Jim Klobuchar Writes

Wonderful writers are to be so admired and read!

by Charlie Leck

After election night (4 November 2008), an extraordinary night in all of American History, I went looking for good writers and for exceptional essays about what had happened.

A few days ago I gave you Garrison Keillor’s wonderful piece about the event, in which he said… “A nation spread its wings and achieved altitude.”

Today I’d like to bring you another – again from a Minnesota writer and one of the finest I’ve ever read regardless of where he’s from. Jim Klobuchar wrote a column in our local paper for many years. He had thousands of loyal followers (fans) who would never miss his column (and I’m not embarrassed to say that I was one of them).

Jim’s retired now, but still writes a column on the Internet, but on a rather irregular basis. I check in every week or so to see if anything new got posted. When I checked on Thanksgiving Day I found this delightful piece.

Enjoy! If you want to read Jim regularly, you go to: http://www.jimklobucharwrites.com/

Jim Klobuchar returns to an arena that will be familiar to his readers when he was a columnist for the MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE. You’ll find here a periodic mix of commentary and personal reflections drawn from a lifetime in daily journalism. They might season your day.

The Tears of Millions
Dissolve Their Pain
On a Memorable Night
by Jim Klobuchar

Reconciliation does not come easily in a land with the volatile history of the United States of America. It is a country of enormous and impetuous energy born in revolution and settled by people of mixed races and tongues with clashing dreams and purposes.

And when one has lived through nearly a third of America’s lifespan, he learns the hazard of being seduced by naiveté in the face of one more emotional epiphany in the country’s heaving shifts of politics.

So I know—we know—that the brave and beautiful words intoned by Barack Obama in the culmination of one of the glorious hours in American history will seem airy and distant when the meatgrinder of practical politics meets the brave new world.

But they should not be forgotten.

Nor should the tears.

A friend called me Wednesday morning. “I couldn’t help myself,” he said. “I found myself crying watching people cry. Why was that?”

I said I thought it was for the same reason millions were doing the same, why I was.

We’re human. What we were witnessing was not so much the triumph of Barack Obama or the Democratic Party returning to the White House as a cleansing of centuries of hurt and struggle.

Hundreds of thousands of the people we watched in Grant Park last night we’re whispering to themselves. Their words were almost identical. “I wish they were here to see this and to feel it.” They meant family now gone, people who had suffered but had brought their children and grandchildren and descendents to this moment without believing it was possible. They had faced the humiliations and the gulags of second class citizenship. And now this: A man of color voted into the White House of America.

The emotion of the moment was so overwhelming that men and women in the TV newsrooms, professionals, wept, and with them Colin Powell and Jesse Jackson in the crowd and athletes in their lockerooms, millions in front of their TV sets. This was not the emotion of pride but of simple thanksgiving. The words—“I wish they were here tonight”--became a litany that embraced them all and bound them together as surely as the sight of an African- American standing under the lights and in front of the flags as the next president of the United States, telling them:

America, we have come so far. We have seen so much. But there is so much more to do. So tonight, let us ask ourselves—if our children should live to see the next century—what progress will we have made?”

It was a summons from a man who two years ago had looked at the mountain of odds facing him and decided he might know more about the strength of America than those who boasted about it.

He must have said then, as he did last night to a new generation that must make the decisions of America: “This is our moment. This is our time.”

When you think hard about it, this was an almost unimaginable hour for America, so notorious for its concussive politics. From ocean to ocean people at home and in the streets and the rally halls were enveloped by the magnetic power of it, the Americas of mixed colors and tongues, aging Americas, the new Americas, generations of Americas—brought together by an idea, in Obama’s words: “to reclaim the American dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth that, out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope. And where we are met with cynicism and doubts and those who tell us that we can’t, we will respond …yes we can.”
And they did

And billions of people around the world watched. This was an America they had not seen.. It was an America that gave the promise of joining them rather than dominating them, listening to them rather than manipulating them.

There was as much joy in London, Paris, Rome, Lima, Cairo and Rio de Janeiro as there was in Chicago. A new America? Yes, but not necessarily an America yet united. A united America could not possibly exclude the millions of people who voted for John McCain. On election day there is never going to be a united America, or anything close to it. The possibilities of what comes after, at least in principle, were surely heightened by the magnanimous concession speech of John McCain. It was a tribute to the highest values of an old warrior, and surely came closer to the genuine John McCain than the crusty and sometimes aimless candidate of the campaign. It felt good to hear his generosity and his healthy closure to a calamitous season.

And now, back to another reality. Recession, unemployment, peace or war and budgets. Mr. President, welcome back to Washington, and good luck.

By Jim Klobuchar
copyright: Jim Klobuchar

Warren Wakefield

Great Grand-Pappy Could Write Okay
by Charlie Leck

There is some news print and ink in my wife’s background. A great grandfather, Warren Wakefield, wrote for newspapers for most of his adult life. That is he, pictured above. He edited the Wayzata newspaper for the last six years of his life (1912-1918). Heading up a weekly newspaper back then was very different than today. They were real newspapers that people counted on and they were content rich. A nephew of Warren, Harry Wakefield, wrote editorials for the Minneapolis Tribune in the early part of the 1900s. A daughter, Lisa, has her Masters Degree in Journalism (I guess they call it Mass Media studies these days.)

One of my very pleasant activities right now is to learn as much as I can about Warren. Thanks to the History Center in Saint Paul, I’ve lately been reading some of the writing he left behind. I thought I would share a few gems with you. These came from either speeches he gave (for he was a frequent speaker at community events) or from some of his editorials over the years.

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They are so good that I wanted to share them with you. Pass them on to others who also enjoy writing done well.

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“The man who opens a farm on a frontier is building a home for himself and his family and his impulse is to surround that habitation with an atmosphere of morality that will safeguard the character of his posterity. His log cabin, mean in appearance and cramped in dimension, is to him but the foundation of a commodious dwelling which time and energy will evolve. His stumpy and stubborn patch of corn ground is but the prelude to the broad cultivated fields of the future…” [from a speech to a church celebrating its 50th anniversary]

“The legislature is in session, but who cares!”

“The state legislature has assembled in extraordinary session. All session of the legislature are extraordinary in their depleting effect upon the resources of the taxpayer.”

“Some children were badly frightened by a cow last week, when brave Mrs. Eddy came to the rescue with her parasol. The beauty of the parasol attracted the attention of the cow and the children got by unmolested. Our advice to ladies traveling unprotected is “always carry a parasol.”

“Great wealth makes a hog of its average possessor, while “Culture” removes its devotee from all genuinely human association. All real humanity is jammed between the High brows and the hogs.”

“My first work away from home was done for Mr. Dudley. I plowed what has recently become known as “Bald Hill” with the blacksmith’s famous horse, “Old Tom,” and a queer apology for a plow forged by my employer. I worked for five days for a wage of seventy-five cents per day and my dinner and when the job was completed I spent another week in an attempt to collect my pay. The old gentleman was quite deaf, but his infirmity never prevented his hearing an agreeable communication, and it was a matter of public knowledge that he was quick to hear a proffer to pay money and invariably deaf to a demand for settlement. After completion of my job I haunted the man’s stone shop for days and frequently interrupted the industry of its occupant with a loudly shouted demand for my pay. I would jerk his leather apron to claim his attention; he would incline his head, place his hand behind his ear and I would yell, “Mr. Dudley I want my dollar and a quarter.” He would regard me with astonishment and seizing his hammer would respond, “No, No, I never let boys take my horse.” I would repeat my demand to be told, “If you want a boat, take the red one.” Finally, I was obliged to appeal to Mrs. Dudley, who gave me five shiny silver quarters, the first money I ever earned.” [from the unpublished memoirs of Warren Wakefield]

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Visit the web site of Native Oaks Farm!

Thelma Jones

You just know a real writer when you read one, don’t you?
by Charlie Leck
[6 July 2007]

You know, when you pull a book down off your library shelf early in the morning – one that has been there, untouched and unread, for about 20 or 30 years – and you crack it open and begin reading , and, you shuffle and shift your body into a more upright position and keep reading and turning page after page, and forget the time or where you are or what you have to do, and suddenly your back begins to ache and you realize that you haven’t stirred in 3 or 4 hours, and so you get up to stretch and hold the book out before you and realize you’ve nearly read it through and haven’t enjoyed anything so much in years and years, it’s a really wonderful way to begin a day.

Such it was yesterday when I grabbed this old faded copy of a book by Thelma Jones, Once Upon a Lake. Who’s Thelma Jones? Duknow! She says in the book she was a librarian right here in Wayzata for years. She wrote another book that I did read years ago, called Piety Hill. It was nothin’ to write home about, believe me!

But this book – this wonderful book about Lake Minnetonka – well, it is just so beautiful that I can’t quite believe a hoard of people haven’t told me about it. From the opening sentences of the Preface to the delightful closing lines, it is just marvelous: “What was left to Lake Minnetonka was domesticity. From shore to shore she was ringed with domesticity, substantial, devoted – and tame. But she had her memories.”

This librarian was a writer. She built these incredible pictures in my mind by swirling together words in the most delightful and delectable manner. Why, Hemmingway couldn’t have carried her jock stra…. Oops, that must be some other kind of undergarment worn by woman about which I do not know… That’s how wonderfully she writes. You know, I don’t know anything about her. I think I’ll stop in at the bookstore today – the one that faces out over the lake – and I’ll ask Peggy about Thelma and just who she was – other than a librarian, of course! It doesn’t appear she wrote any other books. Why, for heaven’s sake, why?

Let me read to you just these opening paragraphs and, then, you see for yourself…

“In May 27 of 1852, as the northern hemisphere of earth tilted toward the direct rays of sun, beams of light fell upon a United States that was exuberant, questing and quickened with the sense of its own power.

“As earth turned upon its axis, the sun’s rays touched the free state of Maine, fell like a warm promise upon the bundles and boxes of herded, expectant people at the Port of New York, sped over the Appalachians, dyed gold the Great Lakes and the rivers braiding down to the Gulf of Mexico, and lit the patterned green of the Ohio
Valley, where for the first time in creation land had been measured and staked into true squares for man to own and husband.

“In Michigan, Iowa and the slave state of Missouri, that May sun beamed upon whiskered crews with surveyor’s chains and tallymarkers tattooing such six square mile squares upon the body of the continent, and the boss men among them, cheered by the sun, shouted carelessly, 'Oh, tie down your corner marker, boys. Blaze your witness trees. If it ain’t accurate, we’ll be the last white men to see it, anyway.'

“In New York, the sun’s first light touched the curly head of an exhausted little State of Maine woman who had just prepared a time-bomb called Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly, and in Illinois the sun fell upon the shambling figure of a lawyer who could not stay out of public life and illumined it and stretched his long shadow to infinity – but no-one much except a few abolitionists were too worked up. For the most part the country was oblivious to the threats of disunion; it was a buoyant era.

“Before the sun’s rays crossed the central sea of grass and the Rocky Mountain snow to start sweat upon the backs of possessed men sluicing gold in the valley of the free state of California – before that, the sun’s rays gilded the top of a rectangle of hardwood forest dropping, remarkably, down into prairie land. This watchfob of forest, forty miles wide, a hundred miles long, lay in the Territory of Minnesota at a latitude exactly equidistant between the equator and the North Pole, lay, one might say, upon the solar plexis of the continent. So thick-bolled and tall and compact were the trees of this peninsula of forest that though in May the leaves were mere pencillings of green, the sun did not penetrate to the forest floor. At its center, the land rose and the forest upon it surged in waves over hills and down into valleys that were always dark with dampness. Here, in this rippling forest, like a sunburst of jewels, glittered an enormous and beautiful and strangely-shaped lake. Its shoreline was so cut into bays, straits, channels and long, reaching headlands that it appeared to be not one but sixteen bodies of water.

“There were a number of islands in the lake, and upon the lee side of the largest one, several young men sat about the ashes of a fire. They were eating fish which they had wrapped in wet paper and baked over the dying coals, and their spirits were as high and as bold as the national mood.” [Jones, Themla: Once Upon a Lake, Ross and Haines, Minneapolis, 1957, pps 15-16]

I’m sorry. I can’t write anymore today. It would be disrespectful!

I've Been Blogging!

by Charlie Leck [9 April 2007]

I’ve been blogging for a few years. I tried maintaining the blog on a personal web site; however, it became way too complicated and difficult. It seemed that it might be a little easier on a public blog service like Google’s. So, I’ve given it a try. I’ve had a pleasing number of folks who’ve been reading the blog entries on my website and, now, I hope they find it easy to switch over to this new location.

My subject matter will vary greatly. I’ll deal with life in the wonderful little town in which I live and I’ll write about being a grandfather. You’ll catch me bragging about my kids occasionally, too (though I’m certainly not going to get specific about their identity). You’re just liable to find me boasting about my wonderful wife, too. And, I’ll write about people I know. People fascinate me and I come across so many genuinely good and delightful people who remind me the world is mostly a good and hopeful place. If only we could harness all the positive energy from good people and apply it to the world’s current problems. I’ll also stifle you with opinion; however, it’s not just off-the-cuff viewpoint that isn’t thought out. I’ll try to show the thought-threads when I pump out my opinions and allow you to trace the manner in which I got to a particular place or idea. I’ll even write about food and recipes – and movies and plays I’ve seen and books I’ve read. Once in a while I’ll also write about faith and matters of theology. Though most of my friends think I’m a wild-eyed liberal who has no faith, it just isn’t true. It’s just not a street-corner or dime-store type of faith and you won’t find me evangelizing or proselytizing at all.

One of your responsibilities will be figuring out when I’ve got my tongue firmly planted in my cheek and when I’m wagging it for real.

I think I’m capable of maintaining a generally interesting blog because I do keep myself informed. I love to read both fiction and non-fiction and I am nearly addicted to the New York Times. I love to read the classics and can roam through the works of Dickens again and again. Yet, I also enjoy the work of contemporary mystery writer, John Grisham. He diverged from his usual path when he wrote A Painted House and I’m so glad he did. Though I read it more than a few years ago, that book lingers in my memory, and thinking about it always stirs my heart. I’ve never been able to bring myself to see the movie because I’m frightened I’d be disappointed. Grisham’s book, An Innocent Man, was listed on my blog as one of the best books of 2006. This is another instance where Grisham didn’t produce a fictional who-done-it, but dealt with hard, cold facts and did it extremely well. It’s a spell binding book.

Let me just warn you, as my friends would have me do, that I am an unabashed liberal. I’m politically liberal and theologically liberal. I have trouble with conservatives who are way out on the hard right. It doesn’t make sense. There’s too much need in the world – too much pain, too much ignorance, too much poverty and too much hunger. It seems impossible to me to look the other way. I wish everyone would read the remarkable book by Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope. It’s a very clear outline of what we in America must do in order to keep our nation great and in a leadership position. A friend of mine recently saw the newly released movie, Amazing Grace. As he watched this story about the efforts of William Wilberforce to make slave trading illegal in 18th century England, my friend was struck with the idea that this great English legislator must have been my great, great grandfather. Though my friend was taking a dig at my liberalism, I was enormously flattered. You will not find a drop of favorable sentiment in me for the foolish and misguided policies of our current President, George W. Bush.

I am very troubled by the growing divide in America between the rich and the poor. The rich have become so fabulously wealthy in these days. My father would have called it “filthy rich” and he would have meant it literally. How can we complain about government spending money on attempts to alleviate some of these horrible problems in our nation and around the world? Certainly, every attempt won’t work! However, we’ve got to try!

So, come try me on! Join me in conversation. If you respond to my writing, I’ll read carefully what you have to say and I will reply to you. That’s a promise! What a wonderful world! I’m glad I’ve lived long enough to blog! It would have been awful to have missed it.

Posted by Chas Leck on Friday, April 20, 2007


WEDNESDAY, MARCH 28, 2007

We're in the Banking Business Now
and we've made our very first business loan!
by Charlie Leck (28 March 2007)

There was no doubt. It was bound to happen eventually. After I first read about the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Muhammad Yunus, and wrote an essay here called Poverty is Unnecessary it was clear it would happen.

Yunus developed the concept of Micro Credit and began lending very small amounts of money to small businesses in third world countries. It's proven very successful.

Then I recently read a wonderful column by Nicholas Kristoff, the New York Times writer, about how he's made several loans to such small businesses and has even had the opportunity to check on one of his businesses during a trip to Afghanistan.

It was a compelling piece and so I, too, gave it a try by following Kristoff's suggestion to a web site called KIVA.

It was a simple enough thing to do, you know. I just went to the KIVA web site and registered and then looked through many dozens of businesses that have applied for loans and I picked out Cony's Hot Kenkey. A few clicks later I had become a microcredit financier and Comfort Herssey was $50 closer to a goal of borrowing $700. "KIVA lets you lend to a specific entrepreneur in the developing world – empowering them to lift themselves out of poverty."
Comfort (I hope she'll forgive me for referring to her by her first name, but it's such a lovely name) is a 42 year old mother of 5 kids. Her fried fish and kenkey, a meal made from maize, are supposed to be very popular in Abokobi. I think she's going to make it and I think I'll be paid back with interest. You could help Comfort get closer to her loan goal by going to KIVA and investing in her future also.

I'll tell you, I sure feel good today about making the loan. I just wish I could get my hands on a piece of that kenkey. If it's as good as people say, Comfort and I are gonna make a lot of dough!
One of Kristoff's loans went to Abdul Satar, a baker in Kabul, Afghanistan. So, on a recent trip, Kristoff sampled some of Abdul's bread. The loaves sell for 12¢ each. Kristoff knew he had a winner when he tasted the product. Mr. Satar borrowed a total of $425 and used it to open a second bakery and hired four new employees. As Kristoff says, the baker now "benefits from economies of scale" and is able buy his firewood and flour in larger quantities and, therefore, for less money. Mr. Satar has no idea what the Internet is nor how he got the loan. KIVA works in Kabul with a local lender and the Mercy Corps. Those two organizations find borrowers and vet them.

In countries like Ghana and Afghanistan, commercial lenders often charge as much as 100% interest for business loans. People like Comfort have no hope of borrowing such funds. There have been hundreds and hundreds of success stories through the microcredit process. I'm hoping Comfort is another one of them.

Let me just append here that less than 24 hours after I hadcontributed $50 toward the $700 loan Comfort was seeking,the loan goal was achieved. I consider that rather spectacular.I was so inspired that I went back to the KIVA website and madeanother $50 loan, this time toward a $1,000 goal being sought bya woman in the Ukraine.

Click here to read about the Kristoff visit and watch the video.

END

READER RESPONSES TO THIS ESSAY
I've taken some hits on the above essay from a number of readers. They think I'm hyperbolizing about the value of the microcredit program -- that the funds are going to more middle class persons than to the truly poor; that it really isn't changing the oppression of women. Unfortunately, none of the critics gave me permission to post their comments here.

In response I would like to post Frank Rich's reply to these same criticism. Rich's comments were posted on his excellent blog and, I think, go right to the point of the comments I've received.

March 28, 2007, 12:26 pm
Answering Your Questions on Micro-Finance
by Nicholas D. Kristof
Wow — I was blown away by the response on the Tuesday colum about Kiva (so were the people at Kiva!). Thanks to all who became newly-minted financiers, and let me try to address some of your questions.

Several people asked about terms and interest rates. In Kabul, the borrowers pay 2 percent per month. That sounds like a lot but it’s far less than money-lenders there charge. And of course some of that goes to inflation, so the real interest rate is lower.

The interest doesn’t go to you as a lender but go to the local organization, Ariana, that administers the process. It’s very important that these micro-lending groups become self-sustaining, and Ariana is expecting to become self-sustaining at an operational basis this year. That will enable it to expand much more broadly — and it’s far better to have interest-bearing lending that is self-sustaining than interest-free lending that requires subsidies and is thus limited. Right now Kiva is not allowed to pay interest to the lenders (under U.S. banking laws), but it is seeking permission to do so. Thus in the future you may find yourself getting a small amount of interest back as well.

A couple of people complained that I was taking a swipe at other aid groups when I mentioned that Kiva avoids bureaucratic layers. I didn’t mean to, for I’m a huge advocate of what aid groups do. In Darfur, groups like Doctors Without Borders, IRC, Care, ICRC, World Vision, AJWS, Islamic Relief, CRS and others do fabulous work. I’m a longtime sponsor of a child through Plan International, and I’ve seen their work on the ground. Ditto for Mercy Corps and many other aid groups.

But it is also true that the aid structure often involves top-down decisions, incredible bureaucracy and paperwork, and the dispatch of expensive American expatriates who have to drive around in SUV’s. Where possible I think it’s much better to support local groups rather than those expats. The locals cost much less than foreigners and they usually have a much better idea of what people need. So if Kiva can bypass expensive aid groups and lend directly to people who are screened (as in Afghanistan) only by groups like Ariana with an all-local staff, that really is a step forward.

One reader commented that micro-lending is not for the poorest but for the lower middle class, because the poorest don’t have the capacity to borrow. That’s just not true. In Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and India, you routinely see the poorest and most vulnerable people (e.g. widows) borrowing $50 or so to buy goods from a wholesale market and sell them in a retail market for a mark-up.

Moreover, empowering women is an essential part of the micro-finance story, and you don’t find anybody more vulnerable than poor women in these societies. In Pakistan, I spent a day with Kashf Foundation (a superb micro-lending organization, run entirely by Pakistanis), and it was incredibly inspiring. The borrowers are often completely illiterate and barely able to buy food. And the stories are amazing.

One woman who had only had daughters told me that her husband had been about to get a second wife (on the theory that she would bear him a son) when she borrowed a bit of money from Kashf to start a small embroidery business in her home. The business prospered, and now her husband says he would never think of getting another wife. Another woman told me that whenever her husband beats her, she tells him that she’ll stop borrowing — and then he stops and goes off sulking, but doesn’t beat her.

Micro-finance isn’t a magic bullet. As readers know, I’m a big believer in medical interventions, such as fighting malaria and AIDS and maternal mortality. But it’s definitely a part of the solution.

Posted by Chas Leck at 7:20 PM