If your clergy offers excuses or dismisses Trump’s insane post, offering anything other than condemnation, then you need to (a) find a new congregation
or (b) stock up on asbestos underwear for eternity.
Like Marriages, Wars are Easier to Get Into Than Out Of
I think General McChrystal has presented the most thorough and insightful analysis of Trump's Iranian fiasco of any out there. It is well worth your time to read https://www.nytimes.com/2026/
Without doubt, Iran has been a bad actor, supporting Hezbollah and oppressing people with sharia law. Whether that warrants starting a war with no endgame is another question.
There are two reasons that Trump can't simply declare victory and go home: Iran and Israel. Iran is fighting an asymmetrical war; this is not WWI trenches or WWII tank battles. This can range from drone strikes to computer hacking to terrorist attacks and who knows what else. Israel will do what Israel wants to do. Period. Neither Iran nor Israel is on Trump's timetable.
There is a long history of distrust between the West and Iran, not just 1979 but 1953 and 1941. You might also listen the the four-part series from The Rest is History podcast about the fall of the Shah and the Iranian Revolution. https://therestishistory.com/episodes/fall-of-the-shah-part-1
Other thoughts ----Pete Hegseth talks about "silly rules of engagement". Throwing out rules is a two-edged sword and a very dangerous one in the Middle East.
Make no mistake, this "preventative" strike is a war; it became that with the sinking of the Iranian ship off the coast of Sri Lanka.
Trump's standard operating procedure of erratic behavior then moving on to the next reckless, ill-conceived project may be stuck in a real quagmire this time. Iran also is not Greenland. Sadly, the global economy is impacted, and that means people and nations with less resource than the US are going to truly suffer, not just be inconvenienced.
The jack-booted thugs in ICE costumes are shredding the Constitution daily and have no respect for human life. Granted they are hastily recruited, ill trained, and poorly led, but that is not really an excuse. They (and their counterparts in Border Patrol, Homeland Security, etc) follow the lead of their master whose power "is limited only by his own morality", the life-long cheat, bully, adulterer, whoremonger, and grifter who sells autographed Bibles to his brain-washed minions. Our nation is imploding because of the demented and dementia-ridden Beast in the White House, who is friend of our enemies and enemy to our friends on a global scale.
Heaven help us.
Looking to basic physics Newton’s Third Law of Motion states: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction force. It would appear that politics in America adheres to physics rather than philosophy or morality. Neither party want to make things right but pushing back to the center and some semblance or normalcy after the other party has been too far in one direction or other. This leads to increasing extremism. Beware the pendulum
Now the push is into sheer madness. At this point this should be visible now even to some of his supporters. There is no other word for the extremism of President 47. Do not say his name for he feeds on hearing it like fire feeds on oxygen. He thinks in terms of absolute power…but was already corrupt before he took office.
From the silliness to the Gulf of
America to the vile comments on Rob Reiner’s death to strafing survivors of a
boat struck by missile to ICE murdering a mother in her car. It gets worse every day. This is megalomania of the Nero/Caligula variety - boundless evil. There
will be a judgment, possibly of a Nuremburg type, definitely of an eternal nature.
February 6 is the birthday of the late David W. Cooley, president of the Memphis Chamber of Commerce from 1968-73 and then again from 1984-95. I went to work for him in 1987. I was 25 and reasonably sure that I was pretty fair PR hand. He assured me that I was not nearly as good as I thought I was, taught me a good deal, and recognized other talents in which he encouraged me (large scale event planning being one). No Gen X or Millennial could last a day with Mr. Cooley; they would simply wither, die, and melt down to a small pile of ash after one of his inspired chewings out. A Marine who rose to the rank of corporal, he was no nonsense. “Your turn in the barrel”, “the hog is in the ditch”, or “that don’t get it walkin’ or ridin” were frightening phrases but not nearly as much as a note on his special blue notepad.
He could also praise and mentor. He was an excellent communicator. I learned a lot about public speaking from him. I’m not talking about the sanitized TED Talk pablum that passes for speaking these days. I am talk about a stump speech. Cadence is a lost art. Most important of all, a speaker must watch the reaction of his or her audience. About 75 % of public speakers I hear are just tone deaf and canned. It’s a waste of everyone time really. Oh, I can tell you from experience that you have not lived until you encounter a skeptical or hostile audience. That’s a wake up call unlike any other.
Cooley was a lifelong chamber man. It was a career path and required an interesting skill set – part researcher, part preacher, part negotiator, coalition builder, and driven competitor. Civic pride on a scale befitting the town you worked in and for. He had a favorite short poem he would sometimes work into speeches, a little doggerel verse called “The Kind of a Town” or something like that; wish I could remember the words. If he had been preaching to a congregation, this would have been his benediction.
International Paper came to Memphis on his watch. There were other notable accomplishments in that era as well. It was a good time for Memphis and the Mid-South.
He was rough on my in my youth and
he wonderfully kind decades later when he would check in with me periodically to
see how Memphis was faring from his retirement in South Carolina. A chamber man
through and through. David W. Cooley
1929-2022.
Two plumbing project going on – one somewhat urgent and hitting lots of obstacles but I’m getting it done, the other less urgent but already is mild disaster stages. So I have thus turned a three bathroom house into , one functional shower/tub!
I miss my Reese house some days. Even though much older than my Olive Branch house, I had lived there so long that I knew it to the bones and how to repair /maintain. Of course after making my first visit to my old Poplar-Highland Kroger a couple weeks ago and seeing armed guards checking receipts of customers leaving…well, I think I’ll stay in Mississippi.
But back to plumbing. Spurred by
the falling of the giant oak summer before last, I have having to re-route a
drainage pipe which runs 85’ from the house to what was the middles of cow pasture
40 years ago and is now part of my yard. I had never been able to find the
outlet of said drain pipe before the tree fell and the clearing crew removed a
sizable portion as thicket as well as part of the tree (the rest remains as a
large and intriguing lawn ornament).
Well, said exposed pipe has created a mini mudhole such that my Kubota zero turn got tuck this summer
and I had to pull it out with the pick up truck. Thus I am now adding 100’ more
of pipe to get the water to an actual drainage ditch. It would be about 70” as
the crow flies, but by needing to zig and zag around the big tree and some
stumps , it is just over 100’.
I would have done this earlier in the year but wouldn’t you know I am working some sort of damn event just about every weekend; I need to get this done before winter so I spent this weekend on it and took a vacation day today.
I am running 100’ of 2” PVC. My experience hereto fore with PVC pip has been sink traps and about a 3’ run in the attic to fix a leak in the HVAC. This job probably should have gone to a contractor but here I am - about half as handy as my dad but probably three-quarters as stubborn as my mom so naturally I am going to try it.
This weekend I marked off the course with the best slope for water drainage with stake and string. Because the variance on an angle can make a small mistake a big problem, I went further and laid out 100” of PVC to see exactly where to dig. Sounds simple and it is btu that took the better part of two days.
Today, I thought the implementation would be simple because I reserved a trenching machine from Home Depot. Had the machine worked, I would be done with the trenching in an hour. But the first machine was broken (noted before I left the parking lot) and the second had a start problem (noted after I hauled in home behind my car on small trailer hoping not to get run over). So I dug it by hand using a pick, an ax (after I broke my 20 year chain saw on roots) , and a shovel and that only took six hours. Well, the 80” I finished took six, I still have a bit more to go.
Someone is going to say did you
call before you dig? One of the broken trenchers at HD was broken because someone
hit a gas line and it caught fire. Ouch.
Well, no I did not because I didn’t have to. I know that this spot has
been nothing but cow pasture since 1940 when my grandfather bought the land and
the only thing I might find would be some old barbed wire (which I did) and, of
course, fire ants (a couple of which crawled up by boot, socks and pantleg to
bit my knee. I did use his ax to cut some tree roots, the same ax he always
kept in his pickup truck bed behind the spare tire.
The weather was fairly temperate – but humid – and the ground reasonably soft, and while I am tired and sore , very sore, I got it done.
Plumbing project #2 however is very nearly at the point where I call a plumber. I am less worried about the price than the ridicule…but then again, this one is less time sensitive and I will probably try to fix it a time or tow or three more. Did I mention that I inherited mother’s stubborn streak?!
This is far more than you want to
know about my day but I thought it would
be a distraction from the election. Anyone that wants to help di out that
remaining 20’ tomorrow night and not watch TV is most welcome.
It may be an oversimplification to say that each of these stepped into a vacuum, but it is fair to say that these countries were in a radical state of change with no clear path forward and great anxiety among the populations.
The Ottoman Empire existed from 1299 to 1922. The long and complex history was marked by conquest, often religion-fueled. Like erstwhile adversary Russia, it was an absolute monarchy (sultanate) and often anachronistic. Ataturk’s accomplishment was to create the secular Republic of Turkey and work toward modernization. Modern Turkey has been an ally of the West from the Korean War to the present as well as trading partner.
China was united as an imperial state in 221 BC and various dynasties continued until the establishment of the Republic of China in 1912. There was trade with the Roman empire and the creation of a rich cultural history. Chinese fleets were involved in trade from East Africa to Japan and beyond during the Ming dynasty. In the 19th century western powers negatively impacted China (Opium War 1840) and unlike the Japanese, the Chinese did not modernize and did not fare well in opposing the West. The 1912 Republic was beset with problems including regional warlords. Chiang Kai-shek managed to contain these and bring Western style reforms to military and government. Fighting both the Japanese and Mao’s communists, Chiang was beleaguered for much of his time on the mainland before retreating to Taiwan in 1949.
A newspaperman Mussolini had leftist political leanings early on but managed nonetheless to become the father of Fascism. He led Italy from 1922 to 1943 and was executed by Italian partisans in 1945. His chief objective was to unite the Italian people who for centuries self-identified by region, city, and ethnicity. He is famously said to have “made the trains run on time” but more impactful was his work on a spirit of nationalism by engaging in a series of small wars in the 1930s. He did not join the Axis in WWII hostilities until June of 1940 having originally stated a non-belligerent status in 1939.
Three very different personalities with one common denominator of establishing (or redefining) a national identity. In ordinary times the defining of national identity can be fairly nuanced by pop culture, elections, the emergence of technology, and less decisive events than world wars or radical changes in governmental structure but the 1920s were anything but ordinary.
More importantly national leaders must be judged in no small part by how well their people fared.
The Italians suffered the strain of being nearly constantly at war - Libya, Ethiopia, Albania, and then the later world wide conflict. Accordingly Mussolini was viewed as hero, buffoon, and albatross at various times - finally the Italians themselves had enough and hanged him.
Turkey under Ataturk by contrast brought emancipation to women, an organized government, trade & industry, a new education systems & scores of new schools, and more. He is remembered 80 years later in the words of the current president with "eternal respect".
Chiang's China is a mixed bag. His accomplishments include land reforms, reining in the warlords, and some economic development. Beset by wars - some foisted upon him, some chosen - he was "building the ship while sailing the ship" in setting up a more modernized country in the midst of that chaos. The retreat to Taiwan in 1949 ended the experiment on the mainland, but created a thriving economy on the island. Mao's communist country is now the world's second largest economy due in large part to massive manufacturing & exporting... a kind of capitalism. I wonder would the Generalissimo would think about that?!
You may have heard a little chatter about fossil fuels contributing to global warming. There might be something to it. If you are old enough, you remember the oil embargo of the 1970s and if older still, gas rationing during WWII. Clearly the supply of petroleum products will eventually be outstripped by demand. The Jetsons need to hurry up with producing those flying cars!
Meanwhile, for those nonprofit fundraisers with the energy to read this after the Giving Day posting frenzy, a word of caution of about well-rounded revenue sources. Previously I probably mentioned the danger of grant dependency. With one, three, or five year life cycles and the temptation of mission drift, there is a danger of creating programs and projects that are not sustainable. I would also admonish about dependency on corporate support , but we are all only too well aware that it is drying up.
So back to fossil fuels and fundraising. If your non-profit is heavily dependent upon bequests, estate gifts, and memorials, you need to be making new friends and well as remembering the old ones at a rate of 3:1 (source: National Association of Made Up Numbers -- but still a pretty good guess). No more dinosaurs are giving their lives for your petroleum reserve confidence. No more sweet little old people -- I say this as I eagerly approach Medicare eligibility -- are suddenly appearing on your donor roster with an intent to donate for 20+ years. Bequests come from long term relationships not one night stands (just in case there is anyone I have not offended yet).
Donors are not numbers or commodities despite our abnormal love of databases and spreadsheets. Donors are people who have interests, emotions, and a need to interact. Donors are courted, crops are cultivated. Everyone gets tired of being asked for money; people like being asked to volunteer, advise, meet the front line staff, and engage in meaningful ways.
Best of luck on surviving year-end fundraising. If you think you may not survive, I can send you our planned giving brochure...but we hope you feel better!
Of all of the kings who reigned in Mesopotamia the name which probably comes to mind most readily is Nebuchadnezzer II (reign 605 – 562 BC) of Chaldean Babylon.
Oh sure there is a lot of be said for Sargon of Akkad (reign 2334-2279 BC ) and legal minds will lean toward Hammurabi (reign 1792-1750 BC) of Amorite Babylon, but the widest recognition comes in no small part due to the good work of generations of Sunday School teachers and Nebuchadnezzer's conquest of Judah, Daniel in the lion’s den, the fiery furnace temporarily occupied by Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and then of course eating grass for a few years.
What you might not know is that Nebuchadnezzer built probably the first history museum. Babylon was just re-emerging after years of Assyrian domination and needed an extreme makeover. The new king got right to work – new temple to Marduk the hometown deity, really nice hanging gardens, and a museum among other things.
The museum was dedicated to the history of previous cultures in Mesopotamia of which many had come and gone since the Sumerians basically invented writing around 3,500 BC. It had statuary, cuneiform tablets, pottery, but oddly no gift shop as far as we know.
This is probably a good time to take a quick look at your sundial or calendar. Where are we on the timeline of familiar world history? Fall of Troy about 1,200ish BC, Romulus founds Rome around 715 BC but the city does not rid itself of Etruscan kings until around 509, the Peloponnesian War runs 431-404 BC, the Zhou Dynasty is running things in China during the reign of Nebuchadnezzer, the Olmecs are winding down in Mesoamerica, and the Buddha aka Siddartha Gautama in born in 563 in Nepal. Got it? Okay.
What happened before 3,500 BC? A lot but we don’t know as much because pre-history is generally defined as the time before written language. There were surely permanent settlements, agricultural and trade economic systems, spoken languages, etc but the documentation of this come more from archeologists than anthropologists.
NOTA BENE: Just because people lived in cultures without written language doesn’t mean they weren’t intelligent. Are you smarter than a 5th grader? I hope so. Are you smarter than someone who lived in 1927, 1834, 1061, 235, or 321 BC? You undoubtedly have a great deal more knowledge of all sorts of things, but are you wiser, more complex emotionally, better at using available resources, a better problem solver, or more content? Not necessarily.
But back to the museum. If we talk about history from 3,500 BC (or BCE, we can discuss that another time) to the midpoint of Nebuchadnezzer’s reign, say 584, that is 2,916 years. The range from 584 to 2023 is only 1,439 years. True, with steam powering the industrial revolution, the transatlantic cable connecting Europe and American via telegraph and then telephone, the electric light bulb, radio & television, air flight then space slight, and the internet, the rate of change of the past 250 years alone is staggering. Even so we are all products of our time.
Our time, perhaps a bit more than three score and ten now with modern medicine, is still a blip in a 5,523 timeline (add several more thousand for pre-history living if you really want to feel itty bitty tiny in the grand scheme).
So bravo Nebuchadnezzer and all the subsequent history and natural history museum curators and supporters down through the ages. It is important to be present and live in the moment, but there is so very much to be learned from the past.
I grew up in Olive Branch (family farm and church) and Whitehaven (Harding Academy at Hwy 51 & Holmes then SBEC on Tulane). Every so often on the AM radio a new Elvis song would come out and that was kind of cool. I was doing Algebra I homework (7th grade , a momentary prodigy for math but that soon passed) at home one afternoon when the news came that Elvis had passed away. It was sad of course but not a surprise. Trips to Methodist South and health peril had been broadcast before.
There was no Renaissance or Reformation per se in Russia. At the ascension of Peter the Great (1682-1725), the main garments were medieval robes, women of the royal family were kept locked in towers, literacy was barely existent and contact with other countries shunned. Russian forces of that era were mauled by Ottomans and Swedes. There was no northern seaport. Serfdom, flogging, death by impalement or any number of similarly gruesome methods was common. Russia lost the Crimean War in 1856 to England, France, and the Ottomans. Fast forward to 1904 and Russia is trounced by Japan. The revolution in 1917 takes place partly because of the incompetent leadership during WWI. The Soviet Union won WWII by a combination of attrition and scorched earth, brawn over brain. Post war Europe, the Iron Curtain, and Cold War are within memory for many.
These are all a big deal it seems. The first one is a very big deal of course and the subsequent ones simply mark the realization that we have survived another decade. I remember celebrating 40 in a big way but 50 not so much. And this week 60 is about waxing nostalgic.
Who knows how much is left? No one. I have a long list of things that I have not done - marriage, kids, international travel, focusing anything enough to be really good at it! But I have plenty of things I enjoy doing and have had some notable accomplishments -- some have stood the test of time, some have not.
I am no cognizant of putting off things which I will find enjoyable and enriching because I have just one more task, project, job to handle. Seems like I have missed a few years of fun events which occur in April or October just because I am too busy to take the time to enjoy. I will work on that.
It is always nice to just catch up with people too, that requires intentionality and I will make the effort.
Not yet time to call it a wrap and just reflect though - there is more to enjoy.
Sister and brother, painter and photographer, a familial familiarity but two distinctive styles – this is Gore + Gore, a pop up art show opening Friday, April 9, at the Medicine Factory at 85 Virginia Avenue W.
Kat Gore is a well known painter. A graduate of Memphis College of Art, her work has been a favorite of interior designers, has shown in commercial galleries, and graced a Memphis in May poster. Her style is markedly her own whether a particular piece is whimsical or pensive. Her use of muted color and imagery that may be bold or subtle coupled with the occasional bit of mixed media always leads her fans to wonder what is coming with the next body of work in the same way that children run down a staircase on Christmas morning.
Sanford Gore is a bit more enigmatic, lower profile, exploring and creating quietly, now with a near ancient wet glass technique, now with a modern camera. The images are haunting or exuberant or both.
In their first duo show (in adulthood), the pair will showcase new works in the 1912 patent medicine factory downtown that has quickly become an artist’s colony, housing both studio space and exhibit areas.
The show opens on Friday, from 5:30 to 7:30 pm with an additional open house on Saturday, April 10 , from 10 am until 12:00 pm. The show will remain up through Saturday , April 17, with subsequent viewing by appointment.
We can find
dozens of articles from the Association of Fundraising Professionals and other credible
sources, but equally we can go with what we know instinctively.
Relationship
building is a lifecycle
·
Donor prospecting/cultivation – find them
·
Donor engagement – get them interested and on
board
·
Donor increase in giving – encourage greater
participation
·
Donor as advocate – when the donor becomes an
ambassador to peer exponential growth become possible.
·
Donor bequest – the commitment to a legacy gift
is the greatest testament of donor confidence.
First
rule: Don’t take an engagement ring on the first date. It is off putting. Relationships develop over time.
Second
rule: Relationships are two-fold – the relation between organizational rep
and donor and the relation between organization and donor. The organization
will outlast the rep (or it is a really shaky org) so make sure that the org
and donor have a real relationship.
Third
rule: Relationships are transactional. One way is not sustainable over time
– donors get bored, feel used, feel unloved, and move on unless they are
engaged.
Metric:
Stay in touch. The longer the interval in actual person-to-person communication
(newsletters don’t count), the colder the call when you make it. Calling for no
real reason often sparks suspicion and just feels awkward for all involved,
therefore use any logical reason to touch base (call, email, message) such as upcoming
talks or webinars, events such as 5k run
or wine pull (according to possible interests of the donor!), birthdays, and
art exhibits or sports team standings.
NOTA BENE:
Our wide range of donors have different preferences for communication – text,
FB Messenger, phone call, email, letter (not form).
Donors
are a moving target
·
Donors come and go – if they get bored with us
or more excited by another organization, they move on
·
Donors are multi-faceted – they likely support
more than one organization, not just ours AND there is likely a hierarchy in
the donors mind of which organization should receive the bigger check.
·
Donors have lives – Things happen – small
children in school evolving to empty nesters, career changes, household moves,
death of a spouse, divorces, etc – and
if we keep them through good times and bad, there may be ups and downs in
giving that may or may not reflect how much they like our org.
First
rule: Stay on top of the info - new addresses, new phone numbers, new emails,
new employers, new spouses, new last names – we have to watch for every clue
and update as best we can. Jot down the number on the caller ID , observe the
email address sending an RSVP.
Second
rule: Connect the dots – obits are
the best tool for confirming who is married to whom, parents’ names, children’s
names, and more. Glean information everywhere you can and stow it in RE.
Third
rule: Track as best you can the community involvement of donors – other
orgs they support, their memberships, their passions and interest…these latter
make for good talking points.
Metric:
Continually update records. Time spent on updating information is well spent.
Know the
product
·
Donors have heard our standard speech – ever go
to a comedy club for the second set by the same comedian? Or a concert tour
where the band does some “spontaneous” banter by rote in the next city?
·
Donors want to know what is new now – fair
question, don’t we all?
·
Donors want to know --- lots of things
First
rule: Keep up as best you can with
changes within your own organization– be they virus related or not – because
someone may ask you and it would be nice to have an answer ready.
Second
rule: Find ways to engage your co-workers in departments/areas where
programmatic work is taking place, i.e. the trenches floor. It’s an eye opener.
You’ll learn much more than the talking points in your brochures.
Third
rule: Give tours of programmatic areas (in non pandemic times) and GO ON
tours with co-workers who may have different perspectives and talking points.
Be a secret shopper with a notepad. You would learn something new, but it is
also about watching the donor’s interest peak or wane, listening to what they
ask.
Fourth rule:
Share what you learn with your co-workers in development.
Metric:
Learn more about your organization at every opportunity and build relationships
within the organization as well as outside the organization.
