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On Taking a Knee hi

Taking a knee is, at least to me, a bigger statement than BLM. Black Lives Matter, racial injustice, white supremacy is a critically important piece of this act of civil disobedience, but there is much, much more behind it. A history of events and acts brought us here.

I’ll never forget my friend Franko, after one of our 200 mile bike races, we were in Wildwood, NJ, noon the next day. On the boardwalk a loudspeaker started playing the national anthem and every one stopped. Some saluted, all stood at attention, with Franko screaming, “What are we, Pavlov’s Dogs?” Then sitting down on a bench. I joined him. No one liked that act much either.

I’ll be taking a knee or refusing to stand and salute until cops stop killing black men for selling untaxed cigarettes, and young men are no longer tortured and mutilated and drowned for saying “Hello” to a white woman, and kids aren’t shot in their cars for going for their wallets, during racially profiled traffic stops. The cops that commit these crimes hurt and endanger all of us, including the good a decent cops.

I’ll not stand and salute until we have a true representative government, and we address corruption, and term limits and lobbyists and the fact that it’s still legal to sell tobacco and dispense profitable opiate pain killers like they were Chiclets. I’ll not stand until there is no more Citizens United, and no more US congressmen in Moscow on July Fourth.

I’ll not stand until we address systematic racism and men like Mitch McConnell thinking that $1400 is making us all quit out jobs and sit around drinking beer. I’ll not stand until we have decent affordable health insurance, until we live in an economy that benefits the many, not the few. Until we have sensible gun laws and education is a right and not an expensive luxury affordable only to the affluent. I’ll not stand until the CEO, again, makes ten times what the line workers makes, not five hundred times. I’ll not stand until women stop being raped and that horrific act blamed on how they dress, and men in power think they can grope and touch women because they are men in power.

I’ll not stand until the children are all fed, not Boeing and Exxon. I’ll not stand until there is no more homelessness and heroin.

I’ll not stand until actual history is taught in schools and we learn of the Trail of Tears and what kind of men founded this country, men who owned other men. Until acts of hate like the Tuskegee Experiment are discussed in the classroom, not FaceBook, sixty years after it all occurred and the victims of this governments hate are all dead and gone. Until we openly face and address the slaughter and theft and rape of the native population of this nation.

I’ll not stand until we acknowledge that John Lewis being beaten bloody on the Edmond Pettus bridge in 1965 and the boys who died in A Shau Valley, in 1969 were all victims of the same machine that exists only for the profit of the ruling class.

If you want me to stand and salute give me something to be proud of, not ashamed in my soul.

I was not standing and not saluting long before Kaepernick. It is my honor to now join him.

I guess some of us will not be standing a pretty long time. It’s time to stop standing and saluting because that’s what we are expected to do, and start demanding justice.

I hear crap about taking a knee or refusing to stand is disrespectful to the men and women who served in the military and fought for American ‘freedom.’ What is truly disrespectful is refusing to acknowledge the truth and refusing to demand better, and standing and saluting because a song is played. It’s not about disrespect, it’s self respect and demanding decency for all people.

Like Franko said, we are not Pavlov’s Dogs.

If you want me to salute an ideal, make it so the ideal is not a lie.

We Need Men Like These Men

I was not a fan of Mohammed Ali, I was a follower, a believer. He was the greatest of all time.

In a time of complete chaos and societal breakdown, and a time when the old bastions were falling and failing and revealing an ugly truth, Ali stood up and demanded a courageous honesty.

His demand crossed lines and barriers or religion and political views and nationality and color. With a great sense of humor, he related stories of winning the gold in the Olympics only to come home and be called, “Boy,” and told to eat at the colored table and use the colored bathroom. You could sense his rage, but he didn’t betray it, he smiled and rose above. A waitress told him one time, “We don’t serve Negros here…” and Ali replied, “That’s fine, I don’t eat ‘em either!”

Ali was a friend of Malcolm X, maybe more an acquaintance. It stands to reason I listened to this man too; trying to learn from his words.

There is a myth that Malcolm was a racist and hated white men. That is absolutely not true. Malcolm stood up to injustice. He stood up for the oppressed and wrongly accused. Malcolm encouraged you to be polite and dignified, but if someone crossed your line, where ever that line was, whatever that line was, “Send him to the cemetery.” As I watch this world burn and watch the fearful being lead by truly gutless political and social leaders, I crave the courage and honesty of men like Ali and Malcolm X.

The Fourth Step – A searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

Samuel Clemons was as socially liberal and politically progressive as any man in the nineteenth century could be. He wrote in a voice and used words and names for black men and native men that were offensive at best, flat out wrong is a better word for it. I never met the man, but I know this was not his heart.

Mark Baskerville is my best friend—and one Hell of a content editor—and I have had many discussions about the use of that one derogatory term, too often used to refer to people of color. The word hurts and offends me. I can only imagine what the word stirs up for Mark. We’ve discussed using the word in my own work and decided it best to let it die, we need to dig deeper and work around it. It is time to let the word die, as it is time to let other ugly stereotypes die.

I fear Clemons could be next.

John Steinbeck was a communist, not a Red Square, Jack-boots, tank and missile parade communist; read The Grapes of Wrath. It will tell you all you need to know and understand about Capitalism and Communism. Commies scare people. Regardless of the truth he presents. We are conditioned to fear the commies and see the capitalists as the good guys. Hysterical if you think about it. No one seems to think about it.

I get a lot of my world view through Steinbeck’s eyes.

I fear Steinbeck could be next

Hemingway glorified killing bulls and war and disillusioned men and drinking and fighting. A painter with words, terse and definitive and necessary.

I fear Hemingway could be next.

Dickens wrote of child abuse and forced child labor and union work houses. Things that would and should offend. A very ugly history.

I fear Dickens could be next.

We need to pull down the statues of slavers and hate filled men, and put the effigies of them in a place where they are not revered, but not forgotten.

We need to rename the slavers parks and military bases. We need to include many of the founding fathers of this nation in that group and once and for all see them for exactly what and who they are. Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and James Madison were no better men that Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee. They all shared the same values and morals. They owned human beings, They all saw themselves as somehow better than the people they owned and enslaved. I cannot separate that from a man and his allgeded greatness, Washington as the father of our country, as a great general, Jefferson’s flowery prose, about independence and liberty while both men owned people. Ponder that, ownership of another human being. The sentient decision it was somehow ok to own other human beings negates any alleged goodness.

I was never a fan of Dr. Suess. I thought his books were creepy. I’ve often been referred to as the Grinch. A fact I take pride in. That said, Geisel wrote from the perspective of a man at that time who thought it was right and just to paint Chinese people as slanty eyed rice eaters, and African men with bones in their noses. It was not ok then or now, but it is vitally important that we confront who we are and who we were and not erase it from history.

It is not some cliche to say if we don’t learn from our history, we are doomed to repeat it.

Look around, look at the Proud Boys and the MAGA hats. Now, more than perhaps ever in our history, it is vital we look at all these words and drawings and actions and figures and see them for exactly who and what they were, and who they are, and learn from that. There good lessons to be learned and gleaned from the some, and there are ugly truths about us to be learned others.

We don’t need to cancel anything. We need a reckoning. Like the forth step in AA/NA, we need a ruthless and truthful self inventory. We need to look in the mirror and see who we are and what we have allowed for for too long and get to work to fix it. There are more than a few statues that need to be knocked down.

This is not some great left-wing conspiracy. It is simply time to face who we are and work to be better.

New York, 2020

I don’t like Andrew Cuomo, never have. I didn’t like his father either.

I think Andrew Cuomo did an exemplary job when NY city and state were the epicenter of the early outbreaks of this pandemic. I love the naysayers have such criticism for his part in the nursing home debacle. I was talking to a friend yesterday, a guy far more pro Cuomo than me, I came away from that conversation remembering what a catastrophe New York was facing in those early days.

Like with everything else, the urgency of that moment is diluted by time, and the the fact we have now recovered from that moment. I think Cuomo may have screwed things up with sending sick people from hospitals to nursing homes, but I’m glad that wasn’t my decision.

NYC wasn’t in crisis last April, it was a battlefield. I don’t know anyone qualified to second guess anyone’s decisions at this time. My mom died in a nursing home at the very outset of this disaster. I have no idea if Cuomo’s policies had a hand in her death or not. It really doesn’t matter.

I do know some, like Cuomo in NY, Murphy in NJ and LaMont in CT were making impossible decisions when nothing was working and more people were dying in a single day in the city in 2020 than marines in Khe Sanh in 1968.

As these men worked to save lives, the sitting President was saying it would magically disappear and calling it the China Flu.

Emmett Till

Every time it happens I think not a damn thing has changed since Watts, and Bobby Seale and Huey Newton—1966.

Not a damn thing has changed since Marvin wrote Inner City Blues—1972.

Every time the cities explode with rage I say to some other white guy, “What exactly do you expect?”

Malcolm X said, ““Concerning nonviolence, it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks.”—1964

Cities will burn again and in a twist of doublespeak that would confound George Orwell, the fascists will blame the anti-fascists. ‘Proud Boys” and the Klan and the other cowards will say things in private they don’t have the balls to say in public, and call themselves patriots.

Emmett Till, 1954, beaten and militated, then shot for passing a comment to white woman, in a grocery store in Mississippi. Recently the white woman, Emmetts accuser, Carolyn Bryant, admitted he never touched her and she made up the accusation.

Not a damn thing has changed. This has always been America. 1861 to 1954 to 2021, not a damn thing has changed. Just the words. The words of some may not be so harsh now. Maybe there is a contrived illusion of compassion and understanding, but not a damn thing has changed since Emmett Till, and not for a hundred years looking back and not for a hundred looking forward.

This has always been exactly what and who we knew we were.

Every time it happens I ponder the crime of being a black man in America—2021

Thank you, Mark Baskerville for clarifying the horrific details of Emmett’s death