“On the 18th of April in ’75…Hardly a man is now alive who remembers that famous day and year.” I was going to post all of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride” (the first substantial poem I ever memorized) yesterday, but, as usual, stuff happened. That means today is the 19th of April, a date banged into the heads of children living in Arlington, Massachusetts like me, the anniversary of the ugly little battle that took place just up Massachusetts Avenue a bit on Lexington Green, that officially started the Revolutionary War.
700 British troops were marching on a mission to capture traitors/patriots John Hancock and Samuel Adams and seize a rebel arsenal when they were blocked by 77 Minutemen under Captain John Parker. British Major John Pitcairn ordered ragtag army to disperse, but the proverbial shot rang out, everybody started firing their muskets, and a few minutes later eight Colonists were dead or dying and ten more were wounded. Only one British soldier was injured, but at around 7 am the same fateful day, the Redcoats got what was coming to them a little further up the road, at Concord Bridge.
One subsidiary benefit of memorizing “Paul Revere’s Ride” is that I’ll never forget that famous day and year, or the day after it. I wonder how many of today’s public school-educated children, even those in neighboring Arlington, know the significance of April 19. Heck, I wonder if it will be mentioned in the mainstream media’s blathering today at all. It would be a good day for the President of the United States to use his “bully pulpit” for something positive and remind everyone, but no, these days that platform is reserved to call half the nation fascists.
I digress, however. Celebrate the beginnings of America by taking about ethics, for this is the only nation in the world that was created to embody ethical principles and to model ethical values.
That battle rages on.
Ethics Alarms 
On the subject of separating this country from the UK…
The Tory Party has spearheaded a bill that would permanently criminalize the sale of tobacco products to anyone born after January 1, 2009, creating a “smoke-free generation” and eventually making tobacco sales to literally anyone illegal.
Speaking as a non-smoker and about as far from a conservative as any even occasional commenter here, I think this is daft. Given that tobacco growing is a far bigger business here than east of the Atlantic, I can’t see a similar proposal getting any traction here, and it would be even stranger to see such a proposal coming from the GOP.
Thoughts?
I shouldn’t be weighing in, I guess, but things have been slow on the forums lately, I got depressed by inadvertently looking at the traffic stats (EA gets about half the looks it did in 2015, before I infuriated our left-leaning readers by chronicling the 2016 post-election ethics train wreck), and I think this is, unfortunately, an easy one. Tobacco’s poison, and should have been banned long, long ago. But it wasn’t banned; it’s now part of the culture, and legalizing it now will work about as well as banning alcohol did here, which is to say, it won’t. We’re stuck with tobacco forever: we can make it less popular, but banning it will just give criminals something else to make money from.
By the way, one of the stats I stumbled on is that I’ve made 63,579 comments on my own blog, or about 15% of the total (370, 081).
Or maybe I’m the only one commenting. Maybe EA is nothing but a narcissistic fantasy, signifying nothing…
Or maybe you’ve held to integrity in a world that is increasingly focused on self-serving means, confirmation bias, and success by any means necessary. Ethics is not a message a lot of people want to hear about. Or rather, they want to hear that what they are doing is ethical, and don’t like when someone says they are not acting ethically.
Ryan Harkins wrote, “Or maybe you’ve held to integrity in a world that is increasingly focused on self-serving means, confirmation bias, and success by any means necessary. Ethics is not a message a lot of people want to hear about. Or rather, they want to hear that what they are doing is ethical, and don’t like when someone says they are not acting ethically.”
^^^THIS^^^
Well, you’ve always had a lot better numbers than me, and my numbers are way down from even the recent past. My most-read post from 2024 has fewer than half as many views as my *average* from 2020, which was itself way down from a few years before that.
I write mostly for myself, trying to keep myself sharp, and to force myself to clarify my own thinking. That’s a good thing, I guess, since I haven’t hit even triple figures in nearly a year.
Your last statements were how I justified spending so much uncompensated time on EA when Grace was telling me I couldn’t afford to do it. And I believed it then and believe it now.
Curmie,
I have to agree with your assessment that writing for yourself to help clarify your thinking is valuable. I have done this for years. When I first started reading EA my comments were longer and more frequent. Today they are shorter and less frequent because so many others have sharpened my understand through their commentary. Right now it seems the best I can do is agree and unless I have some unique perspective on a subject it is irresponsible to simply disagree with another’s perspective.
btw I meant to weigh in on your commentary on why good teachers are in short supply. I stopped teaching (community college level) when it became apparent that the concept of being “student centered” meant keeping students happy paying customers rather than getting them to perform at a prescribed level. Like Franklin’s comment about when people learn they can vote themselves a raise and the effect on the republic the same effect occurs when student evaluations of teachers are used by the administrators to determine teaching quality. Those who gives all A’s and B’s get glowing evaluations while teachers who hold students to high standards are graded lower. Bad teachers figure this out early and just give high grades and fail no one even if that student fails to perform at even minimal standards
I always compared the teacher evaluation numbers with the average grade. If the former was better than the latter, it was probably a good sign. If the latter was better than the former, it was definitely a bad sign.
I also agree with your reluctance to join in the conversation just to do so. There are topics, mostly involving political perspective, that I just avoid here. I’ll comment if I have something to say that might actually change someone’s mind, but it’s useless to argue with someone I consider incorrigible on an issue (and who would consider me so).
Jack wrote, “Maybe EA is nothing but a narcissistic fantasy, signifying nothing…”
I have thought exactly the same thing about my blog.
One of my goals for retirement was to stretch beyond my local bubble, read, listen and write more about my observations of the world around me whether others thought my perspective was valuable or not and starting a blog was a nice way to work towards that goal. Ethics Alarms has been a piece of that goal.
Wanna compare some apples and oranges…
After one month short of 5 years active on my blog, I only have 704 total comments and 192 (27%) of those comments are mine. I have 50 subscribers, that number was only 36 before I published the blog When “Settled Science” Is Not Settled And The Fact That It’s Not Settled Is Intentionally Being Hidden From The General Public last month.
It seems to me like it’s a rare individual that wants to read or talk about “Things That Change Our Society”.
I saw that story — I think daft is too kind a word for it.
I would like to think that the federal government doesn’t have the authority to do such a thing here — Prohibition needed a constitutional amendment — but I’m not so sure any more.
And how would you enforce it? We already have a huge black market in cigarettes from North Carolina to New York due to the difference in taxes.
I read the ode to Paul Revere each year on my birthday April 18th. That means ive read it 70 or so times by now. It is a shame that recently I saw articles that focused on others that acted on that day in some capacity. Revere seems to being sent to the back of the bus.
BTW another hsitorical event that gets ignored ia the April 15th death of Abraham Lincoln. .
Hey! Patriots’ Day is Mrs. OB’s and my anniversary. Every year! Forty-nine, this year. It was 1975, Saugus, Mass. The Bicentennial was ramping up at the time. We remember seeing a guy with a ponytail with a ribbon on it sticking out of his three-cornered hat zipping down the street in his VW Bug. We picked the date because April 19 was a Saturday, and we could both get Monday off from work. We spent our wedding night in a hotel on Rte. 128, together with a youth hockey team that was making all sorts of racket in the hallway.
Happy Anniversary, Mr-n-Mrs OB, we’re a mere ~ 27 years behind you…’course I was 47 before I convinced the gal next door/through the backyard she couldn’t live without me….
You should don your (arguably) priceless Paul’s Club sleeveless tee in celebration.
PWS
I was well and truly cooked upon meeting the future Mrs. OB at the tender age of twenty-two, a little over fifty years ago.
I remember attending a work buddy’s wedding in the early ’80s. We’d been married around ten years at the time. There was a couple in attendance who were celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary around the time of the wedding. Someone (young, as were we) asked the husband, somewhat amazedly, what the secret was to their having such a long marriage. “Never got divorced,” replied the husband, laconically.
And the most significant and bloody battle on April 19 was fought in Arlington. Lexington and Concord were relative skirmishes.
I don’t think the Revolutionary War gets its due. It was a long, fiercely contested, bloody, destructive war. Eight years long. Crops, livestock, housing and businesses destroyed. Looting and plundering. Fires set. Disease. Nasty business. Not just Brits and Hessians marching in lines and being fired at by cleaver citizens hiding behind rocks and trees.
I’d agree. The British were a thoroughgoing nasty piece of work. They saw us as rebellious traitors who needed to be suppressed and subdued, and if that meant sacking the odd town or ten or raping some farmer’s daughters, that was our fault for rebelling.
That’s not to say there weren’t excesses on the American side, but not, I think, on the same scale and callousness. As well, Washington, Franklin, et al wanted to present us as heroic Patriots, not like those murdering British bullies.
In truth, remember that Britain didn’t build its empire with sweetness and light — and they saw America as a legitimate part of that empire.
That’s the home front side of the war. On the military side, we had some successes but also a lot of defeats. Part of Washington’s genius was keeping an American army in being through many setbacks. He knew that the rebellion could only exist as long as his army did. He, as Lincoln, was one of the all time bitter-enders in American history. You could kill him, but he was not about to give up as long as he was alive and had a soldier to follow him.
Such is my opinion. It beggars the mind to imagine the fortitude Washington had to demonstrate to carry us through the war.
Jack might be the only one to read this tardy comment. My kidneys decided to stop working again; Drs can’t come up with a diagnosis. I’ve fallen behind on my consumption of EA.
I thought the 19th/20th of April had some recent events’ anniversaries. Columbine, Oklahoma City, Branch Davidians, & Randy Weaver in Idaho.
The other is less recent; Adolph Hitler’s birthday.
For trivia, Vladimir Putin & I share a birthday on October 7th, the same day Hamas ambushed, slaughtered, raped, tortured, kidnapped & killed Israelis.