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Weather: Partly cloudy. Not as cool with highs in the lower 70s. North winds 5 to 10 mph. Saturday Night: Mostly cloudy with a 20 percent chance of showers. Lows in the upper 50s. North winds around 5 mph.
Saturday Night: Mostly cloudy. Lows in the upper 50s. North winds 5 to 10 mph. See the daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
Today at a Glance:
The Saturday Flagler Beach Farmers Market is scheduled for 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. today at Wickline Park, 315 South 7th Street, featuring prepared food, fruit, vegetables , handmade products and local arts from more than 30 local merchants. The market is hosted by Flagler Strong, a non-profit.
Tree-lighting ceremony: The City of Palm Coast is inviting residents and visitors to the 11th Annual Tree Lighting Ceremony at Central Park in Town Center, 975 Central Ave., Palm Coast from 6 to 9 p.m. Join Santa, the Palm Coast City Council, and the Rotary Club of Flagler County as they count down to the lighting of a beautiful tree and celebrate the arrival of the most wonderful time of the year! Details here.
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center: Nightly from 6 to 9 p.m. at Palm Coast’s Central Park, with 55 lighted displays you can enjoy with a leisurely stroll around the pond in the park. Admission to Fantasy Lights is free, but donations to support Rotary’s service work are gladly accepted. Holiday music will pipe through the speaker system throughout the park, Santa’s Village, which has several elf houses for the kids to explore, will be open, with Santa’s Merry Train Ride nightly (weather permitting), and Santa will be there every Sunday night until Christmas, plus snow on weekends! On certain nights, live musical performances will be held on the stage.
Gamble Jam: Musicians of all ages can bring instruments and chairs and join in the jam session, 2 to 5 p.m. . Program is free with park admission! Gamble Rogers Memorial State Recreation Area at Flagler Beach, 3100 S. Oceanshore Blvd., Flagler Beach, FL. Call the Ranger Station at (386) 517-2086 for more information. The Gamble Jam is a family-friendly event that occurs every second and fourth Saturday of the month. The park hosts this acoustic jam session at one of the pavilions along the river to honor the memory of James Gamble Rogers IV, the Florida folk musician who lost his life in 1991 while trying to rescue a swimmer in the rough surf.
Grace Community Food Pantry, 245 Education Way, Bunnell, drive-thru open today from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. The food pantry is organized by Pastor Charles Silano and Grace Community Food Pantry, a Disaster Relief Agency in Flagler County. Feeding Northeast Florida helps local children and families, seniors and active and retired military members who struggle to put food on the table. Working with local grocery stores, manufacturers, and farms we rescue high-quality food that would normally be wasted and transform it into meals for those in need. The Flagler County School District provides space for much of the food pantry storage and operations. Call 386-586-2653 to help, volunteer or donate.
In Coming Days:
Dec. 23: Culmination of toy drive for Toys for Tots at AW Custom Kitchens, European Village, starting at 11 a.m. A drawing for all eligible participants will take place at 2 p.m. Anyone who will have donated toys for the drive will have a chance to win various items, including a 65-inch 4K Smart TV, an Apple iPad, a pair of Apple Air Pods, and gift cards from the co-sponsors of the event. Fifty such cards have been donated. With proof of a voucher, donors also will receive a free hot dog, a free drink, a free popcorn, a free cotton candy, and a free snow cone. There will be a variety of fun things to do such as a bouncy house for children in thanks to the community for its generosity. See details here.
Notably: Let’s try a little exercise in perspective. The word is sometimes used too casually. It can use a little perspective of its own. It can have all sorts of implications: false assumptions, stereotype, deception, trompe l’oeil. The absence of perspective can be fatal, not just to pilots and ship captains. So. September 1874 was near the end of Reconstruction. Bands of white supremacists rampaged across the South, expropriating Black properties, terrorizing and murdering Black families, threatening anyone who’d vote for Blacks, or Blacks who’d vote. Impunity reigned. Ulysses Grant’s administration was rapidly abandoning its commitments to protect the newly enfranchised. William Lloyd Garrison that month wrote a letter to the Boston Journal, decrying the collapse of order in the South. He quoted this long passage from a current issue of the Iuka Herald, in Mississippi (a town the size of Bunnell still in business in the northeastern-most corner of the state):
We must act speedily and decidedly, no matter what it costs. Better lose the lives of half our citizens than see the whole outrageously trampled upon by an ignorant and savage negro mob. We suggest to our brethren the formation of White Leagues in every civil district in every county in the State. Let them meet in secret and be bound by the most solemn oaths, and let death be the penalty of any violations of the Order. Already, we have good reason to believe, such leagues have been formed in many counties, and the thing is becoming more and more popular every day of its existence. This land is ours, by right and by inheritance, and we must, we will control it, even at the expense of oceans of blood and millions of lives. The constant cry all over the South is, the negroes are threatening to burn this town and that; to murder the women and children in this place or the other. Let the hellish barbarian brutes go on; we will take a score of lives for every woman or child murdered; and when once we start, in fact not a damnable negro savage assassin will be left in the South. We accept the gauge.
Now let’s go through that again and change just a couple of words:
We must act speedily and decidedly, no matter what it costs. Better lose the lives of half our citizens than see the whole outrageously trampled upon by an ignorant and savage Arab mob. We suggest to our brethren the formation of Jewish Defense Leagues in every civil district in every county in the State. Let them meet in secret and be bound by the most solemn oaths, and let death be the penalty of any violations of the Order. Already, we have good reason to believe, such leagues have been formed in many counties, and the thing is becoming more and more popular every day of its existence. This land is ours, by right and by inheritance, and we must, we will control it, even at the expense of oceans of blood and millions of lives. The constant cry all over the South is, the Palestinians are threatening to burn this town and that; to murder the women and children in this place or the other. Let the hellish barbarian brutes go on; we will take a score of lives for every woman or child murdered; and when once we start, in fact not a damnable negro savage assassin will be left in the South. We accept the gauge.
With the exception of that part about “death be the penalty of any violations of the Order” (Israelis have always considered their own lives sacred, as they should, but other lives not so sacred and more like disposable, as they should not). Those very words could have been written by Jabotinsky, Begin, Shamir, Sharon, Netanyahu (even as some of them claimed tepidly to denounce the Meir Kahanes of the real JDL). In one variation or another, they have been spoken by them. Are spoken still, words and deeds, as we lose count of the dead of Gaza, only a minority of them men of fighting age.
—P.T.
Now this:
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The Live Calendar is a compendium of local and regional political, civic and cultural events. You can input your own calendar events directly onto the site as you wish them to appear (pending approval of course). To include your event in the Live Calendar, please fill out this form.
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Acoustic Jam Circle At The Community Center In The Hammock
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
For the full calendar, go here.
“Murderers? What d’you expect from them? From their point of view, we are aliens from outer space who have landed and trespassed on their land, gradually taken over parts of it, and while we promise them that we’ve come here to lavish all sorts of goodies on them, cure them of ringworm and trachoma, free them from backwardness, ignorance, and feudal oppression–we’ve craftily grabbed more and more of their land. Well, what did you think? That they should thank us? That they should come out to greet us with drums and cymbals? That they should respectfully hand over the keys to the whole land just because our ancestors lived here once? Is it any wonder they’ve taken up arms against us? And now that we’ve inflicted a crushing defeat on them and hundreds of thousands of them are living in refugee camps–what, d’you expect them to celebrate with us and wish us luck?”
—From Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness (2002).
Ray W. says
The Vanderbilt Project on Unity & American Democracy recently published its Civics 101: Keep Demagogues Out of Democracy. A significant portion of the paper is devoted to our founding fathers and their thoughts on demagoguery.
The golden rule of a healthy constitutional democracy, it intoned, comes from “Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Livy, Edward Gibbon, Alexis de Tocqueville, Abraham Lincoln and the framers of the Constitution.”
“… The golden rule is that demagogues destroy democracies. In their writings and speeches, these incisive political philosophers teach us that demagogues … are to the body politic of democracy what cancer is to the human body. …”
“The framers of the Constitution were the first Americans to understand this all-important principle of democracy, so much so that thwarting the rise of a demagogue was one of the primary motivations behind the Constitutional Convention of 1787.”
“Less than two weeks after the start of the convention, George Washington made this fact plain in a letter to the Marquis de Lafayette. In the letter, Washington explained that his crucial purpose in attending the emergency gathering of delegates in Philadelphia that summer was to prevent a demagogue from gaining power in the politically unstable young nation — and thus eroding constitutionalism and stripping Americans of their newly won rights, freedoms and liberties.”
“Washington described to Lafayette how he had recently been compelled out of retirement by an urgent risk to the United States. ‘Anarchy and confusion’ were threatening the security of the American people and the rule of law. But, Washington wrote, there was a deeper risk than this. It was that the political chaos of those years created fertile ground for exploitation ‘by some aspiring demagogue who will not consult the interest of his country so much as his own ambitious views.'”
“In a letter written three weeks later to David Stuart, a political colleague from Virginia, Washington reiterated the point, lamenting that the widespread distrust in the federal government under the Articles of Confederation had rendered ‘the situation of this great country weak, inefficient and disgraceful.’ In this letter, too, he concluded by warning about the destructive impact of ‘Demagogue[s]’ on the United States federal government. …”
“During the convention itself, the framers consciously built the Constitution as a bulwark against demagogues. In the surviving records of the speeches given at the Constitutional Convention, the word ‘demagogue’ was used 21 times by the framers as they crafted the Constitution’s checks and balances to prevent these politicians from gaining power and then transforming democracy into despotism. …”
“Later, [Alexander] Hamilton went on to predict an ominous decline in republics from demagoguery to tyranny. As he put it in Federalist No. 1: ‘History will teach us that … of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants. …'”
“Nearly four decades later, Abraham Lincoln echoed the framers, cautioning his countrymen about these ‘men of ambition.’ In 1838 in an address to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln warned that Americans might one day become disaffected from their government, and, out of desperation, they might turn to ‘an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon.'”
To the pestilential partisan member of faction, as James Madison described him in Federalist Paper No. 37, a demagogue is anyone belonging to an opposition party. To the hoped for virtuous man (or woman) that was to be fostered by our liberal democratic Constitutional republic, a demagogue is anyone who contorts reason to achieve a perceived personal benefit instead of conforming one’s thoughts to reason, that form of reason as our founding fathers understood it, and following reason to wherever reason leads one, to the benefit of us all.