Exit, Voice, and Loyalty

by William H. Benson

January 10, 2019

     Economic and political ruin strikes one country after another. Yes, it seems that, on occasion, the world’s nearly two hundred countries will suffer a disaster, a disintegration of the country’s stabilizing political and economic forces that pushes its citizens into the very center of chaos.

     For example, the civil war in Syria drags on. An estimated 500,000 people have lost their lives since 2011, and another 13 million have found themselves displaced and forced to flee the country. Once the U. S. troops leave, the Syrian people can expect more barrel bombs, bullets, and bloodshed.

     Venezuela’s economy has disintegrated. Since 2014, at least 2.5 million people, possibly as many as 5.0 million, have packed their few belongings, walked away from homes and jobs, and migrated to neighboring countries. The reason: Venezuela’s inflation rate now stands at 1,299,744%.

     The country’s previous ruler, Hugo Chavez, and its current ruler, Nicolás Maduro, engineered a complete economic collapse by draining the national treasury and then borrowing billions. Today, $50 billion of their bonds are in default, and “90% of the population live in poverty.”

     Officials in South Sudan, the world’s newest country, also looted some $7 billion from its national treasury and parked the funds in bank accounts in Kenya and Uganda. A war over who will control the country, has caused “perhaps half a million deaths, mostly aggravated by hunger and disease.”

     In Yemen, the rebel Houthi party controls the prized western region, including the ports on the Red Sea, while the government controls the central and eastern regions. The war between the two factions has caused mass starvation and disease for the people. A writer for the Economist said last week, “There are many who do not want peace. Powerful people on all sides are profiting from the conflict.”

     These calamities in these four countries are today’s disasters, and one can predict that at some point in the future, each will subside, and then other calamities in other countries will appear and replace the current crop. Nothing bad stays bad forever, even if the current inflation rate exceeds 1.2 million%.

     Time levels all. An American physicist named John Archibald Wheeler pointed out, “Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.” 

     This brings up a question. “If we know that today’s disasters will recover, what will cause a nation to turn itself around?”

     The English language has an interesting phrase: “The worm has turned.” It describes how a situation can change, when a person, an institution, or even a country that has been weak, unlucky, and unsuccessful can become strong, lucky and successful.

     Two weeks ago in the New York Times, a columnist named Ruchir Sharma pointed out that bubbles happen—think tulips in Holland, emus in Texas, and last year’s bitcoin craze. The bubble’s mood is greed, defined by mania and driven by hype.

     But then the same columnist pointed out that there are “anti-bubbles,” and their mood is fear, trepidation, and suspicion—think war, rumors of war, looting public coffers, famine, disease, an exodus, hyperinflation, a busted economy, and onerous debts.

     Sharma says, “Bubbles and anti-bubbles share one thing; they don’t last forever.” When greed turns to fear, or when fear gives way to hope, then we say, “the worm has turned.”

     The economist Albert O. Hirschman wrote of “exit, voice, and loyalty.” In most market economies, people have a choice, and if they do not like the choices, the products and services offered, they will head to the exit signs. They are free to leave the shop or pack up and leave the country.

     In most democratic countries, people will not leave if dissatisfied with their leaders’ political decisions. Instead, they will speak their minds, and voice their opinions, hoping that others will listen and change the political status quo.

     A third option: people neither leave or say anything. Instead, they choose silence and remain loyal. They adopt a wait and see position. Hence, exit, voice, and loyalty.

     Yes, time changes all. It will heal gaping wounds, rectify deep injustices, knock down the powerful and mighty, and lift the downtrodden. The 18^th century writer and thinker William Blake said, “Eternity is in love with the productions of time. In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy. The cut worm forgives the plow.”

The Emancipation Proclamation

by William H. Benson

December 27, 2018

     Jill Lepore, Professor of history at Harvard, published this fall her most recent book, These Truths, A History of the United States. In it, she writes a most riveting account of the days leading up to Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation.

     On September 22, 1862, Lincoln announced that “he would free nearly every slave held in every Confederate state in exactly one hundred days—on New Year’s Day 1863.” Later, Lincoln explained to his cabinet. “I said nothing to anyone, but I made the promise to myself and to my maker.”

     Like a prairie wildfire, word spread south and west, to those bound in chains, stuck in bondage. Jill Lepore writes, “Across the land, people fell to their knees. A crowd of black men, women, and children came to the White House and serenaded Lincoln, singing hosannas.”

     Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, said that “in all ages there has been no act of one man and of one people so sublime as this emancipation.”

     Some wondered if Lincoln would keep his promise. The former slave Frederick Douglass said, “The first of January is to be the most memorable day in American Annals. But will that deed be done? Oh! That is the question.”

     In December, Lincoln spoke to Congress and said, “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.” On Christmas Eve, day ninety-two, a concerned Charles Sumner, Senator from Massachusetts, visited Lincoln at the White House, and asked, “Would the president make good his pledge?” Lincoln assured the worried Senator that, yes, he would keep his word.

     On December 29, 1862, day ninety-seven, Lincoln read his draft of the Emancipation Proclamation to his cabinet and invited their comments. Salmon Chase, secretary of the the Treasury, suggested a different ending, “I invoke the considerate judgment of all mankind and the gracious favor of almighty God.” Lincoln adopted Chase’s words. 

     “Ninety-seven, ninety-eight. Ninety-nine: New Year’s Eve 1862, watch night.”

     That night an overflow crowd gathered at the Shiloh Presbyterian Church to hear the black abolitionist, Henry Highland Garnet, preach. “At exactly 11:55 p.m., the church fell silent. At midnight, the choir broke the silence: “Blow Ye Trumpets Blow, the Year of Jubilee has come.”

     Day one hundred. At 2:00 p.m., in the White House, President Abraham Lincoln picked up his pen, and said, “I never, in my life, felt more certain that I was doing right than I do in signing this paper.” He signed the document. The deed was done.

     Near the document’s conclusion, Lincoln cautions the former slaves. “ And I hereby enjoin upon the people so declared to be free to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defen[c]e; and I recommend to them that, in all cases when allowed, they labor faithfully for reasonable wages.”

     Lincoln understood human nature. If a laborer works for a landowner, then he or should expect to receive “reasonable wages.” It is a terrible to thing to work hard and receive nothing back.

     “In South Carolina, the Proclamation was read out to the First South Carolina Volunteer Infantry, a regiment of former slaves. At its final lines, the soldiers began to sing, quietly at first, and then louder: My Country, ’tis of thee, Sweet land of liberty, Of thee I sing!”

     Jill Lepore writes, “American slavery had lasted for centuries. It had stolen the lives of millions and crushed the souls of millions more. It had cut down children, stricken mothers, and broken men. It had poisoned a people and a nation. It had turned hearts to stone. It had made eyes blind. It had left gaping wounds and terrible scars. It was not over yet. But at last, at last, an end lay within sight.”

     As Union troops advanced, and the Confederacy’s power dwindled, black men and women dropped their rakes, shovels, and hoes, and began leaving the fields where they had labored for so little.

     Lepore writes, “The American Odyssey had barely begun. From cabins and fields they left. Freed men and women headed north, south, or west, searching. They were husbands in search of wives, wives in search of husbands, mothers and fathers looking for their children, children for their parents. Some of their wanderings lasted for years. They sought their own union, a union of their beloved.”

     January 1, 1863, the day Abraham Lincoln emancipated the slaves.

Antarctica’s Summer Races

by William H. Benson

December 13, 2018

     Fifty-three runners will compete in the fourteenth annual Antarctica Ice Marathon on Thursday, December 13, 2018. A Russian-made Ilyushin-Il-76TD aircraft will transport the runners from Punta Arenas, in southern Chile, to Union Glacier, Antarctica, on Wednesday, the twelfth, and then the same aircraft will return them to Chile on Friday, the fourteenth.

     While at Union Glacier, runners will reside in double-occupancy tents that the sun heats during the twenty-fours of daylight, sleep in polar sleeping bags, and endure temperatures of just above or below zero degrees Fahrenheit, depending upon the windchill. No chance for a hot shower after the race.

     Participants this year will include fifteen from China, nine from the USA, seven from Australia, and lesser numbers from Indonesia, Mexico, Poland, Ireland, Italy, and other countries. It is an international event. Runners will run two loops of a 13.1 mile-course, equal to a marathon’s 26.2 miles.

     Who would have thought that women and men from all over the world would run a race in Antarctica to re-enact a historical event that occurred in 490 B.C., 2,508 years ago? A Greek soldier ran 26.2 miles from Marathon to inform Athens’s citizens that the Greeks had defeated the Persians.

     Last year’s women’s winner at the Ice Marathon was Kelly Allen McLay of the USA, in 4 hours, 56.37 minutes. Winner of the men’s division was Frank Johansen of Denmark, in 3 hours, 37.46 minutes, and he then joined the Seven Continents Marathon Club.

     This year each runner paid 16,000 Euros, or $18,211 to run.

     Another far more arduous race is now underway during Antarctica’s summer season, November through January, but with only two participants: Colin O’Brady, 33, an American adventurer, and Lous Rudd, 49, a captain in the British army. Both decided, independent of the other, to achieve a first, cross the Antarctic continent solo, unsupported, and unaided.

     Solo means alone. Unsupported means without dogs or food drops. Unaided means without kites that harness the Antarctic’s ferocious Katabatic winds and pulls a skier across the ice.

     Instead, both O’Brady and Rudd intend to ski alone, miles apart, ten to twelve hours everyday, and pull a 300+ pound Norwegian sled called a “pulk,” that carries a tent and a ninety-day supply of high-calorie food, but no change of clothes.

     On November 2, the men departed at the point where the Ronne Ice Shelf meets land, headed uphill toward the South Pole, and once there, they will turn to the right and head to that point where land meets the Ross Ice Shelf, a total distance of 921 miles.

     The first leg is all uphill, and most strenuous, from just above sea level to the South Pole’s 9,301 feet above sea level, just shy of Leadville, Colorado’s elevation. A man tugging a sled in white-out conditions, “like being inside a Ping-Pong ball,” may not notice the uphill climb, but he can feel it.    

     Louis Rudd, “The beginning was crazy. The weight was so heavy.”

     A writer for Wired magazine, said, “It’s straight-up impossible to take enough calories with you to get across the continent of Antarctica.” The two men hope to prove that writer wrong. Both men eat as many calories as they can, but “they still expend more calories that they take in.”

     Both O’Brady and Rudd know the risks, and that Antarctica is unforgiving. In January of 2016, an adventurer named Henry Wolsely tried to do the same, but gave up when only thirty miles from the finish line, after an infection sidelined him. Days later he died.    

     Both O’Brady and Rudd carry cell phones and GPS devices to alert their rescuers should they exhaust their food supply, or fall into a crevasse, or develop an infection, or break a leg. Before they sleep, they lay out their solar panels and charge their phones.

     Also, before they sleep, they hang up their wet clothes. Sweat is deadly in a polar environment because moisture can freeze on the skin when motions stops, causing body temperatures to plummet toward hypothermia.

     Every day, the two men feel overpowering pain and utter exhaustion. They slip, fall, get up and trek onwards. On Thanksgiving Day, O’Brady described the first four days as very emotional. “Crying, frustrated, physically rocked.” Rudd says, “It is grueling, a different level to anything I’ve done before. It just takes so much out of you.”

     A one-day marathon in Antarctica sounds exhausting, but to ski nearly 1,000 miles across the frozen continent over three months at a high elevation far exceeds a marathon’s physical demands.

Gaza

by William H. Benson

November 29, 2018

     On November 29, 1947, 71 years ago today, the United Nations voted to partition Palestine between first, the Palestinians, the people and families who had resided on that land for centuries, and second, the recent immigrants, the Jewish Zionists, who had fled Europe after the Holocaust.

     Six months later, on May 14, 1948, Great Britain withdrew from Palestine, and that same day the Zionists created a new nation, Israel.

     The next day, May 15, 1948, armed forces from the neighboring Arab nations—Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq—invaded Israel. The Israelis fought for their lives, with fewer numbers and inferior military equipment, during this, the first of several Arab-Israeli wars.

     Yet, the Israelis won their battle for survival. Daring tactics, a motivated army, and makeshift bombs and rifles defeated their enemies. “Defeat for the Israelis would mean eradication.”

     Fearing the Israelis’ intentions, some 750,000 Palestinians people fled their homes and villages in Palestine, and found temporary shelter in Jordan, on the West Bank of the Jordan River, in Egypt, in Lebanon, and on a strip of land that borders Egypt, five miles wide and twenty-five miles long, alongside the Mediterranean Sea, the Gaza Strip, where two million Palestinians live desperate lives.

     After seventy-one years, the Palestinians’ temporary settlements are now thought of as permanent, yet, they and their children and grandchildren dream of returning to their native villages.

     Since 2007, Hamas has controlled the Gaza Strip. Some countries, including the United States and Israel, consider Hamas a terrorist organization, but others, including Russia and Turkey, do not.

     Hamas’s officials want to liberate all of Palestine from Israeli occupation, establish an Islamic state across Palestine, and allow Palestinians and their descendents to return to their towns and villages.

     To accomplish this, Hamas launches rockets into Israel. They set aloft incendiary balloons that fall on Israeli agricultural fields and that scorches thousands of acres. They march along the wire fence and protest the open-air prison that the Israelis force them to live in. They build tunnels under the fence.

     War between Israel and Hamas has broken out four times since 2007. The last war, in 2014, “ravaged the territory further and left more than 2,000 Palestinians dead.”

     Christopher Gunness, of the United Nations said, “The humanitarian situation was already disastrous. There’s more than a decade of an illegal blockade. It’s collective punishment.”

     Late in October this year, the Israeli government tried another approach, peaceful and calm actions.

     Israeli officials allowed diesel trucks to pass into Gaza where they filled fuel tanks at the Gaza’s sole electrical power plant. For a few days, the Palestinians enjoyed access to electricity, and hospitals, homes, businesses, and sewage treatment plants could operate again.

     The Israelis also allowed $15 million dollars to pass unobstructed into Gaza, donations that Qatar, a wealthy Arab emirate, gave to the Gaza Palestinians. Hamas then paid months of missed back pay to “thousands of civil servants, teachers, and police officers.”

     This de-escalation fell apart though on Sunday, November 11, 2018, when Israeli special forces, dressed in civilian clothes—including some dressed in women’s clothing—drove a civilian car three kilometers into the Gaza Strip, near the southern city of Khan Younis.

     The Israeli commandoes stopped their car in front of a house that belonged to Nour Baraka, a Hamas battalion commander, in charge of “digging attack tunnels and firing rockets into Israel.” In the gunfight that ensued, the commandoes killed seven Palestinians, including Nour Baraka, but were forced to call in airstrikes “to cover their retreat back into Israeli territory.”

     One Israeli commando was killed during the raid; another was wounded.

     In a rage, Hamas responded with a flurry of rockets, aimed at Israeli communities near Gaza, and, in turn, Israeli aircraft pounded targets inside Gaza. By sundown on Tuesday, November 13, 2018, “Israel and Hamas signaled a willingness to end the clashes.”

     One wonders why Israel’s government would signal peace, hoping for a long-term truce, and then launch a covert undercover operation into Gaza. They must know that, “For Israel to return to a policy of targeting individual Hamas commanders—a tactic abandoned in recent years—could raise tensions along the fence.” A fifth Hamas-Israeli war is a real possibility today.

     Will the Gaza Strip Palestinians ever experience peace? If so, may it happen in 2019.

Gettysburg and Armistice Day

by William H. Benson

November 15, 2018

     At Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on July 1, 2, and 3, 1863, the Southern General Robert E. Lee dared to invade the north, in a false hope that President Abraham Lincoln and the Union Army would sue for peace, and recognize the Confederacy, but Union troops held strong at Gettysburg. After the battle, Lee retreated back to the South, and for another two years, he fought only defensive battles.

     The battle at Gettysburg was horrific. Some 5,000 dead horses or mules littered the battlefield, and an estimated 8,900 men fell during the three days’ fight. The Harvard historian, Jill Lepore, said, “They lay in trenches, they lay on hilltops; they lay between trees, they lay atop rocks.”

     Cleanup crews set ablaze piles of horses and mules, and then covered the fallen young men with stones or dirt. One civilian was killed, a girl named Jennie Wade, struck down by a stray bullet.       

     In the autumn of 1863, officials decided to disinter the 3,512 fallen Union soldiers, and rebury them in what became the Gettysburg National Military Park.

     Then, over the next twenty years, officials and families from the South made the journey north to Gettysburg to dig up 3,320 fallen Confederate soldiers and rebury them in cemeteries across the South. Yet, an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 or more Confederate bodies still lay at Gettysburg, never disinterred.

     President Lincoln agreed to give the “Dedicatory Remarks” at the dedication ceremony at the Gettysburg Park, on November 19, 1863, 155 years ago this month. In about two minutes, Lincoln said 272 words. Edward Everett, a renowned orator, gave the Gettysburg Address. He spoke for two hours.

     Lincoln did not mention any individual man, soldier or officer. He did not mention the town of Gettysburg, or the two sides that were fighting, or even the word “slavery.”

     Instead, Lincoln mentions the Founding Fathers of 1776, that they built “a new nation” upon “Liberty. He lifts the words from the Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal.”

     Lincoln talks of “a great civil war,” “a great battle-field,” “a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live,” and he says that “the brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it.”

     The author Garry Wills said, in his book, Lincoln at Gettysburg, that Lincoln’s speech “hovers above the carnage,” that he wanted to “clear the infected atmosphere of American history itself, tainted with official sins and inherited guilt,” and that the battle is “an experiment testing whether a government can maintain the proposition of equality.”

     Why did the young men at Gettysburg fight with such unswerving ferocity? During and after the war, some argued that Southerners fought for states’ rights, and that Northerners fought to preserve the Union, or for a thousand other reasons. Jill Lepore said, “Soldiers, North and South, knew better.” They fought for slavery, or against it.

     A Confederate soldier said, “Any man who pretends to believe that this is not a war for the emancipation of the blacks is either a fool or a liar.” In 1862, a Wisconsin soldier said, “The fact that slavery is the sole undeniable cause of this infamous rebellion, that it is a war of, by, and for Slavery, is as plain as the noon-day sun.”

     The Northern soldiers fought to uproot and eradicate the business of buying and selling men, women, and children. The Southern soldiers fought for the right to own property, and that included their laborers, their unpaid, held-in-bondage, chained slaves, a most wretched and horrific business.

     Sunday, November 11, 2018, Veterans Day, the 100^th anniversary of Armistice Day, the day when the Great War in Europe ended. As many as nineteen million soldiers lost their lives during that ugly war, and as many as eight million civilians, due to famine, disease, the Spanish flu, or genocide.

     The Great War was fought on a scale far beyond any witnessed before in human history. This was government folly at its worst. There was no moral reason, like slavery, to justify the massive slaughter. There was no speech like the Gettysburg Address, that “hovered above the carnage.” There was no talk of Lincoln’s “new birth of freedom.” There was only four years of slaughter, and then an Armistice.

      Human beings had invented machines that could kill other human beings with deadly efficiency on a battlefield, or from the air, but governments had not learned how to avoid the folly of war and steer the ship of state away from the precipice.

     At Gettysburg, men fought, and men died, and, as Lincoln said, they “gave the last full measure of devotion,” and that the world “can never forget what they did here.”

The New York-Packet and the Constitution

by William H. Benson

November 1, 2018

     Jill Lepore, the Harvard historian, published her newest book a month ago, These Truths: A History of the United States. In a short introduction, she describes in detail the October 30, 1787 edition of a semi-weekly newspaper, The New-York Packet.

     A reader then could have read: of “a schoolmaster who was offering lessons in reading, writing, arithmetic,” of an estate sale of “a large and General Assortment of Drugs and Medicines,” of a “Scotsman who offered reward for the return of his stolen chestnut-colored mare,” and of a merchant who was selling “dry codfish, molasses, ground ginger, rum, writing paper, and men’s shoes.”

     In addition, that same reader might have glanced at two additional advertisements. The first: “To be sold. A likely young Negro girl, 20 years of age; she is healthy and had the small pox; she has a young male child.” The second: a copy of “the Columbian Almanac, plus, as a bonus, something entirely new, the Constitution of the United States,” on “four pages of parchment.”

     A slave girl that could not expect pay for her hard labor for a white taskmaster, an almanac that predicted the tides and the phases of the moon, and a new Constitution that sought to ensure liberty. The New-York Packet‘s editor mixed the “atrocity of slavery” with the blessings of liberty. 

     Lepore also pointed out that if a reader flipped to page two of that same edition of the New-York Packet, she or he could have read Alexander Hamilton’s words in the first of The Federalist Papers.

     “[I]t seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”

     Ever since, Americans have had “to decide the important question.” Can the people of this country  govern themselves by “reflection and choice,” or only by “accident and force?” The brash thirty-year-old New York City lawyer named Alexander Hamilton believed that we could.

     Except for Rhode Island, fifty-five representatives from the states assembled in Philadelphia on May 25, 1787. George Washington and James Madison came from Virginia, Alexander Hamilton from New York. Their average age was forty-two, but the oldest by far was Benjamin Franklin, then eighty-one.

     Together they pledged themselves to secrecy, going so far as to nail the windows shut. Stuck inside that Convention hall throughout that hot summer, until September 17, the men sweated, argued, debated, lost their tempers, regained them, and compromised, until they hammered out a Constitution.   

     The 20^th century historian John P. Roche described the Founding Fathers, “[T]hey were first and foremost superb democratic politicians.” Working in their state governments, they had learned the art of argument, of debate, and of agreeing upon a compromise that would more or less satisfy all.

     John Dickinson, a Pennsylvania representative to the Convention, said, “Experience must be our only guide. Reason may mislead us.” In other words, pure philosophical reason constructed in an ivory tower may falter when tried in a world filled with power-hungry and greedy men and women.

      Of “experience,” the 20^th century historian, Douglas G. Adair, said that, “no other word was used more often; time after time ‘experience’ was appealed to as the clinching argument for an opinion.”

     Jill Lepore describes three founding truths: “the idea of equality came out of a resolute rejection of the idea of inequality; a dedication to liberty emerged out of [the] bitter protest against slavery; and the right to self-government was fought for by sword and by pen.” Equality, liberty, and self-government.

     In August this year, the political columnist, George Will, quoted Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural address of January 1861, when the new president called “the Declaration of Independence the ‘apple of gold’ that is ‘framed’ by something ‘silver,’ the Constitution. Silver is less precious than gold; frames serve what they frame.”

     With Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, plus the 55 representatives’ Constitution, and a Bill of Rights, we Americans, you and I, are a most fortunate and a most blessed people.

     Two interesting points. I met Jill Lepore in April of 2010, when I attended an awards banquet for the History Department at the University of Northern Colorado. She gave a riveting account of the close relationship between Benjamin Franklin and his house-bound sister, Jane Mecham. Also, Ms. Lepore points out in her book that the New-York Packet‘s printing shop was located a mere eight blocks from the World Trade Center.