Whmankeworldofwords's Blog

I received an email from one of my brothers-in-law that dealt with a bit of history.  It’s an example for politicians who want to be remembered for their integrity.  We all know that’s an unusual tribute for a politician.  The e-mail follows. Enjoy!

Harry Truman was a different kind of President. He probably made as many, or more, important decisions regarding our nation’s history as any of the other 42 Presidents preceding him. However, a measure of his greatness may rest on what he did after he left the White House.

The only asset he had when he died was the house he lived in, which was in Independence Missouri. His wife had inherited the house from her mother and father and other than their years in the White House, they lived their entire lives there.

When he retired from office in 1952, his income was a U.S. Army pension reported to have been $13,507.72 a year. Congress, noting that he was paying for his stamps and personally licking them, granted him an ‘allowance’ and, later, a retroactive pension of $25,000 per year.  After President Eisenhower was inaugurated, Harry and Bess drove home to Missouri by themselves. There was no Secret Service following them.

When offered corporate positions at large salaries, he declined, stating, “You don’t want me. You want the office of the President, and that doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to the American people and it’s not for sale.”
Even later, on May 6, 1971, when Congress was preparing to award him the Medal of Honor on his 87th birthday, he refused to accept it, writing, “I don’t consider that I have done anything which should be the reason for any award, Congressional or  otherwise.”

As president he paid for all of his own travel expenses and food.
Modern politicians have found a new level of success in cashing in on the Presidency, resulting in untold wealth. Today, many in Congress also have found a way to become quite wealthy while enjoying the fruits of their offices. Political offices are now for sale. (e.g. Illinois  )
Good old Harry Truman was correct when he observed, “My choices in life were either to be a piano player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there’s hardly any difference!

I say dig him up and clone him!!

The Canucks had a great season. They came within a game of winning the Stanley Cup. On reflection, that’s better than how well 28 of 30 other teams did this past season.

The really sad thing about the end of this last hockey season was what happened on the streets of Vancouver, after the final whistle of the Stanley Cup game seven.  Most of those young men and women rioting were children ten years ago. In their sober state they will look to us like many of the young people we might meet in a secondary school building or on a college campus.  Most would be able to boast of coming from, what people will call, a respectable family.  So what went wrong?

It seems to me that we have to go back to the childhood years of those rioting individuals. Modern thought on child rearing has told us that the old folks didn’t have a clue on how to raise children to become well adjusted adults. The expert in the last couple of decades have pointed to methods like spanking, and many other ways of correcting children that they called old fashioned, as terribly detrimental to them.  It is safe to say that last night’s young rioters were reared in the modern way.  Most will never have had a spanking.  But based on what we saw happen last night  in Vancouver, what grade can we give the modern child rearing expert?  What was last night’s evidence of how successful the modern way really is?

From the young rioters’ actions last night is is clear that they have not learned to respect themselves and others. They have no idea of the importance of a good name.  Their behavior told us that they do not know what the value of property is to their well being. Are these young people well on the way to becoming well adjusted adults?  After last night’s sad display of our young people’s maturity we must ask ourselves, “Do the so called experts on child rearing have it all wrong? Have they duped us?” It is said that the proof of the quality of a cook is in the eating of  his pudding, and the pudding tasted rotten last night, to put it mildly.   

The question I ask myself is, “Who benefits and who loses?

It is obvious that big business does not lose with this tax or big business wouldn’t be for it in such a big way.  I don’t believe that big business will create  more jobs because of this tax.  Matter of fact, it will take their accounting departments less time to deal with the provincial sales taxes, and so each large company will likely lay off a few people.

What about small business?   People who run restaurants and businesses like it are against it.  They’ve been losing customers and therefore profits.  They don’t win with this tax.

What about working people?  The government says it will cost those people only a couple hundred dollars a year.  No big deal, right?  It is when it means Christmas presents or no Christmas presents for the two kids in the family.   Groups against the HST claim it is a lot higher than $200 per year.

For two different two week periods I kept track of what I paid in that portion of HST that the provincial government charges, and that they had not taxed with the GST.   The first two week period cost me an extra $34.27 and the second two week period cost me an extra $19.86.  I also calculated the extra cost of the six days of holidays we staid in B.C. on our way east.  That cost was just pennies short of $100.00.  So if I combine the weeks and say it cost me $54.07 per month and carry that forward for the 12 months of the year, it would cost me an extra $648.84.  Now add in the extra $100 for holidays, there goes $748.84 of my money.  Right?

No, there’s more bad news for me.  I didn’t calculate the amount of HST on gasoline and other items and where the tax is hidden like it is applied to the taxes on gasoline.  That’s right.  We pay taxes on the taxes added to fuel costs.  On a liter of gasoline we pay at least $0.35 in taxes and HST is added at on at the end to the total of gasoline costs and other taxes.  It’s a tax added on taxes.  Now on how many other products does that story repeat itself?  One thing is certain.  Just how much the HST costs us we can’t figure out exactly.  Let it be sufficient to say it is more than $500.00 per year for a couple, as in my case, and much more for a young family of four or five.

Now the question is, “How should I vote”?

It’s been too long since I’ve updated my blog.  What are my excuses?  I’ve been writing and proof-reading a good deal.  Since the beginning of the year I’ve been working on a sequel to Secrets of Hawking Manor.  Two novels that I had finished writing last year and want to publish this year have taken many hours of proof-reading, work that is still in progress.  One of them, In Joy and in Sorrow, has already undergone three edits and is now in the final stages of a fourth and last one.  I’ve also done several edits of Beyond the Breaking Point.  I would like to do one more, or better yet find someone to do an edit for me.  I tend to get too close to the story, unless I leave it alone for many months.   If I work on a novel sooner, I miss mistakes.  It takes a good deal of time and special care to proof-read and edit  more than one hundred twenty thousand words.

In addition, I have organized my poems by topic, and begun to add photos or pictures as background for some of the poems.  I have written the poems over a period of many years.  Each one I wrote  when a thought, a feeling or a scene made a deep impression on me.  Forging an experience into a poem was a personal expression meant only to help remind me down the road of  my feelings to something meaningful to me at the time.  Until recent years I had not thought of sharing my poetry.  I had shared one or two only at rare times  in close circles on special occasions.  But those occasional readings resulted in repeated encouragement by others suggesting to me that I bring them to a wider audience.  I have recently decided to put them together in a book. This is time consuming work, but I do want to publish a book of poems this year, a book that I have titled All Things Beautiful.  Two of the poems I shared earlier.  You can read “A Christmas Prayer” and “Did the Bugle Weep for You”, when you scroll down the blog.  The poem following these paragraphs, “A Broken Promise”, I wrote in the fall of 1994.

A Broken Promise

There, on my table,

In the center stood

In crystal

On the polished wood,

A rose,

Exquisite in design.

Its head,

A crown,

More finely shaped

Then any by a mortal made.

Its strength,

A thorn, poised and secure,

A promise ring,

Of long life sure.

Its breath,

A healing for the soul,

A touch of love,

Sweet, beautiful and whole.

Each silken pedal

Perfectly the other wed,

But there on my table,

The rose was dead.

I believe  it’s more important than ever that parents and teachers make sure young people learn to think early on. In the world, as we know it today, our youth must be ready and able to critically analyze all significant promises, ideas, suggestion, proposals, policies and laws, and be willing to speak out in efforts to hold, especially our elected officials, accountable.  I give for  your careful consideration an article sent to me that I pass on with the hope that it will arouse in each reader a deep sense of urgency to check everything out carefully that has the potential for large scale and long lasting consequences.  Let us determine to be thinkers, as we enter this new decade.  I look forward to many comments.

All that glitters is not gold is a trite saying, but it does hold some truth in it, and it might remind us to look at what the positive and negative consequence of bio fuels are, for example, before creating large scale programs to promote the use of these.  We’ve been duped about global warming.  By whom and for what reason are questions we must ask along with how were they able to do so?

The American Thinker published the following article on January 3, 2011

December 30, 2010

Manmade famine in America

It seems inconceivable, but people in America are going hungry en masse due to a famine caused by political authorities. Fresno, California is not yet a sister city of Kiev, Ukraine, but the two cities, capitals of rich agricultural regions, share a history of mass hunger caused by central governments indifferent to the suffering of their people, in the pursuit of ideological goals. Investor’s Business Daily explains:

Fresno is the agricultural capital of America. More food per acre in more variety can be grown in the fertile Central Valley surrounding this community than on any other land in America – perhaps in the world.

Yet far from being a paradise, Fresno is starting to resemble Zimbabwe or 1930s Ukraine, a victim of a famine machine that is entirely man-made, not by red communists this time, but by greens.

State and federal officials, driven by the agenda of environmental extremists, have made it extremely difficult for the valley’s farms, introducing costly environmental regulations and cutting off critical water supplies to save the Delta smelt, a bait fish. It’s all driving the economy to collapse.

In the southwest part of the Central Valley, water allotments as low as 10% of normal have created a visible dust bowl. The knock-on effect can be seen in cities like Fresno, where November’s unemployment among the packers, cannery workers and professional fields that make agriculture productive stands at 16.9%.

So bad is the economy, due to federal water restrictions, that almost a quarter of local families are going hungry in Fresno:

Local newspapers and Fresno County officials are trying to rally Facebook users to vote for Fresno in a corporate contest sponsored by Wal-Mart for $1 million in charity food donations for the hungry. Fresno, a city of 505,000, has taken the national lead because 24.1% of Fresno’s families are going hungry.

The destruction of the agricultural economy of America’s most productive region is yet another example of federal policies literally destroying America’s productive capacity. To be sure, the Fresno famine is not causing mass starvation, merely hunger.  But this is America, and destroying jobs and agricultural capacity is a shameful initiative of government.

During September we had a wonderful time in Germany.  One of the many highlights of our 18 days was the time spent in Lauingen, a small city on the river Danube, seen here behind us.  This part of Bavaria was home to me for several years from the end of the war until we moved to Northern Germany.   The town dates back at least thousand years.  On the right side is one of the several towers that  was built into the wall that surrounded the town at one time.  I thought it was a good sign of the people appreciating their history by the sections of the wall that had been preserved along with many of the old buildings and most of the historical sites of the area.

One of my hobbies is collecting lighted Christmas houses and the porcelain people, accessories  like carriages, animals and trees that go along with setting it up as a town or village.  We have recently set the 171 lighted houses up and opened the doors for the people of our town to view the setup.  Friday and Saturday night and Sunday afternoon the total number of visitors was 223.  Many of the visitors liked the mountain scene with all the skiers, sleighs and toboggans and the farming area best.  The kids seemed to like the ferris wheel and the train sets best.  I started the collection in 1993 after selling my collection of miniature electric trains.  Back then I started with six lighted Dickensville pieces and a few people that came with the set.  It was a humble beginning.

Giving time to writing and getting a couple books published has taken a bit of a back seat for me right now.  I have finished four novels since publishing “Secrets of Hawking Manor”.  I’ve also begun to work on a sequel of that novel.  Just over 60 pages of the sequel I have completed now and proofread once.  I find that writing the sequel is a bit more difficult than I had thought it would be before I set out to do so.  But so far it has been enjoyable to write, and the research I needed to do had been very interesting.   For a change of pace I did shift for a few days to write a bit of poetry, and I’m pleased with a couple of the pieces I managed to write, one of which I’ve shared below.

One of the great joys of our recent days has been the time we spent with several of our grandchildren.  Part of that time we’ve spent in arenas watching them play hockey.  It really is pleasing to see how they have progressed even from the first part of the season just three months ago.  I’ll have to go to public skating session more regularly to make sure I’ll be able to keep up with them on the ice.

So what do I find interesting these days?  I’m not sure if interesting is the right word for what’s happening in British Columbia’s political scene.  First we have our long time Premier, Gordon Campbell, resigning.  The way he and his party had brought in the unpopular Harmonized Sales Tax lowered his popularity to single digits in the polls and in the end cost him his job.  It seemed there was no easy way for the party to turn their fortunes around quickly.  To my way of thinking this should have been a barrel full of impetus for the in the polls high flying opposition.  Wouldn’t you think they’d do everything to help the Liberals destruct completely?  But low and behold, a second bombshell went off in Victoria, shortly after the Premier’s resignation.  The leader of the NDP, the official opposition, could see no other way to save her party but to resign also. Her party, well out in front in popularity by all polls, seemed to have a great, almost sure opportunity to form the government in the next election.  The party was way out in front in popularity.  The leader had been given a recent 84%  endorsement by her party, but 13 of her cohorts decide this was a great time to mutiny.   What were they drinking?  That move has to call in question whether or not this group of politicians is and will be fit to govern.  So the Liberals received a wonderful Christmas gift from the NDP.  Maybe we should have expected something like this.  Christmas, after all, is the season for giving.  Unfortunately for that party, their generosity may well have bankrupted them.

Christmas is just around the corner.  Matter of fact, there are  less than 20 shopping days left until Christmas Day and Boxing Day a day later.  Wouldn’t it be interesting to see the result of a poll about what kind of gift most people hoped to get this year, and what most people thought is the very best present to receive by  one and all?  If you stop long enough to think about this leave your thoughts about this.  Thanks.

A Christmas Prayer

Father in heaven we give you praise

For this time of year, the Christmas days.

Help us to remember during this season

The meaning of Christmas and the reason

Why we celebrate this time of each year

Sing carols; buy presents for all we hold dear.

Help us in the frenzy in the shopping mall

Not to forget the one who was born in a stall.

In the hustle and bustle as we go our way

Help us to stop for a time to think and to pray.

Let us recall God’s angel old Zacharias saw.

Augustus’ decree, the shepherds’ great awe

When they heard the angel from heaven’s glory

Announcing the Savior’s birth and His story.

Help us to sing with heaven’s host of his birth,

Of the promise of God and of peace on earth.

This season we give thanks for all you have done,

And take time to worship your glorious son.

Tomorrow we will gather at the cenotaph in this community as many people will do in all communities across this great country.  We will  honor those who fought and those who gave their lives in the wars in which this country’s men and women took part.   It is a time to remember their sacrifices.

It is also a time to think what we individually and collectively can do to make war something to be found only in history books.  Individually we can purpose in our hearts and minds to be tolerant of others, to regard each life as sacred, to remain informed about the workings of government and chose our leaders wisely.  To think that six of every ten young service men and women lost their lives or were wounded in the two world wars, a total  not of  thousands, or tens of thousand or even hundreds of thousands but millions, must be seen by us all as tragic.   Collectively, we must stand on guard for the democratic process and stand on guard against tyrants and lawlessness.

Some years ago thinking of my personal loss I wrote the poem below.  I share it with the hope that someone else who had lost a loved one will find comfort reading it.

Did the Bugle Weep for You?

My father, young and full of hopes and dreams

Of life yet to be lived for many days thereafter,

Of your mother’s smile, your wife’s soft touch

Of your sons’ and daughters’ happy laughter.

Cold duty called you to take arms

To fend against advancing guns

Of men also with dreams and hopes

For their future days and loved ones.

My father, young and full of hopes of days to come. 

An evil and a senseless war one cold morning  slew

Your hopes, your dreams, your life still young.

At the end of that day – did the bugle weep for you?

(W. H. Manke 11-11-01)

Politics in British Columbia seldom are dull.  Today we witnessed the premier of the province announcing that he is stepping down.  Reactions around the province have been predictable.  In many quarters of the province his announcement was cheered.  Others, no doubt, were not pleased.  I believe it was cheered by most in his  party and among his own members in the House who saw the man’s lack of current popularity as a threat to their own political survival.  There is no doubt that he had made significant mistakes.  The fact is, however, that each member of his team is responsible for those mistakes.

If the members of his team granted the kind of power to their leader that prevented them from disagreeing with him on matters of policy and direction then these same members abdicated their responsibility to represent the people who elected them, and they shoulder the blame indirectly for what went wrong.  If they had been fully consulted and had given their input and support the the policies and directions the government took, they are obviously directly responsible for the government’s blunders.  As the leader of this government he holds the can either way, but that does not absolve the other member of his team from shouldering a share of the blame. 

We may say that Mr. Campbell chose to run as leader and so deserved the outcome.  In my view that is a shallow sentiment.  There is a human toll that this kind of event takes in the life of a man that we all too often disregard.  The man gave many years to public service.  His governments with his leadership had made positive contributions to the province, we must admit, but he will be remembered for what went wrong, for stepping down.  I’m sure he will not sleep well tonight and in many of the nights to come.