BONUS: King, Carter linked by their humanity
Queensbury Town Board to meet today to discuss ethics policy
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This sounds totally anachronistic for someone who was president of the United States, but what struck me most about Jimmy Carter after visiting his presidential library in Atlanta was his decency, his goodness.
And then the fact he wasn't asked back for a second term by American voters tells us a lot about what is important to the American people.
A day after visiting Carter's library, and just one and a half miles down the road, the folks at the Martin Luther King National Historical Park showed me a connection I had not made before as they compared two natives sons of Georgia as being cut from the same cloth - King and Carter.
President James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr. and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. are two extraordinary global leaders who were born in the state of Georgia. These two passionate humanitarians, one white and one black, were raised in the segregated south yet both became renowned leaders who persistently strived for world justice, peace and human rights. The close-knit family connections, strong faith traditions and the intimate ties to the community deeply influenced both of these men to become the great leaders that we know today.
Consider the current occupant of the Oval Office, it is like reading from a comic book.
Although the two men never met, Carter was a sequel of sorts, taking a more traditional path to changing the world through elected office rather than passionate protest.
By the time Carter was first elected to the state senate in Georgia, Martin Luther King was already a national figure - although perhaps not in the White world - for leading a national Civil Rights movement into the national limelight and garnering real change.
I thought I knew the story of Martin Luther King, but my admiration grew as I reviewed his footsteps this week.
Consider this story I never heard before. It is 1953, and this 24-year-old black preacher weds in Marion, Alabama, but then is unable to secure overnight accomodations because of his color. Instead, the honeymooners spent the night in a black funeral parlor.
I suspect indignities like that stay with you.
Just two years, Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat on a bus and this young minister is thrust into the middle of the Montgomery bus boycott.
After spending his wedding night in that funeral parlor, I suspect he knew something about being treated as a lesser man.
There is a long account in King's own words at the Atlanta historic site of a late-night phone call during the bus boycott that speaks to King's inner turmoil.
My wife had already fallen asleep and I was about to doze off when the telephone rang. An angry voice said, "Listen, nigger, we've taken all we want from you. Before next week you'll be sorry you ever came to Montgomery." | hung up, but I could not sleep. It seemed that all of my fears had come down on me at once. I had reached the saturation point.
I got out of bed and began to walk the floor. Finally, I went to the kitchen and heated a pot of coffee. I was ready to give up. I tried to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing to be a coward. In this state of exhaustion, when my courage had almost gone, I determined to take my problem to God. My head in my hands, I bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud.... "I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left... I can't face it alone."
At that moment I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never before experienced him. It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice, saying, "Stand up for righteousness, stand up for truth. God will be at your side forever." Almost at once my fears began to pass from me. My uncertainty disappeared. I was ready to face anything. The outer situation remained the same, but God had given me inner calm.
Three nights later, our home was bombed.
The boycott lasted 381 days, but it was just the beginning of the fight for civil rights.
King's defiance of an Alabama state court injunction against demonstrating in Birmingham led to his arrest on Good Friday 1963 and ultimately to his famous letter from the Birmingham jail:
We have waited for more them 340 years for our constitutional and God-given
I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim... when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a denigrating sense of "nobodiness;" then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.
Later that year came the "I have a dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.
After black schoolchildren were beaten to the ground by whites in Mississippi, King came to their defense and accompanied them to school.
After black marchers fighting for voting rights at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma were attacked by state police on horseback, King led the march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge and on to the state capital in Montgomery in a battle for voting rights.
Ultimately, his efforts made him the symbol of the Civil Rights movement and led to his assassination in Memphis while supporting a sanitation workers strike.
He was just 39.
Two years later, Jimmy Carter was elected governor of Georgia and said this during his inaugural address:
"I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over. The test of a government is not how popular it is with the powerful and privileged few, but how honestly and fairly it deals with the many who must depend upon it," Carter said in January 1971.
I suspect Martin Luther King would have nodded his approval.
He might even have thought Carter a kindred spirit.
Carter was raised by his farmer father among Black neighbors, farm workers and tenant farmers. He never forgot those lessons or those people. He later said King's movement influenced his own beliefs.
After Carter's death earlier this year, Newsweek asked King's daughter, Bernice King, about Carter.
"When I look at his life and I look at my father's life, they both started from different places," King's youngest daughter said. "But in an interesting way, they both operated from a similar frame of reference, which was the belief that we can create a just, humane, peaceful and equitable world."
Again, those beliefs by a politician seem almost prehistoric today.
The Carter library summed up the president this way:
In 1977, the American people wanted a president and a government they could trust. Jimmy Carter ascended to the presidency in turbulent times. He undertook a sweeping reform agenda that included restoring accountability in government, creating the first national energy plan, supporting human rights around the world, encouraging peace among nations, and keeping the United States strong and secure. And he promised the American people that he would never lie to them.
And yet the American people turned him out of office after one term.
Two great men.
One was voted out of office.
The other was murdered.
What is wrong with us?
Queensbury ethics
The Queensbury Town Board is finally getting around to talking about its conflict of interest.
There is a workshop scheduled for Thursday at 3 p.m. in the supervisor's conference room next to the supervisor's office at the Queensbury Town Hall with one of the items to be discussed “ethics code and disclosure.”
This is a public meeting so anyone can attend and for those who have voiced concerns in the past, they should be there again.
From the vague description on the agenda it sounds like the board may try to change the wording of the ethics policy so it does not have a conflict.
Sophie on road
Like most dogs, Sophie sleeps a lot, but she continues to be a marvel on the road.
I set up her bed in the back seat where she has plenty of room to lounge. She mostly sleeps while we drive and rarely takes in any of the sights.
On Tuesday, we did a 450-yard jaunt from Charleston, S.C. to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. We were in the car for about 7 hours - with two stops - and we did not here a peep out of Sophie.
It has become our routine for me to ask my brother if Sophie is in the car because she is so quiet. We are afraid we might leave her behind.
Sophie on beach
We always wondered how Sophie would react to ocean waves because she does not like to get her feet wet.
On the first glance of the Atlantic Ocean Tuesday, she charged into the sea only t find herself completely surrounded by the wake. She repeated this a few times before retreating farther up on the beach.
She seemed to really enjoy it.
Graduation speeches
If you want to compare the real America vs the Trump America you just have to compare the graduation speeches of Trump at West Point with that of 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley at Wake Forest.
If you get a chance, read the entire speech from Pelley. It is well worth your time.
Here is one snippet:
To move forward, we debate, not demonize. We discuss, not destroy. But in this moment – this moment, this morning – our sacred rule of law is under attack. Journalism is under attack. Universities are under attack. Freedom of speech is under attack. An insidious fear is reaching through our schools, our businesses, our homes and into our private thoughts. The fear to speak. In America? If our government is – in Lincoln’s words – “of the people, by the people and for the people” – then why are we afraid to speak?
The Wake Forest Class of 1861 did not choose their time of calling. The Class of 1941 did not choose. The Class of 1968 did not choose. History chose them. And now history is calling you, the Class of 2025. You may not feel prepared, but you are. You are not descended of fearful people. You brought your values to school with you and now Wake Forest has trained you to seek the truth, to find the meaning of life.
I wonder if history is calling all of us.
Read the speech.
Not sleeping
After my column about our country's failure to address the dangers from climate change ("This is why you can't sleep at night"), I got one comment from a reader I believe is important to share:
"As a water quality scientist, I feel as though my 30-year career in the Adirondacks working on acidification in lakes and ponds and all of the advancements have now been lost b/c of all the greed in our society," Jim Sutherland wrote. "At this point in my 8th decade of life, I am ashamed to be an `American'"
What was missing?
Substack columnist Robert Hubbell took a close look at President Trump's bizarre speech at West Point and his social media posts that day (does Trump ever take a day off from social media?) and reported this:
The only thing missing from Trump's Memorial Day message on social media was any mention of the service members who died so that we might be free. The day honoring their deaths was nothing more than a platform for Trump to attack his enemies. Converting Memorial Day into an opportunity for partisan ranting dishonors the death of every service member who died in the line of duty.
Ken Tingley spent more than four decades working in small community newspapers in upstate New York. Since retirement in 2020 he has written three books and is currently adapting his second book "The Last American Newspaper" into a play. He currently lives in Queensbury, N.Y.
“To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.” - Thomas Paine
And my fellow veterans see the Commander In Chief trampling upon the Constitution every day, that democracy blueprint we swore an enlistment or commission oath to defend with our lives if necessary. Veteran morale suffers, and the work of the VA's new suicide prevention initiative, for which volunteer at age 80 (my last rodeo), gets more complicated.