The Supreme Court Rules on My Blog Posts

Well, actually the Supreme Court ruled this month on two of my blog post topics. I don’t do political commentary every day – not even every week. On those occasions when I have written about political issues, the two most frequent topics have been healthcare reform and immigration.  I am pleased to report that this month the highest court in the land has backed up much of what I have been saying.  Indeed, June has been a very important month in addressing two big issues for our country. 

On Immigration

My blogging on immigration was mainly in response to Alabama’s harsh immigration law. The last time I commented on the Alabama law was on May 9 with “Our Immigration Dilemma. “

When my state refused to repeal or even budge on its Immigration law, even after the protests and the many requests from our citizens,  it became all too clear to me that Alabama will not do what is just and right in this situation unless and until the Federal government intervenes. I should have known this. The same was true with Jim Crow laws, civil rights and integration (but one can always hope that his state will do better).

The Supreme Court’s ruling on the Arizona Immigration law, issued on June 25^th, is a sure step toward correcting Alabama's law. As reported in The New York Times, immigration is a matter of federal jurisdiction , not individual states:

The justices make it clear that this case is about the power of the federal government to set immigration policy and to pre-empt, to a large degree, state policies that can infringe on that federal power. An expert on immigration law, Micahel A. Olivas, explained: "We can't have 50 different immigration policies, 50 different foreign policies."

The only part of the Arizona Law that the court tentatively upheld was the section that allows law enforcement to determine immigration status of someone detained for other reasons if there is legitimate suspicion. When this part of the law is enacted, it will likely lead to racial profiling which may then be struck down by the court.

So in short, there is some hope yet for justice. Will congress now embark on serious immigration reform?

On Healthcare

As for healthcare, I have had several posts in regard to President Obama’s Affordable Care Act.  As a healthcare worker, I am all too familiar with the failure of our healthcare system to grant access to healthcare for many of our people. I am also acutely aware of how our insurance premiums are driven up by the many people who show up in our emergency rooms without insurance. Hospitals cannot not treat them, and the cost is passed on to those of use with insurance. Many of these uninsured patients cannot afford coverage. Some are unemployed; some have part-time jobs with no insurance benefits. It is all too clear that we need reform that will bring better access to healthcare and reign in the spiraling costs of insurance coverage.  My last blog about healthcare was on April 9th after arguments had been made before the Supreme Court in the case challenging legality of the Affordable Care Act and we knew that a decision would be forthcoming in June. I was obviously concerned at the time when I titled that essay, "Healthcare in the Courts: Checks and Balances or Partisan Gamesmanship?"

Much has already been said in blogs, in print, and on the airwaves about the significance of this landmark Supreme Court ruling in which Chief Justice Roberts sided with (and wrote) the majority opinion to uphold the Affordable Care Act. Ezra Klein has a good commentary about what this ruling will mean for the country by showing how it will affect real people in their day-to-day lives.

Take a deep breath and be not afraid

In both of these important cases that went before the Supreme Court, I am thankful that reason and justice tipped the scales over doctrinaire extremism and partisanship. So much of what we have heard from vocal opponents of "Obamacare" and from loud supporters of Arizona’s immigration law has been a reaction based on fear. The road ahead will not be simple or easy, but we must never let fear be our guide.

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Images from a Deep Horizonless Night

Sometimes when a writer is prompted to produce something on the spot, characters just spring up from somewhere.  I discovered that I had some characters lurking in my subconscious that I previously had no inkling of. One day my friend Joe Saling posted the beginnings of a poem on his blog The Word Mechanic. He shared the first three lines of a poem:

“Standing on the stateroom balcony
Peering into the endless black
Of a horizonless night”

Joe said he could get no further with the poem and asked his blog readers to try to finish it and send him whatever we came up with.  I had the picture in my mind and just began writing. This is what came out:

Standing on the stateroom balcony
Peering into the endless black
Of a horizonless night

I couldn’t help thinking of that dame that walked up to me

Just a few hours before.

She had the look of a wanderer

But a wanderer who knew her way around.

Only tonight she was a lost kitten

With eyes as deep as that horizonless night.

“I know it must be fate, Mr. Marlowe,” she said to me,

“That on this night, when all seemed so hopeless

I should find you here.”

That’s what she wanted – hope on a hopeless night.

I had seen that look before.

Sometimes that look would lob a zinger

Right into the pit of my stomach.

Another needy client

Short on hope,

Short on insight,

Even shorter on cash,

But long on virtue.

I promised her I would see what I could do.

I wasn’t so sure about this beau she told me about.

I didn’t know if he was on the up-and-up,

But he obviously meant something to her,

And now he was nowhere to be found.

I don’t know why I agreed to it –

Yeah, I know why –

It’s because I’m a sucker.

A sucker for a cry for help,

A sucker to track down dead-beat scum,

A sucker to thrash out a little justice in this godforsaken city.

A sucker for the deep dark eyes

Of a helpless girl

On the edge of another horizonless night.

Several  months later, long enough for me to have put the stateroom poem out of mind, my friend Jim High from Mississippi posted on his Facebook page the following:

“To provide a little enjoyment, I would like my Facebook friends to comment on this status, sharing how you met me. But I want you to LIE!!! That's right, just make it up. After you comment, copy this to your status so I can do the same.”

This was my immediate reply:

It was a warm night in July. Some dame had sent me out to find the creepy low life that had promised to get her beau away from the Tupelo Mob.  Seems the green horn had fallen for the oldest con game in the book.  I didn’t particularly want to drive my ’71 Nova across the state line into the sweltering Mississippi night, but those soft brown eyes grabbed me in a way that I knew I had to put tomorrow on hold until I could see this one through.  I pulled into the Delight Hotel without a clue as to where to find the bum or how to get that dame’s lover out of harm’s way.

“Hey, mister,” I said to the guy behind the counter of the two-bit flop house. “You seen this guy?” I showed him the photo the soft- eyed blonde had given me of her lover boy, Preston.

“Yeah, I seen him,” he said. “Headed down Highway 145 about two o’clock this afternoon – said he had some business in Verona”

“Thanks, pal,” I said.

“Name’s not pal – name’s High. Jim High.

And that’s where the partnership began.

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I am no psychoanalyst, but I am interested in what it might mean when characters take form within our imagination. When we dream, our subconscious mind will often latch on to archetypal figures to create a story. Often that dream story can tell us something important about ourselves if we can stop to hear what our subconscious is saying.

Here I am confronted with some images that I am sure I saw in the movies. There is a detective trying to figure things out. There is a beautiful, vulnerable and engaging young woman with captivating eyes. Not pictured is the boyfriend who somehow falls in with the wrong crowd and there is the thug whose actions are endangering the young man and have the young woman in a state of grave concern. What am I to do with this information?  Do I try to take a look at what these images might mean, or do I continue to write it out and see what comes of it? Sometimes it’s enough to make a fellow stop dead in his tracks, take a deep breath and peer into the endless black of a horizonless night.

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About My Father's Business: A Father's Day Remembrance

(For Father's Day, I am reposting a blog entry that first ran in September 10, 2010)

"I think the most important question facing humanity is, ‘Is the universe a friendly place?’ This is the first and most basic question all people must answer for themselves.” – Albert Einstein

Clyde Kinnaird

A friend once asked me, "What motivated your father to be different from those around him?" Certainly that is the underlying question that motivated the essays I have written about him, and it probably influences much of my response to life. The question itself is much more effective than any specific answer that might be given. Some questions are best left out there calling to us, rather than giving definitive answers. I imagine that if my siblings were to answer that question, you would get some similarities, but many specifics would be different. So you see, any answer I give may say as much about myself and my opinions (by what I choose to remember) as it does about my father. With that in mind, I will tell you a little more about my father, "Pop," as we called him.

On Baptismal day

Clyde Kinnaird was a Baptist minister and educator. He pastored small churches in Alabama. Later on his career he became "bi-vocational" when he began teaching in the public school system while continuing as pastor in rural churches. Unlike most Baptist preachers, his sermons were more often taken from the sayings of Jesus than from the teachings of Paul. In fact, when I picture my father in the pulpit, I have a simultaneous image in my mind of Jesus teaching on the hillside. To this day, when I think of Christ, I see the teaching Jesus and the compassionate Jesus rather than the crucified Christ. I can thank my father for that image.

Pop bringing me down to the waters of baptism at Lake Martin, August 1964

After my father died in 1996, I became especially conscious of the influence he had in his own unpretentious way. When I delivered the eulogy at my mother's funeral, three and a half years after my father's passing, I said, "Both of my parents left the world a little better than they found it. That is their inspiration and challenge to those of us who remain." It is that realization that caused me to do some reflection and to ask myself what kind of influence my own life may have.

One reason I began writing essays was to put down in writing what I believe and what I value. My thinking is that it is of benefit to me to express it, and if nothing else, my daughter will have a written record of what is important to me. I wish that my father had written things down, but he was not one to write. I have two notebooks of sermons written by my maternal grandfather (whom I never met), but not a single note or letter from my father. I have to rely on memories and recollections of what he said and did. In reality, though, memories and recollections are all that anyone has of their father.

Growing up in Centreville

Pop was born in 1910, the seventh of nine children, in Centreville, Alabama. He was born 45 years after the Civil War ended. My father's parents and grandparents had current memory of living in a defeated nation and an occupied territory, while at the same time being absolutely patriotic with an undeniable love for their country. Pop spent his childhood with horses and wagons, and as a young adult, he was a mechanic who worked on Model A's and Model T's. His father, "Lud", was a rough-and-tough rascal who made a living farming, running a black smith shop, driving a taxi, and serving at least one term as road commissioner. His mother was the local midwife who was known in the community as "Aunt Claudia."

Apparently, he knew early on that he would be a minister. Pop told us of an experience he had at five years of age. He said he was out in the yard playing and was overcome by an unusual feeling, or sensation. He could not fully describe it, but he said he knew then that he would be a preacher. He recalled that he ran inside and told his mother, "Mama, I'm going to be a preacher."

To me, this sounds like a mystical experience that would have been precocious at that age. The way I interpret it is that my father became aware that he was living in the presence of something far greater than himself, and that awareness was an uplifting, comforting experience. My father's explanation would probably lie in something I often heard him say, "Sometimes God gives us a little taste of Heaven just to assure us that everything will be alright." Compare this to Einstein's question, "Is the universe a friendly place?" My father would have said, "Absolutely!" A mystic like Meister Eckhart would say, "Without a doubt."

Pop graduated from high school in 1928. I once looked through his senior yearbook that a classmate had sent him late in life. I was struck by how optimistic his class was in their statements and dreams of going out into the world. I was also impressed with the good-natured humor I found in those pages. The class prophet said of my father, "Clyde Kinnaird thought he was going to be the next Charles Lindbergh and fly across the Atlantic. He hopped into an aeroplane and made it across the Cahaba River. He landed in a field, thinking he was in Paris." It was especially poignant to me as I read the upbeat messages of that class, knowing that those graduates in 1928 had no idea what lay ahead in 1929 when the Great Depression hit.

Moving On During the Depression

My father claimed that the Depression did not have much noticeable effect on his community because most people in their small agrarian town had very little money anyway. Nevertheless, I cannot help thinking that the Depression influenced the timing of my father's higher education. He did not go to college until six years after graduating high school. It must have been a call to ministry that motivated his going on to Howard College in 1934, in the middle of the Depression, without enough money to make it through the first year. Even then, at a time when many Baptist preachers had no higher education, my father completed college and seminary.

One person my father admired, and who surely must have influenced him, was a retired missionary to China, Dr. Napier, who came to pastor the First Baptist Church of Centreville. "Up until then, we had not had an educated pastor in the pulpit. Most pastors would come and stay about 18 months. By then, they would have preached all their sermons and would move on." Dr. Napier, my father recalled, would carry books with him to the pulpit and share with the congregation what scholars had written about various scriptures. "We had never had anything like that before."

Dr. Napier's son, Davie, also must have had some influence on my father. They were both at Southern Seminary at the same time and would often ride home together. Many times while I was growing up, I would hear Pop comment about something Davie Napier had said. Davie Napier went on to become a renowned professor at Yale Divinity School, a United Church of Christ Minister, and chaplain at Stanford University. Somewhere along the way, my father latched onto the conviction that education and religion were vital to individual and community development. If the Napiers did not instill the idea, they surely encouraged it.

A Career and a Mission

Pop showing my daughter
how to shuck corn

Pop said late in his career that he had essentially done mission work all his life. I think that is very true. He spent his life, by deed and example, trying to bring education and religion to the farmers, mill workers, housekeepers, laborers, and merchants of Alabama. On the one hand, I could tell that my father was often frustrated by the lack of education and the dearth of thoughtful religion among his peers. One the other hand, he demonstrated a sincere respect for people whether they were rich or poor, educated or uneducated. He brought dignity to the pulpit and to the classroom, but always related to the working class and the working poor. After all, his own family were farmers and working class people and he himself had been a garage mechanic who went off to college to "make a minister." He was never interested in moving up the social ladder. Pop considered such actions "uppity and pretentious."

He was a conservative man from the Old South who took some remarkable stands and had some progressive ideas. More important, he left his corner of the world a little better than he found it. My father understood when I left the Southern Baptists after fundamentalism had become so rampant and entrenched. I think, though, that he regretted that I was living with the same frustrations that he had lived with. I may be a little more open to change than Pop was. In some ways, maybe I am a little more tolerant, but that is only because I learned from his example of granting dignity to others and showing respect for all.

Attributes of Distinction

If I may recapitulate, perhaps I can sum up my answer to my friend's question of what motivated my father to be different from those around him:

1) He saw education and religion as two avenues for improvement. Pop had a strong commitment to continuing education and a striving toward thoughtful religion (he used to say that religion should be reasonable).

2) He believed in showing dignity and respect for every person, regardless of their social standing.

3) He believed that the Universe is a friendly place.

If I can hang on to those things from here on out, I think it would do my daddy proud.



In Memoriam: Richard Clyde Kinnaird, Sr.
September 8,1910- December 18,1996

For more about my father, check out these other posts:

Trust Yourself: A Message form my Father

A Local Hero


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