Author: Bruce R. Nelson

A RED PARACHUTE MADE OF GOLD

Golden parachutes are back in the news these days, and as ever before, getting the black eyes they so richly deserve. Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes quickly bit the dust after long-time anchor Gretchen Carlson brought sexual harassment charges against him. She settled for $20 million while Ailes walked away in shame and disgrace – and with an exit package of $40 million. Only through Alice’s looking glass would Fox’s “fair and balanced” world give the harasser twice as much as the harassee. Former United Airlines CEO Jeff Smisek was fired last year and left with close to $37 million. Then there is Carrie Tolstedt, Wells Fargo’s vice president for sales, who was all set to parachute out of the fraudulent bank account scandal her division created with a $124 million package.

Those examples were noted in a recent Harvard Business Review piece characterizing the emerging trend of using such compensation packages to rid corporate suites of scandalized executives. That, says HBR, was never the purpose of a golden parachute. Instead, it argues, these payout packages originated in the 1970s to protect executives from being fired in corporate takeovers, not to enrich CEOs who were either dismissed for poor performance or just wanted to walk away with a bundle of cash.

What neither the fallen chieftains of capitalism nor the Harvard Business School may know is that the underpinnings of these enormous exit packages can be traced to the teachings of Karl Marx and the Communist Party. A golden parachute is severance pay on steroids. Severance is a common term in our lexicon now. It means paying workers who are laid off or bought out when a company reduces its workforce. Back in the early 1930s, however, such a practice was unheard of in this country. Severance pay originated in the newspaper industry in 1933 and quickly spread to other employment sectors. I learned all this during my career as a negotiator for The NewsGuild-CWA, the union that represents newspaper workers, among others. Here’s the quick story:

The Guild was organized in 1933 by a group of reporters and editors led by a then-prominent New York columnist, Heywood Broun. The newspaper industry was facing a recession back then and publishers were getting rid of journalists left and right. So the immediate burning issue was that dedicated, hardworking employees should not be summarily fired without some sort of compensation for their years of service, a.k.a., severance pay. Many newspaper owners agreed, and before the first comprehensive contract was negotiated, a number of papers entered into interim agreements with the Guild providing for severance pay based on length of service for laid off workers.

Those were the seeds of the golden parachutes. Because Broun and his Guild colleagues, detached journalists that they were, had little aptitude or patience for the nitty-gritty of union building, they hired a number of young, passionate organizers from the American Communist Party. It was a pragmatic, not ideological, move. The Commies knew how to organize and they helped set up local unions at newspapers throughout the country. Once the national union was up and running, the Guild, like many unions in the 1950s, got rid of the reds. But not before they had an opportunity to inject a little Marxism into the newspaper contracts.

That meant that those early severance pay agreements dealing with layoffs evolved into a system in which employees built equity in their jobs with each passing year, equity that would be liquidated when they left the company through a severance payment based on years of service. The formula in most contracts called for two weeks’ pay for each year and it was paid regardless of how the employment ended, whether by resignation, retirement, disciplinary discharge or layoff. In the event of death, the benefit was paid to the employee’s estate. The principle of severance pay was not a cushion against unemployment. It was a recognition of the Marxist concept that workers have a property right in their jobs, based on their contributions of labor. Severance was the means of cashing in that ownership stake.

Various national labor publications in the 1930s took note of this unique provision in newly negotiated newspaper contracts and the concept quickly spread. As the years passed, however, the benefit lost much of its leftist luster. When pension plans were negotiated into subsequent contracts, severance pay was scaled back so that it was paid only on dismissal or layoff. But the culture had been changed. There was an accepted practice that employees should get something more than a handshake or a kick in the rear end when walking out the door. That DNA then wildly mutated into parachutes made of gold now carrying disgraced corporate fat cats out of their executive suites. Somewhere Karl Marx is shedding a tear and insisting that this is not what he had in mind.

A FRUITFUL DAY IN THE OPERATING ROOM

If life had gone according to plan, a scintillating piece of ponderous commentary would be appearing in this space. You’d be sipping a warm beverage while taking in my words of wisdom, nodding and smiling between paragraphs. Either that, or I would have hit a raw psychic nerve mid-sentence, sending you to You Tube’s cute kitten channel for immediate relief and redemption. Well, my friends, I am here to tell you that life does not always go according to plan. Just ask Jeb Bush, or if you want a second opinion, Rick Perry, the guy who got tossed from “Dancing With the Stars” faster than he did from his quest for the Republican presidential nomination. Oops.

My diversion was far less profound, but just as frustrating. I was scheduled for minor outpatient surgery at Washington Adventist Hospital yesterday, the second of two procedures in a month aimed at removing a benign mass from my back. A benign mass, I learned from Dr. Google, is a non-cancerous tumor, not a pre-Vatican II Catholic church service conducted by hippie folk singers. There are, I guess, some valid procedural reasons why an allegedly minor operation needed two surgical dates. But the explanation is so dry, and uninteresting that it should never be reported outside of a medical journal, and even then only if it is really hard up for copy.

Here’s the deal, along with a full waiver of my HIPAA rights. Initially the tumor was, in the highly technical jargon used by physicians with five years of graduate school and a two-year residency, the “size of an orange”. Then came the first surgery. When the bandages finally came off, my appendage had been reduced to, again in the medical vernacular, the “size of a key lime”. Yesterday’s surgical adventure was to have been a brief cut-and-stitch aimed at the final excision of the devolving fruit. Instead, it was a day-long adventure.

I arrived, as instructed, two hours ahead of my 9:30 a.m. operating table time. I was prepped and ready to get this done by 8 a.m. Because nobody in the nation’s capital has been able to come up with a way for people to move from one point to another in an expeditious and orderly fashion, my surgeon was held prisoner in I-270 traffic until 11 a.m. I gave thanks for needing only a simple key lime removal instead of a life-saving quadruple heart bypass.

“This won’t take long,” he said, as the anesthesiologist sedated me. I awoke hours later in the recovery room. The surgeon was standing by my bed, sputtering words you never want to hear in these circumstances, “You aren’t going to believe this,” he said. “It was the size of a grapefruit.” He positioned his hands, as if holding a county fair blue ribbon grapefruit, his face flashing the smile of a prideful fisherman boasting of a trophy catch. I told him I was glad he was having such a good day and then fell back to sleep.

All of this, dear readers, is my feeble way of explaining why you are not looking at an insightful commentary on a burning public policy issue. It takes a lot of slicing and dicing to extract a grapefruit. Given the state of our current world, pain is not a useful ointment for the dissection of complicated issues. Try to think fondly of me whenever you have your next fruit salad. I’ll be back soon.

SHIELDING STUDENTS FROM EVIL WON’T HELP THEM ALLEVIATE IT

College campuses, once a hotbed of anything-goes radicalism, are morphing into antiseptic bastions of thought cleansing. The source of this depressing trend is a new breed of students, determined to avoid offense or emotional discomfort at any cost.

Harvard Law School students, according to The New Yorker, have asked their professors not to teach about rape law because the subject is traumatic for them. Northwestern University students filed federal charges, eventually dismissed, against their instructor for writing a professional journal opinion piece opposing prohibitions against faculty-student dating. They said it made them uncomfortable. Students in a number of colleges have been allowed to skip reading assignments that contain passages that might upset them. Here’s how Atlantic Monthly introduced a lengthy analysis of this trend: “Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities.”

Indeed it is. The movement’s origins were benign and well intentioned. It started with infrequently used “trigger warnings” on assigned readings, designed as a heads’ up for students who had experienced trauma – sexual assault or other violence. They weren’t excused from the assignment, but the advance warning allowed them to consult with a therapist or take other precautions. In those same early days, human rights training for both faculty and students focused on a concept of “microaggressions”, a form of subconscious racism or sexism typically involving a stereotype. An example would be telling Asian students they must be good at math.

Those noble and sensible beginnings, however, evolved into darker outcomes. As a result of student pressure, backed by threatened social media attacks and the filing of federal discrimination charges, trigger warnings expanded way beyond the traumatized few and are now issued by more than 50% of the faculty, and for such subjects as racism, classism sexism, disregard for personal autonomy, spiders, drug use, suicide, indigenous artifacts, Nazi paraphernalia and slimy things. Worse yet, many schools report that a trigger warning now means students don’t have to read the objectionable material. Fortunately, leaders of some of the country’s leading educational institutions have recently tried to dial this movement back. American University, the University of Chicago and others have adopted policies against trigger warnings. Meanwhile, microaggressions have gone from a human rights learning strategy to a list of things that should never be said. In the University of California system, for example, the faculty has been warned against using a long list phrases, including, “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.”

Sheltering students from unpleasant thoughts and offensive ideas is anathema to what education is all about. How do you teach history without exploring the horrible trauma of war, slavery, Jim Crow laws and the treatment of American Indians? How do you teach literature if you have to trigger out Shakespeare’s “Othello” because of its violence against women, or his “Henry V” because of Henry’s use of warfare and threatened sexual violence as a way of obtaining political success? What about the suicide themes of Sylvia Plath’s poetry or the fear, pain and suffering caused by totalitarianism in Kurt Vonnegut’s novels? If the goal of education is to teach students not what to think, but how to think, you don’t get there by allowing them to remain in their comfort zones.

Trying to shelter students from racist and sexist microaggressions may alleviate momentary angst, but it does nothing to eradicate the broader problem that produced them. When they surface, why not use them as teachable moments so the entire class can learn what stereotyping is and the pain it causes? It is sadly ironic that this push to create a sanitized, safe and protective campus environment is happening at a time when this country is 30-some days and a handful of poll points away from electing as president someone whose campaign has been filled not with microaggressions, but with “YUGE” macroaggressions. Here is a small sampling of the headlines: (TRIGGER WARNING: These news reports are likely to cause anxiety, depression and a sudden interest in Canadian real estate.)

Donald Trump Eats a Taco Bowl to Prove His Love for Hispanics
Trump Campaign CEO Complained of Jews at Daughters’ School
Donald Trump: If Black Lives Don’t Matter, Then Go Back to Africa
Trump Calls for Banning Muslims From Entering U.S.
Trump Wanted to Fire Women Who Weren’t Pretty Enough

That’s the world outside of the campus cocoon. The Donald Trumps out there do not come with a trigger warning. Dealing with them, resisting their vile hate and racism is not optional. That’s why we need college graduates who are ready, willing and able to work against the forces they’d rather not think about. It’s the only way we can move this evil trauma from the headlines to the history books.

LONGING FOR THE GOOD OLD DAYS OF MITT ROMNEY

The date was Oct. 2, 2012. The day’s top political story? Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney called for permanent immigration reform. Elsewhere on memory lane, do you remember Romney’s biggest gaffe on women? It was during the second presidential debate. He was excitedly describing his diversity hires from his days as governor of Massachusetts and said, “We had binders full of women.” With those six words, Romney created an instant internet meme and one of the most popular Halloween costumes of 2012. Four years later, his successor spent the weekend trashing a former Miss Universe and then called the New York Times to complain about how his opponent said bad things about the women her husband slept with. Oh Mitt, we hardly knew ye!

It’s all such sweet, innocent nostalgia now, but it wasn’t always thus. As we approached the 2012 election, those of us on the left side of the aisle saw Romney as the goofy, out of touch, rich kid we tried to avoid in high school. We couldn’t imagine anything worse than a Romney presidency. Now we can. He is still the goofy, out of touch, rich kid we tried to avoid in high school. But if Hillary Clinton’s numbers suddenly go south, and if we could make a quick deal with the devil, well, Hail to the Chief, President Mittens!

During the past 24 hours, Donald Trump has been vacillating between two of his current obsessions: the body size of the 1996 Miss Universe, and intimate details of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s personal life. The two are linked only in the byzantine torture chamber that is Trump’s mind. HRC caught the Donald off guard during last week’s debate when she introduced Alicia Machado, the beauty pageant winner and one of his many body shaming victims. Trump left the debate sputtering about how he might have to “get nasty,” as if he’d been teaching a Dale Carnegie course all these months. He later clarified, in the call to the Times, that his new appeal to women will be to drudge up Bill Clinton’s affairs and “reveal” how Hillary criticized some of the other women in her husband’s life. That would be an October surprise only to someone who has never heard a country-western song or read the Starr Report, whichever came first. Then, a few hours later, he reversed course and complained to a Pennsylvania rally that Hillary has never been loyal to Bill.

In the beginning, Donald Trump was a joke, the Pat Paulsen candidate of 2016, someone who parodied the antiseptic, polished, focus-group-tested rhetoric of real politicians. In one of the cruelest twists of political fate our country has ever seen, the joke caught on. Many of us stopped laughing a long time ago. This campaign is no longer about issues or public policy. It’s about human decency and dignity and civility. It’s about showing respect for people you disagree with, or who come from different backgrounds, ethnicities or experiences. This qualification for office was unwritten and unspoken but has always been there, and until now, was always followed. We Americans argue about everything else – taxes, foreign policy, education, the environment, – but we have always shared the desire to be led by a decent, dignified president. Prior to August of 2016, every presidential nominee, regardless of party affiliation, met that standard.

Trump does not. He is mean, vindictive and cruel. He delights in name calling, in hurting anyone who differs with him. He embodies the very worst of our current culture and its screaming, divisive discourse of verbal abuse and incivility, of dismissing contrary views with brutal, painful attacks on those who hold them. Sadly, this election is not about any of the vital policy matters facing this country. We don’t reach those issues, because this election, first and foremost, is about only one thing: keeping a man who delights in hurting people out of the White House.

UNDECIDED MILLENNIAL VOTERS AND THE FOG OF BOOMER MEMORIES

There is a lot of handwringing in the Hillary Clinton camp over a sizeable contingent of recalcitrant millennials whose electoral preferences right now are either a third party candidate or none of the above. I’ve also noticed a few angry Facebook jabs at the younger set from fellow baby boomers wondering what is wrong with kids today? I was all set to the hit the like button on one of the them, but was interrupted by a 1968 flashback, my room covered with Eugene McCarthy banners and my father yelling at me: “What the hell is wrong with you kids today?”

Like it or not, we boomers are handing the demographic baton to our millennial progeny on Nov. 8. This will be the first election where those born between the early 1980s and 2000 outnumber us. According to recent polling, this generation prefers Clinton over Trump by 50% to 18%, leaving a whopping 32% of the country’s largest voting bloc up for grabs. It’s a tough nut to crack for both major party candidates because, frankly, one third of these young voters think the whole system sucks.

Take Jo Tongue. She’s 31, a Fort Collins, Colorado mother of two with another on the way. She told the Washington Post that she can’t make herself vote for either Clinton or Trump and feels “bummed that we’re at a place where it all feels like a joke.”

Then there is Nathan Mowery. He’s 26 and lives in Gainesville, Virginia. He told the New York Times this week that, as a Muslim, he would not vote for Trump, but finds Clinton to be uninspiring. He plans to vote for a third party candidate and, according to the Times, was unapologetic about his decision. “I’m casting a protest vote because it makes it visible to major parties that there are people who are motivated to vote but are unwilling to vote for either of them,” he said. “I hope that whoever runs in 2020 will get their act together and one of the parties will put somebody up that younger voters can align themselves with.”

To the progressive boomer crowd, this is heartbreaking. We lie awake at night, shuddering at the thought of a Trump Dystopia, a toxic cornucopia of everything we have spent our lives fighting – racism, misogyny, xenophobia, autocracy. This is a close election and these votes are desperately needed, not just to stop Trump but to elect as president, for the first time, a superbly qualified woman. Why can’t those kids see that?

The answer is in my 1968 flashback. To me, back then, the major party candidates in that election, Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey, symbolized everything that was wrong with this country – a horribly immoral war in Vietnam, rampant racism and an entrenched old-white-guy establishment that refused to share power. If I had been old enough to vote then, I would have rejected them both and written in “Clean Gene” McCarthy, the lefty peace and love candidate who lost the Democratic nomination to Humphrey. Through the wisdom of hindsight, of course, that was a bad call. Humphrey, the Father of Liberalism, helped deliver the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare and the Test Ban Treaty. If he had gotten a few more votes in ‘68, we would never have had Richard Nixon and Watergate to kick around.

Yet, in that 1960s moment, while our friends were dying in an endless war, many of us young boomers yearned to reject the entire political system that created that cancer. We had no desire to be either realistic or pragmatic. We wanted to start over with something new. That was our vision, our dream. Youth is a time for dreaming, even when it produces bad choices.

I say let’s cut the millennials some slack. First of all, half of them are already supporting Clinton, mirroring the population at large. A far smaller group, 18%, is backing Trump, who according to most polls is over 50% with baby boomers. As far as the progressive cause is concerned, our young friends are doing better than us geezers. That leaves the pox-on-both-your-houses crowd, a third of this gigantic youth demographic. Within the next few weeks, some of them will undoubtedly discover that the House of Trump is far more dangerous than the other one. But let’s respect their process. They aren’t exactly inheriting a perfect world from us. Let them dream, let them learn, let them grow. Even if it means making mistakes. Like we did.

COLLEGES CALL IN THE DOGS TO SAVE THE STUDENTS

Just in case you haven’t visited a college campus recently, these are not exactly the easy, lazy, hazy days of higher education. Student anxiety and depression are off the charts. Suicide prevention is a major concern. The long and winding road to pomp and circumstance is paved with stress and tension. And for good reason. A gloomy and uncertain job future has mortgaged-out parents pushing their kids away from liberal arts to science, technology or engineering, regardless of their offspring’s aptitude or interest. As a result, 2016 graduates left campus with an average debt of $37,172, many with a major foisted upon them, and no immediate job prospects.

Relief, however, is in sight. The chieftains of academia put their heads together, probably in multiple conference rooms lined with white boards and coffee urns, to take up the urgent matter of student stress. What to do? What to do? With $1.3 trillion in student debt and climbing, helicopter parents buzzing overhead and a student body stressed to the max, these administrators brainstormed this dilemma with their collective PhD wisdom and came up with a solution: animals.

That’s right. America’s universities and colleges are going to the dogs – and cats, snakes, chinchillas, pigs and small horses – but in a good way. Rather than fix the underlying causes of student stress, like tuition cost and the job market – administrators turned to the animal kingdom as a source of relief. Pet therapy programs, long used by hospitals and nursing homes, have a solid track record in reducing blood pressure, anxiety and depression. And compared with drugs, major medical interventions or eliminating the source of the angst, animals come pretty cheap. That’s how they quickly rose to the top of the white boards.

Yale Law students can check out Monty, a border terrier mix, from the school library for 30 minutes a crack. The University of Connecticut brings cats and dogs in for stress reduction during finals week and to help students cope with their classmates’ suicides. Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia has “puppy rooms” staffed by trained therapy dogs to help stressed out students relax. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York allows students to have their own therapy animals live with them on campus. That makes a variety of dog breeds, along with a menagerie of ponies, snakes and chinchillas, etc. permanent fixtures on the RPI campus.

The trend began with a small number of pets brought in occasionally by nonprofit groups to help with campus stress. It quickly morphed into the RPI approach of allowing students to bring their own pets. As a result of litigation under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Federal Housing Authority regulations, schools receiving federal funds cannot stop students from bringing their therapy animals with them for the entire college ride. These “service animals” do not necessarily need certification, but schools may request a doctor’s letter drawing a nexus between a specific physical or emotional condition and the pet selected to mitigate it.

The University of California at Berkley, birthplace of the 1960s’ free speech movement, has evolved into a virtual Noah’s Ark, with residence halls filled with rabbits, kangaroo rats, pot-bellied pigs, cockatiels, ferrets, ball pythons, Cuban rock iguanas and Chilean rose hair tarantulas, all appropriately leashed, caged and/or vaccinated. Administrators there say they err on the side of letting animals in as a way of helping students cope and keeping litigation costs at a minimum.

All of this is, in a way, kind of sweet and refreshing. Who can object to letting overanxious college kids get some moments of peace and calm from the pet of their choice? Besides PETA, that is. I suspect it is only a matter of time before we hear from the animal rights activists about subjecting dogs, cats, pigs, et al, to the ravages of undergraduate dorm life. Still, in a more perfect world, we would find a way to reduce or eliminate student costs and the helicoptering parents they produce. That way students could enjoy learning on their own with minimum tension, and the animals could return to their own stress-free habitat. Unfortunately, we aren’t there yet. So cue the therapy iguana. Midterms are coming.

NO RELIGIOUS LIBERTY FOR A HUNGRY CHILD

There was an amazing piece of news out of western Pennsylvania this week. You may have missed it because it happened the same day Angelina and Brad told us it was over; we process grief at different speeds. To fill you in: a school cafeteria worker quit her job when she had to deny a young boy a hot lunch because of a balance due on his account.

As reported by the Washington Post, Stacy Koltiska said she was working the cafeteria register at Wylandville Elementary School in the unincorporated town of Eighty Four, about 25 miles southwest of Pittsburgh. She said she will never forget the little boy’s eyes as he stood there with a tray of hot food. Due to a new school policy, the lunchroom staff is prohibited from giving hot lunches to anyone whose parents owed $25 of more for past meals. Because of the balance owed, Koltiska was duty bound by her work rules to deny him the hot lunch.

Under the policy, the parents will be charged $2.05 for their son’s meal, the one that Koltiska had to dump into the garbage. In lieu of hot food, the debtors’ child was handed a cold sandwich consisting of two slices of wheat bread and a single piece of what Koltiska called “government cheese.” So she quit, right then and there. She told the Post that her religious faith does not allow her to deny a hot meal to a hungry child. “As a Christian, I have an issue with this,” she explained. “It’s sinful and shameful is what it is.” She said she resigned out of a moral obligation. “God is love, and we should love one another and be kind,” Koltiska said. “There’s enough wealth in this world that no child should go hungry, especially in school. To me this is just wrong.”

Shockingly, there has been radio silence over Koltiska’s plight on the part of the evangelical right and its “religious liberty movement”. I fully expected Kim Davis to show up with a picket sign. She’s the clerk of court in Rowan County Kentucky who refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples because her religious beliefs outranked the law, or so she said. Davis did a few days in jail while relishing the martyr role and the army of Republican politicians who scrambled to her side for a photo op. This was the seminal event in a nation-wide push for legislation establishing the right to discriminate against the LGBT community on the basis of religious belief.

The argument is that people who sincerely hold religious convictions should get a pass whenever there is a conflict between the law and their faith. This has resulted in the passage of legislation in some states allowing florists, caterers and others to refuse to provide services for a gay wedding based on a religious opposition to same sex marriage. It also produced the Supreme Court decision in “Hobby Lobby”, where the justices said a business owner with a theological objection to birth control is free to remove contraception coverage from the company medical plan.

So why aren’t the religious liberty zealots expressing outrage over the school lunch dilemma? Granted, taking hot food away from a hungry child has nothing to do with birth control or the anti-gay agenda, but the religious principle could not be more directly applicable. Kim Davis became an overnight folk hero in some quarters when, as an elected official, she refused to issue gay couples the marriage licenses they were legally entitled to. Poor Stacy Koltiska, following a school board rule she abhorred, dumped the little boy’s lunch into the garbage, handed him a pathetic cheese sandwich and quit her job. Two women; the same God; two different conflicts between their faith and the law. One of them followed the law she disagreed with and then walked away, never to deny another child a hot meal. The other never followed the law, kept her job and went on a speaking tour with a hostile rant about “religious liberty”. Which of them went to a better place is unknown to all but God. But it’s a pretty easy guess.

DECISION 2016: ALL WE ARE SAYING IS GIVE VERBAL ABUSE A CHANCE

This presidential campaign is quickly emerging as one of our country’s darkest hours. Public policy discourse has taken a back seat to brutal name calling. Poetic rhetoric has been replaced by angry noise. Civility is out. Personal attack is in. The worst part is that this venomous angst is seeping through the pores of the body politic, infecting all of us – our relationships and our families. Roughly one third of people polled recently

A House No Longer Divided
A House No Longer Divided

said they have been attacked, insulted, or called names on the basis of their political opinions. One in four of those surveyed said a recent political discussion permanently damaged a relationship.

Facebook executives recently told the Associated Press that U.S. users sent out four billion political messages during the first seven months of the year. Although the network claims not to track unfriending metrics, a spokesperson told AP that such communication cutoffs are on the rise. That includes people who left FB in disgust over political posts, as well as those who stayed but selectively weeded friends based on partisan rants. The news service quoted Scott Talan, an American University communication instructor who tracks social media and politics as saying he has seen some fairly hostile Facebook exchanges recently. “They range from pretty harsh, graphically laced, attacks upon people. . .to statements of ‘if you support this person, you can no longer be my friend.’”

My 90-year-old uncle, Jenner Nelson of St. Cloud, Minnesota, encountered an analog version of this Facebook estrangement and adroitly moved to rectify it. He’d been lobbied for months by the Trump and Clinton factions within our family and decided to let us all know where he stood by posting both candidates’ signs on his lawn, as pictured above, but only after covering their names with large X’s of red duct tape. “To heck with them both,” he said. Although the gesture didn’t dampen any of our partisan passions, it helped, at least momentarily, put a political campaign in perspective.

A couple of factors brought us to this point. But first, these words from our two major party candidates for president: “racist”, “bigot”,  “crooked”, “totally unqualified”, “dangerous”, “dishonest”, “incompetent”, “fraudulent”, “basket of deplorables”, “lose cannon”, “stupid”, “unfit”, “weak”, “total disgrace, and “pathetic”. And those are just for starters. The word cloud emerging from this campaign is horrendously strident. Put that together with the political intransigence that has paralyzed Congress for the last several terms and we are left with . . .well, a lot of people yelling at each other. One recent survey indicated that the incivility of political discourse is so bad that 40 percent of classroom instructors are hesitant to teach about the election for fear of adding to what is already a serious bullying problem in their schools.

Yet, there is something else going on here. Families, friends and coworkers have always differed on political choices, usually without creating an interpersonal crisis. My parents used to joke about canceling each other’s vote on election day. Nobody is laughing now. The difference with this election is that it goes to deeply held values, the kind of stuff that is part of our core, that defines who we are. We can have friendly disagreements over health insurance or NATO funding without a lot of existential angst. It’s a whole different situation when you are talking about keeping Muslims out of the country, deporting undocumented immigrants, building a wall around Mexico and issues of equity and justice for African Americans and the LGBT community.

This is visceral, heart and soul stuff. We are in different places because we’ve had different experiences that have contributed to our conflicted wiring. My 1960s childhood turned me into a passionate human rights advocate. That means I’m against the wall, the Muslim ban and for amnesty-based immigration reform. That also means I see Donald Trump as a pariah, someone whose world view is totally contrary to my values. On the other hand, there are good, decent folks out there who see jobs disappearing and their communities filling up with people from other countries and cultures. They long for the days when America was a different kind of place. They want to recapture what’s been lost. To them, Clinton is the pariah and Trump is the one with a map to their promised land.

Our vision for the future could not be more different. Yet, they are both so clearly valid to us that, particularly among people who share a connection, it is painful to talk about politics right now because it is a conversation that, by necessity, challenges and threatens our deeply held conflicting views of the world. This interpersonal quagmire could be mitigated by national leaders who would engage us with a vocabulary of civility and accommodation instead of name calling and polarization. Sadly, those cards are not on the table. All we can do right now is follow the road that is right for us and respect those we care about who take another path.

THE JOE PATERNO STORY: DON’T LET FACTS MAR THE LEGEND IN OUR MIND

Joe Paterno, depending on your perspective, was either God’s gift to college football or a pathetic pedophile enabler. The continuum between those two extremes runs the length of a football field. And there is nobody at the 50-yard line; you either revere JoePa or you despise him. Although he has been dead for nearly five years, when it comes to a posthumous life, this guy has been more active than Elvis.

This past Saturday, for example, there was a celebration in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of Paterno’s first game as Penn State University’s head football coach. During that time span, he won a gazillion games and became a beloved legend and prolific rainmaker for the Big Ten school in State College, Pennsylvania. Then, in 2011, his halo took on a sudden tarnish when his longtime assistant, Jerry Sandusky turned out to be a serial child molester. Many of the sexual assaults occurred in the university’s athletic facilities. Although Paterno denied any knowledge of his assistant’s crimes, an investigation by former FBI director Louis French found that he had likely known about the pedophilia and did not report it. Just a few weeks ago, according to the Washington Post, a judge unsealed documents in a civil suit showing that one of Sandusky’s victims told Paterno about his molestation in 1976, and that the head coach told him he didn’t “want to hear about any of that kind of stuff” because there was a football season to worry about. Sandusky was convicted and is serving 30-60 years in prison. Paterno was fired by Penn State in late 2011 and then died from lung cancer in early 2012.

It was against that backdrop that Penn State rolled out “Joe Paterno Day” at the football stadium Saturday afternoon. And everyone went to their corners of outrage. “Why don’t they call it Protect a Pedophile Day?,” messaged one camp. “Paterno is innocent;” said another, “he is vilified only by those who know nothing.” Some placards said, “We Love You Joe!” Others asked “What About The Victims?”

Lauren Davis, a journalism major and opinion editor for the Daily Collegian, Penn State’s student-run newspaper, incurred brutal alumni wrath with her understated editorial suggesting that, under the circumstances, a Paterno tribute was in bad taste. Emails, according to the New York Times, immediately poured into the school newspaper calling Davis a “clueless, treacherous traitor,” an “idiot” and several other names the Times said it could not print. They were from graduates from the 1970s and earlier, all unloading their venom on a journalism student. The message from one man was, “I hope God can forgive you for your actions, I sure as hell can’t.”

So much anger, so much hate, so much divisiveness. We’ve grown accustomed to it in our political campaigns, now we can’t avoid it at a football game. That’s what happens when we chose to live in a black and white world of heroes and villains. The truth is that Joe Paterno is neither. All of our lives are compendiums of choices, good, bad and in between. If JoePa knew about the molestation and said nothing, he made a terrible choice, but it doesn’t mean he didn’t make other choices that were good, that helped develop and shape his student athletes. It does mean, however, as Lauren Davis, the student editor, wrote, that Penn State should not be honoring this guy, treating him like a saint, particularly with the brutal testimony of the victims still haunting the community. The past is over. Sandusky is in prison. Paterno is dead. Let it be. This is not the time for a party.

Speaking of bad choices, those geezer graduates, who verbally abused a journalism student for spouting wisdom that escaped all of them, have hopefully exhausted their quota for the year. But probably not. Psychologist Eric Simons says his research shows that a sports team is an expression of a fan’s sense of self. He says self-esteem rides on the “outcome of the game and the image of the franchise.” That might explain why a bunch of Nittany Lion alumni in their 60s and 70s are insisting that a dead football coach is blameless. If JoePa covered for a pedophile, it’s a personal wound to them. And we thought football was just a game.

A COLLECTIVE NUMBNESS TO TRUMP ATROCITIES

The most perplexing mystery of our time, other than Duck Dynasty and the Kardashians, has been how Donald Trump can say so many stupid things and continue to be a viable presidential candidate. Let me crack that cold case with one word: volume. He says so many stupid things that they evolve into an anesthetic blur. Under the power of that anesthesia, well over 40 percent of likely voters are ready to extend their middle finger to the political establishment and send this clown to the White House.

Take the past 24 hours as an example. Trump came clean about his fabricated conspiracy over President Obama’s birthplace, falsely accused Hillary Clinton of creating the issue, and then suggested that her Secret Service agents disarm and see if anyone tries to kill her. And Al Gore paid a price because he claimed to have invented the internet. But don’t you see? That’s the point. We remember Gore’s internet gaffe because it was one of the very few stupid things he said. He spent the rest of time talking about boring stuff, like carbon footprints and Social Security lock boxes.

If Trump had been intently focused on well thought out policy issues for the last 10 months and then, in a weak moment, advocated the assassination of his opponent, it would have been curtains on his campaign. It’s all people would have talked about from now until the election. Instead, in a matter of hours, he will have pushed that thought from our minds and replaced it with another outrage. The human brain is not equipped to simultaneously concentrate on multiple atrocities.

Broadcaster Keith Obermann took a stab at it this week, much to the delight of the progressive community. In a well scripted and delivered 17-minute rant, Obermann listed 176 truly outrageous things Trump has said or done. He included the attack on the Pope and the Gold Star parents, his history of not renting to black people, his claim that Obama invented ISIS, his suggestion that Russia hack Clinton’s emails, his insistence that his buddy, Valdimir Putin, would never go into Ukraine, which he invaded two years ago, and 170 other equally bizarre comments and actions. Yet, days later, when I started to write this paragraph, I had to download a transcript of Obermann’s rant because I couldn’t remember the laundry list. It’s like laughing your head off at a comedy club but being unable, the next day, to remember more than one or two of the jokes.

This is why it seems like the media is hounding Clinton on the email and foundation stuff while not holding Trump to his foibles. In one instance you have two issues with long shelf lives. In the other, you have serial defects, each succumbing to its successor. In the history of dumb political stuff, nobody holds a candle to Trump’s volume. That’s why it is easy to recall those other non-Trump blunders. Remember how John Kerry “voted for the bill before I voted against it”? Or, Howard Dean’s scream? Or Dan Quayle’s misspelling of potato? Or Rick Perry’s “Oops”? Or a helmeted Michael Dukakis ridding in an armored tank? Or Gerald Ford promising no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe when such domination was already well in place? Or Sarah Palin’s foreign policy bonafides based on the proximity of her back yard to Russia?

Donald Trump outdoes all of them combined, before breakfast. On a rational level, it is eminently sensible to suggest that the American people would be embarrassed to have as their leader someone so thoroughly entrenched in ignorance and buffoonery. For a sizeable portion of the electorate, however, this campaign is not about rationality. It is about their utter disgust for our government. It’s not so much that Donald Trump is their savior. He’s their middle finger, their protest vote against a changing world they’ve come to hate. They are united in anger and there is no revelation, no October surprise, that will deter them from trying to foist their candidate of rage onto the source of their scorn. Instead, the only path to hope in this election rests with those who, despite all that is wrong with this country, care enough to change it rather than blow it up with a middle finger.