The Valley Viewpoint

Run a list of bad behavior. You can multiply it if no father is around. Higher chance of committing a crime. Higher chance of getting hooked on drugs. Higher chance of winding up poor. Higher chance of landing behind bars. Higher chance of depression. Higher chance of suicide. Higher chance of violent behavior.
And the worst of all, higher chance of doing the same thing somewhere down the road — leaving a family, or walking away from a marriage.
All because a man was plenty interested in having sex, and not the slightest bit interested in the consequences. But what about a Dad who wants to stay? Who wants to do the right thing and then runs into Family Court.
The words “prejudice” and “corruption” do not really convey what family courts are about. They are the linchpin of a massive political machine that thrives and grows by systematically destroying families. Within this machine individual judges are “no more than blind executors of the system’s own internal laws,” as Vaclav Havel has written of another kind of apparat, laws which are “far more powerful than the will of any individual.” What we have, in other words, is a system of bureaucratic terror, the kind of terror that has never before been seen in the United States. I have previously written on my own experiences in Family and Supreme Court in New York in front of the likes of Judge John Sweeny, whose bench practice reeks of conceit and arrogance or Support Magistrates like Rachelle Kaufman whose whole career proves that stupidity combined with arrogance and a huge ego will get you a long way in New York State’s judicial system.
Let’s consider another part of the problem that’s rarely addressed: a Family Court System that is out of control. From the Families Civil Liberties Union comes the following:
The countdown of NY’s worst judges marches on :
# 13 JUDITH D. WAKSBERG (Kings County Family Court): Waksberg’s actions have caused havoc to numerous families. No more so than what she is doing to a young boy, whom she continues to separate from her father, Lee Carda. In that case, she modified a prior order, from the atypically reasonable Judge Michael Katz, that had allowed the little boy unsupervised access to Mr Carda. Waksberg changed that to supervised visitation, without any hearing on the motion, and effectively endorsing mother’s alienating behavior. She then took no action when the mother failed to make the boy available for visitation, and turned a blind eye when she moved out of New York to Florida. What “Whack-job Waksberg” did do was order a torturous forensic evaluation, costing the parents $15,000, and forced the father to pay 75% of that. She then withheld the final report from the father and his attorney. And when the mother failed to bring the child to therapeutic visitation, she did nothing. In July 2018, the FCLU witnessed Waksberg completely ignore a contempt motion filed by Mr Carda after the mother had blocked all physical contact with the father and allowed him only 10 minutes of phone contact in eight months. Instead of ordering the mother to comply with the order and help rebuild her son’s relationship with her dad, Waksberg told the father to “work on [his] parenting skills”. A court observer was so appalled by this callousness that he called out that this was a “tragedy of justice.” Waksberg ordered one of her armed officers to remove the observer from the court. She then pressured the father to agree to a settlement agreement that would excuse all the mother’s violations and allow him “visitation” with the boy — in FOUR YEARS time. Those settlement negotiations took five hours, further enriching the three attorneys — Andrew Black (dad), Mahmoud Ramadan (mom’s attorney, who has not turned up to five scheduled hearings), and the corrupt Children’s Law Center’s Lauren McSwain (who has failed egregiously to protect the child’s welfare). Those attorneys churned billable time as they debated how many photos of the child the mother should send to the father — eventually agreeing to five photos per month. Waksberg signed off on this order, but took no steps to address the mother’s blatant contempt. Instead, she ordered a forensic evaluation with one of King’s County family court’s worst hacks, Sophie Michelakou, who has made hundreds of thousands of dollars from court appointments. Chances of justice or any improvement to the boy’s life: zero.
Terrified of publicity, Waksberg instructs her court officers to stop people coming into her courtroom, or just to throw them out. She also harasses journalists reporting on her actions. She is slovenly in her distribution of key items of evidence, such as forensic reports. Appointed by NYC Mayor Bill DiBlasio, Waksberg came to the family court bench in January 2017, having received no formal judicial training in family court matters.

I had an exchange with a cousin of mine, yesterday, regarding one of my FB posts. Now this cousin is as smart as they come and is someone who has devouted his life to his community and his teaching profession. They don’t make ’em better than he and I’m blessed that we share the same grandfather.
Our brief exchange got me thinking about the state of things, now, in our country.
Most residents of Washington, DC; Manhattan; Marin County, Calif.; and Cambridge, Mass., didn’t know anyone who had voted for Donald Trump. West Virginians couldn’t have imagined someone casting a ballot for Hillary Clinton.
I’ve been interrogated by a loud neighbor who wanted to know if it was true that I voted for Trump. Before I had a chance to respond, those standing around started to distance themselves from me, and one young woman gave me a stare that seemed to say, “Even if you were the last male remaining alive on earth, I wouldn’t have dinner with you.” Now, I’ve been told that Im a great dinner companion, but it didn’t matter. They all wanted to unsee me.
There is a sense, today that partisan affiliation reflects more than just a voting preference. Rather, it says something about your character. And where you come down on Trump is increasingly a decisive factor in whether or not someone wants to associate with you.
The acrimony in politics has become so pervasive that 91 percent of voters said it was a serious problem in a Quinnipiac University poll released last month. There was strong consensus about who was at fault: 47 percent said they blame Trump more; 37 percent said Democrats.
I don’t know where we’ll go with this. I sometimes find myself re-reading the words of Abraham Lincoln who said, at the close of his First Inaugural Address:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

If you wonder why the left has reacted so strongly to the Mueller report findings of no collusion, all you have to do is recognize that they need to continue the demonization of Trump as opposed to running on what their platform has morphed into.
Consider the following:
As political analyst Sean Trende has written:
That over the course of the past few years, Democrats and liberals have: booed the inclusion of God in their platform at the 2012 convention . . . endorsed a regulation that would allow transgendered students to use the bathroom and locker room corresponding to their identity; attempted to force small businesses to cover drugs they believe induce abortions; attempted to force nuns to provide contraceptive coverage; forced Brendan Eich to step down as chief executive officer of Mozilla due to his opposition to marriage equality; fined a small Christian bakery over $140,000 for refusing to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding; vigorously opposed a law in Indiana that would provide protections against similar regulations—despite having overwhelmingly supported similar laws when they protected Native American religious rights—and then scoured the Indiana countryside trying to find a business that would be affected by the law before settling upon a small pizza place in the middle of nowhere and harassing the owners. More recently they have embraced late term abortions.
Given the above, if you were a Demcrat running for office, wouldn’t it be easier to run on Mueller report dissatisfaction as opposed to running on a platform as I just outlined?

“Tell your mother that I want to see her”. These terrifying words, said by Sister Patrick to me in 8th grade still makes me break out in a cold sweat. All that afternoon, I tried to both figure out why this ‘request’ was being made and, more importantly, how to tell my mother. Over dinner, that night, I blurted out the summons. My mother looked at me, long and hard, and delivered the only thing a mom could say, “What did you do, now?”. “Nothing, Mom, I don’t know”, as tears began to flow. The next afternoon, taking public transportation, my mom went to the convent. She later described her ringing the side door bell and, after waiting for what seemed like an eternity, being ushered in for her meeting. “Thank you for coming, Mrs. Kowalski, I’ll get right to the point, we’re worried about Edward getting into a Catholic High School, he’s distracted and not doing well in mathematics”, she said. “It would be DEVASTATING, for Edward, we feel, should he not get in”. I don’t know what my mother said to Sister Patrick that afternoon. I do know that she was quiet when she arrived back home. ‘What did Sister Patrick want, Mom?”. ‘Nothing, it was a Mother’s Club, issue, Eddie”. Now, my cousin, Kevin was a grade school teacher at a Catholic School in Harlem and he ran a successful Co-op preparation program for his students. I was drafted. For the next 8 Saturdays I was part of his program. A white kid in Spanish Harlem. After a while, I was accepted by the other kids who were all trying to achieve the same goal – get into a Catholic High School. When I took the actual examination, I did just fine. Now, the post script of this story is that when I did enter my Freshman year, at a Catholic high school, I was fortunate to finish that year academically ranked in first place. I remember receiving the school’s General Excellence medal and bringing it home. My mother looked at it and asked if she could ‘borrow’ it. The next thing I remember was her putting her coat on and saying that she’d be back soon. When she returned home, she told me that she took the long ride into Manhattan arriving at the same bell on the convent door but this time, it was she that wanted to see Sister Patrick. ‘Just wanted to show this to you, Sister’, was all she later told me that she said. She never told me what the good Sister said. I transferred to Xavier the next year. Sister Patrick also told me that I’d ‘never get in’ to that school.

I guess the meaning of this story is knowing what a family is about. It’s not just about love. It’s knowing that your family will be there watching out for you. Nothing else will give you that. Not money. Not fame. Not work. Thanks, Mom. PS, I still can’t multiply a fraction………

I was going through old newspapers columns today and I pulled one out that I’ve been saving for a while. It was page 1 of both the Detroit Free Press and USA Today. The headline in USA Today read:

“Study: 25 percent of Americans have no one to confide in”

Hmm.

According to the American Sociological Review, over the last two decades, the average American went from having three people to whom they could confide important matters to just two. And one in four Americans had no one to confide in at all.

No one to confide in.

Is there a lonelier sentence than that?

I began thinking about this problem alongside what happened to our summers. As you might expect, the sociologists blamed these study results on the typical suspects: too many people living in the suburbs and working in the city. Too many people with headphones over their ears. Too many people imprisoned before a TV set or computer screen or a smart phone.

But you can’t blame machines for everything. We’re the ones choosing to dive inside them.

I think there’s more to it. I think it starts earlier, like back in high school. After all, very few adults make their “best” or “lifelong” friends when they are in their 30s. Our closest friends are usually people we’ve known much longer, often since we were kids. Stephen King, in one of his most memorable stories, “The Body” (which later became the movie “Stand By Me”), wrote what I always considered the best single sum-up of this. It was the last line of his tale:

“I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12.”

There’s a reason for that.

Think about it. When do you establish the strongest bonds of friendship? Not when you’re moving a million miles per hour. You do it when you’re hanging around, riding the game bus, lying in the grass, kicking a can, sleeping over in a friend’s basement. When you’re going slow enough to listen to your friends’ words, to look them in the eye, to share those uncontrollable fits of laughter.

Friendships might be photographed at parties or celebrations, but they are forged in much quieter moments. The guys I knew when I was 13 are still guys I can talk to today. The guys I shared midnight pizza with in in high school are still men I can confide in if I need to.

The point is, to have a trusting friendship — one that provides you with confidants — you have to give it time to breathe. Not to compete. Not to text-message. To breathe, to hang out, to smile, to share time, even boring time.

So maybe when folks who have kids today are deciding what their kids should “accomplish” this summer, they should consider the value of slow, meandering friendships with kids who live nearby. True, such things don’t give you diplomas or trophies when the summer ends.

They give you a lot more. Right, Louie? Right, Tommy?

A friend of mine posted this picture of the subway stop that we who attended Xavier High School used.
When I saw the photo, I was struck, immediately, by the flood of memories I had in remembering how many times I stood at that spot waiting for my train. Depending on the time of day that I was there, the station could be stangely quiet; almost catherdral like in it’s silence. It was at this station that many thoughts about my day at Xavier would run through my mind. It allowed me the time look back over the day, the week, the year, while I was trying to figure out where I had come from and where I was going to; for sifting through the things I had done and the things I had left undone; for a clue to who I was and who, for better or worse, I was becoming.
I remember being there, after a dance, late at night and being with a girl who lived in Woodside and she wanted to ride home on the subway with me! I never wanted the subway to arrive!
Today, I sometimes wish for a place to have these long thoughts.
Seeing this picture reminded me that there are, indeed, some locations where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves and to reflect on where our journeys have brought us. A place, unchanged, where, if we close our eyes, with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we can remember consciously the lives we have lived.
And you guys thought it was just a picture of a subway stop!

So, the other night, I found myself with a group of friends in Manhattan. Having just seen Livingston Taylor at the City Winery (a great show, by the way) we all decided to go to a restaurant that I used to frequent when I was a steady commuter to the city. “Let’s call an Uber”, one of my friends said and before I knew it, Kelly whipped out her cell phone and said “Our driver’s on the way”.
I am from the generation whose mothers preached, “Don’t ever get in a car with a stranger!” So right from the start, Uber had me nervous.
Let’s see. You download an app onto your phone. You type in where you are. A driver you never met before suddenly appears, knows your name and has a loose connection to your credit card. The vehicle may be a Lincoln, an SUV or a 6-year-old Kia, the same car the driver just took to the grocery store, or, for all you know, a drug pickup.
You get in.
My generation is more afraid. Actually terrified. And, perhaps, in the end, more practical.
We are also dinosaurs.
So while young people, like my colleague Kelly and her husband Jeff gleefully hail Uber cars on their way out of bars, and cities everywhere argue over whether Uber unfairly competes, avoids taxes or influences legislation, baby boomers are still mumbling, “Wait, you just get IN the car? And the driver could be ANYONE?”
The long and the short of this story is that we got to our destination just fine and Manny, our Uber driver couldn’t have been nicer. I guess I just needed to shake my head and return to my planet, waiting for yellow cars with black checkers to take me to restaurants or train stations or airports.
I know. A dinosaur. But look at how long they lived.

Have you ever had the time of your life and not even know it?
Is Heaven a place where you go or is it something you carry within you? Can you be in Heaven every single second of your life if you’d just take the time and recognize that you’re already experiencing it if you’d only stop for a minute? By doing so, does it make the difference between a living Hell, where, in my experiences, I was always behind, always unhappy, and always unfulfilled — always a step behind on my writing, my relationships with my family, with my friends, and with my kid, and a living Heaven, where even if I had wanted more out of life, all I had to do was stop and look.
I guess what I’m saying is that I believe in Heaven on Earth, and I believe it’s found anywhere you seek it.
Here’s where I found it:

I found Heaven on being able to drop my daughter, many years ago, off at school. I remember stopping for breakfast, sometimes, and having that time, just the two of us, to chat about her world and mine, to introduce her to music, and to make up music with her, to talk about values as well as about nonsense. It was just as much fun picking her up and I wish I did it more often.

And I found Heaven with many of my friendships that began with fellow Xavier High School classmates that have now stood the test of time. There’s not a lot you can hide from someone who knows you since you’re 13 years old! Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, lemme tell you. Those are big years. Everybody always thinks of it as a time of adolescence—just getting through to the real part of your life—but it’s more than that. Sometimes your whole life happens in those years, and the rest of your life it’s just the same story playing out with different characters. I could die tomorrow and have lived the main ups and downs of life experienced with those guys. Pain. Loss. Love. Gratitude. And what we all so fondly refer to as wisdom. That’s Heaven.

I found Heaven with some of the Jesuit teachers I had. The teachers of my life saved my life and sent me out prepared for whatever life I was meant to lead. Like everyone else, I had some bad ones and mediocre ones, but I never had one that I thought was holding me back because of idleness or thoughtlessness. They spent their lives with the likes of me. They lit a path for me and one that I followed with joy.

I found Heaven in finding my voice. What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? Find you voice and you will find Heaven’s justice.

I found Heaven with the family that I was raised in. My family taught me that, sometimes, the manner of what they gave me was worth more than the actual gifts received. So Heaven, to me, was found in bungalows in Rockaway, tenements in Manhattan or the Bronx or Sandy Hook, NJ.

I found Heaven in learning to be humble. One of the great challenges of growing up has been trying to get over myself–to become humble. My, once proud, streak of independence only persisted because I thought that everything I had become and everything I had accomplished was because of my own effort. I did it all by myself. I did it as if there were, well, no parents, aunts, uncles or cousins. I guess that’s normal in adolescent life. But, in my adult life and in my life now, I see over and over again that this is simply not true. Everything that I have I’ve been given. I’ve never done it alone. I’ve never been lacking. I’ve always had everything I need and I am profoundly privileged. God has graced my life, and called me to seek gratitude and humility in response. Maturity now or middle age, calls me forth to go further still–beyond humility and into generosity. My parents, grandfather, aunts and uncles, have lived their lives for me and in turn I seek to honor them by trying to be there, as best as I now can, by helping and being kind to others So, thank you, Mom, Dad, Nagh, Sissy, John, Uncle Jimmy, Aunt Dottie, Elsie, Georgie, Mary and Jack, Raymie and Liz.

I found Heaven in watching the little girl that I used to take to breakfast before kindergarten, graduate with honors from Boston College and finish her MBA from UCONN ranked number 1.

I found Heaven, over the course of a career, that allowed me to get many friends jobs and I’ve seen Heaven experiencing laughter with many former and current colleagues.

I found Heaven with the recognition that the only real fun of working in a profession so closely associated with the law is to stop people from pushing others around. I’ve also found Heaven, on one occasion, seeing an opposing lawyer sanctioned for his crime of, simply, being an arrogant jerk.

Lastly, I found Heaven in trying to be bolder with my talents and more forgiving of my weaknesses.
So acceptance, and sadness — well, I believe they can coexist. Sadness is inevitable — we’re only human, and trying too hard to rise above it only hurts more. But I do accept. I accept that all life is finite, and I accept that all of our times will come soon. And I accept that Heaven is here. All I’m saying is that you don’t have to look too hard for something that’s already here.

Fifty-six men signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4th 1776. History rarely records what happened to some of them.
Five signers were captured by the British as traitors and were tortured before they died.
Twelve had their homes ransacked and burned.
Two lost their sons who were serving in the Revolutionary Army, and another had two sons captured.
Nine of the 56 fought in the war and died from wounds or hardships caused by the war.
These men were not ruffians or rabble-rousers; they were well-spoken men of means and education.
Twenty-four of the 56 were lawyers and jurists, eleven were merchants, and nine were large plantation owners.
All of them signed the Declaration of Independence knowing full well that the penalty would be death if they were captured.
Signer Carter Braxton, a wealthy planter and trader, died in rags.
The properties of Dillery, Hall, Clymer, Walton, Glwinnett, Heyward, Ruttledge and Middleton were looted.
Thomas Nelson Jr. and Thomas McKeam died bankrupt.
Francis Lewis’s wife was jailed and she died there.
John Hart had to flee his dying wife’s bedside. His children fled for their lives. He died of exhaustion. Norris and Livingston had to hide out in the forest and live in caves.
I wonder how many people today would in the words of the Declaration of Independence, “mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor,” all for the sake of freedom.

Liberalism isn’t really about making the world a better place. It’s about reassuring the elites that they are good people for wanting to rule over it.

That is why Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize for having good intentions. His actual foreign policy mattered less than the appearance of a new transformative foreign policy based on speeches. Gore promised to be be harsher on Saddam than Bush, but no one remembers that because everyone in the bubble knows that the Iraq War was stupid… and only conservatives do stupid things.

Liberal intelligence exists on the illusion of its self-worth. The magical thinking that guides it in every other area from economics to diplomacy also convinces it that if it believes it is smart, that it will be. The impenetrable liberal consensus in every area is based on this delusion of intelligence. Every policy is right because it’s smart and it’s smart because it’s progressive and it’s progressive because smart progressives say that it is.

Progressives manufacture the consensus of their own intelligence and insist that it proves them right.

Imagine a million people walking in a circle and shouting, “WE’RE SMART AND WE’RE RIGHT. WE’RE RIGHT BECAUSE WE’RE SMART. WE’RE SMART BECAUSE WE’RE RIGHT.” Now imagine that these marching morons dominate academia, the government bureaucracy and the entertainment industry allowing them to spend billions yelling their idiot message until it outshouts everyone else while ignoring the disasters in their wake because they are too smart to fail.

That is liberalism.

What will they say about you when you’re gone?

I attended a funeral last week of a woman who I recently had come to know. A 92-year-old pillar of her community, she was eloquent, brilliant, devoted and religious.

The service was sparse and simple. Mostly prayers and thoughts. First, several of her grandchildren spoke, followed by her two daughters and her son.

Each of them mentioned something they had learned from their mother or grandmother. A life lesson that was indelibly etched in their hearts.

One grandson spoke about her kindness and how she lent him money to buy a car — on “very favorable terms” — meaning when he could afford to pay her back, he did.

Her eldest daughter spoke about how her mother’s wonderful and devoted marriage set an example for the next generation.

Her youngest daughter laughed at how she used to get, as a holiday gift, a book of stamps, because, her mother said, “they will come in very handy when you send letters.”

And her son told poignant stories of how his mother bravely broke up neighborhood fights, made him wear a coat even on a 75-degree day in the winter — because, she said, “it’s a winter 75 degrees!” — and insisted he “Clap!” at a neighborhood parade, to show recognition for those marching, warning him that TV was turning his generation into passive observers.

He also told of how his father, early in his parents’ marriage, had a bout with cancer and began to withdraw from the family, fearing he was dying and not wanting the kids to miss him when he was gone. And how his mother firmly but lovingly reminded her husband, “How do you want us to remember you?” — as a kind and caring patriarch, or a distant, removed one?

By the end of the service, everyone had laughed and cried. It was clear a life had been well-lived, had touched countless others and had left behind warm and comforting memories.

Contrast that with an obituary that ran back in 2016:

“Marianne Theresa Johnson-Reddick born Jan. 4, 1935 and died alone on (March 15, 2016). She is survived by her 6 of 8 children whom she spent her lifetime torturing in every way possible.”

The obituary, submitted by her children, went on to blast the woman as mean and abusive:

“Everyone she met, adult or child, was tortured by her cruelty and exposure to violence, criminal activity, vulgarity and hatred of the gentle or kind human spirit.”

Far from the tears shed at the funeral I attended, this woman’s offspring were glad she was gone:

“We celebrate her passing from this earth and hope she lives in the afterlife reliving each gesture of violence, cruelty and shame that she delivered on her children. Her surviving children will now live the rest of their lives with the peace of knowing their nightmare finally has some form of closure.”

Wow. I guess “may she rest in peace” is out of the question.

You wonder how awful this woman had to be to be memorialized this way. According to an Associated Press account, the children had been removed from her care in the 1960s and had been estranged for more than 30 years. Their case was so awful that it helped lead to legislation in Nevada allowing children to sever ties to abusive parents.

“Everything in there was completely true,” Patrick Reddick told the AP. He called his mother a “wicked, wicked witch” and said that while the main purpose of the obituary was to bring attention to child abuse, it was also to “shame her a little bit.”

Still, this was three decades since they’d had to deal with her. The social norm when someone dies is to shout the good and whisper the bad — or at the very least, say nothing — part of what is suggested by the term “paying your respects.”

But as Johnson-Reddick proves, that doesn’t govern every death. Or every life. And the abuse you dish out may come back to you.

Most of what we do in this world is a rehearsal for our funeral. No matter how much you say, write or decree, in the end, you are summed up in speech and print by others, their memories, their impressions.

What will they say about you after you’re gone? The only similarity between these two mothers is that they were eulogized not by a list of accomplishments, but by how they treated others.

Something to keep in mind if you’re thinking about your legacy.