Susan Feathers

All things come ’round to the Truth, eventually.

Last night at the Democratic National Convention, I saw Americans from all “walks of life” coming together for one purpose: saving democracy as our form of governance.

It once was true that political conventions were showcases of different ideas on how to improve our democracy. Now, because of a mutant form of the Republican party, our task is about saving all that Americans have built together for nearly 250 years of striving for a more perfect union.

Liberals, conservatives, independents and all —over two and a half centuries of blood, sweat and tears — are coalescing around Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to repair and strengthen our ship of state. Joe Biden’s team saved us from the brink of disaster. Now, we must come together for Harris and Walz.

Photo by Manfred Hu00f6nig on Pexels.com

Think of our nation as a grand sailing vessel, sails full and straining for the horizon. We are all on that ship together, but there is rot in the hull below the waterline. Joe Biden and freedom-loving congresswomen and men, are reaming out the rotten planks and replacing them with solid oak, rebuilding what has been torn down. We are coming together to be more weatherly!

Weatherly!

Let’s elect Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to be the next Captains and fill our crew with strong sailers who know what it means to work together. We have a destiny. We have a map, and, the winds are in our favor!

VOTE.GOV

Kamala Harris Campaign Site

Republicans for Harris – some prominent Repubicans are encouraging Republicans who can’t vote for Trump to vote for Harris whether you agree with the platform or not. This is to bring a ground swell that pushes back on lies and threats and a wrong direction for people living in a democracy.

Vote Forward: Get out the vote! I like this group because they don’t tell people who to vote for, just to vote as part of your responsibility in a democracy.

Let’s bring our Ship of State round about and sail closed hauled into the sunrise of destiny on the American Democratic Adventure!

Photo by Susan Feathers, Gulf Islands National Seashore

Patterns in Nature, in Social Thought

Rising Sun Redbud in VA Beach at Tidewater Community College

An extraordinary book series, penned in the early 19th Century came into the world in nine volumes: Cosmos written by Alexander von Humboldt.

Humboldt, a polymath, explored the Americas from the Amazon to Mexico as a young man. Imagine it is the 18th century, being in only your second decade of life, and striking off to explore the Amazon rainforest, climb 22,000 foot volcanoes, all with no specialized survival gear, prey to huge, voracious mosquitos, being the prey of jaguars and pythons! Later meeting with Thomas Jefferson – the then American President – at the end of his exploration to show the President what he had learned. Jefferson had just aquired a huge territory (Mexico including California and most of what we know as the West tody) which Humboldt meticulously mapped and accurately measured. He showed the relevance of his discoveries to Jefferson in terms of understanding the limits and possibilities of settlement and economic activities for the young America.

Carting large instruments up volcanoes and down ravines, recording plants in all these different environments, von Humboldt meticuously mapped what we now know as biomes and launched the field of biogeography. He demonstrated that across similar landscapes, certain plants appear in similar environments forecasting today’s understanding of the world’s ecosystems and how they form. With meticulous mapping and measurements, he mapped bioregions.

Today we understand that in each region there is a keystone species signifying a particular biome. He showed how this phenomenon is similar across the world (later mapping in Asia). But, this is a relatively recent understanding. By including an aesthetic understanding, being inspired by the magnificense of the Creation he presaged James’s Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis which understands the Earth’s living systems as self-regulating.

Why is Humboldt important and how does it relate to the Return to Nature and Beauty?

A major theme in Cosmos is the unity of science and human esthetic appreciation of the Creation: science, interrelatedness of life and geology, art and wonder. Later historians categorized this perspective on nature as a romantic conception of science. Today we know it as ecology.

Actually, Humboldt was the first person to present an early understanding of ecology: the extraordinary webs of life that occur all across the globe in similar environments and which are governed by a dynamic process. Below is a Smithsonian short animation of Humboldt’s life and accomplishments.

Smithsonian Institute Educational Video

Andrea Wulf and The Invention of Nature

An extraordinary biography of von Humboldt, The Invention of Nature, was published to great exclaim in 2015. Andrea Wulf, its author, is a talented biographer and writer on nature, science (in particular geology) and the men and women who created or recorded the world’s greatest beauty, design in great botanical gardens of the world, and the men and women who brought these aesthetic experiences and deeper understanding of natural science to the world community. There are three presentations below which explore Alexander von Humbolt’s life and his amazing accomplishments and contributions to our insight into nature.

The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf

Learn More

And More!

Return to Nature and Beauty

Voting is the most important thing we can do to protect our children’s future.

I’ve been following the Guardian’s State of Emergency newletter. Today, the Guardian reports that hundreds of scientists who are involved in the IPCC’s tracking of climate change responded to a query about the most important thing people can do to help curb a warming planet.

“The science is there, but the lack of will of politicians worldwide is retarding climate change [action],” said Prof Alexander Milner, at the University of Birmingham in the UK. ~ The Guardian

When I started this blog back in 2009, it was focused on nature and writing. I want to return to that practice now, knowing that how I vote is essential to protecting what I love most: my family, the sanctuary of woods and shoreline, the adventure of writing and reading.

During these fraught days of political warfare in America and violence and hunger in many parts of the world, I have sought that “quiet wood” through the authors who have influenced my life and offer sanity and a good way to live. I turned to Aldo Leopold last week, picking up A Sand County Almanac for another read.

As political rhetoric dominates the airways, I instead have been walking with Leopold through the months of his hunting, observing and reflection. Long ago, when his family was young and Leopold worked at the University of Wisconsin, developing their Arboretum, he bought an 80-acre, “worn-out” farm in the sand counties. Surprising his family one morning with the news, he invited his wife, daughter and sons to join him to restore it to its natural state.

Thus began the now famous experiment that literally millions of people around the world have read about, been inspired to do the same and visited the farm where the chicken coop was transformed into the now famous “shack.” Below is a photo from my own pilgrimage in 2014. You see the restored prairie grassland and maturing forest around it.

Aldo Leopold Foundation, Baraboo, Wisconsin: “The Shack” and Restored Landscape. Photo by Susan L Feathers

Here is a little of the quiet peace I found in the Almanac which sustains me through this raucous period in history. Leopold extols the virtue of early rising.

Like many another treaty of restraint, the pre-dawn pact lasts only as long as darkness humbles the arrogant.

To my fellow Americans, please go vote for the leaders who recognize climate change and propose to continue climate safe policies. Go here for voting information. There is still time to register!

If not, Leopold’s great work may be more a eulogy to a once wondrous Earth.

High Crimes and Misdemeaners

The Constitutional Legacy of Watergate

Today’s publication of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from An American (on Substack) takes readers back to when President Richard Nixon engages in a cover up of crimes and abuse of his power. It begins when a break in at the Democratic Party offices occurs in June of 1972. As the investigation moves forward, the nation learns that officials in Nixon’s leadership and operations staff were the perpetrators. Richardson describes the subtrefuge and lies perpetrated by Nixon and the subsequent deliberations in Congress during a House Impeachment investigation.

At the time, two articles of impeachment were brought forth by the House of Representatives : 1: the cover up, and 2) the abuse of power. Both are relevant in our time: former President Trump and crimes in office and a subsequent interference with the peaceful transfer of power.

The recent attemps by President Trump to alter election results and his actions while in office that spurred citizens to an insurrection at the Capitol have not been adjudicated because Republicans no longer have the ability to think beyond political affliliation. A partisan Supreme Court has recently ruled that the President has almost complete immunity for acts commited while in office and to some extent afterwards. It is an outlier. It changes us from a democracy to an autocracy and it is very dangerous.

Below is a link to a new podcast from the National Consitution Center in which legal scholars and historians discuss Watergate and the House and Senate investigations in light of the current discussion about abuse of power. At that time in the early 1970s, the President was held responsible for his acts while in office. Even the President is not above the law our representatives declared. That was a time when many Americans and legislators on each side of the aisle were clear about our Constitutional principles.

We the People Podcast on August 8 from the National Constitution Center.

Protecting the Union. Photo by Susan L Feathers

History in the Making

Just when you think the sky is falling…

Biden stepped away from running for a second term, nominates Kamala Harris. Harris gains unprecedented support from youth, from communities of color, from Republican lawmakers worried the MAGA extremists could destroy the democracy each generation has striven to keep. Netanyahu visits and delivers an unapologetic address about the war in GAZA promising not to stop or turn back. Harris comes forward strongly in defense of Gazans in the line of fire while asserting support for Israel as long as it abides by human rights principles. She wants to see a two state solution.

Women from all sectors of the nation are galvanizing behind Harris as the clearest defender of women’s rights in her time in politics (Women for Harris). We have a wave of democratic actions happening and consequent outpouring of funds in record time. Men have galvanized to support her as evidenced by White Dudes for Kamala! Many institutions and nonprofits and civic leaders have voiced their support for the current Vice President.

The nation has awakended and perhaps the clouds, spewing misinformation and nasty digs from the throats of Rump and Rants, will soon part to let in some truth. I’ve been shocked and pleasantly surprised and again recall the edict: the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Well, our eyes are open wide.

Biden has set in motion efforts that will address the extreme rulings and unethical acts of justices on the current polarized Supreme Court. His bill would set standards for justices to hold them accountable for their actions like the rest of us; overturn the presidential immunity ruling just passed that grants immunity to a president for almost any action made while in office and to some extent afterward. Biden calls for shortening the term of justices from life to 18 years. The recommendation dovetails with Constitutional scholars and historians who recently discussed how to reform the Supreme Court to avoid what has become jerrymandering of the Court.

Watch the discussion among scholars invited by the National Constitution Center to review the 2024 Supreme Court.

Anti-Defamation League and the National Constitution Center

Listen to two constitutional scholars discuss President Biden’s new proposal for Supreme Court reforms on We the People Podcast at the National Consitution Center.

Civic Virtues and the Founders

I highly recommend readers take time to listen to this session of We the People podcast from the National Constitution Center and how the founders read from Cicero’s The Tusculan Disputations in their quest for personal virtue – which none achieved but strived toward, followed by historians and writers reflecting on civic virtue in maintaining a democracy.

Think for yourself and the ability to reason – these must be resurrected.

Panelists include Jeffrey Rosen, Director of the National Constitution Center, and University of Chicago Professor Eric Slauter, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist George Will; and Melody Barnes, executive director of UVA’s Karsh Institute of Democracy.

The Founders and the Pursuit of Happiness, and the Virtuous Life

Cicero’s The Tusculan Disputations

Getty Images Link

Who was Cicero? Link to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The Warp and Woof of Democracy

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. ~ Abraham Lincoln

I’ve tasked myself with reading more about our history and our changemakers. In Our Ancient Faith by Allen C. Guelzo, Lincoln is preparing for a debate with Frederick Douglas and jots down this idea above.

Democracy at its root is relational.

If an indiviudal would not be a slave, he must not deny the same to others. Consent of the governed is the fundamental principal on which our government carries forth the will of the people.

In these very turbulent times, most recently demonstrated in a violent asassination attempt on the life of former President Trump, the nation has paused to consider how this could happen and what caused the youmg man to engage in such an act. We also reexamine how separated we have become, how violent rhetoric has caused people to distrust each other exemplified in the last seven years of political divide, vitrieolic language and extreme othering.

Lulu Garcia-Navarre revisits Robert Putnam’s study of the state of our Republic in the New York Times (July 14, 2024). In light of a new 2oth year edition of his book Bowling Alone, updated to include social media, they discuss why there has been little progress, even worsening separation among us, deepening the loneliness epidemic and consequent fear of each other.

Putnam discusses Alexis de Tocqueville‘s famous studies of American democracy published in 1835 and 1840. He observed that we were joiners – members of dozens of clubs and group affiliations. We were intensely relational including both close relationships and more social relations from hunting to sewing clubs, societies and guilds.

Garcia-Navarre and Putnam exmine how these kinds of relationships over the life of a citizen facilitate democracy. This brings me full circle to consider how Abraham Lincoln described democracy as relational. If I would not be a slave, I would not be a master.

Would more frequent nonpolitical relating to each other prevent the growth of misunderstanding and mistrust among us?

I encourage you to listen or read the article.

Related to this is how our founders understood morality. Founders thought about how each person manages oneself: restraint, kindness, courtesy, honesty, etc. It had nothing to do with the imposition of values on free citizens. To founders it was about improving oneself and continually self correcting by personal inventory over a lifetime of striving to be the best person possible. Self management.

Perhaps this is honed in an array of relationships throughout our lifetimes and that is why we see a weakened American democracy for which our relational lives is its essence. See the National Constitution Center’s discussion of how our founders thought about morality as self control and self management. Character.

Our rights and duties to engage in Civil Dialogue is at the heart of democracy.

What do you think? Leave a comment so that we can discuss this matter.

IT IS BIDEN: LEADERSHIP & WISDOM

Biden at the 75th Anniversary of the founding of NATO, our great alliance of democraces across the Atlantic, delivers a powerful message. I am solidly behind President Biden as the leader who has the greatest vision of America’s role at home and in the world. Let him lead: elect him to a second term to finish his vision of a free world and more just America, ready and able to help stem climate impacts and secure America’s and the world’s futures.

Biden’s Record: A Great President

Heather Cox Richardson’s July 9 Substack Letter reviews Biden Administration’s accomplishments from the viewpoint of a historian as opposed to “horse race” media reporting.

The most consequential investment in renewable energy and justice for Energy Transistion required to secure American families and the world community during climate change. It is underway and already transforming communities across America while employing Americans in great jobs at unprecented rates. States, red and blue, are benefitting economically.

A record of high jobs creation, low unemployment and business growth. Support of workers’ rights, wages and benefits, and support of unions. Inflation is low and steady.

Legislation to reduce college debt, improve health care, support families and children through reduction of poverty; calling out companies that drain wealth from families through high interest rates and inflated costs of products and services. Reduction of the high cost of pharmaceuticals, and allowances for Medicare to negotiate the cost of life-saving drugs for all Americans.

Standing for the rights of LGBTQ and Transgender individuals to the protections of the Constitution as citizens with equal rights to the bounties of citizenship and the community of a freedom-loving people.

Maintaining the separation of church and state as a fundamental tenet of the U.S. Constitution since its founding.

Unwavering support for women’s reproductive rights and healthcare. This is one of the most important protections of women’s rights now struck down by a partisan Supreme Court. Biden promises to sign reproductive rights into law when reelected for a second term. This is about health and freedom of choice.

Assertive foreign policy with NATO and in new alliances in the Global South and among Pacific allies to protect democracy across the world. Unflinching commitment to support Ukraine in its justified defense against unprovoked aggression by Russia. Biden will continue to support Ukraine to victory with a strong NATO commitment. NATO has grown stronger, adding new countries in Europe during Biden’s term of office. Support for Israel while negotiating for justice for Palestinians in Gaza. We are safer with Biden’s leadership. He has the long vision younger Americans do not possess at this critical time in history. This is the time to support wisdom and experience.

Call me an optimist, but to me Americans “get” all this and will come through to victory against the second internal threat to our democracy in recent history with Trump and the MAGA Republicans. This is not supposition. We experienced four years of Trump in the White House and its termination with an insurrection in the Capitol and assault against the rule of law by convicted criminals. The latter is only the latest odd ball and dangerous internal grab for power and suppression of liberty among our people seen from time to time in America’s history. Recall: the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Now we are the watchmen and we must not fail Liberty.

America is about the steady and determined growth toward plurality and diversity as promised in our founding documents and principles. We are about the steady march to freedom and liberty for all. We have stumbled in the past and sometimes lost that vision, but in this time, in this place in history the future of life on Earth is at stake. Its too high a danger to fail now.

On the Precipice

I consider Citizen’s United the Trojan Horse that released democracy’s enemies into the Body Politic. ~ Citizen for Freedom

July 3, 2024

As a young child I loved this week which contains both the 4th of July celebration and my birthday. It was a time of great celebration of our country’s role protecting freedom at home and abroad. 1950. I was five years old and IKE was Predident. American and Europe were free from the Nazi menace and rebuilding Europe and its allies, forming the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as a guardrail for democratic nations, pledging to come to each other’s aid when enemies of freedom attacked unprovoked.

Is that world I knew as a child and grew up in – the family, the nation, and a free world – passing?

This present day America which has grown rich and powerful, is in a world of hurt. Gnawing at its foundational principles and structure is a cancer fed by disinformation and superwealth of individuals and corporations empowered by the Citizen’s United ruling – the agent of its dissolution. Corporations do what they do not by consent of their employees but by the inclinations of its leadership: superrich CEO’s and Board members. Whose freedom of speech did Citizen’s United protect?

This abberation of the law is what gnaws at the heartwood of American Democracy. It empowers wealth to choose for us. We can see clearly today that it matters who we put on the Supreme Court. The justices who made the ruling on July 1, 2024 extending Presidential Immunity from the law, struck deep into our essential freedoms, making it not only easier but likely that Presidential power will be abused. It circumscribes citizen’s freedoms making it easier for men to become despots and citizens no more than serfs.

The current Supreme Court has made one ruling after another in which we witness the slow but sure weakening of the Body Politic: 1) Circumscribing the Voter’s Rights laws; 2) Eliminating guardrails on discrimination; 3) Striking down Women’s Rights; 4) weakening the administrative state which has long stabilized the democracy from one adminstrtion to the next; and 5) re-balancing the Balance of Power in our democractic structure and function by giving unlimited power to the Presidency though immunity from the law.

They struck at our basic tenet: no one is above the law in America.

While in theory, a President with character and true loyalty to the basic laws and tenets of a free people would not abuse this power, the fact is that we are now left with the elimination of the legislature’s role as a check on Presidential power (i.e. the people’s consent). Or, the burden of proof just got harder.

Freedom-loving Americns must rise to this singular moment in the country’s history. While we are not perfect by any means, we are still a democracy where voters determine its future.

No matter one’s opinions on political philosophy, you cannot deny that Joe Biden is a man of character and his Cabinet has worked tirelessly to help average Americans. The Blue Ticket has always been for the average citizen but this year the Blue Ticket is about preserving the Republic.

We are at the precipice of freedom.

A Free People is the final refuge of Liberty. Today I call upon everyone I know to stand against the Supreme Court’s decision, to flood the election precincts on November 5 and vote the Blue Ticket to turn the tide away from authoritarianism and flowing back toward freedom of individuals to govern by consent only.

See it for what it truly is: the Vote of Our Lives.

Do We Have a King?

A Coup on American Democratic Institutions

From the National Constitution Center

Dispatch Podcast July 1, 2024

National Constitution Center We the People Podcast

Heather Cox Richardson

A major blow to our democracy has been delivered to the American people who are even more disempowered than before. Let no one diminish the fact that everything is weighing on the American people now to make sure a man with poor character and a history of criminal acts and record of insurrection against the USA, never gets into the Presidency again.

Everything rests on this. And now that all the checks and balances are gone EXCEPT the people, we must act and assure a future for our children.