Category Archives: War & Peace

A Marker for her Mother: A Survivor’s Journey

The case itself was old news – from 1974, in fact. But only in 2007, thirty-three years later, was a marker to be placed on the victim’s grave, by her daughter.

The victim was Beryl Mitchell, killed by her Army Green Beret husband on December 1, 1974: stabbed, strangled, and dumped nude in a wooded area of Ft. Bragg. Her husband was later convicted of murder and spent several years in an Army prison.

Their daughter, Christine Horne, was in elementary school. She worked for decades to overcome the impact of that trauma. As a closing part of that process, Horne was coming to Fayetteville to organize a memorial for her mother and install a headstone; the fact that the ceremony took place at the beginning of what is called Domestic Violence Awareness Month was entirely not coincidental.

The memorial became an impressive public event; both the police chief and the Cumberland County sheriff were there –though the army did not respond to her invitation to send someone. The event climaxed in the release of thirty-three lavender balloons at the cemetery. A crowd of fifty-plus watched the balloons rise into the blue sky. Among them were many women, survivors of domestic violence, who showed up unannounced to be part of the witness.

I was Director at Quaker House in Fayetteville then; and Quaker House became a quiet part of this story. Domestic violence was not one of our program priorities then, though of course we heard about it in our counseling, and as part of the life of the community. (The military has an ongoing epidemic of domestic violence, which it works diligently to downplay and keep quiet. Of course, much the same thing could be said of the rest of our society as well.)

Dog Days True Quaker Stories: The Party That Went On Too Long

Much of my initial “information” about the Communist Party came from watching a TV show, “I Led Three Lives,” after we got a TV in mid-1952. The show started the next year and ran for more than a hundred episodes. It was inspired by the true-life career of Herbert Philbrick of Boston.

For years, Philbrick was a seemingly ordinary white collar office worker. But he was also a secret member of the Communist Party, spying and planning to overthrow the American government — and even more secretly, a double agent helping the FBI foil the Communist schemes. In 1952, he published a best-selling book about all this; and Hollywood jumped on the story line.

(In an episode I sadly missed, one such –fictional– plot was about how the party was going to turn vacuum cleaners into handheld missile launchers. Sound, um, far-fetched? But J. Edgar Hoover approved that episode, as he did all of them, so it must have been thrilling.)

Now I know much better how, in the late 1940s and into the 1960s, “the Communists” were a very big deal for Americans. Hiss’s two trials marked a major turning point in U.S. public opinion, toward a hard anti-communism, of the sort I grew up absorbing like milk on cornflakes.

Two Election Comments — Bear With Me

Now, here in Carolina we currently have a redhot race for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Richard Burr, a faceless Republican known mostly for saying little, collecting millions from coal companies, and being the best friend & defender of torture in the U.S. Senate.

Burr’s challenger is former state Senator Deborah Ross. A year ago, when she announced, few gave the little-known Ross much of a chance against Burr.

But that was before Donald Trump turned the state into a purple battleground, and before the federal courts threw out most of the vote suppression tools the right-wing legislature had enacted to hold down Democratic voting. Now the polls are very close, and Burr’s attack ads are getting down & dirty.
This is Burr’s big attack ad. Note the three key elements: pro sex offender; ACLU Lawyer; — and in the background, where many might miss it but the base won’t, is the visage of a presumably predatory male of dark hue and evil intentions.

How down & dirty? Just a couple days ago, the senator unveiled a saturation attack ad against Ross that uses three magic, time-tested, silver bullet Democrat-destroying elements: “pro-sex offenders” and — wait for it — “ACLU.”

But there’s more: in the background, an ominous dark-skinned male visage.

For the GOP & further right base in NC, any of these is a killer; the combo adds up to a go-for-broke, four-pronged assault. And the ACLU thing, at least, is true, Ross did work there, from the mid-’90s til 2002 when she ran for the legislature.

That’s fine with me — hey, I’m a proud ACLU contributor/member. But this is still North Carolina . . . .