When I was a child, the Lumbee earned my enduring admiration by vanquishing the Ku Klux Klan with war whoops and gunfire at the Battle of Hayes Pond, thus successfully defending their reputation for both ferocity and integrity.
It was disappointing to hear that just-elected Southern Baptist Convention President Johnny Hunt, a Lumbee Indian, came equipped with a paddedresume.
Hunt's advanced degrees are variously honorary or issued by what the Baptist Center for Ethics publication Ethics Daily calls "diploma mills."
My disappointment grew when I learned that, looking back, Hunt's personal resume isn't the only one to consider here. Robert Parham, executive editor of Ethics Daily, wrote:
One of Hunt's own "sons in the ministry" was forced to resign from the prominent First Baptist Church of West Palm Beach, Fla., in part because of his diploma mill degrees.
Highly recommended to the church by Hunt, Steven Flockhart was forced out "over a controversy involving fabricated education credentials," reported Baptist Press, which noted that the Palm Beach Post had discovered that Flockhart had obtained correspondence degrees from Covington Theological Seminary, "a Georgia school not accredited by any recognized accrediting agency."
Can a man who presumes the title "Dr." as though he had a valid academic Phd., and fails to accurately assess his own key staff, lead his denomination out of the land of memebership "free fall"?
A majority of those voting at the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting in Indianapolis said "yes," and it is faintly conceivable that he will prove to be something of respite from hard-line conservatism which is grinding the SBC down. We will see, but today I am moved to give thanks for being a Presbyterian.
01:53PM Jun 02, 2008 in category by George W Frink
British-born human rights organization Reprieve has detailed evidence that extraordinary rendition continues and may involve use of prison ships -- a practice that would have infuriated the Founding Fathers.
The Founding Fathers had not forgotten that more Patriots died under horrible conditions in 16 or more British prison ships anchored in New York Harbor than in all of the Revolutionary War battles combined.
Those floating Revolutionary War hell holes were an expedient adopted when land-based prisons overflowed, whereas to would appear that Bush's prison ships, like the system of secret prisons Bush claimed to have shut down in late 2006, is secrecy.
Although the charges come forward amid the din of other news, they will not be readily dismised and forgotten. Reprieve, founded in 1999 by human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, makes the charges by way carefully documented reports, which offer evidence that prison ships have been used and are in use within and outside of the territorial waters of Diego Garcia. That Indian Ocean atoll is a British territory. As a result, the reports have added fire to debate over possible complicity by British officials.
The US administration chooses ships to try to keep their misconduct as far as possible from the prying eyes of the media and lawyers.
Bush administration behavior thus far, and Republican failures to press him on his misleading statements, suggests that we aren't likely to learn the full truth until a new, Democratic president is securely installed in the White House.
05:10PM May 08, 2008 in category by George W Frink
CNN's failure to correct May 6 primary-eve errors led Karoli to indict them with a personal eulogy.
To my eye she has the story and its conclusion exactly right.
You see, Lake County, Indiana, disrupted the stagecraft of horse-race-reporting journalists by being slow to report returns. As an apparent result, Wolf Blitzer, John King and Hammond, Indiana Mayor Tom McDermont ganged up on Gary, Indiana, Mayor Rudy Clay.
That ugliness began as browbeating and moved on to implications that the digital ballot boxes in Gary had somehow been stuffed -- implications that appear to have been and as of this writing appear to remain vacant speculation.
I have long relied upon CNN. I hate to think of CNN as as full of sound and fury, signifying whatever makes convenient stagecraft, but bashing public officials with speculative allegations which happen to give drama to the sometimes tired business of reporting election returns isn't worthwhile journalism. If I were involved in that primary-eve contretemps, one way or another, I'd issue a correction and apology. Such corrections are both painful to make and among the fundamental obligations of facts-first American journalism.
The "earthquake" former President Bill Clinton had in mind wasn't Sen. Barack Obama's triumph in a contest that may have aroused Tar Heel pride enough to turn North Carolina electoral blue once more.
The Democratic primary became a war for the Tar Heel soul and an insult to Tar Heel pride when Republicans fired from that well-polished cannon of racist smear, and were answeredbywitheringfire from the generations who have had enough.
That would have been the battle front had Presumptive Republican nominee John McCain not made a failing gesture at forbidding use of the ad, thus telling us all he believes we're too dumb to know a ruse on sight.
You may search from the pine forests, deep swamps and tobacco fields where I was born to the university lecture halls near me as I write and through the mountain tops, gorges and hollows of the west.
You will find Tar Heels in all of their wonderful variety.
What you will not find is one who misunderstood the twin Republican insults.
McCain and his party think we are too weak-minded to understand the strategies of contempt which they tried to use once more during this primary, and too weak-willed to stand up for ourselves and defeat those strategies.
05:01PM Apr 23, 2008 in category by George W Frink
North Carolina Republican leaders demean the campaign heritage of Jesse Helms with that thin, inebriated wander of a television ad they plainly presume will volley his lightning.
The ad, which Republican presidential hopeful John McCain has asked them not to air, makes no scalpel cut to the organ in Southern minds where pockets of animating resentment sometimes lie concealed.
Instead it swings lazily at three different Democratic candidates, without quite yoking them all together with the minister whose censored speech predominates.
Then abruptly it ends with someone saying again that overused "too extreme for North Carolina" campaign code phrase, which always seemed to me to imply that we North Carolinians really cannot take care of ourselves in the big bad world.
The effect is somewhat less inspiring than I had hoped, since my taste in attack ads was shaped by the white hot malevolent focus of yesteryear. Whereas in its somewhat less than 30-second run time, this North Carolina Republican party campaign centerpiece can move a wide-awake Tar Heel from either major political party to heavy-lidded yawning.
Even one of dirt-road birth like myself, who became accustomed to and perhaps even addicted to boredom while growing up, cannot remain fully awake through repeated viewings.
Of course not. Good grief. We know that State Treasurer Richard Moore and Lt. Gov. Beverly Perdue both want the Democratic gubernatorial nomination and, yawn, have both endorsed Sen. Barack Obama's bid to become the Democratic presidential nominee. We've seen, heard and read about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. We've heard or read about Obama's speech addressing the related issues. We've all heard Sen. Hillary Clinton and others tell us at length what they would or would not have done had they been Obama.
So why, oh why, are we going over parts of this again?
There's the rub.
Because there are those who believe it serves the interests of the state Republican Party to get us cranked up about it all. If they can get us cranked up about it all.
The leaders of that party believe it is not insulting when at election time they try to get us drunk on vaguely racist high dudgeon, the way other political operators tried to get our ancestors drunk on campaign rotgut. So that dirty old glass is on the table again.
01:54PM Apr 07, 2008 in category by George W Frink
Autism in its acute forms is extraordinarily difficult to handle, even while requiring $50,000+ a year in therapeutic attention to grant each child who suffers it a chance at some measure autonomy.
Unless you live in South Carolina or one of the 15 other states which as of this writing to some degree mandate coverage, family health insurance you may have is unlikely to help pay for intensive therapies required to open the door to a better outcome.
Nor is the struggle over if you do live in one of the 16. Parents of autistic children, already exhausted by the demands of the illness, must fight for the benefits law requires.
Save where statute intervenes, insurance companies most often cooly submit that the treatment of autism is not a medical procedure and so not their concern.
Charleston Law School professor Lorri Unumb, who led the fight for change in South Carolina, explained CNN the experience she and her husband had in seeking coverage for care for their son Ryan:
It's not like you read your insurance policy and you can see a specific exclusion. We submitted bills, and we'd get denials back that said "experimental... denied," or "provided by a non-licensed provider... denied." Or sometimes the insurance companies would say "this therapy is educational in nature, not medical... denied."
Yet the diseases which compose the Autism Spectrum Disorders are complex and as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention make clear, they require medical diagnosis or something indistinguishable from it to classify well and so treat appropriately and effectively. The CDC and like authorities also agree that ASDs are the result of genetic, environmental and/or other physiological insults, all undeniably within the realm of medical concerns.
ASDs in most cases require both early intervention and a combination of therapies which are as medical as the rehabilitative therapy more American soldiers should receive when they return home from Iraq. Both cases illustrate how far down the path of commonplace neglect this nation has strayed in public health policy, so that conscience requires Lorri Unumb and others like her to join in years-long battle for legislation like Ryan's Law.
Calling ASD treatments "educational benefits" is a especially false logic. The fact that treatment often occurs at school attests to the age of those treated and speaks directly to the overarching value of keeping those children as much with mainstream life experiences as possible during their 20 to 40 hours a week of therapy.
They must be with other children, lest we risk eventually setting them apart as pariahs and so fail in our fundamental moral obligation to care well for those least able to defend themselves.
That good purpose of helping children live the lives of children by providing treatment at school was not spontaneously embraced by school systems across the land as a natural educational activity. It is fostered by the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which in return helps fund the programs.
Susan Pisano of America's Health Insurance Plans, a Washington-based association that represents health insurers, made the place-is-classification argument quite gracefully in an interview with CNN:
I think that it's perfectly understandable that if you are diagnosed with a condition, or a family member is diagnosed with a condition, you want to get services. Traditionally those services have been provided through early intervention programs for children in the 0-3 age group, and by schools for children who are older.
Yet the place of treatment cannot transform the treatments into the equivalents of language arts or math classes, any more than swallowing prescribed medication at school makes that an academic activity. School sponsorship does not transform the treatment either, any more than psychiatric counseling delivered at school becomes coursework by virtue of the building in which it occurs.
The American Academy of Pediatrics regards ASDs as so important an aspect of its members' practices that it has published a technical paper on the subject. That paper begins:
Autism and its milder variants are not rare. Most pediatricians will have the opportunity to provide a medical home for a child with autism.
What drives health insurance companies to their overstrained logic is clear in work like that of Michael Ganz, an assistant professor of Society, Human Development, and Health at Harvard School of Public Health. His studies conclude that $70,000 or more a year is required to properly treat an ASD child with any but the least acute symptoms.
American Health insurance companies typically want none of that cost, for they are by and large in the business of making money, and in most cases of avoiding the burden of those in most need of help.
Children are not spreadsheet ciphers and our obligation to come to their defense is inescapable.
Conscience in this case requires the remedy of law.
05:34PM Mar 25, 2008 in category by George W Frink
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton said today in an interview with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review that "she would have left her church" if her pastor made inflammatory remarks like those made the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
She tried to wrap it in a politically convenient homily about choices Sen. Barack Obama might have made regarding whether to continue to attend Trinity United Church of Christ while Wright was pastor.
She said:
He would not have been my pastor. You don't choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend.
How morally remote from real life, in which her declaration still means she would walk out on her church community if the pastor currently assigned to her home pulpit offended her.
It is as though she doesn't understand either the nature of church membership or its obligations. As the editor of the Biblical Recorder put it in his blog:
Church membership isn't just about a particular minister and his sermons. It's about a community. ... Your church, especially in our transient society, is your family. The persons in your Sunday school class or cell group are likely those you hang out with or call when you have a free evening and want to do something with a friend. Your children's friends are there. You make connections that carry into your everyday working world. These are the people who rally to your needs.
Unless you're Hillary Clinton, who at the pastoral utterance of sufficiently offensive words would abandon all of those fellow church members with whom she had developed relationships of Christian fellowship and mutual spiritual support.
If I ever trusted her about anything important, I don't now.
Gallused-overall wearing North Carolina tobacco farmers from whom I first learned to read a newspaper would have described current Democratic primary coverage in terms that I reserve for barnyards.
They and their descendants aren't confused, but anyone visiting from Mars or an extrasolar planet might be misled by hyperventilating media coverage into believing there is a cliff-hanger race between Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Here in the Old North State we can enjoy the attention of Clinton and Obama campaign visits, and should vote with enthusiasm come the May 6 primary, without buying into the myth.
Grandaddy always said "every vote counts," even if you know who's going to win. I believe that were he alive today, he'd observe that Obama is going to win. And to tell the truth, Grandaddy broke fresh starch on khaki trousers every day, but clothing is beside the point.
After appropriate sarcasm, Politico runs through the math in nice detail, explaining why Ms. Clinton's candidacy is history.
Others say that if she is maybe, perhaps, just ever so possibly to re-create a chance of winning the nomination, Ms. Clinton has to win, well, North Carolina.
Which whiplashes me back to the concept of extrasolar journalists and pundits, since the polling news in that regard forecasts little or no such possibility.
Obama now has and is consolidating his lead here.
Could it be that "down home" we're collectively smart enough to understand issues like loyalty to one's home church, and make allowances, rather than have our heads turned by the spin?
Absent some kind of substantial and unexpected revelation, Ms. Clinton and the extrasolar journalists can take a nap. Rural and urban Tar Heels alike have this thing sorted out, thank you.
Addendum: A survey by Public Policy Polling, done before Ms. Clinton admitted she "misspoke" about having braved sniper fire in Bosnia in 1996, showed Obama with 55 percent to Clinton's 34 percent among likely voters in the May 6 primary.
Today I yearned to have my Grandfather George Frink with me to share Barack Obama's speech, just as we often read the newspaper together in the morning and watched the news on television together at night.
More than a century ago, after putting together a school committee and so securing the state funds required to construct the whites-only Hallsboro (North Carolina) School from which I eventually graduated, my grandfather secretly defied the KKK by subsidizing construction of a school in "The Quarters" there for the black citizens.
Grandaddy would have approved of Obama's epochal speech on living with and overcoming American racial division.
In our grandfather/grandson approach to active listening, we would have annotated that speech with discussion which ranged across how, when I was a child, Grandaddy taught me to speak my dissent carefully, softly.
It was a matter of survival.
He knew he had to teach me restraint, lest loud assertion then of my attitudes and ideas bring the Klan by to shut me up, possibly forever and about everything.
Heaven knows, my father, a Klansman, tried from time to time to shut me up. His militant racism broke Grandaddy's heart and divided us in ways I tried but could not heal. My mother's dividing hold over my father would not permit healing. Yet I did not and do not disown my father, who has passed away. Shunning is not about love or forgiveness, and I am. Nor is it possible, ultimately, to shun that which is as much a part of you as a parent.
It was through the softening, entangling web of memory that I heard Obama say of his former minister, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright:
I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother -- a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.
Amid those words there returned to me the memory of Grandaddy's sawmill.
With its screaming, circular saws he cut mast from his own forest into beams and boards to "sell" to members of the Cherry family for money they brought to him in a well-used paper bag and a glass jar.
Almost all of that mast was cypress my grandfather cut down and hauled out of Columbus County's, White Marsh alone, behind a team of mules. He chose cypress because the termites were unlikely to eat it and it resisted rot.
He wanted that school to last and to offer enduring shelter to his friends' children as they received the education that he had himself been denied as a child. For despite being an inveterate reader whose interests ranged from detective novels to modern physics, Columbus County's poverty and the failure of his father's business had denied him the opportunity to finish high school.
He didn't keep so much as a penny of the school money.
Grandaddy walked or rode his horse alone through the late-night darkness of back roads to return it to his friends, who after a time would return by day to "buy" more of the lumber with which to build their school and maintaining the illusion that he was profiting from what the Klan believed were useless efforts.
"A man does what he can," Grandaddy always said, and he would know what a man can do now.
Just as I know.
Grandaddy and I would not lower our voices this time, or move stealthily through the mosquito-thick darkness to accomplish the good.
Not this time.
I know that together we would join Obama in proclaiming, "Not this time."
This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can't learn; that those kids who don't look like us are somebody else's problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.
This time we would build one school together in the daylight, and celebrate what we have become.
This time we can build together at last the kind of society Grandaddy envisioned and secretly fought for, beginning more than a decade before my father was born.
This time, we can build it to last, the way Grandaddy would.
Note: Here are the text and video of Barack Obama's Tuesday, March 18, 2008, speech.
by George W Frink
It was disappointing to hear that just-elected Southern Baptist Convention President Johnny Hunt, a Lumbee Indian, came equipped with a 
