The Valley Viewpoint

I recently received from a cousin the census and baptismal records of our grandfather who was born in Ireland. I learned that that our grandfather lived in the same house with his father, our great grandfather, and that our great-great grandfather, too, lived with them and was listed as the head of that household at the age of 78! As I reviewed these records, I got to thinking that we inherit from our ancestors gifts so often taken for granted. Each of us contains this inheritance of soul. We are links between the ages, containing past and present expectations, sacred memories and future promise. I also thought about the richness of our family’s ancestry and the fact that I don’t spend enough time being thankful for the family that I have. How many calls have I not made, how many emails have I not sent? I guess we are all guilty of not paying attention to those of us who are still here, yet, it’s ironic,we look back and share records of our common ancestry almost wistfully. I wonder how those folks who lived so long ago would feel about their descendents not keeping in touch with each other? I have some emails and phone calls to make………….

For me, Superman is and has always been America’s hero. I had an uncle who was a weight lifter. When I was 5 or so, I remember asking my mother if my uncle, John, was really Superman. She looked at me and very seriously told me that she couldn’t tell me because ‘no one was supposed to know’. That sealed it for me. From that day on, my uncle was Superman and I was now entrusted with this knowledge. I mean, after all, he carried my sister and I up three flights of stairs using nothing but the palms of his hands. Who, but Superman, could do that? But the real reason he was Superman was that he stood for what we believe is the best within us: limitless strength tempered by compassion, that could bear adversity and emerge stronger on the other side. He stood for what we all feel we would like to be able to stand for, when standing is sometimes the hardest.

We could all use a little Superman these days, couldn’t we? And we could all use a lot more TV shows like this one that you could watch with your kids and be reminded of its message. So, on the nights when you can’t sleep, and during the times when the darkness of uncertainty presses in on you, find a couple of these old ‘Adventures of Superman’ episodes. They’re a reminder that hope must lead the way. They’re a reminder that courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently. Take it from me, because, you see, I was related to Superman.

Today, at work, I heard that a coworker’s daughter has a friend who is turning 16 and is saddened that her birthday celebration is bittersweet because no one on her ‘invite’ list has responded that they will go.
I’m not sure who to blame for this. Is it the parents of the kids who haven’t even responded or the kids themselves for being rude?
This story made me remember this. As many of my friends know, my mother was confined to a wheel chair/hospital bed for the majority of her short life due to MS. This didn’t stop her, however, from keeping tight control of her household; particulary her children.
Coming home, one day, in my 16th year, I was ‘summoned’ to her room. ‘Eddie, I got a phone call from Mrs. Williams today. ‘You remember her daughter, Nancy, don’t you…..you went to grammar school with her………remember?’
By this time, I was sweating……….’Nancy needs a date to her junior prom at Notre Dame High School……you’re going’.
My reaction can only be compared to Jimmy Cagney’s performance in ‘Angels with Dirty Faces’ where, in the death row scene, he is dragged to the electric chair, crying, screaming, grabbing the radiator, etc.. If you haven’t seen this movie, I’ve attached the scene so you can get a visual of what I went through……My performance didn’t work and guess what? I went and actually had a nice time. So, to the kids who don’t want to go to my coworker’s daugther’s friends party and, particularly, to the parents of these ‘Im too busy to respond’ young people……… too bad…you’re missing out on a good time…..

This is a difficult email to write for me. Many of you who follow my Facebook blogs know that I have written extensively on the clerical sex abuse scandals that, all too often, have been widely publicized. Most recently, I published the letter that I wrote to John Cecero SJ about his letter that identified Jesuits who, over the past 50 years, were credibly identified as being guilty of abuse.

I previously wrote of the obfuscation that the Jesuits used in attempting to shield assets with the 166 million dollar judgement that was levied against them when it was found that Jesuits from the Oregonian province were guilty of sexually abusing Alaskan villagers over a period of 25 years. Anyone who visits my page can see these posts.

Like many of you, these scandals have shaken my faith. Last week, the NY Post reported on new suit filed on behalf of a plaintiff who, during the 70’s, alleged that he was sexually abused by Father Hoefner. His full complaint is posted below. Father Hoefner….Jake….known to my family since 1953. Was on the altar when my parents were married at St. Ignatius in 1956. I was a member of the choir and an altar server for most of my grammar school days as well as my high school ones at Xavier. Not once did I see or hear of Father Hoefner doing anything, anything to any of my friends. Not once. But yet, here is another salacious allegation. I’ve shared this with the guys that I knew from my choir and altar days and I’m happy to say the consensus is all the same. But at the same time, I’ve heard stories from these same guys that all have the following in them- “Jake,,,,,no…but did I ever tell you about Father…….’

I don’t know where this will end. I will always be grateful for my Jesuit education and having been influenced by the likes of Woods, Duminuco, Reilly, Keenan, Dineen, Aracich and many others. I’m old enough and have spent so many years in corporate America to know that any organization is weakened by the secrets that it keeps. I hope that these allegations against Father Hoefner are proved false……

https://nypost.com/2019/04/13/horace-mann-alum-details-horrifying-new-sexual-abuse-claims-in-lawsuit/

I have a very good young friend who is struggling with feeling lonely. A talented, attractive person who is going through what we all go through regarding finding the ‘right person’. I’ve tried to convey to her that we’ve all been there; The danger for young folks with new relationships that, sometimes, end is that those first relationships happen but once and only to the very young when it feels like your skin could ignite at the mere touch of another person. You get to love like that but once.
I get it….
Have you ever been in love? Horrible, isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up this whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one person, no different from any other person, wanders into your life… You give them a piece of you. They don’t ask for it. They do something dumb one day like kiss you, or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so a simple phrase like “maybe we should just be friends” or “how very perceptive” turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. Nothing should be able to do that. Especially not love.

It hurts to let go, to say goodbye for the final time and remain distant in your closure, it may even tear your heart out to the point of insanity; but somehow in it all you find the pieces of your worth and you start creating yourself again, and in that journey of transformation you find the essence of what truly matters, inner happiness. It’s life, we all fall at some stage but it’s up to you, to decide how long you want to stay there.

Hang in there, my young friend……..

Of all the things that I have been asked to do in life, today I was honored to be asked to deliver one of this year’s commencement speeches at a local school. Seems that the school’s Headmaster, who has listened to me on Tom Sipos’s Hudson Valley Life Show, feels that I may have something to say worth listening to…..Feeling humbled but suspecting that others may disagree with this, and recognizing that Commencement Speech Season is about to begin, I wanted to share, here, a brief outline of one of the better commencement speeches I’ve heard delivered by Chief Justice John Roberts at the Cardigan Mountain School in 2017.

‘Now the commencement speakers will typically also wish you good luck and extend good wishes to you. I will not do that, and I’ll tell you why. From time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty. Sorry to say, but I hope you will be lonely from time to time so that you don’t take friends for granted. I wish you bad luck, again, from time to time so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either. And when you lose, as you will from time to time, I hope every now and then, your opponent will gloat over your failure. It is a way for you to understand the importance of sportsmanship. I hope you’ll be ignored so you know the importance of listening to others, and I hope you will have just enough pain to learn compassion. Whether I wish these things or not, they’re going to happen. And whether you benefit from them or not will depend upon your ability to see the message in your misfortunes.

Now commencement speakers are also expected to give some advice. They give grand advice, and they give some useful tips. The most common grand advice they give is for you to be yourself. It is an odd piece of advice to give people dressed identically, but you should — you should be yourself. But you should understand what that means. Unless you are perfect, it does not mean don’t make any changes. In a certain sense, you should not be yourself. You should try to become something better. People say ‘be yourself’ because they want you to resist the impulse to conform to what others want you to be. But you can’t be yourself if you don’t learn who are, and you can’t learn who you are unless you think about it.

The Greek philosopher Socrates said, ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’ And while ‘just do it’ might be a good motto for some things, it’s not a good motto when it’s trying to figure out how to live your life that is before you. And one important clue to living a good life is to not to try to live the good life. The best way to lose the values that are central to who you are is frankly not to think about them at all.

So that’s the deep advice. Now some tips as you get ready to go to your new school. Other the last couple of years, I have gotten to know many of you young men pretty well, and I know you are good guys. But you are also privileged young men. And if you weren’t privileged when you came here, you are privileged now because you have been here. My advice is: Don’t act like it.

When you get to your new school, walk up and introduce yourself to the person who is raking the leaves, shoveling the snow or emptying the trash. Learn their name and call them by their name during your time at the school. Another piece of advice: When you pass by people you don’t recognize on the walks, smile, look them in the eye and say hello. The worst thing that will happen is that you will become known as the young man who smiles and says hello, and that is not a bad thing to start with.

You’ve been at a school with just boys. Most of you will be going to a school with girls. I have no advice for you.

The last bit of advice I’ll give you is very simple, but I think it could make a big difference in your life. Once a week, you should write a note to someone. Not an email. A note on a piece of paper. It will take you exactly 10 minutes. Talk to an adult, let them tell you what a stamp is. You can put the stamp on the envelope. Again, 10 minutes, once a week. I will help you, right now. I will dictate to you the first note you should write. It will say, ‘Dear [fill in the name of a teacher at Cardigan Mountain School].’ Say: ‘I have started at this new school. We are reading [blank] in English. Football or soccer practice is hard, but I’m enjoying it. Thank you for teaching me.’ Put it in an envelope, put a stamp on it and send it. It will mean a great deal to people who — for reasons most of us cannot contemplate — have dedicated themselves to teaching middle school boys. As I said, that will take you exactly 10 minutes a week. By the end of the school year, you will have sent notes to 40 people. Forty people will feel a little more special because you did, and they will think you are very special because of what you did. No one else is going to carry that dividend during your time at school’.

Pretty good, don’t you think?

“Please don’t be afraid of me”, the man said when I was seven or so and sitting on the ‘stoop’ of the building that my family and I lived in on 83rd street in Manhattan. I was terrified. He had a hard time getting the words out; his body twisted in spasms as he walked towards me. That man, named Joe, lived in our neighborhood. He was known to my family, having lived there with his wife in a small apartment. He worked as an accountant, I was later told by my uncle who knew him before some neuromuscular disease took hold of him. Disease took everything Joe had; yet he kept going. The kids would shriek as his contortions made the mere act of his walking down the block an agony. As he walked away from me that day, my uncle explained that Joe was sick, his wife had left and he was trying to manage as best as he could. I remember many of our neighbors giving Joe a dollar or two. Sometime later, I remember being told that Joe lost his apartment. He still stayed in the neighborhood. The local deli guys and the bar on the corner would let him wash up at thier businesses.

“Please don’t be afraid of me”…….

I don’t know what ever happened to Joe, nor do I know why God allowed his life to be so hard. I don’t even know why he popped into my mind yesterday. There is a form of prejudice in our society that surrounds disability — a discomfort, a subtle fear of that which is different and unfamiliar. It manifests as pity, avoidance or mockery. When we see someone with a profound disability, a fleeting thought occurs: “What if that were me?” from which we quickly turn with a shudder.

Naturally, many people, especially young people, tend to avoid those who make us feel uncomfortable or guilty. Not knowing how to act or respond to someone very different can be scary, especially for a young person. I glad that some adult took the time to explain to a seven year old what it was he was seeing and that Joe didn’t need to be feared. I wish I could have done something more for Joe. I wish the other kids didn’t run away when he rounded the corner. I thank my uncle for taking the time to explain to me what I was seeing and I hope that Joe is now at peace.

Here are a few words and phrases that liberals use all the time that are conundrums in as much as the words themselves actually say just the opposite of what liberals mean by them.

“You should be open minded.” This means you should agree with liberals and be closed to everything else.

“Pro-choice.” In actuality this means being against the ability of a woman to chose to keep her child. It also means being against the choice of life for the infants.

“We are patriotic, too.” This actually means “we love the dreamy-dream of what we want America to be but we don’t love what she is.”

“We love American democracy.” This means “we love the fact that we can subvert America at every level, especially by implementing vote fraud.”

“Democrats are for the little guy.” If that little guy is a millionaire, then I guess they are for the little guy. Other wise, not so much.

“Freedom fighter.” To a liberal a freedom fighter is anyone that would fight against the U.S.A. You know, like the Taliban, al Qaieda, folks like that.

“Freedom of speech.” To a liberal, free speech means that they should be allowed to say everything. On the other hand, if you are a conservative YOU shouldn’t be allowed to say anything. You should shut up because YOU are dangerous.

“Separation of church and state.” To liberals this means the elimination of church, not merely the separation of religion from government.

“Rule of law.” To a liberal, rule of law is not a fixed thing. It is a capricious, instantly changing amalgam of temporary and convenient rules meant to give cover to their every momentary whim and situational ethic.

“Bipartisan.” Give up your own ideas and agree with them and you are indulging their perfect idea of bipartisanship.

Well, certainly there are a lot of others that I have not touched upon here. But, you get the idea. The sad fact is that when you hear a liberal speak when they are trying to convince others to join them, they are often speaking in terms that contradict their real meaning.

In its continuing efforts to expose what’s going on in NY State’s Family Court, the Families Civil Liberty Union continues with its summary of horrific tales of Family Court Judges.

LORI CURRIER WOODS (Supreme Court, Orange County): Woe betide any parent who questions or appeals this wellspring of rage. Woods’ weapon of choice is to threaten parents that she will send their children into foster care if they so much as whisper an objection to her. She makes snap decisions on who is the ‘targeted” parent, and who is ‘protected’, and then sticks to that decision, no matter what the concrete evidence.

Woods’ anger issues may stem from a tragedy in her family. Her son Zachary, a student at Penn State, died on May 6, 2014, when his car fell a hundred feet from an overpass. Since then she has told parents in her courtroom, “you should consider yourself lucky you even have your children.”

In the milestone case of Joe Picone v Frank Golio, which the FCLU has closely monitored, she made legal history by removing two children from the custody of the biological father (Golio) and giving it to his ex-boyfriend (Picone). She even ordered the five-year-old twins to be uprooted from their home and school in Florida to move to New York, and start their lives again under her nose. The biological dad, Golio, sought intervention from the Appellate Division, and successfully secured a record EIGHT STAYS on Woods’ successive temporary orders. Enraged, Woods set about to destroy Golio. She ordered the kids to come to her courthouse for a private ‘Lincoln hearing’, but when they expressed a wish to return to Florida and live with Mr Golio, Woods ignored their wishes and said that “the children do not know what they want.” Once she had secured a lifting of the stay by the Appellate Division (thanks to the Brooke decision issued by the NY Court of Appeals in August 2016), Woods retaliated brutally against Mr Golio. In the trial, she allowed Picone to cite the kids as legitimate testimony, but dismissed similar reports by Golio as hearsay. A whopping four years after the case came before her, Woods issued a 13- page Final Order of Custody, captioned RPF v FG, which, along with decimating Golio’s time with his children, reads as a vindictive, ad hominem character assassination of Golio. Emboldened by Woods’ support, Picone violated Mr Golio’s visitation and access rights. Golio complained to the court, but Woods neglected to step in, simply ignoring his violation and modification petitions, and stonewalling his entreaties to enforce her own order. Merciless, Woods then foisted a massive child support bill on Golio, way above what it should have been because she used his attorney bills as “imputed income”. These bills crippled Golio financially, and forced him to declare bankruptcy in 2018. Woods refused to downwardly modify the child support order, and then sought to have him jailed for contempt. Meantime, the kids’ lives are in turmoil.

Woods has her favored “experts”, whom she appoints at great expense to the families who come before her. Woods’ cronies include Marc Mednick, who receives tens of thousands from each family to conduct “forensic evaluations” of dubious quality.

A chorus of critics says that being in her courtroom is “traumatizing”, that “if there was ever a reason to vote it’s now get this loony off the bench. It’s insane what she gets away with.” Another parent writes: “Arrogant and rude. I appeared before this judge making a lawful citizen’s request and was made to feel like I was a criminal the entire time. I was not allowed to speak, and it was clear the judge had not reviewed the materials I submitted. My request was rejected in all of 3.5 minutes. I felt railroaded and disenfranchised, further impacting my trust in my government.”

Born in 1958, she is a lifelong Republican. Woods began her career in 1983 as an attorney in the California-based Law Offices of Mikin & Kohn. She then served as a deputy district attorney in Orange County, California, from 1984 to 1985. In 1985, she became an Orange County assistant district attorney. She then worked as an attorney for the law firm of Larking & Axelrod from 1988 to 1992. From 1997 to 2001, she was an attorney and law guardian for the Children’s Rights Society. She then became a councilperson for the Town of Monroe. Her own resume says she worked in these positions through 2005. She took the family court bench in 2006, and was re-elected in 2015 on a wholly inaccurate slogan of “Compassionate, Competent. Fair.” Unless removed, she will hold office until December 31, 2025.

A large portion of the Democratic party’s present animosity toward the Electoral College is rooted in rank partisanship. Since they watched their supposed “blue wall” evaporate in the small hours of the 2016 presidential election, many Democrats have felt sufficient anger with the system to seek to remake it. This habit has by no means been limited to the Electoral College. Indeed, no sooner has the Democratic party lost control of an institution that it had assumed it would retain in perpetuity than that institution has been denounced as retrograde and unfair. In the past year alone, this impulse has led to calls for the abolition or reinvention of the Senate, the Supreme Court, and more.
Critics of the Electoral College bristle at the insistence that it prevents New York and California from imposing their will on the rest of the country. But the Electoral College guarantees that candidates who seek the only nationally elected office in America must attempt to appeal to as broad a geographic constituency as possible — large states and small, populous and rural — rather than retreating to their preferred pockets and running up the score. The alternative to this arrangement is not less political contention or a reduction in anger; it is more of both.
Impatient at the lack of progress that the #Resistance has made in pulling the wiring out of America’s constitutional engine, a handful of states have adopted the “National Popular Vote” plan, which binds their electors to cast their ballots for the candidate who wins a majority of votes nationwide. Until enough states have signed on to tip the balance past 270 — and, indeed, until the inevitable litigation has been concluded — adoption of the NPV will remain purely symbolic. Should it be put into action, however, it would achieve the remarkable feat of removing all of the benefits that the Electoral College provides while preventing the electors of each state from voting for the presidential candidate whom a majority in that state had picked. Who knew that the outsourcing craze would extend to democracy?
The U.S. Constitution is a complex document that, as Whitman might have put it, contains multitudes. At once, it boasts guarantees of democracy and protections against it; hosts an outline for national action, and a blueprint for localism; and serves as a vehicle for the majority, while including guarantees that the most significant decisions must be broadly agreed upon. The Electoral College is one of the many finely tuned institutions within the charter that have ensured stability and continuity in America for more than two centuries. To destroy it in a hail of platitudes, civic ignorance, and old-fashioned political pique would be a disastrous mistake.

It began in 1871 as P. T. Barnum’s Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan & Hippodrome, back when Prussia was still a kingdom and Jesse James was robbing banks. It survived the Depression, two world wars and the new media of its time, including radio, film and television.

But on May 21, the world’s most historic circus, Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey, shut down after failing to sufficiently dazzle the children of the smartphone age and to overcome the fierce opposition of the animal rights movement, which does not want to see animals in the circus.

With all that is happening in the world, I haven’t had time to think about this at length. I can remember looking forward to the circus as a kid in Manhattan at Madison Square Garden. There was a time that the circus would allow ticket holders who arrived an hour before show time to visit their ‘Freak Show’ which gave all who wanted to go a chance to see the performers up close. Now this meant being able to pull the bearded ladies beard; see the giant who would let you sit on his lap and, if you were lucky and your parents were so inclined, a chance to buy his replica finger ring that could fit around your forearm. In retrospect, this was part of the circus that should have shut down, although I don’t recall anyone being mean to the performers. It was exciting to be that close to the circus. Then there were the acts and the excitement of seeing the high wire acts. There was something magical when the Garden’s lights went down and the music went up and you were there with your parents. It never seemed that your folks were bored. Years later, I remember taking my own daughter and watching her being awed as I was. I’ll miss the circus. I can’t believe that there will be a generation of children who will never get the chance to experience a show where their parents could be kids themselves.

Truth, justice, selflessness. Superman meant all these things to me. To me and to any young boy Superman is more than a mere character in a Sunday strip from some long past decade. And more than just a blot of ink on a page. Because what is Superman?

One of his fellow compatriots described him as a man who “had many talents and gifts” and “one who would share them freely,” and stated merely that above all his super human abilities that we know his greatest intrinsic ability was his “power to discern what needed to be done and his unwavering courage in doing it, whatever the personal cost.”

Superman was never meant to be a special individual, but a different one. Superman was to be humble, reserved, and calm in the darkest moments and always restrain his full strength to keep himself form injuring even those that he fought against in the heat of battle.

The everyday ethics of people, influence the actions of others. Such ethics define the standards of modern culture. One would understand why a petty thief wouldn’t pause from perusing the contents of an elderly man’s pocket if he knew Superman could be watching. But, just maybe, that thief would recognize the heart of the noble Kryptonian. And perhaps if that thief were a boy he too would seek him out as a model for good.

Is it not often that we learn from example of others? Imagine the implications of it all. Great men appear in the presence of great events or great individuals. Great men rise to the occasion in times of struggle. Men like Winston Churchill rose to the challenge of leadership and represented the great maritime nation of England In WWII. Great mean like Martin Luther King Jr. made the decision to compromise his security, his reputation, and his own life to stand for a goal that meant his very being all because of predecessors of his message like Mohandas Gandhi, who in another age advocated the equal civil rights of those from any socio-economic origin. Humble men rose from humble beginnings like Abraham Lincoln who living apart from the destruction and despair of America’s Great Civil War spoke that “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” And even perhaps Ronald Regan who established himself in the face of Communism and Totalitarianism reflects that the world needs character and a focus of justice in the world.

There is an absence of clarity, of role models, civic leaders, and outstanding members of society to lead us through the darkness of the world. Especially today, in a world where pop culture and mainstream press focuses on telling people how ugly they are or what ethics they should infringe upon to make their lives just a little better.

I could wager without pause of thought to say that I’d give anything to see the Man of Steel with us: a civic figure, an embodiment of justice, integrity, and honor, a man that showed the world what is meant to be a hero. Because whether or not Superman need or need not exist in today’s world it is up to the people of the world to accept what doctrine he stood for.

Would the presence of a man, who’s wisdom and knowledge predicated the good nature of the human spirit, build for a better world?

Would we all feel just a little bit better knowing that our lives were watched over by an almost omnipotent individual?

Perhaps we all would. I know I would. And maybe now you too will know why the World needs a Superman.