AsAmNews<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\nFormer President Jimmy Carter at age 100, didn\u2019t make it to the new year, nor the next presidential inaugural.<\/p>\n
My guess is the thought of a second Trump presidency may have been too much for him to bear. A convicted felon in the White House?<\/p>\n
We know who Carter voted for, and it wasn\u2019t Trump, unless he was the one in a pantsuit.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve always been a big Carter fan, so when the news came of his passing, it brought me back to a happy place.<\/p>\n
Plains, Georgia Sept. 11, 2016<\/h2>\n
I was visiting family not far from the land of presidential peanut farmers. I found myself the only full-blooded Filipino in the room at Maranatha Baptist Church, the spiritual home base for the esteemed No. 39.<\/p>\n
President Carter looked fine that Sunday in Plains. But especially fine for his job on that day\u2013 to give the Sunday school lesson on what coincidentally was the 15th anniversary of 9\/11.<\/p>\n
Carter\u2019s health made headlines in 2015 when he disclosed having both brain and liver cancer. It was thought he had just two or three weeks to live.<\/p>\n
Everyone\u2019s always underestimating Carter. After treatments, Carter\u2019s forecast turned out not to be true.<\/p>\n
Tech Titans<\/h2>\n
When I saw him, Carter was spry, quick-witted, and kind\u2013Though he did tell a joke about an Asian American.<\/p>\n
At the time, Carter said he\u2019d just returned from San Francisco where he had \u201csupper\u201d with wealthy tech giants, including the widow of Steve Jobs, Laurene Jobs, as well as the first Asian American power couple of the world, Facebook\u2019s Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe\u2019s Chinese,\u201d Carter said to his 99 percent White audience.<\/p>\n
He then said the Facebook couple planned to give away 99 percent of their $50 billion fortune to charity.<\/p>\n
\u201cOnly gives them $500 million for personal expenses,\u201d Carter joked, drawing a big laugh from the crowd.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m guessing he wouldn\u2019t have been so pleased at the tech community\u2019s capitulation to Trump. Zuckerberg and other tech giants from Google, Amazon, and Open AI each gave a million dollars to support January\u2019s inaugural.<\/p>\n
But all that old tech gossip was just the warm-up for Carter\u2019s Sunday school talk, something Carter started that year and continued doing for a few months.<\/p>\n
Sunday Lesson<\/h2>\n
The former president wore a bolo string tie anchored by an eight-stone turquoise clasp that dangled below the neck, as he began the lesson on the subject of grief and the death of his 28-year old grandson. Drawing from scripture (on this particular day, a passage on the persecution of the Thessalonians), Carter said such moments were simply tests of one\u2019s faith, endurance, and hope.<\/p>\n
He said overcoming all that was a matter of self-confidence and relying on our God-given talents, but it was difficult in all phases of life.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe lack inspiration; we lack the idealism to set our goals high. We\u2019ve been satisfied with mediocrity. And I include myself,\u201d Carter said. People want an average life instead of aspiring to be \u201coutstanding, or superb or brilliant or exceptional. And that is a problem we have,\u201d said Carter. \u201cWe set our goals too low, we\u2019re complacent, we\u2019re satisfied with where we are.\u201d<\/p>\n
9\/11<\/h2>\n
He then applied the lesson to the historic day of 9\/11. He said we\u2019re diminished as a country, and our goals for our nation\u2019s future are set too low, he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m afraid that our country and its effect on people of other nations has suffered from the aftermath of 9\/11,\u201d Carter said. He \u201cdidn\u2019t want to brag,\u201d but said his goal for the country was always to be \u201csuperb and be a country that promoted peace and human rights\u2026While I was in office, we never dropped a bomb, lost a missile, or fired a bullet.\u201d<\/p>\n
Too much has changed, he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cSince 9\/11,\u201d Carter said, \u201cwe\u2019ve pretty much abandoned our commitment to human rights as we reacted to terrorism.\u201d He lamented that Afghanistan had become the longest war in American history, a direct outcome of 9\/11, as well as the invasion of Iraq, which Carter called \u201cunnecessary.\u201d<\/p>\n
A Divided Nation<\/h2>\n
Carter, whose administration took us out of an energy crisis, also pointed out how the U.S. is still suffering from a financial crisis that has exposed a deep inequality that has divided us as a people.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve become distrustful of people who are different from us,\u201d Carter said. \u201cWe used to be a proud heterogeneous nation\u2026and now we are fearful\u2026and we\u2019ve become poorer as a country.\u201d<\/p>\n
Compare that with the protective and xenophobic nature of Trump. Carter\u00a0had a better vision of America, but look at what America has chosen for itself.<\/p>\n
Carter won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, a fact that belies how many conservatives see his efforts to find peace in the Middle East as \u201canti-Semitic.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bi-partisan Support<\/h2>\n
Jimmy Carter\u2019s sense of America and the world requires open minds to come together. Too often these days, that seems near impossible.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I was president, I got as much support from Republicans in the Senate and House as I did the Democrats,\u201d Carter said. \u201cNow if you\u2019re a Republican, you don\u2019t speak to Democrats, or support a Democratic president, or vice versa. And many Americans are embarrassed by the presidential election this year.\u201d<\/p>\n
His thoughts in 2016 have only grown exponentially.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve had a deterioration in the quality of life and the relationship between different people that now has become almost acceptable,\u201d said Carter, who added the nation had changed so much it would be near impossible for the current Republican and Democratic candidates to declare their top priority to live in peace or to promote human rights.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was my inaugural speech; I only spoke 15 minutes,\u201d said Carter, who noted that this vision wasn\u2019t just his but shared by the American people who had \u201cidealism and high standards and moral values\u2026and now we\u2019ve lost that.\u201d<\/p>\n
I can\u2019t imagine Trump teaching Sunday school, but Carter, we will miss in the New Year.<\/p>\n
Carter\u2019s calming wisdom would be preferable to the chaos 49.8 percent of the voters chose last November.<\/p>\n
Hard to believe a slim majority of voters (voters for Harris and others) rejected what\u2019s to come in 2025.<\/p>\n
Now with Carter\u2019s death, we all mourn.<\/p>\n
(Emil Guillermo is a journalist and commentator. He was the first Filipino American to host a national news show in 1989 at NPR\u2019s \u201cAll Things Considered.\u201d See his \u201cEmil Amok\u2019s Takeout\/What Does An Asian American Think?\u201d on\u00a0www.patreon.com\/emilamok<\/a>\u00a0Subscribe to him on YouTube.com\/@emilamok1)<\/p>\nSource: Published without changes from Ethnic Media Services<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Emil Guillermo Via\u00a0AsAmNews Former President Jimmy Carter at age 100, didn\u2019t make it to the new year,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":6564,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,8,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","category-online-newspaper","category-regular-column"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6563"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6563\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6565,"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6563\/revisions\/6565"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}