If you want to get the plain

truth —

Be not concerned with right and

wrong.

The conflict between right and

wrong —

Is the sickness of the mind.

—Seng-ts’an

You’ve heard me talk about Brenda Ueland numerous times. Among other things, she was a columnist with a paper in the Twin Cities years ago. “Strength to Your Sword Arm” was one of her three books. The book features a collection of previously published and unpublished articles and essays. She died at the age of 93, in 1985.

On the chapter of discipline and children, she says her motto for raising children is always be careful never to cross a child. And she never did. She also tried to tell children what she thought, but never assumed or felt that she was necessarily right. She got rid of what she calls “a splendidly educated French woman, taking care of her Gabby, a governess but she believed in “discipline” that Brenda refers to as “the flute –voiced, relentless, will-breaking that is practiced all over the world by stupid, well-educated people.” She also thought there is nothing in the world as bad as scolding.

My preferred chapter is titled “Tell Me More,” telling of “the great powerful thing that listening is. And how we forget it. And how we don’t listen to our children, or those we love. And least of all — which is so important too — to those we do not love. But we should.” Brenda tells us: “When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life. You know how if a person laughs at your jokes you become funnier and funnier, and if he does not, every tiny little joke in you weazens up and dies. It makes people happy and free when they are listened to.”

I read this article the first time when I pulled it from a magazine while browsing around the Albert Lea High School library when I was employed as a day-treatment counselor years ago.

I’ve said enough about Brenda for now, at least for this column.

I will switch over to Dick Cheney, who stated over the past weekend that the Bush anti-terror policies kept the United States safer and how he thinks that Obama has made Americans less safe. Nothing serious has happed since Sept. 11. Mr. Cheney says, “I think those programs were absolutely essential to the success we enjoyed of being able to collect the intelligence that let us defeat all further attempts to launch attacks against the United States since 9/11.”

Has he kept count of the soldier and civilian deaths and suicides?

My own belief is what more could have happened after Sept. 11? If it did happen the way it was reported, one has to look what the cost has been to America in response. It was the ground force of a military buildup that continues to climb. I believe New York plans to replace the twin towers with another spectacle verses stilling this sacred ground.

Wasn’t it about that time Cheney assembled his pack oil friends out West to develop new sources of oil and was it the ambition of the previous administration to capture Iraq and bring an end to Saddam and the lives of multitudes of Iraqi’s — innocents,’ many of them children and forcing many Iraqi’s to leave their own land?

Cheney said, “It doesn’t do just to go back and say, ‘Well, George Bush was president and that is why everything is screwed up, because that is simply not true.”

I agree. It couldn’t have happened without the help of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz  and of course Carl Rove. What Cheney fails to mention in his “Bush anti-terror policies” have increased the growth in terrorism.

I suspect the economy we are facing has been influenced by the work force operating that same administration that is currently taking its toll on us.

Cheney reports that he has seen a report itemizing specific attacks that had been stopped because of the intelligence gathered through those programs.

Is it even fair to call torture “those programs?”

The good news, I believe, is that Obama has suspended military trials for suspected terrorists and announced he will close the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay as well as overseas sites where the CIA has held detainees. He has ordered CIA interrogators to abide by the U.S. Army Field Manual’s regulation for treatment of detainees and denounced water boarding.