Author Notes

Breaking News!

After a week of watching the news again I’ve learned this about Covid:

The vaccine will keep you from getting very sick, unless it doesn’t. Then it won’t, but it won’t kill you, unless it does. So generally it’s good, except when it isn’t, but even then it’s not bad, because after you get the shot, you don’t have to wear a mask, except when you do need to wear a mask. But even if you do need to wear a mask, you don’t need to wear one outside, except sometimes when you do. But even if you do need to wear a mask outdoors you can be indoors with other fully vaccinated people without a mask, probably. Regardless, your protection from the vaccine will last a year, or six months, or three. Then you’ll need a booster, unless you don’t.

I’m happy and grateful I’m fully vaccinated. I’ll continue to wear a mask, because it’s the right thing to do.

The same news that reports a loss in confidence in the vaccine actually reports the nonsense listed above—daily.

I wish the ‘news’ would stop breathlessly reporting speculation and actually report facts—what to do and not do. That would help, a lot, to encourage people to get vaccinated and build confidence. This idiocy serves no one.

The Dance

Watching the young boys dance, the spray of sweat and spit. Every duck and weave, and every punch that connects reminds me now that we are no longer the same. I’m no longer one of them, I’m a visitor, an outsider. I’m from another place, another time, a different world.

I realize I don’t move like they move anymore. Even when I am warm, and in the zone, I’m slow and heavy and plodding, compared to these light young boys.

They are kinder to me than I am to myself.

You don’t play at boxing, like baseball or tennis or golf, you don’t play, you fight. You win or you lose. You break bones. You bleed. You get old.

It’s really that simple.

Sitting, in my own silence, I hear the grunts, the deep thud of thick gloves on heavy bags, and guts, and ribs. I smell sweat and canvas and mold and blood.

Young hands move as fast as light.

My hands are slow and arthritic. Even wrapped and gloved, they hurt on contact, pain shoots up to my shoulders. Too many broken bones connected to too many broken bones.

I used to be fast as light.

I used to be impervious and unmovable, a stone wall.

Walls crumble.

But these boys, now, these young men who picked it up where the old men laid it down, Jesus, they are fast.

I shake my head and close my eyes and I feel the sounds as I feel these very old bones.

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.