My husband put up our flag for the Fourth of July and came back into the house singing the Star Spangled Banner. We both love our country. We’re both grateful for this nation we call home. But, on that particular day, I was surprised to realize how ambivalent I felt about the national anthem and about this flag waving to me from my front yard.

Maybe my problem is with our checkered past.

On July 3, I usually stand on the portico of our County Courthouse and take my turn reading aloud the Declaration of Independence. Every year I cringe when we read the paragraph complaining about the ways King George “excited domestic insurrections amoungst us, and endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontier the merciless Indian Savages…”

The Founders abhorred those evil “merciless Indian Savages.”

Never mind the fact that it was Europeans who mercilessly slaughtered and displaced the Native Peoples as they took over the New World. Never mind the merciless savagery inherent in every war – even in the war for our own independence.

Mark Charles is a wise, bold Native American blogger who reminds us of this complicated American history. In his essay, Reflections from the Hogan: The Dilemma of the Fourth of July, Charles calls us to remember all our national history with all its troubling complexity.

Even as we proclaim that “all men are created equal,” we must also acknowledge how many years it has taken this nation to grow toward the civilized understanding that “all” means ALL. And we must acknowledge that we still have more growing to do.

Maybe my problem is with our checkered present.

I stopped writing for quite awhile after the 2016 election. When I finally began again, I admitted I had been Speechless in my anger, frustration and discouragement. I held my tongue, resisting the temptation to heap up mountains of indignant words while my heart was so raw.

It took awhile for me to find my voice again, to find enough balance to trust myself to speak in the public sphere. There are more than enough authors of outrage these days; I want my voice to be one of hope.

To this day, I mostly avoid listening to the voices of rage; instead I seek out other writers who hold onto hope so that I can learn from their wisdom and patience. These authors of hope are still often heartbroken, angry and frustrated but instead of giving into discouragement, they are finding ways to transform negatives into positives. They are living courage during this challenging time.

Parker Palmer is one of my favorite mentors of hope. His gentle honesty written in his On Being blogs encourages me; he models bold, outspoken integrity without any vicious hyperbole.

Recently I went back to his book, Healing the Heart of Democracy; it is helping me sort through my own (still) confused thinking and feeling about the state of our nation.

“Heart” for Palmer is that part of us humans that “integrates the intellect with the rest of our faculties, such as emotion, imagination, and intuition.” When he considers the “heart of democracy,” he ponders how we together as a society might find again our common purpose with reason and imagination.

Palmer sees a tragic heart-brokenness within all types of people these days. The ugliness and indignities, the divides and distortions, the breaks and barriers to personal, communal and political relationships all reveal a pervasive brokenness. Palmer says:

When the heart is brittle and shatters, it can scatter the seeds of violence and multiply our suffering among others…

The Paris News reported on Monday, April 22 that  “the Texas rate of uninsured children was the highest in the country in 2017 at 10.7% … more than twice the national child uninsured rate of 5%.” An estimated 835,000 Texas children went without health insurance in 2017, an increase of more than 10 percent from 2016.

The proposed 2020-2021 Texas state budget seeks to cut $900 million from the Health and Human Services Commission, the department that manages Medicaid coverage. So our legislators want to decrease access to health care for our poorest children even while Texas has the highest rate of uninsured children in the nation.

Quite a few people I care about depend on medical coverage provided by Medicaid or the CHIP program; probably this is true for you as well.

Millions of our Texas neighbors count on a variety of social safety nets just to make ends meet. Some of these supports are charitable, offered by communities like ours: the Downtown Food Pantry, Meals on Wheels, Spirit of Giving, Kings Daughters, Boys and Girls Club, CitySquare Paris… I am ever so grateful for the leaders, volunteers and donors who faithfully provide compassionate assistance to our Lamar County neighbors.

Charitable organizations are a vital part of the network that supports every community, but they alone cannot provide the full range of services that are needed to keep families functioning in a pinch. Medicaid and CHIP offer crucial services to our neighbors right here in Lamar County, services that churches and nonprofits are not able to provide – especially for our children.

I realize those of us across the political spectrum have different opinions about Medicaid expansion in Texas. I am all for it (those are my tax dollars, after all, sent to D.C. Why then does our Legislature refuse to allow those dollars back into the Texas economy? It makes no sense to me. )

I do realize this issue can be approached from several different angles. But I also believe that most Texans – no matter our politics – want to provide healthy foundations for our children – ALL our children. Healthcare, education, safety: these are issues that ought to bring us together in good faith as we seek to have productive conversations and develop collaborative cooperation.

We need broad based ‘both-and’ approaches to our social safety nets: both charitable and governmental. We need to be both donating to private charitable efforts and pooling our tax dollars to help care for our Texas neighbors – especially our children.

I urge you to consider carefully the issue of Medicaid expansion in Texas (or to re-consider if you think you have made up your mind.) I urge you to contact your Texas representatives and ask them not to decrease Medicaid resources in the 2020-2021 State Budget. And I encourage you to join me in supporting East Texas Giving day on April 30.

Let’s pull together and not let partisan politics mess with our Texas children.

Charlotte wrote this guest column for The Paris News after it published an article from the Texas Tribune on April 22, 2019: “Texas removes 1,000s of children from Medicaid each month”

I used to never, ever read the comments people make in cyberspace. We’ve all heard how toxic the conversation can be when commenters get to say whatever they want with the safety of distance and anonymity of the internet.

But now I read the comments and – besides the ugliness – I’m discovering some hopeful respectful connections in places I never would have imagined.

I volunteer with Coffee Party USA and one of my jobs is to post blogs and articles to our Join the Coffee Party Movement Facebook page. A dozen of us editors keep the page populated with content we believe is worthy of discussion, every hour on the hour, 24/7. Our Coffee Party Facebook page has over a million followers and we volunteers take our work very seriously. The things I post usually don’t garner much attention since I circulate articles that encourage people to disagree agreeably, to respect differences and to collaborate constructively.

In today’s polarized, angry culture, you can bet a message of civility will fall on deaf ears much of the time.

But I had an experience recently on our Join the Coffee Party Movement page that completely blindsided me. Continue reading “Enough of this centrist BS” ? No sir, Not Nearly Enough →

A friend once asked me why we liberals talk so much about diversity. As a conservative, she prefers to focus on unity.

I’ve seen this attitude in cyberspace conversations as well. Sometimes commenters scold: Making a big deal out of our differences is a kind of reverse racism. We should be color blind and see only the ways we are alike. 

I once posted this meme on social media once and got several of these “reverse racism” comments. Just by naming the various groups, some people see this meme as divisive. Here’s one comment: This type of message only reinforces a divisive identity policy instead of emphasizing what is our common human identity. The teacher should emphasize our individual human rights as opposed to group identities.

This makes sense in some ways as it speaks to the worthy ideal of being together in community without letting our differences divide us. I applaud this goal; but I disagree that only “emphasizing our common humanity” will stop the divisions. I disagree that “color blindness” will accomplish the goal.

I think we should all see all the color: the splashy and the subtle colors, the soft and the loud colors with which our humanity is painted. For me, color blindness sounds like a sadness, a handicap.

Our diversity is one of the gifts our Creator has given us so why wouldn’t we celebrate it?

Our diversity reminds us that our Creator is a multifaceted, many-sided Reality so of course humanity “created in the image and likeness of God” will reflect this infinite beauty.

Diversity is our inevitable human reality.

It is unity that that requires our serious efforts.

Continue reading Diversity is Our Reality; Unity is Our Goal →

I was raised as a fundamentalist Christian. People who don’t live in this bubble have no idea how much power such an ideology carries. In this way of thinking, there is this deep conviction that we must be RIGHT. Being wrong meant judgment, shame and a hell of a lot worse consequences. We Fundamentalists had to be right and that meant anyone who disagreed with us must be wrong.

Again – if you haven’t been there, you have no idea and I get that so, please keep reading and hear me out. I’m mostly writing this for my Christian Right friends but I’m hoping my Secular Left friends might also find some new insights. And even my Christian Left friends. And maybe some renewed compassion for- and from – all of us

Right and Wrong are interesting categories. They are appropriate descriptions in some fields, but even mathematics reminds us how broad truth can be. 2+2=4 but also 3+1 and 12-8. Right can be right in a variety of ways.

When we function within more subjective categories like philosophy or theology, right and wrong almost lose their meaning. Beliefs, doctrines and dogmas express something about our human experience rather than naming any sort of empirical reality.

Throughout history, humans have misused these subjective constructions as foundations, as eternal truths true for all people in all times. Ideology then becomes a basis for relationship and our beliefs define who is in and who is out, who is right and who is wrong.

If I am right, you must be wrong.

If my beliefs are orthodox, your beliefs must be heresy.

This black and white, dualistic thinking has plagued us since our human beginnings and has been a source of many of our human conflicts. Continue reading If the Right Must be Right then the Left Must be Heresy →