Newer World

Michael Collins

“The past is never dead,” the Irish-American novelist William Faulkner wrote. “It is not even past.”

That is especially true in Ireland, which never forgets.

History is alive in Dublin. Visitors are reminded of it every day, everywhere. From graffiti that says “Up the IRA” to pictures of revolutionary leaders in local pubs, the reminders are hard to miss.

On our second night in Dublin, my friend Randy Norris and I were listening to a session by a Celtic group at O’Neill’s when the singer introduced a song about the marriage of Joseph Plunkett and Grace Gifford at Kilmainham Gaol 10 minutes before he was executed by firing squad for his role in the 1916 Easter Rising. Two days later, on Sunday, we visited the jail chapel where the wedding took place.

Plunkett’s death on his wedding day was a romantic tragedy that helped turn Irish public opinion in favor of the rebels. Before that day, the people of Dublin jeered and spat at the 14 condemned prisoners, our tour guide said. Another turning point was the later execution of James Connelly, who had been wounded in the Rising. Already near death from an infected leg wound, he was taken from a hospital to the jail’s courtyard, and was so weak he had to be strapped to a chair before he was shot. These shootings “horrified and outraged” the people, our guide said. Eighty-four years later, the guide, a young Irishwoman, was still outraged. You could hear it in her voice and see it in her eyes.

Like the other tour guides we met, she didn’t want to be quoted, she said, because her views were “political.”

Although the Easter Rising was a failure that was crushed by 4,000 British troops, it eventually led to the achievement of its goal of an Irish republic independent of Britain. But not until after a bloody civil war that claimed the life of Michael Collins, the charismatic military leader of the 1916 rebellion who had fought the British Empire to a stalemate and negotiated the treaty that divided Ireland, with the six counties of Northern Ireland remaining part of the United Kingdom and the remaining 26 counties becoming the Irish Free State, a self-governing dominion within the British Commonwealth.

Eamon De Valera, the proclaimed republican leader of 1916 and the last prisoner at Kilmainham, led the fight against the Free State, but later became its president, and then president of the republic that was established peacefully in 1949. It is  one of the ironies of history, however, that it is Michael Collins, not De Valera, who lives on in the hearts of the Irish people as a hero.

Collins and his speeches were prominent in Sean O’Casey’s play about the Rising, “The Plough and the Stars,” which we saw at the Abbey Theater on Saturday. It has been performed there since the 1920s. The night we were there, the theater was filled, mostly by Dubliners who wanted to be reminded of their history.

Just a short distance from The Brazen Head, a pub with no fewer than three portraits of Michael Collins hanging on its walls, stands St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the see of the Anglican Church for all of Ireland, north and south. From its walls still hang British flags, and there are memorials to the Irish fusiliers and Royal Air Force pilots who fought for England in the two world wars. The cathedral is a unionist, or orange, enclave in a sea of nationalist green.

Even the Victorian era post boxes, which were once red, have been painted green — another reminder of the country’s former ties to England. But the signs on the post offices, which are painted the same shade of bright green, say Oifig an Phoist in Gaelic. The revival of the once dormant Gaelic language yet another of the many ways that the past is present in Ireland.

Michael Gerson, former speechwriter for President George W. Bush and now a columnist for The Washington Post, has long been one of the leading voices of “compassionate conservatism.”  His 2008 book, “Heroic Conservatism: Why Republicans Need to Embrace America’s Ideals,” was one of those that most influence my political thinking.

In his most recent column for the Post, Gerson argues that if the Republican Party, which is in a position to make huge gains in the 2010 election, embraces the tea party movement and radical libertarianism, it “rides a massive wave toward a rocky shore.”

“A party that is intimidated and silent in the face of its extremes is eventually defined by them,” he warns.

In the July 9 column, Gerson notes that President Barack Obama’s once high approval rating has fallen to below 40 percent, in part, because he “mistook his election as a mandate for the pent-up liberalism of his party.” Now some Republican activists are about to make a similar, but even worse mistake, he says.

He gives the example of Nevada GOP Senate candidate Sharron Angle, who quotes Thomas Jefferson’s radical views favoring violent, French-style revolution, and advocating “Second Amendment remedies” to deal with a Congress she sees as tyrannical. This is hardly conservative in the usual sense of the word.

Gerson, whose grandfather was a Nazarene preacher in Kentucky, also brings up the candidacy of Rand Paul, whose contact with the media has been minimal since he suggested that property rights should trump basic human rights. His campaign’s fear is not that he will make mistakes, but that he will simply reveal his true political views, he says.

The columnist makes the case that libertarianism is not only not real conservatism, but is “a scandal.” It is, he points out, a “retreat from the most basic social commitments to the weak, the elderly and the disadvantaged, along with a withdrawal from American global commitments.”

This view is similar to one I expressed in one of my columns during the May primary election, “Will the real Republican Party please stand up,” which garnered public anger from some tea party advocates but private gratitude from some true conservatives.

I agree with Gerson that Republicans are positioned  to win a landslide in November. But that could be the worst thing that could happen to the party in the long run, because if they make the same mistake Newt Gingrich did in 1994 and see their victory as a mandate for revolution, there will be a backlash.

The United States is neither a conservative nor a liberal nation. It is a moderate, centrist one, and until our political representatives understand that fact, we will continue to have a bipolar political system with violent lurches from one side to the other, bitter partisanship and gridlock, which only increases the electorate’s anger over their leaders’ inability to compromise in order to solve real problems.

My mom and the Sun’s ad staff will want to smack me for this, but I’m going to write it anyway.
Yard sales are out of control and need to be regulated.
There, I said it.
Drive down any residential street in Winchester or anywhere else on a Friday or Saturday, and chances are someone will back her heavily loaded minivan into the path of your oncoming car, causing you to slam on your brakes, then proceed at a crawl down the street before pulling into another driveway.
Every weekend you’ll see bright orange, hot pink and shocking green cardboard signs littering light poles, and colored balloons blowing from mailboxes.
And if you thought you were moving into a quiet, serene neighborhood, guess again. If your next-door neighbor has gotten the yard sale bug, your morning slumber will be interrupted by big, noisy diesel trucks pulling up in front of your house at 6 a.m. or earlier.
When I worked at Transylvania University in 1993-94, I lived on the third floor of an apartment building adjacent to Gratz Park. My neighbors on the first floor didn’t have a garage or a yard, but that didn’t keep them from having a garage/yard sale about every weekend. They would evidently go buy stuff at other yard sales, then cram it into the front room of their tiny efficiency, and some of it would spill out onto the walkway, steps and parking lot, so that other residents couldn’t enjoy their morning coffee outside their front doors or easily get to their cars to escape the madness.
One morning this week, while on the way to work, I noticed a resident was having a downtown sidewalk sale on Main Street. But I doubt that he had a license to set up shop.
A yard sale should be something you have once every few years to get rid of junk you don’t need anymore. It shouldn’t be a business.
That’s what some city officials would like to address with some proposed rules.
I say it’s about time.
According to Mike Wynn’s story in Wednesday’s Sun, the city has gotten complaints from residents about continuous yard sales that have been going on all summer. Some sell packaged merchandise. That isn’t a yard sale, Commissioner Rick Beach noted, it’s a “flea market.”
One resident, Don Spicer, said yard sale advertising in public rights of way have become unsightly.
City Manager Ken Kerns has recommended capping the number of yard sales a resident can have and the number of days they can last. He also suggested a permit and a fee to help pay for the cost of policing the sales.
Those seem to me like reasonable suggestions, as long as the fee is only a small amount. Most people who have yard sales to just get rid of a few things they need shouldn’t have to pay so much that it isn’t worth it to sell the stuff.
However, donating gently used clothes, appliances and other things that are in good condition to Goodwill or Community Services is another a way of getting rid of things you don’t want anymore, and the tax deduction might amount to as much as you would get for selling them to your neighbors or flea market vendors.

Fantastic Fourth

Having Clark County’s Fourth of July celebration on the third has turned out to be a good decision.
Despite concerns about having enough money to pull it off in a year that has been hard for nearly everybody, organizers found willing and generous supporters to contribute the amount needed and the result was a patriotic celebration at Lykins Park honoring our military men and women and emergency service personnel, some great gospel and country music and a spectacular fireworks show.
It was a good reminder that regardless of how bad the economy is, we are a strong community in a strong country, and it’s a good thing to remember our blessings.

Contact Managing Editor Randy Patrick at rpatrick@winchestersun.com

Hands that built America: a Mexican migrant farmworker

From the stony fields

to hanging steel from sky

… These are the hands

that built America

— U2

We Americans love our country, but many are enamored of a myth of an America where people were once mostly alike.

The real America is a land of diversity and opportunity, a nation of immigrants who make up the beautiful kaleidoscope of our culture and the strength of our people.

It is the America made memorable by the stirring words of poet Emma Lazarus on the Statue of Liberty that end with, “I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

It is the America that the Irish rock band U2 evokes in its images about Irish immigrants to New York in “The Hands That Built America.”

But I’m haunted by the questions in that song: “Of all of the promises, is this one we could keep? Of all of the dreams, is this one still out of reach?”

We should remember that it was the hungry Irish who were “hanging steel from sky” in Manhattan in the 20th century and the Chinese who laid steel for the railroads in the 19th century.

Today it’s Mexicans who build our houses, Guatemalans and Vietnamese who harvest our vegetables and fish, Pakistanis and Ukrainians who staff our hospitals, and a man of Kenyan descent who leads our nation.

We have always been a pluralistic society, and that is the source of our vitality as a nation.

But the descendants of some early immigrants want to close the door behind them. Hostility to foreigners is rampant today, and it is what is fueling the harsh rhetoric about immigration.

There’s no doubt that Arizona has a problem with illegal immigrants, some of whom carry illegal drugs into this country. But that is no excuse for the state to enact a law that makes racial profiling legal.

In Texas, where it’s common to hear derogatory remarks about “wet-backs,” Anglos should remember that at the time of the Battle of the Alamo, it was their ancestors, not the Mexicans, who were the illegal immigrants, and that we seized the American southwest from Mexico.

Some of the Hispanic families who are in what is now California and New Mexico were there before the United States was even a nation.

Let’s have a little perspective.

Before the 2008 election, President George W. Bush supported a moderate immigration bill that would make it easier for the 11 million illegals who were already here to get legal status, while making enforcement more stringent. The proposal had the support of conservatives like John McCain and liberals like the late Ted Kennedy, but it was defeated because some politicians, responding to the prejudices of some of their constituents, wanted a harsher approach.

This week, President Barack Obama also proposed a reasonable approach to comprehensive immigration reform. It lays out a path for citizenship for those “yearning to breathe free.”

How Congress and the American people react to the latest proposal will say much about our nation.

Real immigration reform must be realistic. It must hold businesses accountable for hiring illegal immigrants and exploiting them, but it must also make it easier for migrant farm workers and others to get temporary legal status, and it must face the reality that a country of 300 million people can’t just round up one of every 30 or so people and send them “home.”

We must decide: Will we be a nation led by the modern equivalent of the Know Nothings, or will we be the nation that still lifts its lamp beside the golden door?

Is the American dream a promise we still intend to keep?

Honor Staff Sgt. James Patrick Hunter

A motorcycle escort made up mostly of veterans paid their respects to Army Staff Sgt. James Hunter during a prayer ceremony at the funeral home Saturday.

One thousand fifty-two. That’s how many American military men and women have died (as of last Friday) in or around Afghanistan as a result of the fighting that followed the U.S.-led invasion of that country in 2001, according to the Associated Press. Outside the Afghan region, another 78 have died in support of Operation Enduring Freedom.
But those are numbers, and it’s hard to feel anything about numbers.
One thousand deaths is a statistic; one death is a tragedy. Especially when it’s that of someone who was taken in the early summer of his life — a young man with a name, family, fiancee, friends and dreams. A man like Army Staff Sgt. James Patrick Hunter, 25, son of Tom Hunter of Winchester and Patricia Phillips of South Amherst, Ohio. He was to be married to a fellow soldier, Candice Clark.
After two tours in Iraq, Hunter, a combat veteran and military journalist, was one month into his service in Afghanistan when he was killed by an IED. It was a brutal act of terrorism. But then it was brutal acts of terrorism on Sept. 11, 2001 that led the United States and its allies to go after the perpetrators in the mountains of Afghanistan and end the grisly reign of the Taliban, who harbored Al Qaeda. And it was those same senseless acts that led James Hunter to join the Army rather than go to college after he graduated from high school in 2003.
Someone had to protect the rest of us from future attacks. Someone had to do something about monsters like Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and the Taliban who were making life hell for their own people, threatening other countries and destabilizing a strategically important region. Maybe James Hunter thought that someone was him.

A young Marine, Pvt. Jordan Crowe, salutes his fallen comrade.

Like most of those who waited to welcome him to town Saturday afternoon, I didn’t know Hunter and never had a chance to ask him why he served. But I’m grateful that he did. So were the scores of residents who lined the sidewalks, holding American flags, or holding their hands over their hearts as his motorcade passed. Many were young soldiers or old veterans who saluted him. Others were people who had lost loved ones in wars and therefore knew the pain his family and friends felt — and knew the cost of security.
According to the Associated Press, June has been the deadliest month for coalition forces since the beginning of the war in Afghanistan, with 91 NATO troops killed, 54 of them Americans.
There are some who say the cost is too high and that we should bring our troops home. Indeed the cost is steep. And in Iraq, where our military has largely accomplished its mission, it makes sense to begin withdrawal. But in Afghanistan, the fight isn’t over. The Taliban is gaining strength, and its terrorist allies are biding their time, waiting to again use that country as a base of operations.
Is the war winnable? I don’t know. Maybe no one does. But I’m reminded of what Abraham Lincoln said when our country was experiencing one of its darkest hours, and no one knew when the dawn would come.
As he delivered his eulogy on Nov. 19, 1863, the president said it is for us, the living, to dedicate ourselves to the unfinished work those brave men had advanced — and that those who had given “the last full measure of devotion must not have died in vain.”
Lincoln envisioned a “new birth of freedom” to shine as a beacon to the whole world.
I believe America is still that beacon, and I think James Hunter believed it too.
We must not forget his sacrifice — or the sacrifices of the more than 1,000 others who have died in this war. But we also must not forget why they fought, and must dedicate ourselves as a nation to that cause.

Randy Patrick is the managing editor of The Winchester Sun. Comment on this column or others at http://kyvoice.com/winchestersun/newer world/

Staff Sgt. James Hunter died June 18 in Afghanistan.

Staff Sgt. James Hunter’s long journey from Afghanistan, where he died last week, to his final resting place in the Lexington Cemetery will wind through Winchester on Saturday.
Hunter, a soldier from Fort Campbell and the son of Winchester resident William “Tom” Hunter, was killed June 18 by an insurgent bomb blast while he was on foot patrol. The Lexington native grew up in northern Ohio, where his body was returned last week.
His funeral will be at 11 a.m. Tuesday at Winchester First United Methodist Church, where his father is a member, and his burial will follow in Lexington. Rolan Taylor Funeral Home is in charge of arrangements.
Winchester Mayor Ed Burtner, a friend of Tom Hunter’s, said today the young soldier’s body is expected to arrive in Winchester sometime after 1 p.m. Saturday. The route from Interstate 64 will begin at the 96 interchange, proceed down Maple Street to Washington, then along Main Street to the funeral home.
Burtner said he hopes there will be a large crowd of flag-waving residents along the procession route, especially on Main.
“I encourage the public to line the route and to bring flags, if they have them, in honor and respect for Staff Sgt. Hunter,” Burtner said.
The mayor said there would be a brief ceremony at the funeral home with the Rev. James Williams, pastor of First United Methodist, offering a prayer for Hunter.
On Tuesday, following the full military funeral at the church, the Lexington Police Department’s motorcycle patrol will escort Hunter’s remains from the church on Main Street to Lexington Avenue and along U.S. 60 into Lexington to the cemetery. That will be another opportunity, Burtner said, for the townspeople and Clark County residents to pay their respect to the fallen warrior.

Contact Randy Patrick at rpatrick@winchestersun.com.

Editor Samantha Swindler

Small daily and weekly newspapers are  often not as aggressive as their big-city counterparts when it comes to holding accountable those in power but the best ones are, and under Editor Samantha Swindler’s leadership, the Times-Tribune of Corbin has been one of the best.
Swindler, who is leaving Corbin for the Oregon coast, gave the city commission a good spanking before saying good-bye.
At a crowded meeting, the commission cut the position of Main Street manager to part-time while donating $50,000 to the industrial development program, which Swindler said, has little to show for the money it has received, while the Main Street program has done quite a bit to enhance economic development.
“I wasn’t particularly surprised with how Corbin city commissioners voted Monday night because, like all major decisions, it was made long before the public meeting,” she began her column, “The Beauty of Community; the Ugliness of Politics.”
That got my attention because, as a longtime community journalist, I know that’s how many local governments operate — even though it’s illegal and wrong.
She then went on to tell that the commissioners couldn’t be heard because they refused to speak into their mics, and wouldn’t let people in the audience speak — although when there’s hardly anyone there, they routinely open the meeting to discussion.
She urged the people of Corbin to continue to attend the meetings and ask questions, because that “is how politics is supposed  to work,” she said.
“Public servants are supposed to represent the will of the people, not take it as a personal affront when the public actually shows up to a public meeting.”
Thanks to Samantha for reminding us not only how politics, but also community journalism, “is supposed to work.”

Read what former Courier-Journal political reporter Al Cross wrote about Swindler’s parting shot on the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues’ The Rural Blog.

The staff of George Rogers Clark High School's student newspaper.

The Smoke Signals’ staff’s theme song is “We’re All in This Together,” from the “High School Musical” soundtrack. But it could be Queen’s “We Are the Champions.”
That’s because the George Rogers Clark High School student newspaper is the 2009-2010 Award of Excellence winner in its division of the Kentucky High School Journalism Association’s state contest.
The staff won first place for general excellence in the 4A schools division.
As managing editor of Winchester’s daily, the Sun, it gives me pleasure to know that there are up-and-coming young journalists here in my own hometown whose work has been recognized for excellence.
Congratulations to Executive Editor Mercedes Trent and her staff, faculty adviser and journalism instructor Shanda Crosby (who was my editor on the staff of The Eastern Progress at EKU so many years ago),  and the 17-member school newspaper staff who made it possible for  GRC to win this award.
Those receiving individual recognition in the state contest were Madison Roe, second place for news writing; Courtney Leggett, third place for feature writing; Austin Lanter, second place for review; Mercedes Trent, third place for review; Lanter, third place for sports writing; Roe, first place for column; Robert Hatton, second place for column; and Brad Stephens, third place for column; Christian Calvert, first and second place for cartoon; Rachel Everman, third place for single page layout; Leggett, first and third place for two-page layout; and Calvert, third place for illustrations/graphics.
A big thumbs up to the GRC journalism program and the staff of Smoke Signals!

Gen. George Rogers Clark was a hero of the American Revolution, so it’s probably fitting that a school somewhere be named for him.
And in fact, there are nine schools across the country that bear his name, four of them in Indiana, where he lived many years of his life and had his greatest military successes, notably, the capturing of Kaskaskia and Vincennes from the British.

Gov. James Clark of Winchester, an ambitious reformer, created Kentucky's public school system.

But there isn’t any reliable evidence that he ever set foot in Clark County, Kentucky, which is named for him, and where the only public high school is George Rogers Clark — or as generations have called it, “GRC.”
Many have assumed that the new high school on Boonesboro Road, which will replace GRC, will also be called George Rogers Clark High, but that may not be a valid assumption.
We have not heard school officials propose that it  be called anything else, but on the Clark County Public Schools website, it’s simply referred to as the New High School, or the CCPS High School or the new Clark County High School.
Yet many who are enamored of the old school’s name are worried that it will change. Just this Wednesday, we published a letter about it from Janice Cox of Fulton, Ky., who attended GRC when it opened in 1963 following the merger of the city and county schools. She had heard a rumor that it might be called Daniel Boone High School.
Boone would come closer to being a local dignitary, because his settlement, Fort Boonesborough, was just across the river. But Boone was practically illiterate, so his might not be the best name to associate with a center of learning.
And George Rogers Clark, who was homeschooled, was a drunk who couldn’t keep a job, so he might not be the best role model for teenagers.
But there is another historical figure from Winchester who would be an excellent choice to have a school named for him, and that is Gov. James Clark, the father of Kentucky’s public schools.
A resident of Clark County whose mansion overlooks the site of the vanished Winchester High School, James Clark was a remarkable leader in all three branches of government. He was a congressman, circuit and appellate court judge and state senator, as well as governor.
An ambitious reformer, his accomplishments included creating the state’s system of common schools, establishing a state board of education and state superintendent, appointing school commissioners in every county, and strengthening oversight of state government, banking and contracts.
In naming the merged high school for the county’s namesake in 1963, I think Clark Countians chose the wrong Clark to honor. This is our chance to rectify that mistake.

Randy Patrick is the managing editor of The Winchester Sun.

George Rogers Clark senior Morgan Woosley hugged teammate Megan Bealert after the Lady Cardinals defeated Harrison County to win the 10th Region title Wednesday at Jack Shirley Field in Cynthiana. Clark advances to next week’s state tournament. Keith Taylor/ktaylor@winchestersun.com.

George Rogers Clark’s softball players have shown they are winners.

For the third time in five years, Jackie McCloud’s Lady Cardinals are going to the state tournament after having captured the 10th Region title June 2 in Cynthiana.

“They just don’t quit,” McCloud said of his players after they tamed the Tomcats to take the region.

“It just shows that our hard work and dedication paid off,” said Morgan Woosley, one of the seniors.

Hard work and dedication are what it will take when the girls take on Ashland’s Paul Blazer High in the opening round of the state tourney on Friday.

Good luck, girls, and thanks for making us proud of you once again.