A writer and lecturer who has practiced, taught and researched local, national, and international journalism since 1971. Moritz served for 13 years as a national and Asia correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor.
For those of you who have come painfully close to intimacy, consider the porcupine (see video above).
According to the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, this magnificent animal sets a true example of the prickly things which can happen when humans love each other. As for women:
"Without them there would be little assistance at birth, little pleasure at midlife, little consolation at death."
Thus wrote this unhappy in love German philosopher. He spelled out his theories that for all its sufferings love is simply the "will to life," the unconscious working out of nature's need for procreation (see video below).
Schopenhauer's analysis of will led him to the conclusion that emotional, physical, and sexual desires can never be fulfilled.
He favored a lifestyle of negating human desires, similar to the teachings of ancient Greek Stoic philosophers, Buddhism, and Vedanta. See his The World as Will and Representation. By emphasizing the importance of love and sex Schopenhauer foreshadowed the theories of Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud.
Schopenhauer refused to conceive of love as either trifling or accidental. Instead he understood it to be an immensely powerful force lying unseen within man's psyche and dramatically shaping the world:
"The ultimate aim of all love affairs ... is more important than all other aims in man's life; and therefore it is quite worthy of the profound seriousness with which everyone pursues it."
"What is decided by it is nothing less than the composition of the next generation ..."
Could be. So why does it hang around in older age?
Indeed Kimberly was in such a state of anxiety and self doubt when I met her that she might not have been able to move as rapidly through the gate without my encouragement and support.
The movie Glory, 1989: "saints" who opened the gate
Even with an open gate, it takes a "saint to march on through."
For many that is the challenge: to garner up the strength, the courage, the discipline to march on through.
To feed themselves with dignity -- to say goodbye to manipulation of the white "massa," to say goodbye to the government handout.
To say goodbye to the flaunting of sex for prostitution or for surviving by trading drugs.
It's a rough road up and through the narrow gates -- and few of the "saints" meet the standard definition of a "saint."
Indeed many pioneering "saints" can be deeply flawed.
Toward them:
"Let those who have not sinned throw the first stone."
"To those who have given much, much is forgiven."
******
The challenge is to enter the narrower gate: to build self esteem, to avoid the temptation to rely on easy quick buck schemes.
To honor the memory of the "saints" who came before.
As Kimberly Bailey has done -- to become her own kind of "saint" 150 years after the Civil War.
The doors have opened...It is long past due for many more "saints" to march on through.
******
In the Jewish Christian tradition of martyrdom suffering is not in vain.
Through it comes the crown, for God recognizes those who have suffered -- and promotes their souls upward onto a throne of Glory.
I can personally bear witness that God has smiled on Kimberly -- but it is she who has done the work "walking through that lonesome valley by herself."
In honor of the black and white "saints" of the Civil War whose sacrifices made possible a future "saint" -- Kimberly Bailey, Afro-American soldier, educator, and nurse
May she reach her "Promised Land;" their dream survives
BUT in the path to freedom there is no "free lunch"
******
******
Sometime in the next year I will embark upon a kayak expedition to lay a wreath in honor of Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts at the remains of Fort Wagner off Charlestown Harbor. Where their sacrifice in front of rebel guns opened the way for racial equality in the U.S. This is the battle made mildly famous by the 1989 film: Glory.
By helping to prove blacks could fight, Fort Wagner opened the way for President Lincoln's decision to massively enlist African Americans into the Union Army.
For more on the role of colored soldiers in the Civil War see the massacre at Petersburgby this writer.
Ft Wagner: price paid
******
The mass grave at Fort Wagner no longer exists; the site has eroded way back at the beginning of the last century.
The remains of Colonel Shaw and his men have long since been washed out to sea by Atlantic hurricanes.
All that is left is a few skulls which sometimes wash up on the beach.
Ft. Wagner is at lower left
This is the battle made mildly famous by the 1989 film: Glory.
By helping to prove blacks could fight, Fort Wagner opened the way for President Lincoln's decision to massively enlist African Americans into the Union Army.
For more on the role of colored soldiers in the Civil War see the massacre at Petersburgby this writer.
The morning after
********
At dusk July 18, 1863 was launched an attack spearheaded by the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, a black regiment.
(For the broader strategy of the 1863 Union assault on Charleston Harbor see Gate of Hell by Stephen B. Wise. The assault on Battery Wagner was a key part of the Union's effort to gain revenge for the Confederate capture of Fort Sumter in April 1861.)
The unit’s leader, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, was killed.
Spoiled, sheltered, with a wandering sense of entitlement, he seemed to thrive when the Civil War finally came.
He became a man with a mission.
Years later philosopher William James, a Shaw acquaintance, recalled a special kind of courage:
-- the lonely courage it took to drop a commission leading a socially correct white regiment and throw himself into this "new Negro soldier venture where loneliness was certain, ridicule inevitable, failure possible; and Shaw was only 25."
All the more remarkable because Shaw had some of the common prejudices of his day -- and only gradually came to see the fighting potential of his men.
He became their strongest advocate -- that they should be treated fairly, well armed, and adequately paid.
As his respect for his men grew, he ceased to use terms he once used: "niggers," and "darkeys."
After years of wandering uncertainty shifting from job to job young Robert was at last a man with a mission.
A man of many flaws was to be reborn a hero
His destiny was to die young -- to do his small but dramatic part to help a downtrodden race rise up free.
What greater "Glory" could a man seek? In his weakness he picked up the burden of a martyr who bows to death for a broader purpose.
These then were the last letters home by a youthful "saint" who died with "his" black free men in the assault on Fort Wagner:
July 18, Morris Island
"We are in General Strong's Brigade, and have left Montgomery. I hope for good. We came up here last night and were out again in heavy rain. Fort Wagner is being very heavily bombarded. We are not far from it."
And here is the last:
Morris Island July 18, 1863 Dear Father
I enclose this letter for (wife) Annie, which I didn't intend to send to you because it is impossible to tell whether I can write again by mail...We hear nothing but praise for the Fifty-fourth on all hands....
The night before the battle ("Let them know we went down standing up")
The 54th Massachusetts attacks: eyewitness accounts
Shaw took his black men to the front, past thirteen often cheering white support regiments.
At six hundred yards from the fort, Shaw ordered his men to form two lines of battle, fix bayonets, and lie down in the sand.
The men shook hands, exchanged letters, and reminded each other who to send letters to in case they were killed or captured.
Shaw briefed his men and challenged them to "take the fort or die."
********
Members of a brigade scaled the parapet but after brutal hand-to-hand combat were driven out with heavy casualties.
Shaw reached the top of the fort's wall, took a bullet near the heart, and fell dead inside.
Half the regiment had penetrated the fort before withdrawal.
Of the 600 men of the 54th who charged the fort, 272 were killed, wounded or captured. Additional losses from the white regiments which followed brought union losses to 1,515.
Confederate gravediggers buried 800 Union soldiers in the sand in front of the fort the morning after the battle.
Confederates suffered 174 casualties.
The Federals resorted to siege operations to reduce the power of the fort.
This was the fourth time in the war that black troops played a crucial combat role.
The battle for Fort Wagner helped prove to skeptics that black troops could fight effectively. President Lincoln stepped up efforts to recruit them(Wikipedia).
Here is the story of flag bearer Sgt. William H. Carney who, although severely wounded, kept the flag off the ground.
He battlefield exploit was the first in a sequence of Civil War actions to earn an African American the Congressional Medal of Honor (1900).
********
After the battle, the Southern soldiers made a trench, dropped Shaw's body inside. then threw the bodies of some 20 of his black soldiers on top of him -- before shoveling them all over with sand.
Insult though this was, Shaw's abolitionist family thanked the Southern soldiers for burying Shaw with his men.
The dream of these "saints" -- both black and white -- survived.
"Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letter, U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, there is no power on earth that can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship."
-Frederick Douglass
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Kimberly, you follow in a grand tradition.
Courage is to stand up as a professional, self reliant, seeking handouts from no one.
Fighting with courage to make one's way.
The road can be dark and hazy.
For it is, as always, a world without free lunches.
Look forward but also backwards to the "saints of the past."
********
The issues of emancipation and military service were intertwined from the onset of the Civil War.
News from Fort Sumter set off a rush by free black men to enlist in U.S. military units.
They were turned away, however, because a Federal law dating from 1792 barred Negroes from bearing arms for the U.S. army (although they had served in the American Revolution and in the War of 1812).
In Boston disappointed would-be volunteers met and passed a resolution requesting that the Government modify its laws to permit their enlistment.
The Lincoln administration wrestled with the idea of authorizing the recruitment of black troops, concerned that such a move would prompt the border states to secede.
By mid-1862, however, the escalating number of former slaves (contrabands), the declining number of white volunteers, and the increasingly pressing personnel needs of the Union Army pushed the Government into reconsidering the ban.
As a result, on July 17, 1862, Congress passed the Second Confiscation and Militia Act, freeing slaves who had masters in the Confederate Army.
Two days later, slavery was abolished in the territories of the United States, and on July 22 President Lincoln presented the preliminary draft of the Emancipation Proclamation to his Cabinet.
After the Union Army turned back Lee's first invasion of the North at Antietam, MD, and the Emancipation Proclamation was subsequently announced, black recruitment was pursued in earnest.
Volunteers from South Carolina, Tennessee, and Massachusetts filled the first authorized black regiments.
Recruitment was slow until black leaders such as Frederick Douglass encouraged black men to become soldiers to ensure eventual full citizenship.
(Two of Douglass's own sons contributed to the war effort.)
Volunteers began to respond, and in May 1863 the Government established the Bureau of Colored Troops to manage the burgeoning numbers of black soldiers.
By the end of the Civil War, roughly 179,000 black men (10 percent of the Union Army) served as soldiers in the U.S. Army and another 19,000 served in the Navy.
Nearly 40,000 black soldiers died over the course of the war—30,000 of infection or disease.
Black soldiers served in artillery and infantry and performed all noncombat support functions that sustain an army, as well. Black carpenters, chaplains, cooks, guards, laborers, nurses, scouts, spies, steamboat pilots, surgeons, and teamsters also contributed to the war cause.
There were nearly 80 black commissioned officers.
Black women, who could not formally join the Army, nonetheless served as nurses, spies, and scouts, the most famous being Harriet Tubman, who scouted for the 2d South Carolina Volunteers.
Kimberly, you "travel in the footsteps of those who came before."
Come all ye fair and tender ladies. Be careful how you court young men.
They're like a star on a summer's morning. They'll first appear and then they're gone.
They'll tell you some loving story They'll declare to you their love is true Then they will go and court some other And that's the love they have for you
Do you remember our days of courting When your head lay upon my breast You could make me believe with falling of your arm That the sun rose in the West
I wish I was a little sparrow, And I had wings with which to fly Right over to see my false true-lover, And when he's talking I'd be nigh.
But I'm not a little sparrow, I have no wings with which to fly So I sit here in grief and sorrow, To weep and pass my troubles by.
If I had known before I courted that love was such a killing thing I'd a-locked my heart in a box of golden and fastened it up with a silver pin.
In honor of a childhood friend, Richard Holbrooke, a Jewish - Quaker who combined power and ideals. "Sir Richard," I salute you -- for your courage of a lion and your heart of a lamb. In sadness for "Sir Richard" the big mouth, sometimes bullying, confrontational son of Jewish refugees.
With whom I had walked to Quaker meeting as a junior high student in Scarsdale, New York during the late 1950's.
We walked similar paths -- both part children of German Jews who sought for us to blend in by adopting Quakerism. We continued to walk similar paths -- with him at the top as ranking diplomat and me at the bottom as lowly newspaper foreign correspondent.
Focusing in different ways on the same issues.
I had not seen him since 1977 in Beijing -- where both he and I were participating in different ways in the diplomacy to bring an American-Chinese alliance.
We were both peace makers of sorts -- although we had both rejected Quaker pacifism as too parochial.
By the 1990's Holbrooke was well into rediscovering his Jewish roots, while I was beginning to study Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his concept of "costly grace" -- as well as the theological underpinnings of my childhood interest in "Christian realism."
Farewell, farewell to you who'd hear You lonely travellers all. The cold North winds will blow again The winding road does call.
******
Farewell, Farewell, my boyhood friend.
Who died December 13 (born 1941, the same year as myself) of a ruptured aorta while serving as President Obama's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.
In an age of bureaucrats and cautious politicians, the late "Sir Richard" swaggered through a classic role: the flawed hero.
Tough as nails with an idealistic heart and an elephant-size ego, he did not hesitate when calling for military action. But power was to be channeled for constructive ends.
Throughout his 69 years Holbrooke struggled with the challenge of how to impose American will for stability and humane rule -- first in Vietnam, then in the former Yugoslavia, and lastly in Afghanistan.
He served every Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson, and made millions as a Wall Street Banker when Republicans were in power.
"Sir Richard" was a manager of the "American Empire." He sought to combine military, economic, and humanitarian power with what today would be called "nation building" in far away places.
Often it seemed an illusive task of "squaring the circle."
A year before his death, he declared, "I still believe in the possibility of the United States, with all its will and all its strength, and I don't mean just military, persevering against any challenge. I still believe in that."
Holbrooke's greatest achievement was his lobbying of President Clinton to instigate military action during the Serbian genocide against Muslims in Bosnia when Clinton and others were timidly fleeing from an activist foreign policy.
Both inside and outside of government he unabashedly advocated the use of force when human rights issues and U.S. foreign policy goals coalesce.
Because of Bosnia, I see Holbrooke as a truly historic figure. He was militarily a hawk, but a moral conscience within the establishment.
But with lots of foot dragging force in Bosnia came too little and too late. Lots of the genocide had already been done by the time NATO air power and troops forced the 1995 Dayton accords negotiated by Holbrooke.
(See "Holbrooke: Why I Mourn," a remembrance of Holbrooke's role in Bosnia by TV journalist Christiane Amanpour. See also New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, On the Ground.)
(See this survey of how humanitarian agencies now see the use of force.)
Holbrooke also pioneered as one of the first Jews to penetrate the foreign policy establishment using non Jewish connections rather than a the traditionally Jewish Ph.D. professor route.
Instead of going on for a doctorate he chose to join the Foreign Service in 1962 -- mucking around in Vietnam's dangerous Mekong delta while contemporaries such as myself buried our noses safely in doctoral program libraries.
Today Jews serve widely in the foreign service, in the military, and in all kinds of think tanks and establishment groupings where once they would have been unwelcome. Moving deep into establishment journalism -- especially into outlets like National Public Radio.
They are no longer confined to ghettos of political radicalism -- or to stereotypical niches in law, teaching, small business, or finance.
When Holbrooke's father died young, he was, some say, partly "adopted" by future Kennedy Secretary of State, the very non-Jewish fellow Scarsdale resident Dean Rusk. Rusk's son was among Holbrooke's closest friends.
Holbrooke went on to Brown University, which was an excellent penetration point for a Jew seeking transition to the non Jewish foreign policy establishment.
His path to success was not the familiar Jewish academic one, but through mentoring relationships with gentiles such as Dean Rusk, and other establishment State Department people: Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. and General Maxwell Taylor.
His mentors were "muscular men," gentile veterans of the World War II generation -- for whom the use of massive military force was a familiar fact of life. No bespectacled agonizers on moral dilemmas were these.
I would see it like this: the U.S. failure in Vietnam and the plight of Indochinese refugees sensitized Holbrooke to refugee issues, out of a sense of US failure in Vietnam in which he was deeply involved as a young foreign service officer.
Then in 1995 Holbrooke took as his third wife Kati Marton, the Hungarian American journalist of Jewish background. She and her writing projects , helped reopen his Jewish past. For she had only recently discovered her own Jewish identity.
Thus his reawakened sense of Jewish identity and the plight Holocaust victims sat heavily on his sense of the suffering of Indochinese refugees displaced from Cambodia and Vietnam by American defeat there.
His outrage at Serbian genocide in Bosnia as both a private citizen and a government official thus stood at a double foundation: the failure of the West during the Holocaust and the suffering which came out of American failure in Indochina.
For Holbrooke the challenge was always to seize success from failure, "to make the next chapter work."
Hank Williams might be amused but not surprised to learn that a woman I recently met on an internet dating service appears to be doing a form of "sex for money."
A black woman of magnificent and towering charms, a serious "single mother" most eager to elicit gifts, money from a stranger.
Her voluptuous body seethed with hints of future sex.
For days she had been sending scantily clad photos to my cellphone: something a journalist is bound to note. As the clues mounted, I used standard investigatory techniques to locate the Jacksonville, North Carolina "double wide" mobile home in which she lived -- in a nice middle class, mixed race semi-rural area.
Driving out while she was at work, I cautiously drove into her drive circle to be followed in a truck by her polite white husband and charming six year old daughter.
He had a round and pleasantly mustashioed face, and kindly backed out his truck, so that I could drive up to him for a few words.
"I am looking for Mr. Smith, (not the woman's name)" I said.
In a cautious interchange with him in his car and me in mine, I ascertained he was the husband, they were not divorced as she had claimed -- and she had not kicked him out of the house as she claimed.
I did not wish to stay around for coffee.
Checking "Facebook" with a friend we located her wish list of luxuries she wished to own in a year.
Things she was trying to scam gently and indirectly from me. Well above my pay grade. And with no services rendered.
When gently confronted by text message and phone, she put out a fresh line, more likely true: that she was in the midst of a divorce, moneyless, facing the loss of her mobile home.
All the while, as our research indicated, in search for luxuries.
There was, of course, no sex....only a hint of it.....
The Old
We see a growing pattern of prostitution and such on the internet --- both on broader internet and and dating services. And many many escort services advertised in this area.
One other woman was a lovely black hospital worker, both slim and buxom of build.
I met her on a computer dating service. She invited me to her house in Greenville, North Carolina for a sparkling three hour chat.
And then came the text messages asking for "a favor:" could I spare $100 here and there?
She had earlier shown me her bedroom with the comment, "This is where we play."
"A friend with benefits" was what she sought.
She was stunning and charming and sophisticated -- although her bathroom toilet lacked a handle.
I felt that as a journalist of record it was not my part to participate.
I did offer to fix her toilet handle. She declined.
The combination of hard times and high tech gives new imperatives and new opportunities to the modern variety of "con women" and "sex workers."
Some are medical workers.
Some are inveterate beauties, one I met a former airline stewardess, trying to get "help" in return for sex. Many are single mothers.
In the black culture there is a long tradition of sex for gifts. With the full knowledge that a white man will be more vulnerable to a pitch. White women may be more skillful at covering up the nature of this transaction.
As a black woman friend told me, "A black man would laugh off this pitch." But a white and lustful bleeding heart, that's another story.
Many are spurred by minimum wage jobs, the crunch of not being able to meet their needs in this declining economy. Or a thirst for luxuries their incomes will not afford.
Now, it is not all black. A retired white New Bern, North Carolina nurse with many expenses, whom I met on the dating service "Matchcom," recently offered to supply sex for a regular monthly stipend.
I could not help but notice that she was "poured into her jeans."
"Maybe it's time to change careers," she confided. Needless to say I did not take her up on this -- although I did a little bargaining for journalism's sake.
***** "Moritzism" Stay "armed" young man. Stay "armed"
(When the wages of virtue can be death)
"Shit" is what you make of it. Never rely on goodness in others. Nor show excessive kindness lest that be taken for weakness. Be careful whom you trust for the Devil can come to you with the face of an Angel
It's all in how you play the game. Play for all, settle for less, and always have an exit strategy.
Hope for the best. Prepare for the worst. Do not expect mercy from others. Grant it whenever you can.
Laugh and Love (But above all laugh for love requires at least two)
*****
"Farewell, farewell! but this I tell To thee, thou Wedding-Guest! He prayeth well, who loveth well Both man and bird and beast.
"He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all."
A personal theology in film Confronting evil with restrained firmness ("A little caution makes for a longer life")
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A personal theology in song
Some women wait for Jesus, and some women wait for Cain so I hang upon my altar and I hoist my axe again. And I take the one who finds me back to where it all began when Jesus was the honeymoon and Cain was just the man.
-Leonard Cohen
Saving a Space for Love
Love Without End
*****
Constructing a personal theology involves not just abstract theological texts, but an examination of one's entire life experience.
My own was 69 years in the making -- flowing from an idealistic Quakerly stress on the merits of kindness to a realization that weakness will be exploited, that in situations charged in power, an effort to get along can be a road to disaster.
Avoid too much "loving kindness," too much trust -- unless you hold plenty of the cards.
Stay armed young man, stay armed. My own voyage reflects my academic and journalism career, my personality, and the nature of my childhood formative times.
These reflections are based on 55 years of studying issues of war and peace, numerous years as journalist and foreign correspondent, and the sometimes searingly brutal realities of academic politics -- where the worst of human nature is often revealed.
I cannot say that I have come much farther than my rejection of Quaker idealism in the 1950's. I grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust -- and learned through hard personal experience that weakness in the name of kindness is no substitute for the ability to manipulate, to hang tough.
So I end up with the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr discovering what is obvious on the streets: that the strong will bully the weak -- and that love (if it hides weakness) will not conquer all.
Experience is my teacher. It taught me nothing that prophet Niebuhr did not warn me of fifty years ago.
The Serenity Prayer by Reinhold Niebuhr
An idealist may choose safe venues where a veneer of respectability cloaks the cutthroat aspects of life.
But when one ventures out beyond the Eden-like garden of middle class affluence and security one must handle oneself with care.
Saintliness presupposes a willingness to be martyred.
Those of us who are not saints and who have little wish to be martyred had best stay well armed.
Set limits, be firm, do not "speak truth to power" unless you are willing to suffer the consequences.
They can be swift and brutal.
Acquaintances along your road will be exactly as cruel and ruthless as you allow them to be.
*****
In aggregate terms, good often triumphs. But evil will most likely triumph for the individual who does not cultivate strength and the ability to ward off bullies.
This is one reason why toughness and the ability to thoroughly engage in the most brutal of conflicts is essential for the maintenance of most forms of civilization.
The lawyer, the police officer, and the army are powerful and sacred instruments of "God's Will."
These can all be misused, but without them "we are lost."
We can note they are not by themselves sufficient, that they too must be restrained.
True, the advent of new technologies can spread sunlight on evil -- and help dissolve its harmful nature.
But even as we speak, new forms of destruction are being prepared by men and women who will willingly inflict massive pain and death.
Never forget the dark side of the moon.
Gandhi can be nice.
But think twice before turning in your gun.
*****
One way to protect oneself and sally forth in success is to acquire skills and property which other people need.
Then they will develop and show to you their finer points --- respond more positively to shows of reasonable virtue.
When armed with weapons or valuable commodities, one can more easily bring out the positive side of people.
But be careful. Beneath the smiles can be sharks waiting to come out. If you don't have something valued to sell, you are vulnerable if weak.
Most people instinctively know this without extensive study.
For them there is no reason to construct a blog such as this. But for some of us who are perennially tempted to be too nice, it is important to stay "on point." Label Fred "a recovering idealist."
