THE ARC OF OUR CONSTITUTIONAL UNVERSE BENDS TOWARD JUSTICE TODAY: Thoughts on Perry v. Brown

By: Paul S. Marchand

Waiting for the Ninth Circuit to release its opinion in Perry v.  Brown this morning, I felt a curious sense of preoccupation and adrenaline, a sense I recognized immediately.  It’s the sense any lawyer feels at the end of a jury trial, waiting for the jury to come back with a verdict.

Of course, Courts of Appeals don’t come back with verdicts; they issue opinions.  Still, when the Ninth Circuit announced yesterday that today would be The Day on which it would issue its opinion on the merits, that same “wait for the jury” sense of anticipation began to build.

In this sense, the result in Perry v. Brown, because anticipated, actually wound up being somewhat anticlimactic; the record on appeal from the Northern District of California was so overwhelmingly favorable to the case made by supporters of marriage equality that a contrary result would have been virtually inconceivable.

Nonetheless, today’s opinion on the merits frames the issue in a way many LGBT activists might not have expected.  Writing for a two judge majority on the panel, Reinhardt, J., steered clear of issuing any kind of ringing declaration on the issue of marriage itself.  Judge Reinhardt’s opinion is almost at pains to explain that the court takes no position on the issue of whether, as a matter of federal constitutional law, GLBT people enjoy “a fundamental right to marry.”

Instead, the majority opinion deals with questions of process.   

Can a public right to be taken away simply because a majority of voters in a particular election may feel private or personal disapproval toward a discrete and insular minority group within the population?  

Can a public right be taken away where the proffered justifications for stripping an identifiable constituency of a particular right do not bear even rational relationships to legitimate government objectives?

According to the Ninth Circuit, the answer in this case is “no.”  “The People may not employ the initiative power to single out a disfavored group for unequal treatment and strip them, without a legitimate justification, of the right as important as the right to marry.”  Perry, slip opinion at 7.  In reaching its conclusion, the Court relied heavily on the historic Supreme Court decision in Romer v. Evans (1996) 517 U.S. 620, in which the Court held unconstitutional a Colorado initiative measure which had forbidden any local government in Colorado from enacting measures prohibiting anti-LGBT discrimination.  Romer, in short, stood and stands for the proposition that the electorate may not simply impose second-class citizenship on GLBT people simply because a majority of the electorate may disapprove of queerfolk or find us “icky.”

By carefully avoiding the larger question of whether there exists a right to marry a partner of the same gender, the Court may well have insulated itself from some, if not all, avenues of SCOTUS review; it is virtually a truism that when constitutional issues are at stake, a court --- whether a trial court or an appellate Tribunal --- should decide those constitutional questions on the narrowest possible basis.  Certainly, the Ninth Circuit seems to have done so here.

Indeed, by framing its decision as being about the limitations of the initiative process, the Court positioned this case well within the parameters of long accepted federal jurisprudence on the subject of minority rights.  Beginning with the famous Footnote Four of United States v. Carolene Products Co. (1938) 304 U.S. 144, in which the Supreme Court suggested that legislation singling out “discrete and insular” minorities for  less favorable or unfavorable treatment might be subject to more searching scrutiny, federal courts have developed a body of case law providing for ascending levels of scrutiny when legislative classifications of individuals are in play.

By declaring that the proffered justifications for Proposition 8 could not even pass “rational basis” scrutiny, i.e. they were not even rationally related to any legitimate government interest, the Court also cleverly avoided ruling on the issue of whether sexual orientation constitutes a “suspect classification” which would require strict, high-level scrutiny of any statute purporting to classify on the basis of sexual orientation.  Given that any holding identifying queerfolk as constituting a “suspect classification” would probably be stoutly resisted by the conservative SCOTUS majority, Judge Reinhardt was probably wise to avoid so holding.

Of course, anti-LGBT activists and social regressives will, and already have begun to, blast today’s decision.  Given that three of the four front running GOP presidential wannabes have already expressed support for a so-called Federal marriage amendment, we may anticipate that Perry v. Brown will become a major part of the Republican campaign to unseat President Obama this fall.  Certainly, this will be an issue for people who define America in terms of denominational orthopraxy; Rick “Google him” Santorum has often declared that his opposition to marriage equality is a hill he is “willing to die on.”

And perhaps, to borrow from the Klingons, today is a good day for social conservatives to die on that hill; our national conversation on marriage equality has shifted radically in the last decade as a majority of Americans have come to accept the proposition that Ruth and Naomi or Jonathan and David could have just as much opportunity to be happy or miserable in wedlock as Adam and Eve.

Certainly, we’ve come a long way since I was one of the first attorneys in California to take on a marriage equality challenge, almost 20 years ago.  At the time, even in the queer community, the idea of marriage equality was the stuff of visionary thinking.  Though the Hawai’i Supreme Court had ruled in favor of marriage equality, no one on the mainland was even willing to take up the issue.  A professional colleague suggested, rightly it turned out, that we were 15 to 20 years away from marriage equality, and that a national conversation on the issue would have to ensue before the idea of same gender marriage could be taken seriously.

Today, that conversation has led to a national reconsideration of the issue of marriage equality.  As more and younger Americans accustom themselves to the idea that withholding the liberty of marital contract from same gender couples makes no sense, social conservatives can be expected to fight all the more desperately.  Yet, as was the case with our armed forces, participation in marriage by queerfolk has neither destroyed the institution nor has it caused Western civilization to collapse.

To almost any American younger than 50, the reality of out queerfolk participating openly in society is simply “not strange.”  Virtually every straight American has LGBT coworkers, GLBT friends, LGBT neighbors, or queer family members.  For most Americans under the age of 50, the so-called gay agenda has been held up to the light and found not merely unthreatening, but actually rather boring.  For our agenda are usually the same as those of our straight neighbors; my gay agenda for yesterday included paying my Edison bill and my water bill; today my gay agenda will include visiting a family member in a nursing care facility.

Perhaps, in a sense, it was this understanding that queerfolk are so completely integrated into the quotidian realities of American society that made it possible for the Ninth Circuit to frame its opinion as it did, walking a fine line between acknowledging, as the Romer Court did, that anti-queer animus is not a constitutionally sufficient basis for legislation, while at the same time cleverly keeping marriage per se off center stage.

The arc of our constitutional universe is long, but today it, too, bent toward justice.

-XXX-

Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California.  In 1993, he handled one of the first challenges to California then-statutory same-gender marriage ban.  The views expressed herein are his own, and not necessarily those of any entity or organization with which he is associated, nor are they intended as, and neither should they be construed as, legal advice.

INSERT FOOT IN MOUTH, MASTICATE VIGOROUSLY: Why the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s Volte-face on Funding Planned Parenthood Is Too Little, Too Late.

By:  Paul S. Marchand

For almost three decades, the Susan G. Komen foundation enjoyed an unsullied reputation for fighting the good fight on breast cancer.  Its astonishingly effective public relations effort was successful not only in getting macho straight guys, including cops and firefighters, to wear pink, but also in bringing together persons of every conceivable social, economic, or political outlook in the fight against breast cancer.

Until this week.

In an unbelievably ill considered, nay, stupid decision, the Komen foundation decided to discontinue grants to Planned Parenthood, ostensibly because Planned Parenthood had been the subject of an investigation being undertaken by a Republican Florida Congressman.

In fact, there is strong evidence to suggest that the happenstance of the investigation was merely a fortuitous pretext for a politically motivated decision by Komen Foundation VP Karen Handel.  Handel, a prominent Republican activist and unsuccessful office seeker in the state of Georgia, has a long and malodorous reputation for being an opponent of a woman’s right to choose.  The decision to inject the Komen Foundation into the Culture Wars over reproduction appears to be made, or at least heavily influenced, by Ms. Handel.

Today, the Komen Foundation, in the face of a well-deserved torrent of scorn, reversed itself, announcing that it would restore its grants to Planned Parenthood.

Unfortunately for the Komen Foundation, its humiliating climbdown may not be sufficient to restore a reputation left in less than tatters by its ill-conceived foray into divisive, Culture War, wedge issue politics.

What had given the Komen Foundation the moral authority to bring together Republicans, Democrats, men, women, and every other sort and condition of American had been the public perception of the Komen Foundation as being above politics and partisanship; breast cancer, like AIDS, is an equal opportunity killer.  Few if any Americans do not know someone who has lived with the terrifying reality of breast cancer.

Because such a huge number of Americans have been touched by the reality of breast cancer, it was possible to get macho straight guys to wear pink; it was possible to bring together at Komen Foundation Runs for the Cure people who might otherwise not give one another the time of day.  The Komen Foundation operated in what amounted to a political and cultural safe space, an increasingly rare phenomenon in a society that has come to polarize itself along almost every conceivable line of division.

As long as the Komen Foundation stayed away from the kind of overtly political activity that has left other eleemosynary institutions bruised, broken, and hemorrhaging credibility, it was remarkably successful in maintaining a safe space for doing the good work it had been established to do.  Its decision to discontinue its relationship with Planned Parenthood, no matter how quickly reversed, blew that safe space right off the map. 

Now, unfortunately, instead of being seen as the curatrix of a successful, nonpolitical, “bring people together” effort, the Komen Foundation is now, and will be, perceived as just another Culture War operative.  The quality of goodness, even of innocence, which had been such an integral part of the Komen Foundation’s appeal is gone.
 
None of this needed to happen.  The Komen Foundation deserves no kudos for its volte-face; its original decision should never have been made in the first place; one does not praise a child for cleaning up a mess the child has made.  The Komen Foundation also deserves significant criticism for being foolish enough to bring on to its senior management staff a right-wing, anti-choice activist with a clear Culture War agendum; the failure of the Komen Foundation to vet Karen Handel more carefully than it did is inexcusable and unacceptable.

The saddest part of this whole tawdry episode is that it is becoming increasingly difficult for organizations like the Komen Foundation to continue to exist as islands of common ground.  Our culture has been increasingly hijacked by extremists who are more moved by Mao Zedong’s insistence on always putting politics in command than they are by any sense of moral imperative to do good by and for one’s neighbors.

If the Komen Foundation can rightfully be excoriated for being stupid enough to hire an executive of such right-wing Maoist tendencies as Karen Handel, a mistake for which it will probably pay a huge price, we should also feel a sense of outrage that we have allowed our society to be hijacked by political apparatchiks who see in organizations like the Susan G. Komen Foundation not vehicles for the accomplishment of positive social good, but merely as subjects for their lascivious ogling and wedge issue politics.

Having inserted its institutional foot into its institutional mouth, and chewed it right down to the bone, the Komen Foundation may well find itself permanently crippled.  The women of America deserved better than that.

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Paul S.  Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California.  The views expressed herein are his own, and are not necessarily the views of any organization with which he is associated.

HAPPY NEW YEAR: A WISH LIST BEFORE WE GET TO WORK

By: Paul S. Marchand

Any new year is a time for resolutions and wish lists.  Of course, most resolutions go unkept, and few, if any, of the wishes on our lists actually come true, but that doesn’t stop us from making them.

And who knows?  Sometimes we actually keep a resolution; sometimes a wish does come true.

So, what follows is an admittedly idiosyncratic list of wishes and resolutions, some broader in scope than others, some candidly parochial or even personal, for what promises to be a tumultuous 2012:

Let me start with some wishes for all of us in the Ninety-nine Percent:

-First, for continued economic improvement and recovery.  The American Middle Class is the backbone of our strength and our prosperity, but its interests have been too long ignored and sacrificed on the altar of others’ interests.

-Second, that the American Middle Class, which had felt itself voiceless and without advocates for so long, may continue to find its voice, and to hold accountable the politicians and plutocrats who had taken it for granted that the middle class would supinely acquiesce in its own destruction.

-Third, that a newly vocal middle class would use the means at its disposal to ensure that those who wage social and economic war against it do so at their own political peril.

-Fourth, that the middle class resists the wedge-issue tactics of division that politicians of the Scott Walker/John Kasich/Rick Scott ilk use to set us against one another, and which define as enemies those who walk our beats, fight our fires, and teach our kids, when in fact, we are all part of the Ninety-Nine Percent.

Let me also express some wishes for our society in a time when preachers, pundits, and politicians seek to revive the culture wars and exploit them for their own purposes:

-Not only would I like to see marriage equality become a reality wherever the American flag flies, I would also like to see people of good will across the country take a firm stand against the LGBT-baiting that has become a rhetorical staple among political hopefuls of a certain ideological bent.

-I would like to see people of good will speak out ever more strongly for women, and by implication against the war on women that, by seeking to restricting a woman’s autonomy over her own body, also seeks to reduce women in general to the status of chattel.

-I would like to see people of good will speak out ever more strongly for learning and literacy, in the liberal arts and in the sciences, and by implication against the war on learning that has become an ongoing effort of the right wing.  Without a strong commitment to the learning the right scorns as “elitist” our national prosperity and security are at unacceptable risk.

-I would like to see people of good will speak out ever more strongly for the kind of basic human decency that rejects immigrant- and race-baiting.  A discussion about immigration issues is a legitimate one to have, but the racism that too often accompanies that discussion should have no place.

Closer to home, my wish list is a little bit more parochial and even personal:

-We need to find a way to develop a workable legislative “fix” to California’s redevelopment problem.  Abolishing California’s redevelopment agencies, which have been around for almost 70 years, represents a meat-ax solution to a problem that should have been solved with a scalpel.  Certain redevelopment abuses -such as Palm Desert’s use of RDA money to build a lavish golf course and country club, should never have been tolerated, but redevelopment done right had done a power of good in many communities.  Now is the time for Governor Brown and the Legislature to go back to the drawing boards and restore redevelopment in a way that redresses abuses and empowers communities to undertake the kind of work redevelopment was intended to be about in the first place.

-Local leaders in Cathedral City need to do more than talk about economic development.  There has been much talking, but little doing, in the last year, and that needs to stop.  Cathedral City continues to lose businesses, and that does not serve our residents or our business community well.

-Those of us who have made resolutions to exercise more and eat less need the help of our friends, corporeal or digital, to actually keep them.  For if we are able to keep those resolutions on and keep the pounds off , you may see less of us, but what you do see will hopefully be healthier and fighting fit for what promises to be a tumultuous year ahead.

Happy new year, and now, as Ed Schultz might say, “let’s get to work.”
-xxx-

PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney in Cathedral City, where he lives and works.  The views expressed herein are his own, and he hopes you’ll be seeing less of him in the months to come.

THE YEAR OF DAMNED FOOLS AND DAMN-FOOL NOTIONS

By: Paul S. Marchand

It’s been nearly 30 years since I watched Linda Hunt, Sigourney Weaver, and Mel Gibson play off each other in Peter Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously, which takes place against the backdrop of the overthrow of Indonesia’s then-President Sukarno.

A generation and a half later, as America swings into another presidential election year, I can’t help but think of 2011 as the Year of Damn-Fool Notions, or maybe just of damned fools.  Unfortunately, it’s pretty clear that 2012 will be the year of Damn-Fool Notions redux, as we listen to the policy proposals of a bench of GOP presidential hopefuls unparalleled in its thinness since the Democratic presidential pool of 1988.

It’s hard to say which Republican candidate is more appalling.

Has it been Newt Gingrich, with his apparent nostalgia for a dispensation that used to send children into factories at six?  To say that there is something disturbing about the idea of undoing more than a century of legislation designed to keep children in school and out of unsafe working conditions is to understate the case by order of magnitude.

Has it been Willard M. Romney, who was for what he was against before he was for what he was against, or is it the other way around?  The dizzying speed with which Mr. Romney takes up and discards positions has been one of the most extraordinary and unedifying political spectacles of our time.

Has it been Ron Paul, the political munchkin whose antebellum, nay, antediluvian views on race and society seem to be biting him on the posterior of late?  It certainly seems under his libertarian façade, Dr. Paul is nothing more than old-fashioned neo-confederate racist with a generous, adulterating dose of bad Ayn Rand thrown in.

Has it been Rick Perry, who cannot seem to open his mouth without committing another faux pas, detracting as he does so from the sum total of human knowledge?  Listening to Rick Perry demonstrate the limitations of his understanding leaves one wondering whether he possesses even a basal skull set for public office.

Has it been the other Rick, whose last name, when Googled, defines a postcoital byproduct, and whose apparent obsession with what gay men do in the privacy of our bedrooms has led to more than just the occasional raised eyebrow?  To say that he comes across as a political charlatan of the extremest order is also to understate the case.

Has it been the incredible Michelle Bachmann, who would, no doubt, love to come across as an American Margaret Thatcher for our time, but who instead comes across as the crazy pro. per. lady ahead of you on the appearance calendar in court --- the one who insists on explaining in excruciating detail whatever conspiracy theory is uppermost in her mind?

At all events, none of the GOP seekers after the Presidency seem to have recalled Mark Twain’s advice that it is better to remain silent and be a thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.

Time was that the Republican Party could put up highly competent, highly intelligent, highly articulate candidates for public office.  Indeed, by comparison with the current crop, even Richard Nixon would be preferable.

For I was not in jest when I suggested that the current bench of GOP presidential hopefuls shows even less to the American electorate than did the Democratic field of 1988 that ultimately gave us Michael Dukakis -- the best, sadly, of that year’s not very inspiring lot.

In the end, the Republicans will probably do what they have historically done; they will fall in line behind a candidate who has the best campaign machine: Mitt Romney.  And they will do so because, as Bill Clinton once famously observed, while Democrats want to fall in love, Republicans want to fall in line.

Given the thinness and the inadequacy of the GOP presidential field, it’s not surprising that comedians of every stripe should have found the endless Republican primary campaign for the presidency to be an endless source of grist for the comic mill.  Such a development should have Republican strategists deeply worried.

When a campaign season degenerates this early into farce, it ought to be a warning to candidates and their staffers that they are not being taken nearly as seriously as they need to be in order to win.  Back in 2008, a friend of mine with experience in both political campaigns and the entertainment industry, watching Tina Fey’s dead-on impression of Sarah Palin, had no hesitation in calling the race right then and there for Barack Obama.

Worse still for our friends in the party opposite has been the fact that this endless, agonizing primary affairs has also had the effect of giving the President enormous quantities of ammunition to use against whoever crawls out, broken and bleeding, from the GOP scrum to emerge as the nominee.  Another friend of mine, a longtime GOP stalwart, expressed it this way: “the Republicans have learned the Democratic trick of forming a circular firing squad aiming inward.”

So, as we enter into the final days before the much-overrated Iowa caucuses, we see a series of presidential wannabes who have not only managed to make us laugh at them but also to give us sticks to beat them with.  The President, who at the beginning of the fall had seemed to be a dead man walking, increasingly appears to be not only the only adult in the room, but also the only person with the intellect, the understanding, and the stature for the job.

This is not the narrative any GOP strategist wants to see emerging.  It might have been different, had the candidacies of Jon Huntsman, Buddy Roemer, or Gary Johnson ever developed any meaningful throw weight, but all three of them were too smart, too pragmatic, and too potentially appealing to crossover voters, to be able to survive the hard line right wing slugfest the Republican primary processes have become.

For Democrats, the 1988 presidential debacle proved to be a fortuitous turning point.  The lessons learned from that election enabled us to select in Bill Clinton a candidate with sufficient appeal to capture the White House in 1992.  This current election may very well prove to be a similar turning point for the GOP, though I'm not holding my breath.

For while I am not calling the 2012 election for President Obama just yet, I have no hesitation suggesting that the election is his to lose; the auguries suggest that he will in fact be reelected.  If the GOP is serious about fielding a presidential candidate with meaningful hopes of winning in 2016, it’s going to have to tack back toward the center, much as the Democratic Party had to do between 1988 and 1992.  For if it does not, 2016 may prove to be a very unpleasant year indeed for the Grand Old Party.

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PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City.  The views expressed herein are his own.

FOR UNTO US CHILD IS BORN

By: Paul S. Marchand

An unwed mother. 

Situationally homeless. 

Pregnant. 

Traveling with a partner who is not the father of her unborn child.

Not the sort of thing we would expect from “respectable” people.

Indeed, many, hearing such a word-picture, might well be inspired to angry, fulminating discourse on the ills of our 21st-century American society.

Of course, the word-picture in question actually comes from the narrative set forth in Luke’s Gospel of the birth of our Savior in a manger in Bethlehem more than 2000 years ago.

Across generations and centuries, the Lucan infancy narrative, encapsulating both the paradoxical power of powerlessness and the human compunction we feel in the presence of the smallest and weakest among us, has been at the heart of the Christmas story.

For at its core, the Christmas story is about more than giftgiving or liturgies or Christmas trees or official proclamations or Christmas cards (with or without First Dog, pace Sarah Palin).  It is about proclaiming a radical view of human and social justice over against a dispensation that still, after 20 centuries, organizes the world very much without reference to the teachings the infant in Bethlehem sought to impart to us, a dispensation that still reflexively takes the side of Dives over Lazarus --the one percent over the 99 percent.

Some years ago, an Episcopal priest of my acquaintance inveighed against the common cliché of “putting the Christ back in Christmas.”  Instead, he suggested we should perhaps seek to put the Mass back in Christmas.  By sharing the gifts of human companionship, human compunction, and human charity, and by breaking bread together --- both at home and in the context of the Eucharist --- this priest suggested we could do more to share the spirit of Christmas than if we had had all the tangible things in the world wrapped in paper under the tree.

For as much as the birth of a child focuses the thoughts of that child’s family toward what must be done to create a better future, so too does the infancy narrative which lies at the heart of our Christmas story call us to examine our consciences and our conduct, and to focus our thoughts on building a better future for our communities, for our country, and for the world.  The greatest gift of Christmas, therefore, may not be what lies under the Christmas tree.  The greatest gift of Christmas may be the opportunity it gives to us to renew a commitment to the kind of social justice the Infant in the manger came into this world to proclaim:

    “The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me; because the LORD hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound; to proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all that mourn.” Isa. 61:1-2

For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, Who shall be called the Prince of Peace.

Merry Christmas.

-xxx

PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California.  He is a member of the Riverside County Workforce Investment Board.  The views expressed herein are his own.

THE LONG GOODBYE TO THOSE WHO SAVED THE WORLD

By: Paul S. Marchand

Patsy’s Bar, the Bronx.

That’s where my dad remembers being on the afternoon of December 7, 1941. Eight years old, munching on pizza, and sipping an illegal beer.

Seventy years have passed since the Japanese attack against Pearl Harbor. An anniversary that falls on some multiple of ten years always seems to call forth more discussion and reminiscence than an "off year" anniversary. So it is now, in 2011, when 70 years have passed to the day since my dad and the others at Patsy’s Bar heard the news.

The number of those who remember that day --- to say nothing of those who were of military age at the time --- ineluctably grows smaller with each passing year and each passing decade. Seven years ago, writing on the 60th anniversary of D-Day, I noted that the "Greatest Generation" which had stormed ashore on the continent of Europe on June 6, 1944, was passing rapidly into eternity, and as their numbers diminished, World War II was also passing out of living memory; the long goodbye continues.

Seven years later, the number of World War II veterans has diminished even further; those for whom Pearl Harbor is still living memory are most likely to have experienced December 7, 1941 as children, like my eight year old dad in Patsy’s Bar.

While it will probably be at least another couple of decades before the last living American World War II veteran dies, (our last living World War I veteran passed away only recently) the days when there were World War II veterans in every neighborhood and on every block are long gone. A few days ago, the Desert Sun reported that the local chapter of the Pearl Harbor Survivors organization was folding; there were no longer enough living Pearl Harbor survivors in the Coachella Valley to be able to sustain their organization. By 2015, the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, the number of living veterans of that conflict will be close to the vanishing point.

As our collective living memory essentially ceases to be that of the men and women who served and fought during World War II, it shifts to be that of those who were children during what Winston Churchill called those "stern days." I think of my eight year old dad in Patsy’s Bar at the beginning, and I think of my six year old mom, living in El Paso and witnessing the bright flash of the first atomic test up near Alamogordo just three and a half years later in the summer of 1945.

My own generation, the Baby Boomers, was the first to have no direct recall of the Second World War, but we did grow up in communities in which the presence of World War II veterans was still the rule, not the exception. Growing up at the end of the 1960s and the early 1970s in the Hollywood Hills in Los Angeles was to grow up in a place full of veterans --- some still in their vigorous late 40s and early 50s --- who had served in the armed forces not only of the United States and our allies, but even of the Axis as well.

The millennial generation --- those born in the 90s and just coming-of-age now --- and those born in this century, are even further removed from World War II than were we Boomers. For them, the memory of the Second World War can be as distant and sepia-toned as that of the Civil War. The world my millennial cousins inhabit is one in which the barriers and dispensations my generation took for granted simply do not exist.

How does one explain the postwar partition of Germany to someone who was a toddler, or not even living, when the Berlin Wall fell and Germany once again became one?

How does one explain to a young cousin jetting off to Bratislava that not too long ago the Czech Republic and Slovakia were once part of the unified country called Czechoslovakia?

How does one explain that the country known for quality automobiles, consumer electronics, Pokémon, manga, and animé was once feared and hated on account of the "sneak attack" against Pearl Harbor?

How does one explain that the totalitarian communist state which was, in turn, our World War II ally and our Cold War adversary has since turned into a capitalistic, kleptocratic, frenemy?

Seventy years on, how does one explain the sense of disquiet that comes over so many of us on this 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor that perhaps we took more for granted than we should have done those World War II veterans in our midst ---the ones who saved the world--- even if many of them would have been embarrassed to be so lauded?

For, in the end, that is exactly what they did.

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PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City. His dad was in Patsy’s Bar on Pearl Harbor Day, and his grandfather served in World War II. The views expressed herein are his own.

FOR THE OCCUPIERS, FOR THE NINETY-NINE PERCENT, FOR THOSE WHO HAVE FOUND THEIR VOICES AND CRY FOR JUSTICE, GIVE THANKS.

By: Paul S. Marchand

Every Thanksgiving, we find ourselves called upon to think about what we are thankful for.

This year, I find myself thankful for the Occupy Wall Street Movement and for the increasing social and political awareness of the Ninety-nine Percenters who have, perhaps without even knowing it, found themselves living a kind of reality first prefigured in the late Paddy Chayefsky’s screenplay for the 1976 movie Network.

In one of the most famous scenes in that film, the protagonist, the angry newscaster Howard Beale, loses it, famously exhorting his viewers to “get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: "I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"

In our own time, we have seen life imitate art, as countless middle and working-class Americans, tired of being ripped off in the interests of the wealthiest one percent among us, have dared to say “we’re as mad as hell, and we’re not going to take this anymore!”

I’m thankful that, after eight bitter winters of George W. Bush, when middle and working-class Americans felt there was no one to listen to their cries and lamentations against their spoliation on behalf of the “haves and the have-mores” --- the richest one percent in the land, my brothers and sisters of the Ninety-nine Percent have finally found their voice, and have dared to speak truth to those who have unjustly enriched themselves upon the blood, toil, tears, and sweat of those who seek nothing more than basic fairness for themselves and for their posterity.

I’m thankful that, paradoxically, we have an administration in office which we, the people, believe will listen when we say that it is not right that the playing field should be tilted so powerfully against the Ninety-nine Percent of Americans upon whom the prosperity of this country, and in large measure, the world, depends.  That we are frustrated with its slowness to act on our behalf is a sign that we believe it capable of better things than its predecessor.  Now it is incumbent on that administration to listen, and listen well, to our voices. 

I’m thankful that a critical mass is taking shape which dares to say that it is not right that America in the 21st century should resemble France in the 18th; a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that we are all created equal deserves better than to be governed in the interests of a narrow class which bears a distinct and unsavory resemblance to the worst of the French nobility of the ancien régime.

I’m thankful for a movement that looks like America, a movement composed of all sorts and conditions of human beings; of young and old; of tall and small; of rich and poor; of professionals, the fully employed, the underemployed, and the unemployed; of straight and queer; of PhD’s and high school dropouts, of veterans, vagabonds, and vegans; of people of every faith and no faith at all.

I’m thankful for a movement that is not afraid of civil disobedience; I am grateful for a movement that is not afraid to sit peaceably amid clouds of pepper spray; I am grateful for movement that dares to say “these are our streets; we will occupy them. These are our parks; we will occupy them.  This our tundra; we will occupy it.  This is our country; we will occupy it.”

I’m thankful that we are reclaiming our noble revolutionary heritage, that we are having once again a conversation about liberty, about fairness, and about fundamental decency.

If we are to be able to speak in good faith of America as a land of opportunity, we dare not allow ourselves the feckless luxury of an unsustainable social order in which those who have “arrived” are able to pull up behind them the ladder of social mobility and success upon which others rely to better themselves and their children. 

I think it is safe to say that we of the Ninety-nine Percent do not resent the success of those who have made it, what we resent is the efforts of far too many in America’s one percent to prevent anyone else from making it, too.

So, on this Thanksgiving day, I give thanks to God Who in every generation calls forth prophets and witnesses.  I also give thanks for those prophets and witnesses who in our own time are those voices crying in the wilderness on behalf of all who have been voiceless, abused, and ground down.

A single voice, crying in the wilderness, can change the world.  By God’s good grace, we may dare to hope that many voices crying in cities and towns and villages all over this land, may yet change our world in our time for the better, for ourselves and for all who will come after us.  Amen.

-xxx-

Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California.  The views expressed herein are his own.