Game On

Baseball is back.
Yay.
In what seems like yet another desperate move to paint NORMAL over what is the most troubled and difficult year in recent memory, the powers that are Major League Baseball announced that games will commence starting in the last week of July. This year.
Never mind that every state that has opened their doors to kick-start their economies have suffered spikes of new cases of COVID-19. Never mind that there will only be sixty games. And don't even mention that the three weeks of "spring training" will take place in the dead of summer. Apple pie, Chevrolet and hot dogs can't be far behind.
Nor can the National Basketball Association. Their season will wrap up inside a bubble created in Disney World starting at the end of July. Those teams that have already been mathematically removed from playoff contention will be staying home. You might remember when basketball stopped. Suddenly. Two days before the rest of the country was sent home to wait out the pandemic, a flurry of positive cases were identified among NBA players. Then they closed Disneyland.
Everything changed.
Somewhere in there, I stopped missing sports. Initially I was caught with my rhythms disturbed. Without a game to anticipate, watch, then reflect on with my friends and neighbors, it seemed as though a chunk of my life had been forcibly removed.
Or maybe it was actually a relief. When my son came up to visit for Father's Day last week there was a moment where we pined for the hours of sitting in the stands, watching a game together. There are years of shared dad and lad moments connected to spectator sports. And at this point I feel the need to say that I fully expect to leave the door open a crack for what has been a shared experience for my family for decades.
But somewhere in the midst of the isolation, there came this other wave. The one that said that Black Lives Matter. All those players who have been trying to shine a light on those lives suddenly came into sharp focus because there were no games to distract us. We were faced with the reality of how we treat Steph Curry, George Floyd, Patrick Mahomes, Trayvon Martin, Bubba Wallace. Some of them are stars. Some of them are martyrs. I have thought a lot about this over the past three months. I am glad to have had the time to reflect. I don't want things to be normal if that means that people have to get sick and die, or be brutalized because of the color of their skin. These are games that no one wins.
They are not games.
This is not normal.

Casual Causality

Casual racism. No, not the kind you do on Fridays or while wearing khakis. We are talking about the sort of thing that happens far too often. This is usually the case when someone (white) lets fly with something that of course they "did not mean." These are the types of things that come just before an insistence that there was nothing racist intended and that the person who casually let their racist flag fly is not really a racist. How could they be? They have x number of black friends, where x equals a number from one to "lots."
Let me make sure we all get this, by the way: I work in a school with a predominately black population and there have been plenty of times where white guy (me) has felt uncomfortable haring or seeing how "my people" are viewed. I could take offense, and shout "reverse discrimination." I could feel hurt or frightened. Or I could realize that the system that has been in place for our country's history does not truly allow for this to have any traction at all. I accept the fact that I show up as white guy until I distinguish myself as a human being with any other traits that don't give rise to that cultural reality. Not a stereotype. White males own and run everything. They are the oppressors and the ones who made the system work for them for all these years. Little treats like Affirmative Action and the Civil Rights Act did not solve the problem.
This is how casual racism continues to exist. Carrying a Confederate flag and shouting racist epithets at the top of your lungs just makes you a cartoon. Very few, if any, humans of any stripe would allow these idiots to have more than their ten minutes of attention before switching over to something a little more subtle. And maybe a little more dangerous. The Karens of the world are generally horrified once they have seen or heard themselves. Karens of all genders. It's time to stop acting shocked and change the way we treat one another. Think before you speak is a little piece of advice I would like to pass along.
While we're on the topic of "casual," how about treating all women better? Casual sexism isn't casual sex, but it's probably a result of this sort of barely thinking. "She wanted it." "They all want it." Those are the sounds of a terribly insecure human being. What we want and with whom is not for anyone to assume. Providing any sort of gratification for anyone just to get through the world that white men made for their entertainment is no longer okay. "You should smile more." Maybe, but only if no one ever said those words again.
Once upon a time, I wrote An Apology For All Men. I did this as a response to being on the watching end of a world that didn't seem to allow people to be heard. Except white men. I wish I could say that apology made a difference. Not that I can see. So I'll stop apologizing and remind everyone that we will all be here together until the end of the world and so we need to get better at how we treat one another.
Today.

American Idols

Someday they'll erect a statue in your honor.
And eventually, that statue will be taken down.
It happened to Saddam Hussein. And maybe, like Saddam, the same folks who took it down might want to put it back up again.
Statues have a funny way of not aging. Made out of things like bronze or marble, they tend to outlast whatever zeitgeist initially put them up. Statues are more of the fixture type of elements. This has a lot to do with weight. Not necessarily the historical version, but the physical. The monument to Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Virginia weighs twelve tons. It is sitting on a forty foot pedestal and stands an additional twenty-one feet above that. Taking down that bad boy would take some serious vandalism and more than a passing interest in the acceleration of gravity. Wouldn't it be easier just to let it be? Probably. Cheaper, too.
But it would be wrong. Robert E. Lee was the commander of the Confederate Army during the Civil War. If you're not up on your American history, that was the side that was trying to keep things the way they were down south. Slaves. That was the side that lost. And even though General Lee personally felt that slavery was evil, he still fought to defend those who would see that institution continue. The statue in question is located in what was the capital of the Confederacy. I guess that makes sense.
Until we get to the part where the statue was commissioned in 1917, and dedicated in 1890. For you history buffs, that's more than twenty-five years after Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox. More than twenty-five years after Juneteenth. Why was the statue of a loser, and a mighty big one at that, erected in the center of the city that was the conquered capital of a failed uprising? I thought that history was written by the victors. Why isn't there a statue of Ulysses S. Grant riding high above the traffic circle in the middle of town?
Maybe because most of these monuments were thrown up long after they were tributes to the "heroes" of the Confederacy. They were placed in conspicuous places throughout the south, peaking during the early 1900's. Kind of like there were folks who didn't want us to forget the olden days. Or maybe they wanted to keep their thumbs on the racist button just in case anyone would want to forget that legacy. Care to guess what year Maryland decided to add statues of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman to their capital?
2020.
More than two hundred years after that whole Robert E. Lee mess. Debacle. Atrocity. The statue of Ms. Tubman stands an "historically accurate four feet ten inches tall." And even with that relative height disparity, I'm betting Harriett could topple General Lee any day.

Help Police

Those two words up there have plenty of meaning, alone or together. A lot depends on how you choose to assert them. Either word can be a verb or a noun. But perhaps the most regular occurrence of this phrase is a plea for assistance. When things go bad, who aside from Ghostbusters are you gonna call? Help! Police!
There is a moment in the movie Fletch, where Chevy Chase is confronted by Joe Don Baker who plays the crooked chief who is behind the heroin ring being run on the beach. With perfect deadpan irony, Fletch looks up and says, "Thank God, the police." Things have just gone from bad to worse for this investigative reporter. The cavalry has arrived, but not to rescue anyone.
This is what I keep thinking about as we wade through the weeks and days of tumult and questions about police reform. I am certainly old enough to remember playing cops and robbers without a stitch of Chase-ian irony. We knew who the good guys were. We knew who the bad guys were. Of course this was right about the time that a sitting American president felt the need to stand up in front of a group of press and a national television audience to tell them "I am not a crook." Well, as it turned out, Richard Nixon was a crook. The President of the United States was a bad guy. He got out of the White House just ahead of the cops coming to take him away.
At least that's how my twelve year old imagination had it.
It was also around this time that we found out just how bad a guy the Federal Bureau of Investigation had at the top of their ranks. J. Edgar Hoover was the head cop in the United States from 1924 until his death in 1972. For a long time, Hoover was looked upon as a national hero for all his crime fighting exploits. Presidents came and went, but Hoover stayed on. And by the time he was taken out of his well-feathered nest by the angels, he had become every bit as corrupt as any of the ten most wanted. He had a profound issue with the burgeoning civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties. Some of those presidents for whom he served were afraid of him. Even Richard Nixon.
Fear can be a pretty amazing motivator.
Along about the mid-seventies, the trope of one good cop was established. Frank Serpico, in real life and as portrayed by Al Pacino was one of the early whistleblowers. Frank was the one who brought down his fellow cops when he shined a light on the NYPD corruption. In the late sixties and early seventies. Serpico was a lone wolf, and for his trouble he was set up to be murdered by his fellow officers. Setting the stage for rogue cops to be the standard, both in real life and in media.
It is now 2020. The need to rely on old chops like "a few bad apples" doesn't fly very far when we are presented daily with new evidence of bad apples. Everywhere. Those in law enforcement who do not welcome reform of some sort at this time must have been asleep for the past fifty years. Or maybe they were just going to different movies than I was.

The Anthropology Of Peace

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has." Those are the words of Margaret Mead. They have been applied to any number of events or coincidences in the fifty-some years since she uttered them. Come to think of it, I don't expect that Doctor Mead uttered those words. It was more likely a proclamation. 
I would like to assert that this moment in time is a prime example of such committed citizenry. I am not uttering this. I am asserting. The first example I would like to cite the peaceful march through Oakland organized by two nineteen year olds, Xavier Brown and Akil Riley. What started on Instagram ended up bringing fifteen thousand people together to remind us all that Black Lives Matter. 
Speaking of social media and teenagers, the bad rap that these two things often receive from farts of a certain age will be excused while we lavish praise on all those Tik Tokkers who ordered free tickets to the Trump rally in Tulsa over the weekend, causing all kinds of heightened anticipation among the MAGAts. There was wild talk about needing to make a second address outside to speak to the multitudes that were most certainly descending on the Oil Capital of Oklahoma. That was cancelled when it became apparent that the hundreds of thousands were more like a little over ten thousand, leaving a bunch of empty seats. The nineteen thousand seats in the Bank of Oklahoma Center were mostly unfilled. Fire department estimates of the crowd was around 6,200. It's difficult to say for certain whether teenagers with cell phones disrupted the "president's" plans for a comeback, but you have to appreciate the commitment.
Which is precisely what we need right now. You don't have to pull down a statue of some racist figurehead to make a difference. You need to be thoughtful and committed to change the world. Another great woman once wrote that "hope is the thing with feathers." For the first time in months I feel like I could finally stuff a couple of pillows.
Don't stop now. 

Looking For Understanding

Periodically I find myself in a moment of compassion attempting to empathize with the so-called "silent majority" that the "president" insists will swoop in and carry him to another term in office. What is it that makes these Americans feel that they have to gain from another year of this nonsense?
Oops. Sorry. Forgot to turn on the empathy switch.
Maybe you're out of work and you're looking for a reason. You have certainly paid your dues. There must be something or someone else to blame. It might be that the job you used to do has been given away to another person. In another country. For far less than the wage you were making. Now you're making nothing and someone else is doing what you did for less. That's just wrong. And it couldn't be your fault. This is when someone steps in and tells you that foreigners who are not Americans are taking jobs away from Americans. This someone assures you that this will stop if you elect him or her to the highest office in the land. You want your job back, don't you?
Whew. There's one down. Notice that I didn't even bring up all the American corporations that made the choice to send jobs elsewhere in search of the almighty dollar. Corporations that benefit from enormous tax breaks given out by the same fella who says he's doing it all for American workers. Never mind the possibility that the jobs that were lost came about as an industry that was dying because it needs to evolve into the twenty-first century. If someone told me that if I just stood by and voted for them and I didn't have to do anything and everything would go back to the way they used to be, I might be tempted.
Not really.
Just like I would probably want to check out the numbers tossed out with reckless abandon about illegal immigration and crime, both of which have been going down over the past decade or so. Not up. So maybe it's the guns?
If you're one of those constitutional scholars who insists the Second Amendment assures you of the right to strap a grenade launcher to the side of your truck and to pack heat when you head down to Chipotle, you are probably terrified of those radical Democrats coming to your house to take your guns away. I have never had the sort of relationship with a firearm that I would consider intimate, so maybe I'm the wrong person to ask, but I do wonder about the need for automatic weapons when ordering a fast food burrito.
Which makes me think that there may be some fear involved in this whole Trump thing. Someone who reassures us all that we can all be great again if we just stop doing all those difficult things like hope and change. Resignation and fear are so much easier to maintain. And the tickets are free. The self-described billionaire doesn't want your money. He doesn't need your money. He'll do the job for free. Which kind of brings us back to that whole worry about losing your job. A lot of Americans share this concern. Maybe that's what's driving "the president" right now. Given his recent track record, who would hire him if he loses this gig?
Sorry. Not a lot of empathy here.

Lag Time

The "president" said n an interview with the Wall Street Journal last week that he made Juneteenth "very famous." Pretty solid Trumpian move, if not straight up white male privilege. His words were these: "I did something good: I made Juneteenth very famous. It's actually an important event, an important time. But nobody had ever heard of it." In case you missed it, this dullard is referring to the celebration on June 19th of the end of slavery. Not the Emancipation Proclamation, which had become law in the North two and a half years earlier. This was when sufficient Union soldiers landed in Galveston Texas, announcing the end of the war and carrying the charge of upholding the terms of the surrender. Slaves were free. This was, for many, the true Independence Day. 
Can I say that I learned all of that from my teachers in elementary school? Junior high? High school? College? Nope. In the version I learned in a classroom, Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery with a stroke of his pen in 1863. There was no mention of the two and a half years it took to bring about the actual release from bondage. There was no mention of how some consider that there may have been a delay imposed by those sympathetic to the "plight" of plantation owners who would have no way to bring in their cotton harvest if their labor force was suddenly unchained. That a messenger was killed en route to delivering the news and all was kept quiet until troops from the North came down to make an issue out of it. What was Abe going to do? Was he going to ride down south himself and tell loyal members to the Confederacy to knock it off? He could have been shot. 
No. It wasn't my formal education that gave me this news. It was a friend of mine with whom I worked installing office furniture. He asked me if I had plans for Juneteenth. I had no clue. He did. He and his family had a big barbecue planned and were going to spend the day educating white folks like me. Embarrassed and confounded, I took this to heart and remembered it when I moved to Oakland, where Juneteenth didn't need to be explained or "made famous" by some white guy. 
Every day is a chance to learn. Every day a new bit of information falls into our collective lap and we can choose what to do with it. There is a version of history that we need to know, and it's not the one that makes the happiest story. There is a celebration on June 19th, and it serves as a reminder to us all that we still have a long way to go. We're at least two and a half years behind.