Joe Fahey

One of the truly great experiences in being a grandfather is getting to attend those performances that captivate grandchildren during their earliest years.

My granddaughter is four this year and for the last two years I have gone to Sesame Street Live and Disney on Ice.

The first one we went to was Sesame Street Live, which was performed at the Landmark Theatre.

I have a special affection for the Landmark because I remember when it was Loews movie theatre, when I was growing up.

In fact, it was one of five movie theatres in downtown Syracuse along with the Paramount, RKO Keith’s, the Eckel and the Cinema.

Every week, my friends and I would take the bus downtown to go to a movie. It really didn’t matter what the movie was or whether it was any good. We had other ways to amuse ourselves.

About a half hour before the movie was to start, we would stop into the pet section of W.T. Grant’s Department Store, which was located in the 400 block of South Salina Street and but a bunch of miniature turtles.

If the movie was boring or we were bored, we would go up in the balcony and drop them on the people sitting below and wait for the reaction. The reaction could, sometimes be pretty loud and dramatic.

On a few occasions, Grant’s was out of miniature turtles and we had to buy chameleons, a small lizard that changes colors. Sort of like some politicians.

Trust me, when I tell you that dropping a small lizard on someone in a darkened movie theatre produces a louder more dramatic reaction.

When I ran for mayor of Syracuse in 1993, we had a fundraiser in the Landmark and I promised my supporters that if won the race, we’d have a celebration in the Landmark and they could drop lizards on people.

My daughter, Kate, who was seven at the time asked me, “Why were you dropping lizards on people?” “Because they were out of turtles that day,” I replied.

But I digress.

There is something magical about watching little ones, who have seen the Sesame Street or Disney characters on television suddenly see them live on stage. The Sesame Street characters would come down off the stage into the aisles and dance with the little ones to their delight.

My daughter, Meghan, bought Claire a helium balloon and tied it to her wrist. For the rest of the performance I held my breath, hoping that the balloon wouldn’t come loose and fly away, breaking Claire’s heart. It didn’t and the afternoon was a delightful one.

We’ve gone to Disney on Ice twice and are scheduled to go again on Saturday.

Last year, Meghan had a college roommate, her husband and little boy, Jack, go with us.

They had a number of toys that spin and gave off colors in the dark.

Claire, who is a big fan of Minnie Mouse, sat on the edge of her seat through the whole performance.

Midway through it, I heard her ask Meghan, “Can I have a snow cone?” “You don’t need a snow cone,” her mother replied. “Please can I have a snow cone?” she begged. No, you’ve already had popcorn.” “But I want a snow cone.”

I, being a complete sucker for anything she wants, leaned over and said to Meghan, “Get her a snow cone.” Meghan said, “I can’t get her a snow cone because Jack will want one too.” “I replied,” So, get Jack a snow cone and I’ll pay for that one too.”

The snow cone had a plastic holder that was a Disney character and couldn’t have cost any more than nine cents to make.

Meghan held up her hand when the snow cone guy came by and handed her two snow cones.

“How much do I owe you?” I asked the snow cone vendor. “Twenty-four dollars,” he replied.

Now I know what the term captive audience really means.

When the show was over both kids left with the empty snow cone holders.

I’m hoping that they’ll leave them to someone in their Last Will and Testaments someday.

We went out for pizza after the show. The waitress in the restaurant overheard us talking about “Disney on Ice” and volunteered that she was taking her little boy to see it the next day.

“Stay away from the snow cones,” I advised her.

This year, Meghan and Claire went to see the show again. Terri and I weren’t able to make it.

“Buy her a snow cone,” I told Meghan, “and I’ll pay you back.”

Last night Meghan texted me a photo of a very satisfied four-year old happily eating a snow cone.

I’m pleased to report the price didn’t go up.

It didn’t go down either.

In 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act which allowed the United States government to forcibly remove all Native-American tribes from the lands they occupied in Florida, Georgia and other southeastern states.

The Cherokee Nation and members of other tribes brought suit against the removals on the ground that they were sovereign nations to whom the laws of the states did not apply.

The cases went to the United States Supreme Court which, in an opinion signed by Chief Justice John Marshall, agreed with the tribes. This led to Jackson’s infamous observation that “Chief Justice Marshall has rendered his opinion, now let him enforce it.”

Despite the fact that the Indian Removal Act mandated that the government negotiate removal treaties with the tribes, fairly, voluntarily and freely, it was ignored.

The forcible removal of the tribes began with the Choctaw Nation. The United States Army threatened to invade and members of the Nation were forced to walk, some in chains, through the winter weather of 1831 without food, supplies or other assistance from the government to the lands set aside for them in Oklahoma. Thousands died along the way and one of the tribal leaders gave the journey the name, “the Trail of Tears and Death.”

The next tribe to be removed was the Creek Nation. On their forced march, 3,500 of the 15,000 people perished due to the conditions.

The Cherokee Nation was divided over whether to negotiate a treaty for compensation for their lands or to resist. By 1838, only 2,000 members had moved and the Van Buren Administration dispatched 7,000 Army troops to force the removal. The members of the tribe were forced into stockades at gunpoint while white settlers looted their homes.

During the course of this forced march of 1,200 miles, disease and starvation took the lives of 5,000 Cherokee people.

During the past four months the Standing Rock Sioux, members of other tribes and supporters have been camped in North Dakota protesting the Dakota Access pipeline which threatens their water supply and ancestral burial grounds.

Hundreds have been arrested and law enforcement have used rubber bullets, tear gas, pepper spray and water cannons in sub-freezing temperatures in an effort to break up the protests and drive them from their encampment.

Last week, the protesters appeared to win a victory when the Army Corp of Engineers announced they would not approve an easement to complete the pipeline under the Missouri River and requiring the pipeline to be rerouted.

The decision by the Corp of Engineers was criticized immediately by Speaker of the House of Representative and human amoeba, Paul Ryan, who tweeted that it was “big government decision making at its worst” and that he was looking forward “to putting the anti-energy presidency behind us.”

The Company building the pipeline, Energy Transfer Partners, immediately went to court in Washington, D.C. to challenge the decision.

I suspect this victory will prove to be a pyrrhic one and short-lived.

Until very recently the President-Elect, Donald Trump, was an investor in Energy Transfer Partners.

The Company’s Chief Executive, Kelcey Warren, donated over $ 100,000 to Trump’s campaign.

Next month, as President, Trump will be able to order the Corp of Engineers to reverse its decision and allow the pipeline to be completed.

As I write this, I can’t help but ponder what America’s reaction would be if Energy Tranfer Partners proposed constructing a pipeline through Arlington National Cemetery or the battlefield at Gettysburg?

How would we react, locally, if they proposed building one that ran under Skaneateles Lake or through St. Agnes or Oakwood Cemeteries?

The sound and the fury of the protests would be deafening.

We would be demanding that our elected officials, at all levels, reverse this outrage.

And we don’t even have a treaty that protects us.

Shakespeare, once wrote; “What is past is prologue.”

I fear that we are about to witness that again.

I never cease to be amazed at how much amusement I must be providing my neighbors since I moved out of Syracuse to a rural area in our county.

We moved ten years ago and my first memory of being here in the winter was in January 2007.

We had our first blizzard.

Now, I’m used to Central New York winters and even had a job between college and law school in which I was a night supervisor for the City Department of Public Works. My job was to monitor snow plows in a certain section of the city to make sure that they plowed the area they were dispatched to.

The job was a nightmare for a single guy, twenty-two years old, since we had to report at 6:00 p.m. and work until 7:00 A.M.

That winter, as I recall, every blizzard started on Friday night at 6:00 P.M. and ended on Monday morning at 7:00 A.M. We had 133 inches of snow that year. I thought I had seen it all.

The first blizzard of 2007 dropped about five feet of blowing and drifting snow in our driveway in front of the garage door.

I, being prepared like a Boy Scout, stepped outside with a shovel and began to dig my way out so I could go to work. I probably would have been able to reach the road by April.

Fortunately, my next door neighbor, Kevin, who is a good friend and Samaritan, drove by with his plow on the front of his pick-up truck and glanced to his right. He made a U-turn and a short time later I was able to leave for work. As he was leaving he commented, “You’re never going to get anywhere with that shovel.” For the next eight years I made seasonal snow plowing arrangements and all was right with the world.

Three years ago, Terri bought a Ford F-250 pick-up truck so she could tow a horse trailer with the other three jackasses that she lives with and trail ride with her friends. It’s like riding in a Humvee.

I should have seen it coming and one day she said, “We should get a plow for my truck so we can plow ourselves out.” Against my better judgement, I signed off on it.

We bought a seven foot plow with a joy stick that allows you to turn the plow in any direction you need. That’s the good news.

Hooking the plow up is like implanting a Jarvik heart. If you don’t do it perfectly, nothing happens and I am mechanically challenged.

Last winter, despite having 500 pounds of sand in the back of the truck, I kept repeatedly getting hung up on snow drifts.

After calling Kevin too many times to pull me out, he remarked, “You really should get some snow tires for this truck.” Terri replied, “When I bought the truck, the dealer told me I wouldn’t need them.” “He didn’t know where you lived or the kind of winters we get,” Kevin answered.

We drove to a tire dealer the next day and bought snow tires. The rest of the winter was uneventful.

This year, I was on track to be fully prepared for winter.

Two weeks ago, the weekend weather was in the 60’s and Terri decided to power wash the inside of her trailer and put it away for the season.

I made the mistake of walking outside as she was getting started. “Can you get the power washer started?” she asked. I pulled on the chord ten or twelve times and nothing happened.

“Let’s call our neighbor Joe’s son, George,” I suggested, “he got it started last time.”

I called George and explained the problem. He told me, “I can’t come now, I’m in a tree stand in Cutler but my dad is home.”

I called his father, a good friend and neighbor and he agreed to come and help.

On his second tug on the starter rope the power washer motor sprang to life.

“What did you do?” I asked. “Just got lucky,” he answered.

Then we noticed that there was no water coming out of the nozzle despite the fact there was a hose hooked to it.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Joe observed. Since he is a graduate of Clarkson University’s Engineering School, I deferred to him. He started to tug on the hose connected to the power washer and quickly discovered that it was not the hose connected to the water faucet. “You people are killing me,” he said with a laugh.

“If you think that’s funny,” I told him, “you ought to see us hook up the snow plow.”

“Let’s do it,” he replied.

We waited for Terri to finish power washing the trailer and she drove her truck into the garage where the plow was on the ground. After some maneuvering we got the plow onto the front of her truck and connected all the cables.

With Terri behind the wheel, Joe said, “Raise it up.” Nothing happened.

We examined all the connections and Joe said, “Try it again.” Still nothing.

Joe said, “I’m going to get my tools.”

He returned shortly and took the cover off the plow and began to test it to see if it was getting power to it. Everything checked out positive. He scratched his head and said, “Try it again.” Still nothing.” At that point, Terri was getting cold and went into the house to get a jacket.

While she was gone, I said to Joe, “Why don’t you take a look inside the cab and see that the joy stick is properly connected.” Joe went to the driver side and reached inside and raised the plow.

When Terri returned I told he Joe had the plow working.

“What did you do?” she asked. He pulled the joy stick out and hit the power button and raised the plow. “Oh,” she said, “I was pushing this button,” pointing to the down pressure on the joy stick.

“Oh my God,” Joe said, “you people are killing me.”

“We shouldn’t be living out here,” I told him, “I’d have pushed the same button too.”

As he packed up his tools I thanked him several times and said, “Joe, I promise to never call you again about the power washer.” He laughed and left.

That night, the snow started to fall and we would get 4 feet of drifting and blowing snow.

We were prepared for everything but that, since I hadn’t put the snow tires on Terri’s truck yet.

Still, being ever the optimist, I thought I could plow it and maybe stay ahead of it before it got too deep. It didn’t take long before the truck was mired in a snow drift.

I went in the house and called Kevin and said, “I’m hung up in a snow drift. If you’re going to plow later today, could you pull me out?”

“I’m working all day and won’t be home until after dark,” he replied, but Joe is working at home today, give him a call.”

I hung up and dialed Joe’s number.

When he picked up, I said, “Joe, you know how I promised that I’d never call you again?”

“Yes,” he answered.

“Well, I lied,” I told him, “I’m hung up on a snow drift.”

“I’ll be right over,” he said.

He arrived shortly and pulled me out of a good size snow bank but when he when to leave, he got hung up on a snow drift.

After trying to extricate himself a few times, he walked home and got a giant earth mover. He returned and pulled his truck out and cleared out a huge snow drift from the driveway.

While he was gone, I managed to get hung up on a drift which he pulled me off with the earth mover.

The snow continued to fall, blow and drift, by the second day all of the progress that had been made the previous day was gone.

My friend and neighbor, Jake, came over. He’s a mechanic and services the many vehicles we own but don’t operate well. He got chains on the front loader tractor and proceeded to move a lot of snow out of the driveway.

I continued to plow but with no snow tires managed to get hung up on the drifts three more times. Jake alternately pulled me out with the tractor and his truck. I asked him whether someone who managed to get hung up five times in three days didn’t qualify for some type of award. I don’t think I got an answer.

By the end of the week, after the snow stopped, I was able to get the snow tires put on the truck.

As I write this, I can gaze out the window and see the truck and plow. It has four snow tires on it and almost five hundred pounds of tube sand in the back of it.

The temperature is close to fifty and the lawn is green.

Still, a little voice inside me keeps asking; “Are you sure you should be living here?”

“Hell, yes,” I reply.

Almost four hundred years ago the first immigrants arrived off the shore of Massachusetts to settle in America.

They were a shipload of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants on board the ship, Mayflower.

They remained on board the ship throughout the first winter and by spring, half of the one-hundred and two aboard had died from exposure, scurvy and other contagious diseases.

During the year 1621 the surviving passengers were saved by members of the Native American tribes living in the area, including one who had been kidnapped by a British sea captain and sold into slavery but had escaped and managed to return.

The Pilgrims, as they have come to be called, were taught by the Native-Americans how to grow corn, fish in the streams and draw sap from the maple trees.

In November 1621 their survival was celebrated by a joint feast with the Native American tribal members who had saved them and was the first Thanksgiving.

In the next four centuries scores of immigrants would come to America both voluntarily and involuntarily.

During the two decades following the first Thanksgiving, 20,000 more Puritans arrived from England establishing colonies in New England and upstate New York.

During this period, New York was colonized by the Dutch and the middle colonies of New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware were populated by immigrants of Scotch-Irish, German and Swedish descent.

The South saw the emergence of large plantations owned by British settlers who imported African-American slaves who comprised thirty-eight percent of the population while the British and Germans comprised sixty-two percent.

The Irish began arriving in the latter part of that century and into the 1700’s often as indentured servants bound to the masters as another form of economic slavery.

Never missing an opportunity to exploit, Britain exiled sixty-thousand convicts its colony in Georgia.

By 1790 eighty-percent of the population was of British ancestry.

Our first experience with anti-immigration Nativism was embodied in the Know-Nothing Party whose anti-Irish and anti-German platform was their principal ideology. The pary’s efforts were thwarted by the influx of Irish immigrants forced to leave Ireland during the potato famine along with other European immigrants fleeing the various failed revolutions in 1848.

The end of the Mexican war saw instant citizenship conferred on the people living in the territories of New Mexico and California.

Immigrants from all over the world flocked to California during the Gold Rush commencing the following year.

The end of the Civil War brought about the emancipation of the slaves forcibly brought here, although it did not grant them equality or comparable legal status. Despite this hypocrisy, the Government of France bestowed the gift of the Statute of Liberty rising in New York Harbor with a plaque on which is inscribed the sonnet New Colossus by Emma Lazarus and its verse, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free.”

This was the sight that future immigrants, Italians, Poles, Lebanese, Syrians and Jews fleeing the pogroms of the Russian Empire first saw as the ships bringing them docked at Ellis Island in the harbor.

Ultimately, Congress began to pass quota laws which favored Europeans. The laws were vigorously enforced even preventing a shipload of Jews fleeing Nazi persecution from entering the United States and forcing it to return to Germany resulting in all aboard it perishing in the Holocaust.

During the same period, American citizens of Japanese descent were interned and their homes and businesses forfeited throughout the duration of World War II.

We have now just completed the most divisive Presidential campaign in my lifetime.

We have a President-Elect who campaigned on deporting undocumented immigrants, some of whom were brought here as infants and know no other home.

He has vowed to build a wall on the Mexican border to keep people fleeing violence in Central America and drug cartels in Mexico from entering.

He campaigned on the promise of banning all Muslims seeking to enter the United States and now proposes a registry for them.

We now have a Chief White House strategist from the alt-right world. A world that celebrates white supremacy and counts among its members Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members.

I have to wonder how we got to this place.

At this writing, the members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in North Dakota have had water cannons, rubber bullets, percussion grenades, pepper spray and tear gas used on them as the protest the construction of an oil pipeline that endangers their water supply and burial grounds.

The CEO of the company Energy Transfers Partners, that is building the pipeline, Kelcey Warren, has donated over $ 100,000 to Donald Trump’s campaign.

I’m sure he doesn’t expect anything in return.

I also wonder, if the Native-Americans who saved the first immigrants in 1620 knew then, what we all know now, would they have saved them?

Happy Thanksgiving.

This past Tuesday the Joint Salary Commission appointed by the Governor, Legislative leaders and the Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals arrived at its deadline for action without recommending salary increases for the legislators.

The Legislature has not had a salary increase since 1999.

The three members appointed by the Governor and the Judiciary voted to abstain on any recommendation for an increase, while the two members appointed by the Legislative leaders voted to recommend an increase.

The reason for the abstention was simple.

The Legislature would not enact any meaningful ethics reform.

In the past fourteen years, twenty-two members of the New York State Legislature have been convicted of political corruption felonies while serving in that body. Four of them were majority leaders of the State Senate and one was Speaker of the Assembly. Yet, when badly needed ethics reforms are proposed, they fall on deaf ears.

During the nineteen years that I sat as a County Court Judge we received two salary increases.

The first was in 1999 when we received one along with the Legislature.

We then went thirteen years without one.

Why?

The reason was that the Legislature tied any judicial salary increase to its own legislative salary increase.

Never mind that our two salary considerations are entirely different.

The state legislative positions are viewed as part-time and legislators are free to engage in any occupation or profession that they desire without any limit on the amount they can earn.

Judges are full-time positions and are prohibited from engaging in any other profession or occupation to supplement our income.

To make matters worse, the Legislators lacked the intestinal fortitude to raise their own salaries or our salaries during the regular legislative session. Fearing that such an increase of their own salaries would be so unpopular that it might jeopardize their re-election, they would only consider raises during the lame duck session between Election Day and the start of a new session.

Since it is more likely that a legislator will die or be convicted of a crime than an incumbent be defeated, it’s hard to see how this delusion took hold.

Another stumbling block was that the Governor would condition his approval of the raises on passage of an unrelated issue he championed, like ethics reform, which the Legislature was unwilling to pass.

As a result for thirteen years, judicial salary increases died with the legislative ones.

In 2012, after the first Commission formed to review salary increases for both branches of government made a recommendation for judicial salary increases that was binding, judges received their second increase during my career. The Governor demanded ethics reform from the legislators and when they balked he refused to consider an increase for them.

The Governor’s latest insistence on ethics reform as a condition of a legislative salary increase seems to be an obvious attempt at a deflection from his own problems.

Since his premature and ill-considered dissolution of the Moreland Commission and the convictions of Sheldon Silver and Dean Skelos which ensued from that, he now finds himself mired in his own political corruption probe. His closest aide, indeed one he characterized as his brother, and others have been charged with bribery, extortion and bid rigging involving his signature economic development programs.

Cuomo, being the King of Hare Brained Ideas, has now vowed that neither his campaign and the Democratic State Committee will accept donations from companies that have responded to state request for proposals (RFPs) until six months after the winning company has been announced.

He hasn’t said anything about the silent handshakes, winks and nods that usually accompany the letting of RFPs during the awarding process.

Against that backdrop, his pious insistence on ethics reform is reminiscent of the children’s fairy tale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

I have friends who serve in the Legislature, whom I know to be hardworking, honest public servants.

Still, given the rampant history of corruption and the current scandals unfolding, ethics reform with the outside income restrictions it includes, would not only make good sense but would be a small price to pay for their long desired salary increase.

The definition of insanity is said to be doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

The day after the election I decided that I needed to focus on a less violent sport, so I decided to attend the University of Tennessee-Kentucky football game that Saturday.

I am a 1971 graduate of U-T and have often told people that you really can’t appreciate the pageantry of college football until you attend a Southeastern Conference game.

I managed to interest my brother, Chuck, and a good friend that I graduated from Syracuse Law School with, Pat Doyle, in traveling to Knoxville, Tennessee with me. I bought tickets over the phone and made hotel reservations on line for that weekend.

Chuck and I decided to take two days and drive to Knoxville and Pat would fly in from his home outside of Washington, D.C. where he is a very successful attorney.

Chuck and I set out on Thursday morning. My plan was to cover as many miles as possible the first day and get as close to Knoxville as possible, so we could spend Friday on campus and pick Pat up when he flew in.

The drive to Knoxville is basically a straight shot down Interstate 81 until you reach I-40 west, which takes you into Knoxville. It is slightly less than eight-hundred miles and takes approximately twelve hours according to google maps.

It is safe to say that google maps has never driven route 81 through Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Construction crews have been working on Interstate 81 in Scranton since I graduated from U-T without any prospect of finishing it. Terri and I drove this portion of 81 in August and I am happy to report that since then, they have completed approximately three feet of the repairs. I never cease to be amazed at the strategy that involves closing one lane of the highway for fifty miles so that they can repair a couple of feet of it.

We drove all day Thursday and made it to Wytheville, Virginia which is approximately six-hundred miles and should take about nine hours. We made it in eleven.

The following day we arrived in Knoxville at noon. We picked Pat up at the airport and I proceeded to give Chuck and Pat a tour of the campus.

One of the great features of the University of Tennessee is that the State of Tennessee will spare no expense in improving it and offering a first rate education. When I was a Political Science major there, almost all of the faculty had their degrees from Ivy League schools and the campus was always being expanded and improved. The same held true as we walked the campus that Friday. There were new dormitories, academic buildings and a state of the art student union was under construction which would double the size of the existing one.

Pat and Chuck wanted to see my old neighborhood but, alas, it had been bulldozed. They immediately jumped to the conclusion that it had been bulldozed because I had lived there. That may have, in some part, been true but the ostensible reason was that it was the location of the 1982 Knoxville World’s Fair.

I was amazed at the changes in the Knoxville area.

When I was a student, if you left campus and went downtown you were left with the same sensation that a Peace Corp volunteer must experience when arriving at their duty station.

In the forty-five years that have elapsed since I graduated, Knoxville has changed dramatically. At its center is the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame which sits on Pat Summitt Drive, named after the legendary U-T women’s basketball coach and the winningest Division I basketball coach in history. Downtown also boasts an “Old Town” section filled with shops and restaurants similar to what we have in the Armory. Greater metropolitan Knoxville has expanded to include first class medical facilities, medical practices and other innovative technologies.

That night we had dinner with a couple that I went to U-T with and remained fast friends. We have arrived at that age where we talked of children and grandchildren rather than the volatile issues that had consumed us in the seventies or even the election that had just concluded.

The following day the three of us went to the football game.

Neyland Stadium holds over one-hundred and two thousand fans and was nearly filled to capacity as the temperature rose into the seventies on a sundrenched afternoon.

In this post 9/11 era we all had to pass through metal detectors which I set off because of my artificial knee. When I explained it to the police officer, he replied, “Well you couldn’t have left that at home. Enjoy the game.”

The Tennessee Volunteers didn’t disappoint. They led Kentucky throughout the game, winning 49 to 36. The half-time show was devoted to celebrating the indigenous tribes of Tennessee and North Carolina and honoring the service of Native-American military veterans. It was a truly impressive ceremony that the fans loved.

That night we went to dinner in the “Old Town” section of Knoxville and at nine o’ clock called it a night. Age, not maturity, does that to you.

The following day, we dropped Pat at the airport and started our journey home. We stayed overnight in Winchester, Va. and arrived home on Monday afternoon.

The trip was the perfect respite from the turmoil that culminated in the election last Tuesday.

Thomas Wolfe wrote, “You Can’t Go Home Again.”

He was wrong.

You can.

I’ll have to do it again next year.

In August of 2003 following the liberation of Baghdad, the Iraqi National Museum was looted by crowds and Iraq’s most valuable antiquities were stolen for sale on the black market.

Asked to comment on this event, Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, observed, “Freedom is untidy.”

Well, I guess we learned that lesson again this year.

In forty-eight hours, mercifully, this presidential election will be over.

It can’t come soon enough for me.

Although I am a self-confessed political junkie, who thought that I was immune to being offended by a candidate’s behavior and tactics, I found that even I was still capable of being shocked and offended.

At the end of September, I was challenged by a reader to make a case for Hillary Clinton.

I tried my best to do so, laying out their policy differences as clearly as I could. I think she is far superior to Trump as a prospective President and Commander-in-Chief in every important area. Nevertheless, I want to revisit them both again on the issues of character and they ways in which they have comported themselves during this campaign.

I am not enthused about the choices this year.

I have never been a fan of the Clintons.

Bill Clinton lost me when he flew home to Little Rock, Arkansas during the 1992 New York Democratic Presidential primary in which the death penalty was an issue, so he could preside over the execution of a brain damaged death row inmate named Ricky Ray Rector who saved the dessert from his last meal so he could eat it after the execution.

If I had been Monica Lewinsky’s father, he would have needed dental work.

I thought Hillary was a creditable First Lady and admired the way she tried to push universal health care in that role.

I thought she was an effective Senator from New York but I still don’t understand why she didn’t read the classified National Security analysis about whether Iraq actually possessed weapons of mass destruction before casting a vote to go to war with that country.

To be fair to her, apparently only a handful of the members of Congress did read it which I still find appalling.

The e-mail server is a festering wound that could have been avoided, particularly if you know that you’re going to be a candidate for President and you suffer on the issue of transparency.

When the news broke about the server in March 2015, I predicted it would haunt her campaign for the Presidency and it continued to hang over her like the Sword of Damocles as we go to the polls on Tuesday.

Only on this day at this hour has the FBI Director again affirmed that she committed no crimes in using it.

The Clinton Foundation is another self-inflicted, unforced error. If, as Secretary of State, you proclaim that you’re going to put a Chinese wall between the Department of State and the Foundation, there has to be a real wall. That would seem to be especially important if you know that you’re going to be a candidate for President.

Her penchant for secrecy is understandable, given the number of times her husband has been indiscrete, but it could still prove to be her undoing.

All of this, however, pales in comparison to Donald Trump.

Transparent is not a word that anyone would put in a sentence that starts with the words “Donald Trump.”

In 2015 he pledged to release his tax returns, the same as every candidate for President in the last half century. Since then he has refused to disclose them, hiding behind the bogus claim that he is prevented from doing so because he is being audited by the Internal Revenue Service.

Likewise he promised that his wife, Melania, would hold a press conference to address all questions that have arisen about her path to citizenship. That has not occurred.

Trump University has been exposed as a scam that dupes people, anxious to learn whatever secrets to success that Trump claims to know, out of thousands of dollars in “tuition fees.”

The Trump Foundation has been revealed to be a scheme that involves Trump seeking donations from others that he donates to charitable organizations while charging them exorbitant fees to host their charitable functions at his Florida country club.

Trump has also used the Foundation money to settle legal claims made against him and to purchase paintings of himself at “charity auctions”, which now grace the walls in his country club.

Trump has shown himself to be a racist, misogynistic, uninformed narcissist who revels in the adulation of the neo-Nazi, white supremacist, alt-right universe that have been drawn by his appeals to their darkest impulses, like moths to the flame.

There is no group that is safe from his bullying and vitriol.

Mexicans and Latinos are “rapists.”

Latina beauty queens are to be characterized as “eating machines” and called “Miss Housekeeping,” an apparent reference to the Latina accent.

Veterans who were taken prisoner during war, while fighting for this country and were tortured are not heroes, because they “were captured.”

Women are “disgusting pigs” who exist solely for his uninvited, unrequited sexual gratification.

The disabled exist to be mocked and made sport of, if they have written something that displeases him.

Immigrants are to be rounded up and deported, whether or not they were brought here as infants and have lived productive lives and contributed to this nation.

Muslims are to be banned from this country regardless of whether they or loved ones have given their lives for it in the service.

The legitimacy of first African-American President is attacked by spreading the racist lie that he was not born here.

In his opinion, Saddam Hussein and the KGB thug, Vladimir Putin are to be admired and emulated.

It is why the Cincinnati Enquirer endorsed the first Democratic candidate for President in almost a century.

It is why the Dallas Morning News has endorsed a Democrat for President after seventy-five years.

It is no wonder that no living Republican President will endorse him.

It is no wonder that any living past Republican candidate for President will defend, campaign or appear with him.

It is no wonder that former Secretary of State, the General, Colin Powell and the vast majority of Republican diplomats and national security experts condemns him.

This Tuesday, you have to make a choice.

If you vote for Donald Trump because “you don’t like her” and he wins, you have to take ownership of that.

If you vote for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein “because you don’t like her” and Donald Trump wins, you have to take ownership of that too.

During the 1920 Presidential campaign, almost a century ago, H.L. Mencken observed,
“As democracy is perfected, the office of president, represents more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

We have never come this close to fulfilling that prophecy as we are today.

Don’t do it.

I never cease to be amazed at how ungrateful we are for the service of our combat veterans.

In the aftermath of the Vietnam War thousands of veterans began dying from strange forms of cancers never seen before.

When it became apparent that the cancers were the result of their exposure to the herbicide Agent Orange designed and used by our government, the government denied all responsibility and resisted any discovery of their role in its use and manufacture for decades.

I have written extensively about this abdication of responsibility many times over the past decade following the death of my closest friend, Larry Hackett, from cancer caused by Agent Orange.

While almost fifty years has passed since the government exposed its soldiers to this poison, the Veterans Administration, after years of denying that the chemical caused these deaths, has now begun to acknowledge the claims of veterans for disability benefits for the damage it has caused.

Congressman John Katko and former Congressman Dan Maffei each introduced the Lawrence J. Hackett Jr, Vietnam Veterans Agent Orange Fairness Act. It would provide a comprehensive study of measures including compensation for veterans and their survivors.

The Act has languished in the House Veterans Affairs Committee. It has two co-sponsors there and none in the Senate despite entreaties to both New York senators and other serving on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee.

Still, I continue to read the all too frequent obituaries of men dying in their sixties from cancer, who are Vietnam veterans. I don’t guess at the cause of the cancer anymore.

The government fares no better when it comes to veterans returning from Afghanistan, Iraq or the Gulf War.

We witnessed scandals in the Veterans hospitals involving wait times, lack of psychological, psychiatric and counseling services for veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, resulting from the horrors that they witnessed or survived while serving in these wars. The suicide rate among these veterans is staggering.

This past week, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Pentagon has been demanding that veterans of the California National Guard pay back thousands of dollars of re-enlistment bonuses and tuition benefits paid to them as an inducement to re-enlist for additional combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The newspaper stated that as many as ten-thousand veterans are affected. It published stories involving veterans who were injured and awarded medals for service during these tours. Many of them have had their wages garnished and judgements affecting their credit filed against them. Some have lost their homes because of this. Others have lived on a bare subsistence level as they paid back thousands of dollars.

In most of the cases it appears that the affected veterans lived up to their commitment and served successive combat tours.

Needless to say, they feel betrayed.

They have good reason to feel betrayed.

According to the New York Times, when California National Guard officials sought relief from Congress several years ago, it refused to act because of the cost of forgiving these debts.

Shortly after the Times article appeared, The Secretary of Defense, Ashton Carter, ordered the Pentagon to suspend these collection efforts until a new review process could be instituted.

No mention is made of making whole those veterans who have already paid back the bonuses or benefits or been subject to garnishments and other onerous debt collection measures.

There are two elements to this crisis that ought not to be forgotten.

The first is that the bonuses were paid to National Guardsmen to induce them into accepting a combat mission overseas.

Most people enlist in a state National Guard unit because they want to serve in domestic crisis, such as climate disasters, that occur within their state. None of them anticipated the repeated deployments to foreign combat zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan as many in the guard have had to endure.

The second is that the repeated deployments were made necessary because the manpower quotas essential to fighting a war in two places could not be met.

The only alternative to repeatedly deploying state National Guard units would be the return to a draft.

If a draft were reinstituted, unlike the Vietnam War, not just sons but daughters would be subject to it.

That would certainly set new terms of debate about the wisdom of our use of military force overseas.

In the meantime, ten-thousand veterans who have been victimized by our government because they accepted bonuses and benefits they accepted in good faith for service they performed will have to wait in financial limbo until the government decides how to make this right.

Ten years ago, as I stood next to my best friend’s casket in a cemetery I saw a member of the military color guard pass a folded flag to his widow and tell her it came “with the thanks of a grateful nation.”

I wanted to scream then.

I want to scream now.

In the forty-six years that I have been eligible to vote, I have never failed to do so.

It doesn’t matter whether the election was for a Federal, State or Local office. It didn’t matter if it was a primary or general election. It didn’t matter whether I was living in New York or away at college. I always cast a ballot either in person or by absentee.

It has always been my firm belief that if you don’t exercise your right to vote then you forfeit your right to complain.

I have been a candidate for office seven times. I have run in three primary elections and four general elections. I have experienced the thrill of victory and the pain of defeat.

I have worked in countless campaigns for candidates seeking office at every level of government. I don’t have an accurate count of how many were successful and were not.

Sometimes the election involved an issue that was deeply personal to me.

In 1968, before I was eligible to vote, I worked in the Presidential primary campaign of Senator Eugene McCarthy. The war in Vietnam was raging and I had many friends who both volunteered and were drafted and sent to Vietnam. Some came home safely, some came home badly wounded and some didn’t come home.

I though the war was a tragic mistake and I worked hard for any candidate who would end it so that any more friends or young men would be put in harm’s way.

Senator McCarthy wasn’t elected and the war continued under President Nixon into the next Presidential election.

In 1972, at the age of twenty-two, I ran in the New York Democratic Presidential primary election as a delegate pledged to Senator George McGovern, who also pledged to end the war. I was elected and went to the Democratic Convention in Miami Beach that summer where McGovern was nominated. He was overwhelmingly defeated by Nixon that November.

During Nixon’s second term, the nation learned about Watergate and the numerous crimes and “dirty tricks” that the Committee to Re-Elect the President had engaged in to bring about Nixon’s re-election.

Even though the Watergate scandal and criminal prosecutions ultimately led to Nixon’s resignation, nobody claimed that the election was ‘rigged.”

This year, before any votes have been cast, we are being told that the election is “rigged” and the outcome will have no integrity.

It is a curious claim because it comes from a candidate who didn’t utter it until he sensed that the election was slipping away from him.

He made no such claim during the primary season when he was winning each of the Republican Primary races.

He did claim that the results of the Iowa Caucuses were skewered by Ted Cruz who falsely reported that Ben Carson had discontinued his own campaign on the day of the caucuses.

I glean from this, that Trump believes, If Carson’s turnout had not been affected, that he and not Cruz would have won that contest.

That suggests a narcissism and self- grandiosity that is unparalleled even in politics.

What makes his claim that the election is” rigged” so incongruous is that the only evidence that anyone is trying to rig it, comes from the Russian intelligence sources who are hacking into the e-mail accounts of the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton Campaign officials and who are leaking them to their compatriot the accused rapist, Julian Assange, who is hiding out in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London. They are trying to “rig” the election in Trump’s favor.

Yet, we hear no condemnation from Trump about this foreign interference in an election for our highest office.

Trump’s claim that the election is “rigged” rests upon the racist premise that voter fraud occurs on a massive scale among African-American voters. He has issued a call to arms to his Neo-Nazi, alt- right supporters to become vigilantes on Election Day and “monitor” voting in inner-city precincts. This is recklessness that borders on criminal.

In my lifetime, I have seen demagogues like Alabama Governor George Wallace seek the Presidency by appealing to the worst instincts of the American people.

Even as Wallace must have known that he would be defeated, he didn’t attempt to foster violence on the day of the election or undermine the integrity of the outcome.

I can think of no candidate in history who has done this.

Our full and free elections throughout our history have been a beacon for the rest of the world.

I’ve thought long and hard about what should be done to someone who would undermine our democracy in this way.

Only one thing comes to mind.

Lock him up.

I have a four year-old granddaughter whose favorite color is purple. She has a purple bedroom, purple coats, purple sweaters, and purple sneakers. If she could make it happen, everything in her world would be purple.

She also has demonstrated an interest in music. No visit to our house is complete until she sits down at my keyboard and bangs on the keys and pushes all of the instrument buttons.

In retirement, I decided that one of the ways I would try and keep my mind active and occupied was to learn to the play the piano.

There is a music gene in our family but I didn’t get it.

My sister, Mary, got it and took piano lessons and learned to play beautifully throughout her childhood. I can remember how happily our father gave up his Sunday afternoon professional football games so he could sit in an auditorium and listed to ten or twenty children he didn’t know play a recital piece before my sister came on. If he was lucky, he only missed the first half before he could listen to her and sneak out.

My daughter, Meghan, Claire’s mother, got the music gene. She took lessons in grade school and middle school. Her teacher was preparing her for competition when she was tragically killed in an automobile accident. Meghan was devastated and her interest in playing seemed to abate.

I took lessons from one of the nuns I had in parochial grade school for a number of months until the lumps on my head and the mild concussion I suffered during the lessons allowed me to stop taking them.

Claire has heard me practice during her weekend visits and has pronounced my music as “yucky.”

Despite this candid appraisal of my talent, I decided to get her a keyboard of her own to see if it would whet her appetite for learning to play.

Naturally, it had to be purple.

I went to Google and searched for a purple keyboard. To my amazement there was a 49 key purple electric keyboard with a microphone offered on Amazon which could arrive in time for her birthday. I place the order.

The day before her birthday, I received an e-mail from Amazon notifying me that the item was “backordered” and would arrive sometime between late October and late November. I cancelled the order.

I went back online and found the same purple keyboard offered by Sears. I placed the order and was provided with a U.S. Postal Service tracking number and an arrival date of two weeks later. It would be after her birthday but close enough for a late present.

I should have realized that I was in trouble when I entered the tracking number on the Postal Service tracking site and was informed that it didn’t recognize the number. I waited in vain and when the two weeks expired, I contacted Sears. They told me that the purple key board was lost in the mail but that they would arrange to have another shipped.

A couple of days later Sears e-mailed me that their supplier was out of purple keyboards and they would provide me with a refund.

Undaunted, I went back to Google and found a music company in California that had the same purple keyboard. I went to the web site and ordered one. They sent me an e-mail acknowledging my order and a delivery date in ten days.

On the twelfth day I e-mailed the company and told them I had not received the purple keyboard. They asked for twenty-four hours to review the order after which they informed me that my credit card had been declined and the order cancelled.

I immediately wondered, loudly, how I ever would have known that my credit card had been declined and the order cancelled if they were never going to inform me of that had I not inquired. Terri told me that she couldn’t handle hearing anymore about my travails trying to order the purple keyboard.

II decided to keep my thoughts and frustrations to myself.

I stewed for a couple of days and began exploring keyboards that weren’t purple but lying in bed at night I resolved that a keyboard that wasn’t purple just wouldn’t do.

I contacted the music company in California and asked if I had given them the wrong credit card number. They read me the information on the order and I had not. I explained to them that the card had never been declined and asked them to place the order again.

Two days later, they sent me an e-mail with a delivery date and a tracking number. I waited another day and went to the U.S. Postal Service website, inputted the tracking number and held my breath. The purple keyboard had been shipped and was enroute!

Several days later the package arrived.

We went to my daughter’s home that weekend and presented it to Claire. She was very excited about the fact it was purple. She plugged it in and began to bang on the keys and push the other instrument buttons.

My daughter said it was the loudest keyboard she had ever heard.

I pointed out that it had a volume control button with an arrow on it that you could hold down to reduce the volume.

She pressed it and said to me, “It doesn’t work, Dad.”

“I can send it back for a replacement but we might not get another one until she’s ten years-old,” I said.

Meghan said, “Okay, Dad. We’ll keep it but when we come to visit for the weekend I’m sending her into your bedroom in the morning to play it to wake you up.”

I just hope Claire learns a couple of tunes I like by then.