April 4, 2018/April 4, 1968

Fifty years ago, in the early evening of a Thursday I was at home.  Eleven years old I sat watching TV.  My parents were out.  My guess is that mom was at the Lady Rebekah’s and my dad was at an Oddfellows meeting.  I was watching some program, maybe Bewitched when the scroll began across the bottom of the screen. 

In 1968 we knew well the scroll.  On a black and white TV, the scroll was a gray shaded band with contrasting letters that carried news of great importance across the bottom inch of the screen. Disasters and crisis moments were highlighted by the scroll. The scroll was often a stalling tactic while ABC, NBC and CBS got their news staffs into the studio to begin an ad hoc broadcast based on whatever they could confirm by phone and wire. 

On that spring Thursday night, the scroll at the bottom of the screen announced that Martin Luther King, Jr., had been shot.  Quickly the scroll changed to announce that Dr. King had been killed. Once Dr. King’s death was confirmed the scroll disappeared. Every network broke into their primetime programs with coverage of the Noble laureate’s death.  

On that day the world changed, America changed.  A gunman with a scope took down the hopes of so many who had wanted American to move forward toward a non-racial progressive democracy.  An angry man afraid of losing his privileges, those that belonged to him because of his membership card of white skin, killed a dark-skinned preacher whose life had been focused on nonviolent but seismic change.

Cities burned in the aftermath of the wanton killing of that man of peace.  In the fear spawned that summer we lost focus on what really mattered.  We for forgot or let slide the concept of equality.  Simple truths, easy to be spoken but hard make reality, became seemingly unobtainable. One person is entitled to equal rights under the law.  One person is entitled to live where they desire and can afford not where they are steered.  One person is entitled to be judged on the merits of their skill and knowledge and not historically biased perceptions of what “their people” were like. Visible marks of difference such as skin color, sex and traditional garb need to be ignored. 

We never got our footing back in the march for a better world.  We Americans threw in with a new law and order regime.  Seemingly we accepted that the silent majority wanted stability more than anything else.  As a result, instead of getting visionaries like Dr. King we got instead a President who flaunts his ethnocentric bias saying things like, ““They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people,” about the Mexican people.  We are led by a man who refuses to acknowledge the dark racial component of white supremacy present in Charlottesville.

There are choices we will have to make again and again going forward to promote equality and justice for all.  Standing up for the right thing will probably get us pilloried by both the hard left and the hard right.  But even an old soul like me knows that if we don’t stand up and say no more to laws and procedures designed to disenfranchise the different and the poor, the ideals of what America is and what it should be will die just like Dr. King did.  Hate swings with a vengeance.  We must be prepared to fight, and we must be prepared to take the body blows that speaking truth to power will bring. We must stay focused and stay strong.

Breath In, Breath Out; It is not as Simple as we Would Want it to Be. *

“One of the disadvantages of school and learning, he thought dreamily, was that the mind seemed to have the tendency to see and represent all things as though they were flat and had only two dimensions. This, somehow, seemed to render all matters of intellect shallow and worthless...”
― Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund

 

Intellectual pursuit need not be dry and sleep inducing.  Just because rigor and logic are applied to the matters of the world, to the matters of life, does not mean that we cannot just simply experience things that bring joy and delight.  We are capable of duality.  When we see sunlight falling through the trees in a park onto a grassy clearing, we can joyfully experience it as a green space of solitude and warmth.  We can purely see a place to set out a blanket on the ground and to open a picnic basket.

 

We don’t have to see a question of why the trees were located there and whether their roots give off chemicals to prevents other trees from growing between them.  We don’t have to speculate of the genus and species of the grass and why it flourishes in this copse of trees.  We don’t have to think about the carbon/oxygen transition ratio that the trees engage in and whether they in a day take care of our carbon footprint.  Some days are days for analysis and some days are just for sitting down with cold fried chicken on an old blanket. Some days are just for drinking a glass of wine.

 

In my life I have known people who analyze everything including how you say hello to them.  You remember the old stand up bit don’t you where in call and response fashion the comedian says, “Good morning, eh?”.  He then adopts another voice and says, “What do you mean by that?” Sometimes such people just seem lost in an internal chess game that will not end until they die.

 

On the other hand, I have known people who smoked pot, drank beer and slept around until their bodies gave out.  These were good people, nice people but people for whom the phrase, “The road goes on forever, and the party never ends,” was a mantra. These lives were lived in just a shallow and meaningless manner as that of those who over intellectualize.

 

Life requires balance sometimes one must do the hard-cold math.  Other times one must accept and simply be without opinion or judgment. Book learning is fine and gives us the tools to live in organized society, a group of people fighting for higher achievement and freedom from the vagaries of nature’s randomness. But simply being in place in the world is required too.  The issue will always remain how to balance both.  Extremes either way can create a shallow and hollow place of being.

Protest with a New Spirit

Early morning yesterday my wife quietly asked if I was going to the march against gun violence. She was planning for travel and wanted to know if I was going to work because she would have to work me in to her route to the protest. 

I usually work about 3-4 hours every Saturday.  I depend on my Saturday time as a catch-up zone for work that got shunted to the side in the day to day struggle to keep up. To protest or to work, the decision did not come all at once. While contemplating what to do I thought about the kids who were behind the demonstration and their motivations.  Sitting with my coffee in hand I remembered what it meant to me to walk out of school on moratorium day as part of a nationwide protest the Vietnam war. Being part of civil action for a just cause back in the late 1960s motivated me to stay active in political issues the rest of my life.  I decided to go.

Personally, I know a thing or two about gun violence.  While I have never been shot I have had a gun pulled on me during a robbery.  I also tried to intervene when my father grabbed his shotgun to confront some of my friends over a long simmering dispute when I was in my teens.  In the former case the situation was based on just pure evil being amplified by access to a deadly weapon.  In the latter case a man I view as good just lost it and the gun amped up his power level versus 15 or 20 young turks.  I am happy my father didn’t shoot anyone.  I am happy I did not get shot.  But twice in my life the power of a gun has impacted me.  As a result, I don’t keep guns in my home.

When we got to the demonstration the crowd was solid in size but not overwhelming.  The voices that spoke were for the most part on the mark with what I believe.  Nobody was calling for an outright ban on ownership of guns. Shotguns and limited ammunition capacity rifles for sportspeople don’t bother me.  Hunting deer and other game is not an issue for me.  Keeping predators off a farm, again no big deal.  However unfettered access assault weapons and hand guns is a whole different kettle of fish. I clapped, I chanted, and I listened.  Gun waiting periods, background checks on each gun sale and limitation of access to weapons whose primary purpose is wounding or killing other people make sense to me.

In my state the person who put together the gathering of over a thousand people at the state capitol on a cold March Saturday morning was 14 years old.  While I stood there loads of teens walked by me.  Lots of young college students were there.  I would guess the crowd was a least 50% young.  Those of us who protested Vietnam, we are fading from the scene now.  Damn it is good to know that there is a younger generation who has the spark to act burning within it.

Facts Not TaTas

If only we could collectively winnow out the noise in our stream of daily data. If only we could clear out the nonsense and clutter from the material, we see and hear each day. Why should the thoughts and musings of the has-beens, never-really made its, and famous because they’re famous, have a prime position in our stream of information, the so-called “news”?

 

Just because an actor once played a doctor in a movie doesn’t provide the performer valid credentials to discuss the treatment of cardiac failure. Just because a lovely woman once bared her breasts in a glossy magazine to the eyes of millions of adoring men and women, doesn’t give her the knowledge to speak with a heightened public persona about the workings of the brain.

 

The demand for content, and I use that word loosely, is so intense for companies providing news/infotainment. As a result, these purveyors of data will print anything said by a person whose face has been seen before by a large swath of the television watching populace. I don’t need to know how star A copulated with star B. What I do need to know is how close are we to war. I also need to know is how unhealthy are the choices being forced upon me by a monolithic food distribution system. We need to know many things, but factual scientific and political things, to live as responsible citizens of the world.

 

I need knowledge from informed experts. I do not need ramblings from a bosom enhanced pubis shaved talking Barbie doll.

A Different Facebook

Today is day two away from Facebook.  Took a while but my fascination with solitaire has passed.  Now I am back to writing.  I am keeping up with the news, but I don’t need Facebook for that. 

As opposed to searching out who among my Facebook friends is angry or which one of them had the best fish taco, I have been downloading books on the history of the Iberian Peninsula onto my Amazon Fire.  The reason is twofold.  First, I am looking to move to Portugal, a country on the peninsula. My hope, God willing is to go within two years.  Kind of makes sense to understand the fissures and bonds that have hold over the peoples there. Second, I am watching a television series called in English translation, The Ministry of Time. Each episode presents me with some episode of history of Spain that I either have the vaguest knowledge about or I have never even heard of.  Searching out the references is becoming kind of a game for me. 

What I am missing from Facebook is the opportunity to offer support to the people I know there that are hurting.  One friend is battling a serious illness.  Another fired has passed just recently and I am sure the comments and condolences are flowing.  I feel guilty about not being involved on this level.  But Facebook has become something else. 

Facebook has always been about the money from day one.  I get that.  But it is the way that it has grown more and more into an intrusive marketing and data mining service and less and less of a community forum that has driven me away.  Cambridge Analytics is only one example, one big ugly glaring wound of an example, of Facebook’s problems but there are others.

I would join a Facebook-like entity that required a monthly fee of $10 a month if all they did was connect me with my friends and not data mine me and not market me things tied to every reference I have made in a post.  There would also have to be a term of service that indicated the stream of interactions would be monitored for abusive and manipulative posts.  If you had 80 million users paying $10 a month that would be 800 million dollars a month.  I think you could pay for infrastructure and capable monitoring under such a model.

Monthly I pay $6 to listen to music without ads.  I think most of us would pay $5 or $10 a monthly for Facebook without ads and without data mining.  For at least the next six days it is on to Lisbon and Madrid.

Man-Child

This is hard to put into words, but it is a belief I have come to have after years of interactions with younger adults.  We meet regularly in what is in essence a half hour long confrontation.

 

When I talk to younger men, because I mostly deal with men, there is a timidity, a lack of self confidence and a lack of focus that is very different from what I saw among my contemporaries growing up in the 1960s. Adrift, with a lack of focus and an attitude of what does it matter, they bounce from one parent’s home to a friend’s couch to the other parent’s home/

 

Repeatedly I see cases where these young men who should be on a college track but are just lost.  They have taken seven years to get a degree that I rushed through and obtained in 3 ½.  They are tentative about everything.  There is no raging desire to be separate from their parents, to be different and better than the generation that came before.  I can’t think of a single guy I grew up with who didn’t have a relatively concrete plan on what would happened when they finished high school.

 

These men-children are all shaking shoulders and I don’t knows.  Where is the ambition?  Where is the desire to succeed?  Where is the longing for a championship, a scholarship, a place on the Dean’s list?

 

Did we do this to them?  Did screens do this to them.  Did a culture of participation medals do this to them?  I just don’t get it.

Grace is Not so Easily Found

I am walking; the weather is warmer. There are little hints winter is not a permanent condition. Hardly little buds are pushing up through the soil. A wind chime is ringing. OK, this moment, is a state of grace. I think I’ll humbly accept it.