Cagle World

I think I finally understand what white privilege looks like.

I caught some photos of the Met Gala last week, complete with Whoopi Goldberg dressed in something that can only be described as a giant crocheted toilet roll holder and AOC flaunting her chassis in a form-fitting dress with the words “Tax the Rich” scrawled in blood red on her butt.

The Met Gala is designed to raise money for the eponymous New York City museum, a place where I’ve spent many joyous hours as both a child and adult. I fully support the arts, and the need to protect and promote them in an era where everything has become polarized, pasteurized or petrified. Without them, we are Neanderthals before the cave drawings.

But there is a cognitive disconnect in charging people $35,000.00 per ticket, at a time when people are literally struggling to put food on their tables. It is obscene that the equivalent of a yearly salary would be spent on a dinner, a gift bag stuffed with trinkets and a photo op.

The great irony in all of this is that the person writing this column is a conservative who opposes eviction bans, prolonged unemployment subsidies and COVID lockdowns. She’s someone who believes that those who refuse to return to work until they can be assured that there is less than once scintilla of a percent of possibility that they’ll be infected with the virus never intended to return to work in the first place.

I am not one of the woke, who thinks the free-market system is dangerous because it crushes brown and Black people under its massive weight. None of those things make any sense to me.

And yet you would not see me dead in one of those monstrous confections created to display the whimsical yet deeply caring zeitgeist of the wearer. When you go to a costume party, you are not supposed to take yourself seriously. And yet, that is exactly what AOC did, as she paraded herself through the halls, mask-less from all accounts, like a clueless Disney Princess with a Jackson Pollack painting splashed on her tochus.

AOC gets away with it, even though she’s technically a person of color. Whoopi gets away with it too, even though she’s obviously a person of color. They benefit from the truest form of “white privilege” that exists, namely, the privilege of living in the sterile liberal bubble.

That bubble is as white and sanitized as the space shuttle at lift-off. There are no germs that pierce its inner realms, infecting the happy residents with a dose of reality. The people who live within that bubble, and it is quite large and encompasses actors, journalists, politicians and certain religious folk, are incapable of understanding the rest of us out here in the greater world. They think they know who we are, what we need, how we are violating their standards and what should be done with us if we fail to acknowledge their wisdom. They believe that they can lecture us on climate change and reproductive rights, on clean eating and religious plurality, on which lives matter and which are useless. Their speeches sound good, when spoken back to them by others in that echo chamber.

But the rest of us see who they are and what they stand for, and we laugh. They might not hear us, in that bubble, but the sounds are becoming louder and more constant with each passing day. Inhabitants of the bubble have the whitest of privileges, the right to ignore reality. They have the luxury to care for the proletariat, as long as they themselves are fed, housed, groomed and cosseted. Unlike FDR whose birthright privilege did not prevent him from empathizing with the desperate and the dispossessed, these folks are all appearance. They might look compassionate, but each one has a portrait in their attic crumbling from moral decay.

Every time I hear someone attack me or my conservative friends for our “white privilege,” I chuckle. I’ve heard Larry Elder, Clarence Thomas, Condi Rice, Alveeda King and Candace Owens accused of exercising “white privilege.” I’ve seen Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Alberto Gonzalez, Maria Salazar and Susanna Martinez tagged with “white privilege.” You can, apparently, be brown and Black and yet have a certain color of privilege, according to the left.

But the true color of privilege is the color that defines your world view, one that allows you to preach and prattle on about how we need to take care of the poor, all the while draping yourself in diamonds and disdain and traipsing around for the cameras.

Limousine liberals have always been with us. They just used to dress a lot better.

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Copyright 2021 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

I recently filling in hosting a local Philadelphia talk show, which gave me the opportunity to interview Lt. Colonel Jonathan P. Meyers, a retired Marine who’d recently written a memoir about his almost three decades in service: “American to the Corps.”

During his years of active service, Meyers had been involved in a number of memorable events. But perhaps the most exceptional thing he’s done in his life came after retirement when, as a private citizen, he joined with two other former Marines and worked to get U.S. citizens, green card holders and Afghan allies out of Afghanistan before the doors closed and the likelihood of success evaporated like smoke in a Kandahar opium den.

Tragically, as Colonel Meyers explained, he was ultimately unable to get everyone on his manifest out. He’s still trying, even as the Taliban consolidate their power and take their victory laps by beating women and whipping journalists who try and bear witness to their brutality.

“The State Department really put themselves in this position, by not completing the job before taking the last troops out,” Meyers said, criticizing the administration for claiming the Taliban were acting in a “businesslike and professional” manner. He said he knows of an Afghan mother and her American toddler who was injured after slashing her foot on some razor wire after being pushed into a sewage canal by the Taliban.

“Then the Taliban showed up two days ago and executed her brothers,” Meyers said. “So, they’re not being very business-like and professional, but this information is not getting out to the public.”

When I heard him say this, I wasn’t surprised. I know firsthand the extent to which some in the media have been complicit in helping the White House spin the conditions on the ground in Afghanistan. Perhaps they, like the president, wanted to approach this 20th anniversary of 9/11 with an almost triumphant attitude as in “the war is over, our troops are home.”

To some extent, they’ve been successful, primarily because we don’t want to believe that we actually lost. We don’t want to accept the fact that young men and women died for nothing, that others came home with only half of their bodies or minds intact and it made absolutely no difference. The hasty and disorganized withdrawal allowed us to wipe the slate clean like some geopolitical Etch-A-Sketch, and leave the battlefields that swallowed up two generations of Americans in the rearview mirror.

I cannot look at 9/11 and feel relief that we are no longer in the maelstrom. The “optics” of the forever war being over might make President Biden feel as if he’s accomplished something, as if he’s written the eulogy and epitaph for the earth-shaking violence that consumed our troops for two decades. But every time I get a phone call or a text from someone asking for help to get their family members out, I’m reminded that the story isn’t over just because we’ve stopped reading the book.

Interviewing Colonel Meyers was a sobering experience. He deliberately tried to avoid making partisan attacks, even though you could tell in his voice and in his carefully chosen words that he was filled with rage over the hubris of a president and his advisors, reckless and driven to a particular goal regardless of the devastating consequences.

This is what he said when I asked him if he thought that there was any legitimate reason for the State Department to have provided the Taliban with a manifest of names so they could confirm who was trying to get out:

“That’s strike three against us in terms of providing lists of people, and I understand that they provided the manifest that was put together for these airplanes, which again is unbelievable, and what it really demonstrates to me is the political naivete of the people in the National Security apparatus. It’s obvious that you couldn’t be a qualified national security expert and make a decision like that, so that has to be the reason that this is happening.”

Colonel Meyers reminded me that Americans are often at our best when we stop being Republicans and Democrats, dissidents or sycophants, and we simply follow our better angels. Sometimes, that means ignoring our flawed and self-interested leaders, and putting faith in ourselves. I trust the people like Colonel Meyers much more than anyone who considers the terrorists who stole our sons and daughters, who are beating women and kidnapping young boys as being “professional and business like.”

Last weekend, President Biden wanted to be able to say that we were out of Afghanistan. He wanted that sound bite.

And now, he has it. But at what cost?

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Copyright 2021 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

As expected, everyone’s apoplectic about the Supreme Court’s decision not to block the Texas abortion law.

It’s no secret I have been advocating for the criminalization of abortion for decades. Many people disagree with me, and that’s okay. It’s a controversial topic, and there really is no common ground, despite what the peacemakers try and argue. And I fully admit that the Texas law is extreme and novel, to the extent that it allows private parties to enforce it. Revolutionary, in its own way, and it remains to be seen if it passes constitutional muster.

What I want to focus on is the strange hypocrisy that rears its head up every time we discuss abortion rights, something particularly notable today as we deal with the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan.

For over 25 years, I’ve been practicing immigration law. For the last 15 or so, my practice has seen a significant uptick in asylum cases, a large percentage of which involve women who have been the victims of violence. Some of that violence has been at the hands of family members, and some of it has been institutional. Lately, I’ve seen a number of women who were abused by their partners and the police did nothing to protect them. That’s very common in Central America.

But then you have the most horrific situations, namely, when it’s the government itself doing the persecution. That is more likely to happen in countries that adhere to a perverse and draconian version of religious dogma, usually sharia law. And many women who were fortunate enough to taste the freedoms and privileges of the west are now facing what I call “The Great Reversal,” plunging them back into a darkness they either never knew, or of which they only have vague memories.

I’m referring, of course, to Afghanistan, and the resurgence of the Taliban. My position on how the United States catalyzed “The Great Reversal” by its deliberate and poorly-planned withdrawal after 20 years is as well-known as my opposition to abortion. I’ve spent the last two weeks writing about it, lamenting its impact on American allies, on children, on U.S. citizens, and even on dogs.

But now is the time to highlight the most obvious and heartbreaking victims of all: The women. The Taliban wants them clothed in dark fabric, anonymous figures moving through the markets, the streets and all public venues. The Taliban wants to keep them from the dangerous enlightenment that comes from education, something for which Malala Yousafzai almost sacrificed her life. The Taliban wants to strip them of their right to own property, to work at jobs, to constitute human value before legal tribunals. This is no secret. These are facts documented in every official human rights report published over the last two decades.

And while the emancipated women of America did raise concerns about the threat to their Afghan sisters, they saved their greatest vitriol for Texas, the Supreme Court and those of us in the anti-abortion movement. Like clockwork, they were out in the streets holding placards with the same slogans I used to see as a child: “My Body, My Choice.” I always found that amusing, since more than one body was involved.

But I digress. The consistency of the movement in support of abortion rights is not the real problem. What matters to me is the lack of self-awareness of the women who see their foreign sisters standing on a precipice of social annihilation, and are more concerned because the women of one state in this great nation will only have six weeks within which to get an abortion.

There is this argument that most women don’t know they’re even pregnant within six weeks. I find that hard to believe, but even if that were the case, this law will make sure that women who demand reproductive autonomy will become even more vigilant about monitoring their reproductive health. And let’s remember that this law does have exceptions for the health of the mother, so the idea that women are being denied “health care” is a bit specious to say the least.

But beyond that, the suggestion that not being able to get an abortion is equivalent to not being considered human is offensive, and underlines the increasing radicalism of a movement that persists in seeing abortion as not just “health care,” but a mark of autonomy, humanity and equal citizenship.

I would hope that some of the people who are still on the fence saw this overreaction from the most extreme abortion advocates and realized that-even if they opposed laws as stringent as the one in Texas-they reject the narcissism of people who mistake a paper cut for an amputation.

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Copyright 2021 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

I come from a family of fighting men.

My cousin Adolph was a paratrooper who landed at Normandy on D-Day, and the parachute he used – stained with blood and dirt – was turned into my cousin Helen’s wedding dress. My father spent two years in Thule Greenland, at a godforsaken outpost at the North Pole during (no pun intended) the Cold War.

My uncle Louie was a Marine, stationed in Beirut during one of the early crises in the 1950s, and my cousins Alex and Anthony served honorably in Vietnam. Last but not least, my brother Michael was stationed in Iraq during the prosecution of Saddam Hussein as a civilian employee of the Department of Defense.

France. Greenland. Beirut. Vietnam. Iraq. Postcards from the front lines, and a part of my DNA. There is nothing more honorable than service to this country that has given so much, and asked for so little from the majority. But America has demanded that last full measure from the men and women, but especially the men, who have served in combat positions, and we only stop to consider the debt when tragedy occurs.

Last week, 13 U.S. service members were killed by terrorist bombs in Kabul. They were not in active combat. They were doing something that adds poignancy to their mission: Helping civilians escape the hellhole in Afghanistan created by the men in suits.

President Joe Biden is responsible for this, as was Donald Trump before him, and Barack Obama, and George W. Bush, all the way back to the presidents and senators who thought it was a great idea to arm terrorists so we could get back at the Soviets.

But to dwell on this is to ignore the nature of the sacrifice those 10 Marines, two soldiers and a Navy corpsman made last week. They were in the process of evacuating desperate civilians, U.S. allies and their families, women and babies just born, from a country that had fallen into immediate chaos, and imminent tyranny. They were trying to save those people with the power of their US imprimatur, their courage, their intelligence, their ingenuity and to some extent, their weapons.

Their mission was not to capture a hill or fortify a city. It was to be the separate links in a human chain, person by person, life by life, breath by labored breath, leading toward the open door of infinite possibility: Freedom.

The fact that they were killed, murdered, while trying to save lives makes their loss exponentially worse. The Bible says, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” Take it even further: No greater love hath a man that he lay down his life for strangers.

The picture of the Marine sitting down and cradling a newborn Afghani child went viral, and the reason it did is because it spoke to something deep within all of us that lies dormant until tragedy occurs: The understanding that in the dark and dire moments, the touch of a human being is the greatest weapon against despair and the strongest defense against disaster.

That picture is emblematic of what the Marines and other warriors have been doing around the world, in all of the collective war zones on this tortured planet. It is not the shot of the soldier with dark glasses and in cammo with a gun slung across his shoulders.

It is not the tragic image of a battered and bloodied combatant, alone on a hill.

It is the picture of that Marine, cradling the child.

Of the Marines on Iwo Jima, raising the flag.

Of every moment that someone in uniform shows up to represent what this country has always meant, despite the woke naysayers who slander the past with their twisted and evolved retelling of facts and events that never occurred.

Those who died this week are an unbearable loss to their families, a horrific sacrifice to what many consider a failed campaign, a tragic reminder of the fragility of life and the toxicity of radical ideology.

But to me, especially, as I deal with the refugees who long to escape the maelstrom in Afghanistan, the fallen represent the light that burns brightly in the hearts of generous Americans, the power of the human spirit against the nihilism of terrorists and opportunists (often interchangeable) and hope.

May their memory be a blessing, an inspiration, and a call to action. And may their deaths be avenged by our refusal to pay tribute to tyrants.

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Copyright 2021 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

Last summer, I spent a few days standing in front of the Columbus statute at Marconi Plaza in South Philly.

I wasn’t alone.

A lot of good folk were there around me, laughing and singing and eating Wawa hoagies. We were there to show solidarity with the Italian American community of the city, since most of us were card-carrying members. We wanted to show our support and create a human line of defense against a mayor and the woke jokes in his administration who wanted to erase our history.

Of course, the mainstream media didn’t see it that way at all. Most of the establishment sources of news treated the defenders of the statue as vandals, thugs and racists. There were front page photos of some guys carrying baseball bats and sound bites of them hurling epithets at tender tattooed bicycle mamas with purple hair and bruised social sensitivities. And there was this narrative about the Proud Boys having both organized and infiltrated the group.

We were no longer normal Philadelphians trying to preserve our history and some public art. We were a security threat.

I remember thinking, at the time, why all of this animus towards a statue that has existed without incident for over 40 years in the placid, verdant heart of one of the city’s iconic neighborhoods? Which of the residents who had grown up here, built families here, invested their life’s savings here and sent their children to school here had complained about the racist colonizer who had allegedly killed indigenous children and raped their mothers? Was it the butcher on the corner of Broad and Packer? The baker on South Ninth Street? The bricklayer off of East Passyunk? The retired schoolteacher on Fernon street? The pizza maker on South Broad?

No, it was baristas from other parts of Philadelphia who had a problem with the statue of Columbus, and with the proud Italian Americans who built the city and the plaza that hosted his image. It was the newbies, the carpetbaggers from suburban climes, the youngsters who likely had ancestral roots in Italian soil but who were taught to hate themselves and their own heritage.

For two years, there was a battle over that statue, and at every turn and juncture, the media made it seem as if the defenders of Columbus were the same people who put their knees on the neck of George Floyd. If stood with Columbus, we trampled on the rights of the indigenous, those of color, those who are allegedly the oppressed refuse of society.

But that didn’t bother George Bocchetto, the brave attorney of Italian descent who waged battle in the court of law, filing motions and injunction requests and petitions to stop the removal of our heritage. Two weeks ago there was a final hearing on the effort to protect the Columbus statue and keep it at Marconi Plaza.

And last week, Judge Paula Patrick ruled that the city had absolutely no legal basis to remove the statue, issuing a scathing decision that contained this language:

“It is baffling to the Court that the City of Philadelphia wants to remove the Statue without any legal basis. The City’s entire argument is devoid of any legal foundation.”

And that was the nice part. The decision is both precise and brutal, ticking off the flawed reasoning, mediocre lawyering and dishonest motivations of the city in trying to punish Italian Americans for being proud of their heritage. The decision is a complete and total victory for not just Italian Americans, not just the people of South Philly, but for every person who believes in the integrity of the legal system and the respect that we need to show everyone, not just those demographics that whine the loudest about oppression.

Of course, there are people who are particularly displeased with the decision. The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a story discussing the legal victory, and then took a completely irrelevant and borderline defamatory pot shot at Judge Patrick, trying to connect her to QAnon conspiracies. This African-American female judge, who made the mistake of registering as a Republican, is smeared by innuendo by the same organization that smeared the good people of South Philly who defended the statue.

But that doesn’t matter, in the grand scheme of things. What does matter is that a devoted group of people with the will to take a stand for their beliefs, their heritage and their history won a victory on a battlefield otherwise strewn with the road kill of political correctness.

The baristas of Philadelphia will need to find another windmill to swing at. Columbus is there to stay.

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Copyright 2021 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

I’ve been practicing immigration law for over 25 years, and I speak four languages fluently. I’ve traveled widely outside of the United States, and lived abroad for large stretches in the 1980s and ’90s.

All of this is to say that I am devastated with what’s happening in Afghanistan.

Some readers will simply yawn and turn the page on this one. They’re more interested in being warriors against school boards than in hearing about the fall of Kabul. They’re focused on kids in masks as opposed to women wrapped in burqas. They are obsessed with women getting patted on the rear, and not women who are being stoned to death.

I get it, we all have our priorities.

But these days, my interests extend a little broader than to what’s going on in my own backyard, because that’s never been the boundary of my world. When you deal with foreigners every day of your life, especially the type of foreigner who comes to this country in search of protection, you take John Donne’s words to heart:

“No man is an island entire of itself; every man

is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;

if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe

is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as

well as any manner of thy friends or of thine

own were; any man’s death diminishes me,

because I am involved in mankind.

And therefore never send to know for whom

the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

I don’t want to make this political, although it’s difficult to avoid criticizing our current president for withdrawing our troops from Afghanistan. I won’t presume to be an expert in geopolitical issues beyond the impact they have on my asylum clients, and my depth of knowledge in the national security sphere is as shallow as a YouTube makeup star. But I can’t avoid the reality that until Joe Biden made the executive decision to draw down our presence with unexpected haste, the Taliban was relatively dormant.

They’re never inactive. They’re always terrorizing people like my Ph.D student from Peshawar ,who was beaten as he returned home from vaccinating villagers against smallpox. They target folks like my elementary school teacher from the Swat Valley, bombing his building because he dared allow girls in his classes. They make examples of men like my cab driver from Islamabad, who made the mistake of delivering a Swedish journalist who’d written an expose about fundamentalist terrorism, to his hotel. For that service, “Nawaz” was shot at by masked men on a bike.

And these are just the ones over the border in Pakistan.

Now, with the vacuum created by this recent withdrawal, the Taliban in Afghanistan (as well as their Pakistani brothers of “Tehrik I Taliban”) have become emboldened. They are winning, and they know that they are winning, and we have left.

Years ago, my brother Michael was living and working in the Green Zone in Iraq, assisting in the prosecution of Saddam Hussein. He wrote home about the men and women who served as translators, people who risked their lives every day to serve the U.S. government. That government promised to protect them.

And they needed that protection. Those civilians in the Green Zone like my brother were living in one of the safest areas in the Middle East, an almost impenetrable fortress guarded by the most competent, fearless and resourceful troops in the world. The interpreters, on the other hand, lived in villages seeded with informers and terrorist sympathizers. Their families were at risk. They could not hide behind American artillery for their safety. And yet, they showed up every day, and did their jobs, and then squared their shoulders and walked home.

The same thing was happening in Afghanistan. And while our government has made some relatively feeble efforts to support these individuals, like creating a visa classification which would allow them to immigrate, very few have made it to the U.S. And of those who did get visas, the vast majority have left their families behind because of administrative red tape.

Biden has said that he wants to prioritize the removal of these brave men and women, and that’s all well and good for the cameras. But by drawing down the troops, he has helped fuel the onslaught of a terrorist organization that is stronger, more resilient and deadlier than ISIS, al-Qaida, or the many fundamentalist splinter groups around the world.

In the next months, I will be meeting with other asylum clients who are refugees from Taliban cruelty. I will do everything that I can to make sure that they, the lucky ones who made it out, don’t ever have to go back into the maelstrom. I may be successful, and I may not be.

But when I look into their eyes, I will see the others who are not there before me, the ones that stand behind them and who are still in that blighted place left open and vulnerable to the ravages of war and terror.

And I will be ashamed, knowing the reason for it.

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Copyright 2021 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

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Seven years ago, Lucy Flowers died.

It’s taken a while for me to write those words in exactly that way – “Lucy Flowers died.” I’ve written about it on frequent occasion, but usually turn to euphemisms: “Left us.” I also employed “passed away,” “rejoined my father,” “passed on,” “shed this mortal coil,” “went to a better place,” “found peace,” “greeted the angels” and other Hallmark card turns of language.

The clinical finality of “Lucy Flowers died” was something I avoided because it sounded harsh, brutally so, and I didn’t want to admit to myself or to you that she had ceased to be a presence in my daily life. To suggest that a woman who was “dead” was with me when I shopped, took walks in the evening, worked out on the elliptical (smirking as she saw me sweat), tried to impersonate a competent cook and went about living seemed sepulchral and ghoulish.

But she is with me when I do those things, and she is dead, and that’s a fact seven years into my orphaned state. My mother had me when she was 22, and I had her until I was 52, so it might seem silly to compare myself to a foundling like Oliver Twist. But anyone who has loved and lost a mother understands that the umbilical cord does not thin with the passage of time, nor does it break. It becomes elastic, flexible, and stretches to accommodate the changes in the “child’s” life as he or she accumulates degrees and friends and love interests. It stretches to the children of those children, in a beautiful and mystical way. But it does not disappear.

We are always children, even when we are parents, even when, like me, we are alone.

I cannot even say that Lucy has been physically gone these seven years. When I look in the mirror a certain way at a certain angle, I see her. When I frown and grimace at fools, I perceive the same storm clouds in my expression that shadowed her beautiful brown eyes. When I laugh, I hear her own soprano tinkle, even though I’m closer to a sarcastic contralto.

In my house, there are pieces of her in almost every corner, things she made or photos and objects we purchased together and I inherited because I took them. I have a rosary that belonged to my grandmother, and that she kept in her handbag. I have some loose bobby pins that are worth 3 cents apiece but, because they held up her blue-black hair, are worth more than the Hope diamond. I have her recipe for pumpkin pie that she found in an old Philadelphia Bulletin column but changed so drastically that it became her own. I’m not giving it out, even though I can’t bake.

Seven years may not seem like a very long time, and in a way, they’re not. My father will mark 40 years “in Heaven,” “passed away,” and “in a better place” next May, and that is two thirds of my life on earth. But the seven years absence, the hole shaped like my mother’s smile, is harder to take. Daddy is youthful memories and childhood experience, internal Polaroids taken in that magical North Philly of my earliest consciousness.

My mother was my first half century, and I will not have a second. And she was there when the world collapsed around me, and helped pick up the pieces. My father, beloved and a legend, was in the web of dreams when that happened and could only guide by memory. My mother was there with arms, and food and sometimes brutal common sense. Those things I still miss, even though I am an aging woman and not a little girl.

I know that one of these days, I will see her again. Of that, I am certain. Of course, saying this doesn’t make the anniversary of her death any easier. Lucy Flowers died in the earliest hours of an August morning, the same month that she married her beloved Ted, the same month that the sweet dogs Chance and Sophie – who tried to fill the emptied house – were born.

John Donne wrote the holy poem that generations of grieving children have repeated to themselves at the deathbeds of their parents:

“Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

One short sleep past, we wake eternally

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.”

Seven years on, I can say that my mother died. Because now I know that what is gone is immense, what remains is substantial, and what awaits is everything.

–

Copyright 2021 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

The other day, someone reminded me that I had a public Facebook page entitled “Christine Flowers, Columnist and Radio Host.” I rarely post there, which is why I’d almost forgotten about it.

My old editor had suggested I create a public page after stalkers and people who didn’t like what I wrote (almost exclusively readers and agitators from the left) had done some very unsavory things. She thought that setting up a “public” space would protect me and my loved ones from the usual abuses of social media.

But then a friend sent me a screen shot of my Facebook page, which included a warning advising possible readers that “This page may share content that violates our community standards. Review this page before you join.”

I scratched my head, trying to figure out (1) which of the few posts I’d made violated the community standards and (2) what those community standards were.

Because you see, it is virtually impossible to know what comments or photos or other things that fall into the class of free expression trigger Mark Z. and the woke elves who toil away at that shop of his near the North Pole, or wherever. There is no definitive standard by which thoughts can be considered “dangerous” or “offensive.” It’s kind of like when Justice Potter Stewart set out the criteria for obscenity, namely, “I know it when I see it.”

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at this new high-tech imprimatur. The same thing is happening on Twitter, except not in such a targeted manner. The other day I tried to reply to a tweet about Nancy Pelosi’s belief that abortion is a civil right for poor women, and it immediately triggered this message: “Want to review this before sending? We’re asking people to review replies with potentially harmful or offensive language.”

I am certain that I used the word “beast” in my reply, since I find Pelosi’s devotion to abortion to be quite savage. Still, it’s a bit much to start flagging non-threatening comments to a public figure with a finger wagging 21st century Miss Brooks (for those of you who have no idea who that is, Google it).

I suppose a lot of this is in response to the events of Jan. 6, which have completely thrown the country off of its axis. There are those who liken it to a terror attack, those who think it was nothing more than a group of rowdy tourists, and those like me who think it falls somewhere in between the two.

Social media was blamed for allowing conspiracy theories to be foisted upon an innocent public by twisted minds with access to keyboards. That, of course, could describe the internet well before that crazy shaman fellow with the Ride of the Valkyries outfit forced himself into the capitol building.

But the left is using Jan. 6, and some repentant folks on the right, to advance an agenda that has very little to do with the danger and damage on that winter day, and everything to do with silencing dissent.

There is nothing I have ever said, done, or written that could be considered so subversive that it warrants a warning. Being offensive or controversial is common course for a pundit, and those who don’t arouse strong emotions aren’t doing their collective job.

But offense and controversy are necessary in a free society, and even the most despicable opinions (like, in my case apparently, that the women of the #MeToo movement have become terrorists themselves) have a place. If you do not want to read them, hear them, digest them, that is your prerogative.

But, the social media tycoons and their sycophants on the left should not have the ability to act as guardians at the gate of free expression. They should not, in their own way, exercise a 21st century version of prior restraint, dissuading people from reading things they themselves have decided are “against community standards.”

And the larger questions are: whose community are they worried about? And what exactly are the standards that govern that pristine and protected society?

It reminds me of that old movie, “Village of the Damned,” where the little children with their platinum blonde page boys and their empty ice-blue eyes could destroy, with a look, those who crossed and challenged them.

I am not afraid that Facebook will stop open minded people from reading my thoughts. And if they do, there are other ways for me to communicate. I’m Italian and Irish, after all. We are born knowing how to express ourselves with absolutely no ambiguity.

But I’m worried for those who actually will take their lead from the Stalins of social media and allow themselves to be diverted from “offensive” content that will trouble the waters of their gentle community.

I have asylum clients from other, similar communities, who could attest to how easy it is to be numbed into a sense of “comfort” by those who want to hide painful truths from them.

And that’s a lot scarier than anything Christine Flowers, columnist and radio host, has to say.

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Copyright 2021 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

After the NFL became a bastion of gridiron “wokeness,” I basically stopped paying attention.

But I have to say my interest was piqued by a news item last week involving football, or rather, involving the people who don’t know how to throw a ball or run a pattern but who are expert in throwing shade and running amok. They would be the owners, administrators and “others” who ooze social consciousness, hug trees, wear masks and bleat about their concern for humanity.

In other words, the suits in the front office.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell announced a draconian system of repercussions and penalties for players who refuse to get vaccinated. He didn’t mandate that the players get the shot. What he did was basically make it financially impossible for players not to get the vaccine.

Pursuant to Goodell’s fiat, if a game is postponed and can’t be rescheduled because some unvaccinated players on one team’s roster cause a COVID outbreak, that team will forfeit the game and neither team will get paid that week. In other words, it’s like when the teacher says, “If the person who put gum on my seat doesn’t own up, the whole class is going to have a detention.”

It’s guilt by association, and reminds me of the fact that, increasingly, athletics has less to do with sports than with virtue signaling (remember those stupid pink cleats to commemorate Breast Cancer Awareness Month, taking a knee like Colin Kaepernick, and forcing the Redskins to abandon their name?). Additionally, Papa Roger has decreed that the team responsible for the outbreak has to shoulder all of the financial losses, and might also face non-monetary discipline.

This is just the latest example of vaccine-shaming. I understand that we want to create herd immunity, and that it is advisable to get inoculated. As soon as I became eligible, I had both shots of the Moderna vaccine, and I am urging all of my friends and family members to do the same.

But this isn’t about the efficacy of the vaccines. It’s about punishing people who make the decision that they do not want the government telling them what to put into their bodies. This whole idea that a person’s personal decision to seek the vaccine is a measure of their moral character is a scary thing. When I see members of the government blaming Facebook for “killing” people if they provide “disinformation” about the vaccines, and when I see random pundits calling parents who won’t have their children vaccinated “abusers,” I realize that I’ve fallen even further down the rabbit hole.

And now, even football has gotten into the act by making innocent parties liable for the medical decisions of their gridiron opponents. It’s frightening, because it’s an example of how, incrementally, society has decided to use shame as a motivator.

And what an extreme irony. Usually, progressives and the type of people who talk about the “common good” are loathe to make moral judgments about those who don’t follow societal norms. But if you decide that you do not want your child to be vaccinated, particularly where there is flimsy evidence that even the delta variant will cause serious illness or infection in those under the age of 16, you have less teeth than toes and likely married your sister. You are also evil.

And somehow, you are white, conservative and likely belong to the GOP. I find that last part to be interesting, because of my personal acquaintance with numerous people of color who do not want the vaccine. They remember the Tuskegee experiments where Black men were treated as guinea pigs, given placebos instead of being treated for syphilis, and the government kept the secret for many years. We might also remember the eugenics crusade of the last century, where “undesirables” like immigrants and the poor were sterilized by progressive white elites, who knew better.

My point is that taking a vaccine should never become a referendum on our patriotism, our humanity or our concern for our children. And it sure as heck shouldn’t be a way to teach football players a lesson.

I got the vaccine. I hope you get the vaccine. But to me, an unvaccinated citizen is a lot less troubling than a society that uses intimidation and threats in its quest to serve the common good.

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Copyright 2021 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

I was down the shore this weekend, enjoying the sea, the sun and the sweeping panorama of people without masks. Honestly, that was even more beautiful than the sunset over the Atlantic.

One of those sunsets was observed from an outside patio at a fantastic pizzeria just outside of Atlantic City. My Sicilian Square with “Momma’s” sauce was so good, I had to tell “Momma’s” son how much I loved it. He replied, with an almost wistful expression in his eyes: “Thank you, I only wish I had Momma here with me to help out.”

What I thought was a poignant reference to his deceased mother turned out to be the lament of a small business owner.

This wasn’t the first time that I’d heard a similar complaint from small business owners. It seems as if everyone who used to work in service industries prior to the pandemic either found better jobs elsewhere, preferred getting the extended monthly unemployment checks or left the job market altogether.

Pretty much the only people you see in the kitchens, on the scaffolding and hunched over cleaning offices and homes are the immigrants who don’t have the luxury of seeking unemployment benefits.

I’m not an economist, so I can’t offer an intelligent reason as to why this is happening from a financial perspective. I’m sure that businesses themselves were either forced to close or severely reduce their staffing during COVID, and then decided that they didn’t want to go back to pre-pandemic payrolls.

But I think there’s something else at play, here, and I see it in the rhetoric on TV and in the media: “We deserve better.” It’s the idea that some people are too good for the jobs they were doing at wages they didn’t like. Granted, the food service industry is notorious for underpaying their employees and unfairly expecting customers to make up for the miserly wages in generous tips. I’m no fan of the “slave” mentality some employers have.

But I honestly believe that the problem this time around is not with the demand, but with the supply. Or to put it differently, the lack of supply. Workers became accustomed to a few things this past year: Staying home, getting paid to stay home, getting told that they were right to stay home, getting warned that if they didn’t stay home and wear masks, they were unpatriotic, and getting used to having their egos stroked.

It’s really a generational thing, and I don’t mean age. There are some wonderfully motivated young folks out there looking for work and juggling multiple part time jobs, and then there are people my age and even older who are content to take three or four Zoom calls a day (hopefully not a la Jeffrey Toobin) and think that’s enough until quitting time.

I even have friends who said that if their employers require them to return to brick-and-mortar buildings, they’ll quit. One said her health is more important than her paycheck (funny how she doesn’t think that paying for doctor’s visits involves having a paycheck) and another said that she finally realized that there was more to life than the grind of her nine-month job as a teacher.

I remember my father, who worked three jobs during the day while going to law school at night. I remember my mother, who took the overnight shift as a bookkeeper, riding the subway from Logan into Center City and back again in the early morning hours. I remember stories about my grandfather Mike, who drove a trash truck for 20 years in Philadelphia, fell off, broke his back, was out of work for months and then went right back to the job. While he was in bed recovering, my grandmother took odd jobs while raising three young kids. My other grandmother drove a trolley while her husband worked in different restaurant kitchens.

I was privileged. I never had to work, and this is probably why I recognize the unique character of people who did. My few jobs while in school were vanity adventures, things I did so I could say I was “working.” One involved serving burgers at the old Roy Rogers at 54th and City Line. That job ended after I told a customer Happy Trails, as ordered by management, and was told “f— you” by the customer. I also worked at the Valley Forge Music Fair as an usherette one summer, where I managed to run into Paul Anka and knock him down backstage while rushing to deliver show programs.

Again, I had it easy.

But I’m aware of how easy I had it, and I never thought that I deserved kudos just because I showed up for work. These days, that’s exactly what a lot of people think, and COVID has only made it worse. To be fair, it seems that the applicants for unemployment payments have decreased, ever so slightly, since the worst moments of the pandemic. But it’s the exception that proves the rule.

A country built on the honest labor of its citizens should never turn into a country that has to beg people to come back to work.

Let’s hope we figure that out before “Momma” runs out of sauce.

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Copyright 2021 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].