I received an email in early October telling me that my passport would expire soon and inviting me to look into renewing it online. Much of the federal government had just been shut down, and I assumed that renewing anything it was involved with would be a foolish undertaking. I pretty much ignored the email. Then, as we entered November and the shutdown continued, a friend posted that he had just received his new passport about a week after applying online. So I gave it a go. Four to six weeks was quoted. The passport didn’t arrive in a week, but it did make it in slightly less than two. Pretty impressive.

This is my fifth, and most likely my last. Slightly blurred images of the previous four are at left. The dates are 1986, 1996, 2006, and 2016. All are low mileage. Diminishing hair is obvious, but in the actual passport books, diminishing something else is apparent. I have never been one to challenge a passport’s capacity, but that 1986 passport has 15 stamps spread over 7 pages. The 2016 passport has a single stamp.

That single stamp is unique. It is for a 2018 entry to Canada to reach the northern terminus of the Jefferson Highway, and is the only Canadian stamp in any of these four booklets. That is not because it was my only visit to Canada. Prior to June 1, 2009, Canada did not require passports for land travel from the USA. Even after that date, it seems they were not stamped. My 2006 passport has no stamps from anywhere, despite there being at least two documented post-2009 trips to Canada while it was in use.

There are two stamps in the 1996 passport. So the counts for the four retired passports are 15, 2, 0, and 1. Passport number one has five times as many stamps as the other three combined. Hair diminished gradually. Foreign travel plummeted.

Peter Yarrow died this week, and the news brought back some memories that he is a part of. Peter’s main claim to fame was his time with Peter, Paul, and Mary whom I saw twice. I also saw Mary Travers in a solo performance once. Of course, the bulk of my memories come from listening to the trio on the radio and on vinyl.

Both occasions when I saw them in concert contained some personally memorable moments. The first was in 1966 during my second year of college.

A friend of mine was a major Peter, Paul, and Mary fan, and a friend of his even more so. The friend of a friend was from Charleston, WV, where PPM had a concert scheduled. He arranged for tickets and the three of us set off on a weekend trip in my Renault 4CV. Somewhere east of Cincinnati — but not very far east — a rear axle broke. The details are foggy but we somehow got the Renault towed to a garage and got ourselves back to Cincy where we rented a car. Actually, the friend of a friend rented the car since he was the only one of us over 21.

We made it to the concert and (probably through some contacts with the local folk music community) found ourselves backstage at its conclusion. I don’t believe we actually met either Peter or Paul, but merely caught a glimpse of them as they headed to a car and a ride to their hotel. For some reason, Mary’s ride to the hotel that night would be in the passenger seat of the box truck that hauled their equipment. While the truck, which Mary called her “10-ton limo”, was loaded, she casually chatted with the small group of fans surrounding her. When the “limo” was ready, she bid us farewell and climbed up into the cab.

The second memory comes from a concert at Cincinnati’s Music Hall. This was probably sometime around 1980. A co-worker’s wife had a job that somehow enabled her to get front-row seats. This was during a period when I tried taking photos at concerts, so I had my camera with a telephoto lens with me in row number one. This was all above board, and before the music started, either Peter or Paul reiterated that photos were fine as long as flash wasn’t used.

Things were going smoothly until someone several seats to my left took a few pictures with flash firing. A policeman standing on the floor at stage left responded by walking out and stopping in front of me. It was pretty obvious that I had a camera, and he blamed me for the flashes. I will never know what punishment he had in mind because at that instant the music stopped.

The performers knew who was and was not to blame and stopped performing to intervene. Paul Peter walked to the edge of the stage and called to the officer to clear me. All I remember saying is, “I think Paul Peter wants to talk to you.” Finding himself the center of attention in a suddenly quiet concert hall, the policeman never turned to the stage or acknowledged anyone on it but simply returned to his original spot in the shadows.

Sadly, I’ve not found any photos from that night and can’t even remember if I had any that were worthwhile. I do recall that the local paper reported on the concert the next day and mentioned the incident. They referred to the person confronted as a photographer, which was a first for me, and I still think it’s kind of funny.

Yeah, I know that my interactions with one of the greatest vocal groups of the 1960s and ’70s are pretty trivial and involve Peter even less than the other members of the trio. Please forgive me for using his passing as an opportunity to share them. By the way, it turned out that the Renault’s axle wasn’t really broken and the shop where it was towed was able to press on a new bearing and make me mobile for a reasonable charge.

ADDENDUM 4-May-2025: Writing this naturally renewed thoughts of those long-ago events, and when I learned I could access some Cincinnati Enquirer archives through my local library, I went looking. Here is the last paragraph of Cliff Radel’s February 18, 1980, article. Cliff’s day-old memory was better than my 45-year-old one. It was Peter rather than Paul who intervened on my behalf, and I’ve corrected that above. On the other hand, I feel obliged to reiterate that I and the flasher were two different people, regardless of whether either of us was a photographer.

The About page for this blog says its topics might include “just about anything other than politics or religion”, and I have been pretty successful in keeping religion out of my blog and my life — less so politics. I’m pretty sure this post is the most blatant breaking of my own rule yet, but during a week when the internet is awash in political posts, perhaps no one will even notice.

Around Independence Day this year, I revisited the document at the heart of the holiday and was struck by a sentence containing the words “character” and “tyrant”. So much so that I soon made it part of my Facebook cover photo, which is shown here.

Last Sunday, I replaced my Facebook profile picture with the one at left which I had used previously on the anniversary of the pictured assault on our capitol. I had wanted to do that sooner but was traveling and chose to keep an “on the road” picture in place until I was home. My intention was to replace both pictures on the day after the election. The cover photo would go back to the picture of the 1923 version of the Pledge of Allegiance in the Indiana War Memorial Shrine Room that the Declaration of Independence quote replaced, and the profile picture would become one of my previously used “at home” pictures. That has not happened because the day after the election did not feel like the “return to normalcy” I had expected and hoped for. My plans for replacing them are uncertain.

When I changed my profile picture a week ago, I included this text: “There are many reasons to vote against Donald Trump but for me, his actions of January 6, 2021, and the intentions they revealed are, by themselves, more than enough.”

I don’t participate in political discussions in real life much more than I do online but in the few I have had during the last year or so, I have noted my feeling that the disregard for the rule of law and the workings of U.S. democracy Donald Trump showed that day made virtually every other consideration in the presidential election insignificant.

One commenter on the profile picture told me that I was the one being “gaslighted” and that Pelosi was to blame. Another claimed that the assault was planned by “the Dems”. The comments came from good people who I assume really believe what they say. Why is their view so different from mine? Why is my view of Donald Trump so different from that of the majority plurality of voters in Tuesday’s election? I don’t know the full answer to that, but I do believe that what Heather Cox Richardson referred to as “the flood of disinformation that has plagued the U.S. for years now” is a big part of it. I do, on occasion, respond to someone sharing disinformation online by pointing to a source that refutes it. Common reactions are “I don’t trust that source” or “It doesn’t matter if that evidence is fake because I know something is going on”.

Incidentally, Richardson is someone I follow and respect. If you don’t follow her yourself and have room for one more analysis of the election, I suggest her Letters from an American of November 6.

With Trump’s clear victory on Tuesday, I confess to briefly questioning my view of the man but it was over in a flash. All it took was remembering how many members of his first administration, including a chief of staff and his own vice president, also consider him unfit for office.

This post’s title comes from President Joe Biden’s speech on November 7. I listened to it live and was struck by the phrase “Setbacks are unavoidable but giving up is unforgivable.” Others were too as it seems to be quoted in the bulk of reports on the speech. In the speech, Biden, mentions some of his successes such as infrastructure investment and the seemingly unappreciated “soft landing” from high inflation. Understandably, he did not mention failures. The biggest, in my opinion, was the failure to quickly and aggressively prosecute Donald Trump for his words and actions related to that 2021 attack on the capitol. I agree, Joe, that we probably can’t avoid all setbacks. But I do think we could have avoided this one.

This series started in 2014 under the title “I Care Not How. Only If.” In 2018, I acknowledged that I did care how and changed the title to the one at the top of this post. In recent years, I’ve come close to acknowledging that I care a lot about how people vote and changing the title again. Two things have kept me from doing that. One is that the situation that prompted that first post ten years ago still exists — too many people eligible to vote in the USA don’t.

We are getting better. According to the Pew Research Center, 2020’s 66% turnout was the highest rate for any national election since 1900. Some people don’t vote because it is just too difficult and there have been recent efforts, often under the guise of “security” to make it more so even though voter fraud is so rare that it is almost non-existent. If you are in a position to help eliminate unjustified barriers to voting, do it. If you are capable of going over, around, or through unjustified barriers to voting, do that. If there are no unjustified barriers to your voting, vote.

The other reason I have stuck with and actually stand by this post’s title is one of the observations in an article I referenced in the 2018 post where the title was first used. That post is here, the article is here, and the observation I’m thinking of is that people are becoming more engaged in elections. Yes, in far too many cases engagement takes the form of personal insults and glib memes on social media. And yes, people seem to be doing a lot more talking than listening but I’d like to think that there are at least a few more people listening now than there were in 2014.

Ohio folks: Tomorrow, Oct 7, is the last day to register — in person, by mail, or online.

We fought a war to get this country going then gave every land-owning white male above the age of twenty-one the right to vote. A little more than fourscore years later, we fought a war with ourselves that cleared the way for non-whites to vote. Several decades of loud, disruptive, and sometimes dangerous behavior brought the granting of that same right to non-males a half-century later, and another half-century saw the voting age lowered to eighteen after a decade or so of protests and demonstrations.

Of course, putting something in a constitution does not automatically make it a practice throughout the land and I am painfully aware that resistance followed each of those changes and that efforts to make voting extremely difficult for “the other side” are ongoing today. I don’t want to ignore partisan obstructions and system flaws but neither do I want to get hung up on them. I meant my first paragraph to be a reminder that a hell of a lot of effort, property, and lives have gone into providing an opportunity to vote to a hell of a lot of people. Far too many of those opportunities go unused.

We may be getting slightly better, however. 2018 turnout set a record for midterm elections as reported in this Vox article. According to this Pew Research article, turnout was even better in 2020 although the United States continues to trail most of the world’s democracies. It was in the 2020 version of the Pew Research article that I noticed something that I simply hadn’t realized previously. The United States has the greatest difference between the percentage of voting-age population (VAP) actually voting and registered voters actually voting. In many countries, there is no difference at all since to be a citizen is to be allowed to vote. In other countries, the difference is trivial. In the U.S. presidential election of 2016, it was a whopping 31.1% (86.8-55.7). It was even a little bigger in 2020 at 31.3% (94.1 – 62.8). In 2020, I found that startling so I guess I can’t be startled by it again. However, I can be and am dismayed. The problem does not seem to be getting registered voters to the polls; 94.1% is an impressive turnout. The problem is getting people registered. That’s sinking in very slowly.

I first posted the core of this article in 2014. In the original title, I claimed to not care how anyone votes. That was never entirely true, of course. I have my favorite candidates and issues. I’ll be disappointed in anyone who votes differently than I do but not nearly as disappointed as I’ll be in anyone who doesn’t vote at all. I’m reminded of parents working on getting their kids to clean their plates with lines like, “There are hungry children in China who would love to have your green beans.” I’m not sure what the demand for leftover beans is in Beijing these days but I’m pretty sure some folks there would like to have our access to ballots and voting booths.