “bads” are getting harder to ignore. Meanwhile the “goods” are no longer seeming so good. Oil is no longer cheap, and therefore it is less effectively helping us meet our short-term needs. That leaves only one reason for the industrialized world to continue relying on oil – because we’ve stuck that petroleum needle in our veins for so long that we can’t imagine life without it.

It’s obviously going to take rising gas prices for us to kick the habit. After all, we can comfortably ignore the war in Iraq because most of us have played no part in it. We can ignore the growing body of science supporting manmade climate change because it hasn’t really affected most of us and, besides, science is often wrong. And we don’t mind throwing money at corrupt governments because we’re not the ones who have to live under them. These are the prices for cheap gasoline, and for most of us, they are paid by other people.

These realities should have moved us to act, but then the addict doesn’t usually stop using because his actions are hurting other people. He only stops when his personal pain is too intense to ignore.

I guess we should be thankful that, for most of us, rock bottom means $5 or $6 per gallon gasoline. So be it. Enough is enough. If we won’t change until the status quo hits us in the pocketbook, then let it hit us in the pocketbook – painfully, until we decide that the hard, uncertain path to change is preferable to our certain addiction to oil.