"ROMEO's"

 This essay was a particular pleasure to write. Thank you for indulging me.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“ROMEOs”

August 10, 2024

 

“Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and to have her nonsense respected.”

                                                                                                 Charles Lamb (1775-1834)

                                                                                                 The Life, Letters and Writings of Charles Lamb, 1876

                

With politics having become so personal and so nasty, the lure of good humor and fun times is compelling. ROMEOs are one answer. Amidst Wokeism, ROMEOs are, however, politically incorrect, so beware. They are exclusionary, as they are for old men and only old men. Women have their own groups, JULIETs (Just Us Ladies Intimately Eating Together). 

 

First and foremost, ROMEOs are gatherings of friends – old friends, not in a chronological sense, but old in years lived. We help drug companies stay profitable and ensure doctors are able to pay their mortgages. And we all know that laughter is good for us. The Mayo Clinic offers short, simple advice about the connection between health and friendships: “Good friends are good for your health.” And we should all recall the wisdom from A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, with Pooh speaking: “A day without a friend is like a pot without a single drop of honey left inside.”

 

The acronym ROMEO stands for Retired Old Men Eating Out. It fits, mostly. Our grandchildren call us old; we all have XY chromosomes; and, since we meet for a meal away from home, we always eat out. However, the ‘R’ adjective does not always apply. Most, but not all, are retired. Perhaps a different adjective might be substituted: respectful, rambunctious, raunchy, racy, relaxed, resolute, or repugnant? All might be suitable, but not radiant or ravishing. 

 

ROMEO clubs have been around for years. Members of a ROMEO club in Branford – just down the coast from Essex – recently purchased the domain name www.romeoclub.comfor ROMEO CLUB LLC, which is incorporated in Connecticut. This lends a formality unknown among the ROMEOs with whom I gather. In his book The Greatest Generation, Tom Brokaw mentions a group of ROMEOs in Cambridge, Massachusetts started by World War II veterans. My ROMEO friends are either members of the silent generation, or, more recently, boomers. 

 

Like most ROMEOs we are unstructured. We have no rules, no officers, no bylaws, no minutes to be taken. In fact, we would swear we never said what we did say. We are simply friends, lunching together and enjoying the give and take of friendly banter. We cover myriad topics, from literature to politics to sports to history to new restaurants. 

 

At the end of the day, it is friendships that make ROMEOs what they are. A ROMEO group to which I belong dates back more than thirty years. I remember seeing a table of old men having lunch at the Old Lyme Country Club thirty years ago. I thought them quaint and, with laughter their constant companion, I wondered what these old men found so funny. Fifteen years later I joined their ranks and discovered their secret.

 

The worst part of being a ROMEO is losing members, an unfortunate consequence of aging. In his book At the Loch of the Green Corrie, Scottish author Andrew Greig wrote of old friends who fished, noting that there was never competition as to who caught the biggest fish or who would live the longest: “…death of friends just brought chill and sorrow.” Perhaps like old soldiers whose boots are placed backward in their stirrups, we should do likewise with the knife and fork at their place setting. They may be gone, but they are not forgotten. As Charlotte says to Wilbur, “You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing.” Go ROMEOs!

"How Not to be a Politician," Rory Stewart - A Review

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

How Not to be a Politician, Rory Stewart

August 17, 2024

 

“If forced to spell out a political philosophy, I would have said that I

believed in limited government and individual rights; prudence at home

and strength abroad; respect for tradition, and love of my country.”

                                                                                                Rory Stewart (1973-)

                                                                                                How Not to be a Politician, 2023

 

Idealism gripped the traditionalist Rory Stewart when he left his post as the Ryan Family Professor of the Practice of Human Rights and Director of the Carr Center of Human Rights at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government to campaign for a seat in Parliament. An intelligent, ethical man of boundless energy, he was elected in spring 2010 for the constituency of Penrith, on the border of Scotland. At the same time David Cameron was elected Prime Minister to lead a coalition government, ending thirteen years of Labour government and beginning fourteen years of Conservative government.

 

Prior to his Harvard assignment, the Hong Kong-born and Oxford-educated Stewart had served as a British diplomat in Indonesia and Montenegro; he undertook a two-year walk across Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, India and Nepal; and he founded the Turquoise Mountain Foundation in Kabul. As well, Mr. Stewart had written two best-selling books.

 

While he enjoyed time spent with his rural constituents, his story chronicles his gradual disillusionment with his party as it drifted apart from Thatcherism, and his disgust for the cronyism of politics in general: “We should not regard debates as opportunities for open discussion; we might be called legislators, but we were not intended to overly scrutinize legislation; we might become members of independent committees, but we were expected to be loyal to the party; and votes would rarely entail a free exercise of judgement.” Nine years later, in 2019, he attended a dinner in London. He, Michael Gove, Jeremy Hunt, and his nemesis Boris Johnson were running for Prime Minister. Someone asked him why he thought he was a Tory. He explained: “I said I believed in love of country, respect for tradition, prudence at home, restraint abroad.” “The table,” he wrote, “laughed.” He lost. Johnson won. Three years later, with Liz Truss as Prime Minister, Stewart ruminated: “Government might be about critical thinking, but the new style of politics, of which she was a leading exponent, was not.”

 

One might ask why he had decided to pursue a career in politics. The first decade of the 21^stCentury was a turning point in geopolitics. The glow from the West’s victory over Communism had begun to fade. As Stewart writes: “…2005…was the year in which the number of democracies ceased to increase, and in which the civil war in Iraq exposed the full catastrophe of the Iraq intervention. It was the last year in which the British economy was larger than the Chinese. Facebook had just been founded and Twitter was about to be launched.” The rise of China, the ubiquity of social media, and the credit crisis of 2008 “created,” he writes, “the space for an entirely different politics: the age of populism…” In 2009, the idealistic Rory Stewart felt he might be able to blunt that change. He found he could not.

 

While he writes of British politics, his disenchantment with all politics is pertinent, especially to the United States where unity has disappeared and political discontent has set in, as extremism created politics of populism on the right and statism on the left. The book’s strength is that it illustrates challenges we face; its weakness is that it does not provide a solution. Nevertheless, it deserves your attention.

"Freedom"

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Freedom”

August 28, 2024

 

“Freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility. For the person

who is unwilling to grow up, the person who does not want to carry his own weight, this is a frightening prospect.”

                                                                                                Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962)

                                                                                                You learn by Living: Eleven Keys to a More Fulfilling Life, 1960

 

The word freedom is inherent to our Declaration of Independence and Constitution. It is ingrained in what it means to be an American: “And so let freedom ring,” spoke Martin Luther King on August 28, 1963, “from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire…” The Oxford English Dictionarydefines the word: “The power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint,” which is not too different from the definition Noah Webster assigned the word in his 1828 Webster’s Dictionary: “A state of exemption from the power or control of another.” Freedom from fear and freedom from want (two of FDR’s “Four Freedoms”) are offerings of the state, but they do not meet the classical definition of freedom.

 

Democrats see the state as providing the conditions, through rules, laws, and regulations, that allow individuals opportunities – what are now called “positive” freedoms. The Swiss-French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau believed that men are born free but “everywhere he is in chains.” So the state exists to guarantee his liberty and freedom from the restraints of society. Without the state, he believed, there is no freedom. Voltaire disagreed. The state can be a trap: “It is difficult to free fools from chains they revere.” 

 

Republicans define freedom, in accordance with John Locke and Thomas Jefferson, as natural rights, characterized by the absence of external (the state) constraints on individual freedoms. These freedoms are now referred to as “negative” freedoms. Locke, two generations earlier than Rousseau, had argued that people are naturally free and equal, and have a right to life, liberty and property that are independent of society’s laws, ideas borrowed by Thomas Jefferson in 1776: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” The Bill of Rights, adopted in December 1791, exemplified individual freedom. The colonists had lived under a tyrannical king. Fearful of autocracy that could stem from a strong central government, they desired a limited, federalist government, one composed, as Lincoln later said, “of, by and for the people.”  In a September 25^th, 1961 address to the United Nations’ General Assembly, President Kennedy warned: “Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.” 

 

No matter one’s definition, we should all agree that the freedoms to think, to pray, to write and to speak as one chooses are natural rights – gifts to us from God, inherent to us as Americans. We should also all agree that living in a community means that we must respect the rights and freedoms of others, that one person’s freedom to walk where he pleases may violate another’s right to privacy, so that government is necessary to adjudicate differences. The Constitution may give a person the right “to bear arms,” but that does not give that individual the right to kill his neighbor. Some freedoms, such as the right to abortion, are complex, as it contradicts the right to life. The decision to have an abortion, in my opinion, is best decided between the mother, the father, her doctor, her parents and perhaps a spiritual advisor. President Clinton came closest to my own belief: abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.” While we all know that government is necessary for society to function, we should also realize that rules, regulations and taxes, while imperative to civil society, are inhibitors to free expression. Arriving at a consensus means that, individually, we forego some freedoms in the interest of the greater good. We are fortunate to live in a country in which our democratic form of government allows for differences to be debated so as to find common solutions. Even so, as government swells in size, individual freedoms shrink.

 

There will always be areas of conflict between your freedom and mine. Taxpayers pay the salaries of public-school teachers. Teachers should have the freedom to unionize, but that should not prevent parent’s from having the freedom to choose which education system best fits their children – traditional schools, vouchers, or non-unionized charter schools. University professors and high school teachers have the freedom to think and speak as they wish, but they also have a responsibility to instruct students to think independently, to perhaps come to conclusions different from their own. Censorship, “harmful words” and “safe places” are antithetical to the concept of free expression. In a March 15, 1783 address to the officers of the Continental Army, George Washington spoke: “If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep, to slaughter.”

 

Democrats, at their Chicago convention, adopted freedom (along with “joy”) as their theme. According to a New York Times word-count, the word “freedom” was used 227 times in speeches over their four-day convention. I was happy that they did. But there is irony, hypocrisy and perhaps a touch of deviousness in a Party that talks up freedom but which defenestrated its sitting President, nominated Vice President Harris without a single primary delegate vote, wants to mandate EVs, prohibit gas stoves, limit school choice, and that weaponized federal agencies. This is the Party that uses the excuse of “disinformation” to censor political speech, that has done away with the concept of separation of powers by embracing the administrative state; it is the Party which would like to have the Supreme Court come under the purview of Congress. Yet they waved a banner of freedom at their convention. As a skeptic one is forced to ask: What freedom do they mean? Freedom for the state to do as it pleases? Freedom for me, or freedom for thou?

 

As the United States’ government grows larger and more complex, individual freedom, definitionally, lessens. According to the Office of the Federal Register, the number of final rules published each year ranges between 3,000 and 4,500. Wikipedia claims that approximately 200 new federal statutes are enacted each year. Most of these rules and laws are designed to benefit the people. But we should never ignore the fact that every new law and each new regulation has an impact – perhaps minor – on individual freedoms. Freedom is more than a slogan for conventioneers. It is why migrants come to these shores, even as most of us take freedom for granted. Freedom is not dependent on forgiveness of student debt, or dollars spent on entitlements. It comes with responsibilities, as Eleanor Roosevelt reminded us sixty-four years ago. It is an attitude, a belief. It is a gift from God. “Freedom isn’t free,” as the song goes.  It is rare, must be defended and should be treated as endangered. Fifty-seven years ago, in his first inaugural address as California’s new governor, Ronald Reagan said: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the blood stream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.” Amen.

"The Election - Character or Issues?"

 On Tuesday, my wife and I leave for a couple of weeks in New Jersey, where we have been going for over fifty years – my wife for all of her life. We go to the Rumson-Seabright area. While I will have my laptop and printer, I do not plan on spending much time writing. It is not that I don’t enjoy writing essays. I do. But all engines need overhauling, and mine needs a break. You may hear from me, but then again you may not.

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“The Election – Character or Issues?”

August 1, 2024

 

“If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the

people under the pretense of taking care of them, they must become happy.”

                                                                                                                Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

                                                                                                                Letter to Thomas Cooper, 1802

 

While it appears that we Americans don’t agree on a lot, there is general agreement that our political center has been squeezed by extremists at both ends of the political spectrum. Democrats have moved to the left – toward European-style social engineering. Republicans have become more populist, not in an authoritarian way, but in the sense that they represent ordinary people opposed to elitists in government, labor, finance, business and education. At the far-left are those who fly the Palestinian flag, and sick climate-cultists who destroy works of art to bring attention to their agenda. At the far-right are those who fly the Confederate flag, and xenophobes who would deport illegal aliens. Political choice has become more difficult for those inclined toward a politics of consensus and collaboration.

 

An emphasis on character by the media has replaced a focus on issues that affect the electorate. While Kamala Harris may have an edge when it comes to character, she is no paragon of virtue. Both candidates are fodder for the tabloids. The crucial differences between them are not in their character; it is their policy prescriptions. Like most politicians, Ms. Harris is chameleon-like when it comes to where she stands, except on issues like abortion, climate change and Hamas. She was, keep in mind, ranked the most liberal of all U.S. Senators in 2019 by GovTrack.us, a non-partisan Congress tracker. In contrast, Mr. Trump, apart from lacking a sense of humor, being a protectionist on trade, and wanting to make America great again, seems devoid of a consistent political ideology. But he has the advantage of not being a pietistic professional politician.

 

As November draws closer, voters must grapple with multiple issues: the economy/inflation, healthcare, foreign policy/defense, immigration, debt/deficits, abortion, education, climate/environment, entitlements, infrastructure, the Supreme Court, along with myriad concerns regarding the cultural environment, from the role of families, the threat from identity politics, to biological men participating in women’s sports.

 

There are too many issues to comment on all, but allow me to make remarks regarding a few. A report from Statista.com published on July 5^th polled voters’ concerns: “government/poor leadership” (21%), “immigration” (18%), the “economy in general” (17%), and “the high cost of living/inflation” (12%). Biden of course will be gone in just over five months and with him the “poor leadership” that has been a hallmark of his Presidency. The other issues, however, remain. Open borders, both south and north, have let in millions of undocumented illegal immigrants who, with help from the federal government, have spread throughout our nation. Rounding up and deporting them will be impossible, even those with criminal records. In my opinion the number of permanent immigrant visas should be increased, but in the meantime borders should be sealed preventing anymore from arriving illegally. As for the economy, over the past seventy years GDP growth, despite productivity gains of about 300%, has been in gradual decline, from the four percent plus range in the first three decades after World War II, to around three percent plus in the last two decades of the 20^th Century, to under three percent thus far in 21^st Century.

 

During the past seventy years there have been recessions and spurts of higher growth, but under leadership from both Republicans and Democrats the gradual decline in GDP growth has been manifest. Regulation, taxes, government spending, dependency, a lack of personal responsibility and accountability, and the negative consequences of a DEI strategy have all had their effects. For example, a report from the House Budget Committee Chair, Jodey Arrington (R-TX), on April 4, 2023 cited the growth in transfer payments: In 2022 the federal government paid $4.1 trillion in transfer payments to individuals, 65% of the entire budget. The growth in transfer payments has been persistent and seemingly inexorable, from 1.5% of the budget in 1945, to 26% in 1969, to 50% in 1994. No politician from either Party wants to take away benefits, and in fact The Biden-Harris proposals of free community college, student loan forgiveness, increasing food stamp benefits and expanding Medicaid eligibility will add to what is fast approaching an intolerable burden for taxpayers. Voters must ask: which Party is more likely to address threats from the Charybdis of increased individual dependency and the Scylla of unaffordable government?

 

The world has grown more dangerous over the last three and a half years. In taking office, Mr. Biden reversed Mr. Trump’s policies toward Iran, re-engaging the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal, which emboldened the world’s greatest exporter of terrorism. He forsook the Abraham Accords. In August 2021, Mr. Biden abandoned Afghanistan to the Taliban, leaving behind billions of dollars in military equipment and bases. In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, initiating Europe’s longest-running war since World War II. In the past three years China’s naval fleet has surpassed that of the United States. During Mr. Biden’s Presidency another dozen countries joined China’s Belt & Road initiatives, which now includes 150 countries in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and South America. While Mr. Biden was an ardent supporter of Israel immediately following the Hamas-directed October 7 slaughter, he now urges restraint.

 

On education, Democrats are against choice; they favor subsidies to buyers of electric vehicles, and they would like Congress to pass an Amendment that would term-limit Supreme Court Justices and subject them to Congressional oversight. At the Kentland Community Center on June 7 in Landover, Maryland, Vice President Kamala Harris claimed that “the right to be safe is a civil right.” Is that what we want? Students are told that their colleges provide safe spaces, where one can hide from offensive words. Books, such as Huckleberry Finn are banned because readers might find them hurtful. Is that what we should strive for – a nation of Milquetoasts? America was discovered and settled by those who braved the elements and risked their lives. In like manner, daring astronauts took to space sixty years ago. Men and women have bet their fortunes on inventions, many of which have vastly improved lives. If we are to believe that to be safe is a civil right, what will come of risk takers, of innovation? If the nation needs defending, will anyone risk their life? In the August issue of The Spectator, the editors wrote of the adverse consequences of a society consumed with safetyism: “…a zeal for safe spaces begets academic stagnation and persecution; and avoiding the emotional risk of commitment brings with it collapsing birth rates and loneliness.” 

 

We live in a time when individual freedom confronts state supremacy. We need government to care for those unable to care for themselves, but government should be, as was originally intended, limited and constrained. It was established to guarantee are basic rights. Individually, the ingredients for a fulfilled life include independence, self-reliance, curiosity, aspiration, and a willingness to work hard and take risk. Despite the illusion of progressives, none of us are equal, something obvious to those who watch the Olympics, but we are each gifted with unique qualities. It is those we must focus on. Given the candidates in this election, Democrats and the media will speak endlessly of “threats to democracy” and will attack Mr. Trump for being Trump. Republicans, however, should stick to issues.