Ever see a cockfight?

It was the first of six consecutive weeks spent in Nicaragua on my first trip to that Central American country in 1989. We were in Estelí, 90 miles north of Managua, the sprawling Nicaraguan capitol.

Estelí is legendary for the stand its people took in the dying days of the Somoza dictatorship. Estelí was the place the Somoza family was determined to exact “final revenge” on its way out of power. More than 15,000 casualties were suffered in the city as the Guardia Nacional attacked Estelí in those awful days.

In 1979, as Somoza and his followers fled, the Revolution ended. The Sandinistas took control. A decade later the counter-revolution neared an end. That war between the US-funded Contras and the Sandinistas was fought largely from Estelí north to the Honduras border.

Too many years of being on the frontline of internecine warfare turned the city into a frontier-like existence where the constant exposure to life-threatening risks gave way to continual violence of all sorts.

My guide that day was a young Nicaraguan who, years earlier, had been captured as a revolutionary and tortured by Guardia officers. He wanted me to see the back-alley culture of his hometown.

Walking along the streets on a quiet Sunday afternoon the bullet holes in buildings and the bomb craters left by the departing Somozans ten years earlier were evident. We arrived at a building, not more than a dilapidated warehouse. The sign above the door read “Pelea de Gallos Hoy.” Cockfights Today.

Inside, the building was filled with smoke and noise. The floor was dirt, its walls grimy. There were no women, only men. It seemed all were smoking cigarettes, drinking rum, and shouting angrily at one another. Many were waving hands full of Cordobas, the local currency, which in those days was being devalued by the hour.

We worked our way to the center of the building. There we found a rather small, blocked off area, about the size of a boxing ring. Instead of ropes, a wooden fence about three feet high surrounded it. The shouting intensified as we neared the outer perimeter of the fence.

Three men circled each other in the ring, two holding roosters in their hands. They each shoved the face of their rooster into the face of the other man’s bird. The taunting caused each of the cocks to become increasingly angry. The third man appeared to be a referee of sorts. At his signal, the other two men threw their roosters to the ground and the cockfight began in earnest.

It didn’t last long. Razor-sharp knives called gaffs, about 3 1/2 inches long, were strapped to the birds’ legs. The roosters attacked each other with unnatural viciousness. The birds screamed. Blood flew. The gaffs cut deeply into each bird. They continued to hack away, puncturing the other’s body and gouging one another’s eyes.

Within minutes one of the birds did the greater damage to the other. It was held high by the referee and the crowd cheered loudly as he declared that bird the winner while the other bird was tossed out of the ring into a pile of dead and dying losers.

The noise died down a little as Cordobas exchanged hands from those who bet on the loser to those who had money down on the winner.

“Why do the birds act so aggressive toward one another?” I inquired. “Las drogas,” was the answer. The fighting cocks are shot full of stimulants before a fight. The drugs cause them to react to one another in a way that they would not otherwise.

Witness the cruelty. Click on www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNfPLez2gNw

Cockfighting isn’t simply cruel. It is barbaric. I was horrified to learn that this blood sport may have occurred within a few miles of my own home. But Cheyenne isn’t a frontier village in a third world country. The District Attorney should take seriously this horrendous violation of our community values and prosecute all involved to the fullest extent of the law.

New Year's Day in Cuba

There was no place you could go in Havana that day and avoid Fidel’s voice. It was New Year’s Day 1999, the fortieth anniversary of the Cuban Revolution. As he did annually, Castro gave one of his trademark speeches.

I knew enough Spanish to know he was talking about the United States. I knew little enough Spanish that every Cuban I encountered recognized I was from the US. It felt strange walking through the streets of Havana that morning hearing their beloved Fidel blaming my beloved country for the harsh economic conditions confronting Cubans. But patriotic Cubans cheered Fidel even as they graciously welcomed me.

“El Bloqueo” was imposed in the final months of the Eisenhower administration. For the next fifty years supporters of the policy thought the embargo would destroy the Cuban economy, motivating the people to turn against the popular Castro. It never worked.

Castro’s regime survived through the administrations of Eisenhower, Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, and six years of Barack Obama. US presidents have come and gone. Fidel remains.

Evidence of the embargo could be seen everywhere. The Cubans kept 1950s and 60s automobiles running on gas rations, repaired with bubble gum and duct tape. The embargo prevented them from obtaining gasoline and parts. The streets were filled with bicycles and those who rode them dined on rationed food.

Walking the five-mile stretch along a broad seawall that Cubans call El Malecón, one could readily witness that the embargo and economic strains had left deteriorated what was once one of the most beautiful cities in the Americas. Even so, the architecture of a bygone time was spectacular.

Afterward, I downed a Mojito at La Floridita in order to say I’d enjoyed Hemingway’s favorite drink in one of his favorite watering holes.

Seated next to me were a Cuban doctor and his friend. His English was better than my Spanish. He told me about healthcare on his island. Cuba, it turns out, enjoys one of the best healthcare systems in the world. Its medical schools train good doctors who practice all over the world. Doctors are paid only about $40 per month and live in government housing but are proud of a system delivering as high a life expectancy as we enjoy in the US.

We talked about Hemingway. The doctor told me where the man lived who the great writer used as a model for “The Old Man and the Sea.” We walked to his small house. His wife said while he liked to meet “amigos nuevo,” he was too ill to meet folks that day. “Come back tomorrow,” she invited with typical Cuban hospitality.

Since it was New Year’s Day, we gringos wanted to see the ocean. We searched but had no luck. Finally, we knocked on a door and asked for directions to the beach. Imagine your New Year’s morning. Imagine you and your family enjoying the holiday at home. A group of Cubans knock on your door asking directions. What would you do?

I don’t know what I’d have done, but the Cuban matriarch, whose holiday we disturbed, promptly invited us into his home. He led us through the living room where children were watching TV. We proceeded to follow down a long hall through the kitchen where his wife was making dinner. Finally we arrived at the back door. He opened it. We found ourselves on his back deck looking out across the ocean.

“Perdone,” he excused himself returning with a bottle of rum and a boom box. His wife delivered a plate of food. Neighbors joined us. A New Year’s Day party erupted. To celebrate we drank rum, danced and made new friends without any conversation about the embargo.

It didn’t matter. We didn’t talk about our governments. We were simply people celebrating the hopefulness of a new year. I thought of that day when President Obama announced a new Cuban policy. I imagine another party erupted on that same deck.

Lead, follow, or get out of the way

I have a dissenting view in the debate over Wyoming Highway Patrol performance standards, what was too easily dismissed as “quotas.”

Members of the Wyoming legislature quickly pounced on the Patrol’s plan to hold officers accountable for enforcing traffic laws. The Wyoming legislature has seldom been a reliable partner in highway safety. It’s obviously better politics to provide cover for dangerous drivers than to protect the safety of others.

I first experienced the reticence of legislators to make highways safer as a freshman member of the House of Representatives. It was 1971. The issue then was “implied consent.” In those days drunk drivers simply refused to take a breathalyzer test. Their refusal often deprived law enforcement the critical evidence needed to convict.

Highway safety advocates addressed the game playing with the concept of “implied consent.” An application for a driver’s license “implied” your consent to take a breathalyzer test if the officer had cause to think you were driving drunk. A huge loophole that served the interests of drunk drivers was closed. It seemed apparent that allowing drunk drivers to play that game was not in the best interests of the safety of the public.

Not so fast in Wyoming. Our legislature was among the last in the nation to take this important highway safety step. There were cries of “personal liberties” as though driving drunk was a part of the Bill of Rights.

The Wyoming legislature stood in the way of every major highway safety reform from seat belts to child restraints and open container laws. Legislators still refuse to permit the use of cameras to catch drivers who dangerously ignore red lights and cause innumerable serious accidents. On many occasions, they fought the reasonable efforts of Patrolmen to enforce speed limits. They even made it impossible for insurance companies to deem a chronic speeder a higher risk.

They allow “cat and mouse” games to be used by risky drivers to the detriment of the rest of us.

No amount of hard data demonstrating the number of lives that could be saved with the passages of these measures made any difference. Legislators were prepared to allow those deaths to darken Wyoming highways in order to stand by some ill-conceived, libertarian notion of personal freedom.

Increasing numbers of deaths and severe injuries mattered not. It was the ultimate congressional threat to take away Wyoming’s share of federal highway dollars that always brought legislators to the table, albeit belatedly.

Accordingly, it’s business as usual when the head of the Wyoming Highway Patrol is openly threatened by influential legislators because of efforts to improve highway safety. State Representative Eli Bebout, the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, delivered the message that if Col. John Butler persisted in his plan for officer accountability, the legislature would write a new law telling him how to run his department.

The shame is that “never is heard a discouraging word” about the death toll on Wyoming highways. Not a single member of the legislature has championed doing something meaningful to reduce the unnecessary carnage.

More than half of this year’s deaths resulted from a failure to wear seatbelts. Yet the legislature insists on making the enforcement of seatbelt laws as difficult as possible. As usual, a high number of deaths are related to alcohol abuse. Even though this is a chronic Wyoming problem the legislature will not even consider roadside sobriety checks, a strategy that has significantly reduced drunk driving in state after state where legislators are more a part of the solution.

Col. Butler has the responsibility to keep Wyoming highways safe, but the politicians don’t want him to have the authority. The legislature has no such responsibility but they have the ability to interfere with those who have the responsibility.

Now that legislators have forced the WHP to rescind the policy, they should come forward with their own proposals to make Wyoming highways safer.

As the old saying goes, legislators “should either lead, follow or get out of the way.”

A Divine Season of Hope

It’s been a tough year. Daily headlines bring new fears. There’s the growing threat of the Islamic State and its brutality, Syria, Ukraine, Ferguson, and the torture report, not to mention Ebola and weekly school shootings.

We’re in the midst of what we call “the Season of Hope.” As our center of attention becomes more about our fears, our hopes become complicated.

Yet the celebration of the Prince of Peace comes around each year at this time. The image of hope is the newborn in that manger surrounded by Mary and Joseph, the shepherds and the barnyard animals all under a bright star. For Christians, that’s been true for two millennia.

But the hopes of the world might be better tied to an inclusive image of the birth of Jesus. As such, his birth could serve as a cause for hope for all humankind rather than simply a way to prove the exclusivity of the Christian message.

The birth of Jesus is the hope of all the world. The Gospel of Luke records that on that night, “an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with fear. And the angel said to them, "Be not afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of a great joy which will come to all the people.”

Hear that? “Good news” and “great joy” for “all the people.”

In Matthew, we learn “wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, saying, ‘Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the East, and have come to worship him." Two centuries of faulty scriptural interpretation have greatly complicated the relationship between Christians and Jews. Even so there is no questioning that Jesus was born, lived, and died a Jew, teaching from the Bible he read, the Hebrew Scripture.

Christians often cite Hebrew Scripture, what they call the Old Testament, as foretelling the birth. "For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace." Isaiah 9:6.

The Old Testament is the source of Jesus’s most fundamental teachings. Love God and love one another (Luke 10:27). Deuteronomy says, "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD; and you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” From Leviticus,  “You shall not take vengeance or bear any grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

In our times, the hopes for God’s world are complicated by relationships between people of different faiths. It ‘s been too easy to complicate our hopes by focusing on the behavior of “their” radical fundamentalists while ignoring our own. To do so diverts us from the actual teachings of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Those teachings each put great hope in the birth of Jesus and his teachings.

"Behold,” says the Quran 3:45-48, “the angels said, 'Oh Mary! God gives you glad tidings of a Word from Him. His name will be Christ Jesus, the son of Mary, held in honour in this world and the Hereafter, and in (the company of) those nearest to God. He shall speak to the people in childhood and in maturity. He shall be (in the company) of the righteous. God will teach him the Book and Wisdom, the Law and the Gospel.”

There are those who focus not on the birth of hope in that manger but on theological differences. It’s those differences that have, over the centuries, complicated our hopes. The hope for the world, through the birth of this child, requires sitting aside exclusive claims on him, while finding the universal truths in his teachings.  Then all will be guided by his Star.

That would be a divine source of hope.

Time to open presents

How exciting is this time of the year? Christmas is the season of gift giving. The time has come to gather round the proverbial Christmas tree and hand out the gifts. This year’s tree is a beautiful blue spruce. Oops, maybe not. I see now it’s a beetle kill tree from the Medicine Bow National Forest painted over. How nice of someone to keep us from thinking about that nasty climate change at this festive time of the year.

Well let’s get right to the presents. 

Ah look. The first one is for the Wyoming legislature. They say good things come in small packages. It’s a small bit of compassion. How wonderful. Legislators can certainly use it.

There are approximately 18,000 low-income people in this state who have been denied health insurance and access to healthcare only because they found themselves collateral damage in a partisan contest between Republicans and President Obama. With this little gift of compassion, perhaps enough legislators will be able to rise above all of that and actually take care of their constituents. I do hope the package is big enough.

Oh and here’s a gift for the taxpayers of Wyoming. It’s a gift from the Wyoming Department of Health. But the tag says, “Do not open until Medicaid is expanded.” If Medicaid is expanded, the taxpayers of Wyoming will receive a gift of ten-of-millions of dollars in health care, cost savings, and new jobs.

And who is this gift for? Oh, The Wyoming Liberty Group. It’s a beautiful new custom fly rod. Too bad most of them won’t be able to buy a resident fishing license for a while. But then with all that Texas money, they can afford the non-resident license. Good fishing. By the way, I hear some folks are actually taking your bait.

Did anybody get anything for WyWatch? These are the folks who use the Bible to foist their narrow religious views on everyone else. The problem is that their “views” come from a self-serving and erroneous reading of the Old Testament.

So this gift is perfect for my “Old-Testament-Christian” friends. It’s a Bible that includes the New Testament. That will certainly come in handy. I know they’re more comfortable using misinterpreted judgments of the Old Testament to lobby on behalf of inequality and discrimination. This gift will bring them out of their comfort zone.

Now that they have a Bible that includes the New Testament, they’ll be able to read the words of Jesus. “Love your neighbor as yourself,” for example.

Ah, here’s a package for State Senator Charlie Scott. It feels like a framed picture. Ah it is! Look. It is a photo of Charlie with his boyhood friend Methuselah. It says the photo was taken on Methuselah’s 969^th birthday, shortly before the Great Flood and a few weeks before Charlie was elected to his first term in the legislature. What a keepsake. The inscription reads, “Term limits are for sissies! Love, Methuselah.”

Here’s a package for CROW, the Conservative Republicans of Wyoming. Listen. Do you hear a ticking sound? Oh my. I see now. It’s not for CROW. It’s FROM CROW. Maybe we ought to have the bomb squad open this one.

Wait just a minute. Didn’t anyone get anything for the Governor? I thought about it but figured he’d already gotten his present on Election Day. Getting another four years to finally do something is gift enough. Wait there is one more present under the tree. It is for the Governor.

Shake it. Oh my. There are a couple of round things rolling around in the package. What could they be? Let’s read the note. Oh, it’s not what I thought. The note says, “For Governor Mead, two lumps of coal. You deserved a whole sack but EPA regulations allowed only for these two small chunks.”

I’d have bought a present for the voters of Wyoming but decided they have all they’re going to get and deserve whatever it is.

Merry Christmas everyone!