Here Is The News

 In the headlines:

Witnesses say that Vladimir Putin keeled over dead this afternoon. Initial suspicions are an overdose of testosterone. A Kremlin spokesman denied this report, insisting that the Russian leader was overwhelmed during a "wildlife exhibition" in Red Square. Bystanders reported that as Mister Putin stripped down to nothing but a pair of Speedos and entered the ring where ten kittens were waiting "to be subdued," he clutched his chest, then his private parts and screamed "Nyet!" The Russian people, upon hearing of their beloved leader's demise, responded "Putin who?"

In national news, Academy Award winning actress Meryl Streep removed her prosthetics and dull-eye contacts to reveal that she had, in fact, been "doing research for a part" by creating a character she called "the worst human being ever to be elected to public office." Supporters of Marjorie Taylor Greene were shocked by this revelation and claimed that if they had known that they were voting for Ms. Streep in the first place they still insisted on her carrying out her ridiculous agenda. When confronted with the reality that MTG was just a figment of someone's imagination, this same group of Georgia pinheads were quoted, "Huh?"

Locally, the Oakland Unified School District woke up from their thirty year nap and declared that they had discovered the missing money that had been thought wasted or misappropriated over the past few decades and declared that they would immediately halt their plans to close any schools in the city and would be putting forth a plan for paying back all the teachers who had been underpaid and schools that had been underfunded for all those years. The President of the School Board announced his resignation in shame, and offered to fully fund a new playground for Horace Mann Elementary out of his own funds and apologized for all the stress he had piled on the families, students and staff of that particular site. 

Meanwhile in sports, a bunch of grown men got paid for playing games. The mostly white male ownership of these various sports franchises announced that they would be making direct contributions to the food banks and homeless shelters in their communities, citing the many years that they had been swimming in rivers of cash while citizens within sight of their arenas were begging for a scrap of discarded hot dogs and living in carboard boxes next to the lots that were charging more for the privilege of parking than the tickets to get into the aforementioned games. 

We'll be right back with more on these stories and the news about Ted Cruz apologizing for every word he has ever uttered. Happy April Fool's Day. 

We Can Do Better

 I am sorry for what seems to be a deficit in the capacity of male human beings to apologize. I could take a long time to explain why I believe this has become the path of consolation, but these "sorry, not sorry" teases are offensive to everyone. 

A long time ago, I learned that it is not enough to just mouth the words and then move about your business. And there may come a time when the offending party is asked about his motivation, but first you need to take responsibility for your actions. When I say "his," I am focusing on that part of the population that seems to be under the impression that as long as their behavior comes with some justification it can be excused. 

That's poison, folks. One human being harming another is significant. Worth noting. Worth pausing in the course of the day's events to recognize as such. I would like to use this space to help get men over this unfortunate void. Someone placed this ugly substitute for an actual apology into the mix, and suddenly it's become all the rage. Let me be clear: an explanation of your actions is a very different thing from taking responsibility for those actions. The rage I mentioned prior is at the core of this problem. We are all gifted with these things called feelings, and sometimes they get the better of us. When we are caught off-guard by those emotions, we are not at our best. I would like to press the point that these non-apologies are not the collective us acting at our best. 

Heat of the moment, saw red, lost my cool, and so on. As soon as the temperature returns to anything close to normal, steps need to be made to restore the rational discourse. "He or she had it coming" is the kind of phrase that plays well in revenge fantasies, but it does absolutely nothing to restore relations. I am writing this in the shadow of the ugly scene that went out to a worldwide television audience, where Will Smith got up out of his seat at the Oscars to defend his wife from a poorly timed cheap shot by comedian Chris Rock. He did this by slapping Rock and continuing to shout expletives from his ringside seat once he returned. To hear Smith's explanation, he insisted that "Love will make you do crazy things." 

So will anger. The love in this particular moment was not in question. Compounding the level of uncomfortableness for everyone watching, it was only a few moments later that Mister Smith was awarded with the Best Actor award. He used that opportunity in front of a worldwide audience to ask forgiveness from the Academy, who gave him the statue, insisting “I’m being called on in my life to love people and to protect people.” Protect them from ill-advised award show banter? 

To be clear: I am not singling out Will Smith. I thought that Chris Rock's joke was an unnecessary jab at an innocent bystander. I believe it is yet another in a series of unfortunate events of mansplaining and toxic masculinity. The words "I'm sorry" should not appear anywhere near the conjunction "but." That path leads far too often to the phrase, "he/she/they were asking for it." Apologies, I tell my grade school friends, build character. They don't tear it down. Apologies should be an assurance that we hope to do better, and an affirmation that we will continue to try. 

We need to be better at this. I am going to work harder to mine those depths of bypassed sincerity. 

Thank you for listening. I'm sorry if I went on too long. I will make it up to you by making another with less words. 

March The Second

 I went for a walk downtown this Saturday. Most of it was in the middle of otherwise busy streets. The fact that I was carrying one side of a banner and periodically raising my voice in unison with a crowd that surrounded me is probably what kept me safe and free from arrest and/or prosecution. 

Once again, I fell in love with my constitutional rights. Freedoms of speech and assembly, specifically. Police presence was at a minimum, perhaps because we were a group of educators, parents and students. We were wending our way through the streets of Oakland in broad daylight. We carried signs, pushed strollers, and some brought their little dogs on leashes. Our intent was to disrupt, not destroy. We wanted to keep our public schools open to the public. The traffic we impeded was generally supportive with their honking horns as hundreds of us streamed past, hollering and chanting and shuffling our feet. 

There was a certain familiarity with the crowd, some of whom I had taken to the streets with a few weeks back, making some of the same loud points but in a different corner of town. The message, "Save our schools," was still the same as well. There were also plenty of faces that I recognized from hanging around the same district for all this time. This time we weren't there for a training or professional development. We were there to raise a fuss. 

In the months since the list of schools the Oakland Unified School District decided to close, things had gone from bad to worse to worser. Not only are they continuing with plans to close our school, they decided to cancel our playground repair and upgrade and give it away to a school they have designated as a "welcoming site" for students who will be displaced when our school shuts its doors. In the days and weeks since that announcement, I have found it hard to stand out on our school yard and look at the cracked pavement and imagine that somehow this is the playground these kids deserve. On top of this came the school board's decision to extend still more leases to charter schools so they can use the buildings they are currently seeking to empty. 

So I walked a few miles with like-minded individuals and hoped for a future in which all those people who honked their horns or were handed a flyer will find a way to join us for whatever happens next. Because no matter how big the march is, somehow I ended up feeling very alone. 

Heart Beat

 It's okay if you don't know who Taylor Hawkins was. I know who he was, and now that he's gone it becomes increasingly likely that I may never see Dave Grohl perform live and in person. If that name doesn't ring your pop culture bell, that's okay too. Dave Grohl is the lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist for Foo Fighters, a rock band that was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I suppose I felt the need to include that last bit to legitimize my appreciation for them. Mister Grohl was also in a band called Nirvana, which has also been enshrined in that very same museum. And yes, I know that there are a number of individuals who appear on that list of honorees twice, as members of two different bands or also being such a Hall of Fame worthy solo artist. 

That's not the point. 

Foo Fighters were one of the first bands that my son and I completely agreed on. I believe that I did a pretty good job infecting and affecting my son's musical tastes. I also believe that as he grew older he helped shine a light for me on music that was recorded in this century. Foo Fighters were that sweet spot that does not exist primarily in either his nor my CD collection. Playlist. Whatever. Over the past ten years or so, we have made half-plans to take in one of their shows. Something always came up. 

Way back in the days before I had a son, I had aa similar hope about seeing the band for which Dave Grohl played drums: Nirvana. On the night they played in Oakland, I was across the bay taking in a much more low-key artist's show: Bruck Cockburn. I consoled myself at that time with the idea that I would almost certainly get another chance to see what was, at that moment in time, one of the biggest bands in the world. Four months later, Kurt Cobain killed himself and took my dreams of seeing Nirvana and their drummer with him.

I could continue to pine about how Taylor Hawkins' death affects my concert-going future, but the reality of the situation is that Dave Grohl has had to live through the deaths of his friend and bandmate Kurt Cobain only to wait just long enough to experience the passing of the man he has referred to as his "brother from another mother." That thunderous noise emanating from Taylor's drum kit has been silenced. Putting someone else on a stool behind it won't fill the void he left. 

Not for me, and especially not for Dave Grohl. Taylor Hawkins beat on the Terra with fury, and he will be missed. 

Club Dues

 I think that the unraveling or our collective conscience can be found most readily in the argument between "pro-life" and "pro-choice." One side is pro-abortion. The other is anti-abortion. I'll give you a moment to unscramble this word jumble. 

If you decided that both of these labels are somewhat ineffectual because they have been sanded smooth of their actual meaning, then I will award you a special gold star for rhetoric. Somehow, being backed into a corner that suggests that anyone would be "pro-abortion" is a trap that far too many caring individuals have been forced. 

Now go ahead and expand this view into the realm of "conservative" and "liberal." Pity the poor Democrat who winces under the yoke of all the baggage that comes with that label: Liberal. Suddenly you are burdened with an entire ideology and the messiest parts of its legacy. Likewise there are plenty of Republicans who have taken to the revisionist view that it was their party who brought forth on this continent a new President, conceived as Lincoln and committed to the idea of abolishing slavery. It's a convenient eddy in the stream of time where things were different. One of our country's most unrepentant racists, George Wallace, ran under the Democratic banner.  

Of course, there is safety in numbers, and aligning oneself with a crowd allows one the opportunity to duck behind the label without ever having to explain or rationalize one's own beliefs. Suddenly, it's no longer a personal belief, it's part of a codified system that may or may not reflect all the tricky ins and outs of modern life. This may be the only way to imagine how a herd of mostly men could grip tighter to their podiums and declare that abortion should be illegal even in the case of rape, incest or the life of the mother. As if the light creeping through any crack in their group's views might signal weakness. 

The same can be said of the Second Amendment club that seems to grow evermore insistent that every man woman and child has not just the right but the duty to bear arms, as if somehow the body count might reach a point where it turns back on itself and suddenly guns are no longer killing people, they are actually resurrecting them. Cataclysmic weather events across the globe continue to be ignored by those who have committed themselves to the idea that climate change is a hoax. 

If the club you find yourself attached to ignores things like math and science, you might think twice before renewing your membership. 

Smooth Sailing

 Last Thursday was the first time in (checks watch) I don't know how long since I rode my bike to work without encountering a crew putting up cones or barricades declaring my way interrupted for some reason or another. This pavement renaissance has taken place primarily over the months stretching into years of COVID-19. The initial foray into all this additional signage did not begin with any actual repair or construction. The first blockades were erected to let anyone who cared to read them that these were "slow streets," designated to exclude through traffic and to be used by those who needed some outdoor relief: walking, running, biking. It was during these initial weeks that I chose to include myself in the very local group of travelers, not necessarily a commuter but a neighbor out for a morning ride to exercise my lungs and legs. Followed by another later in the day. 

Shortly after this limit was put on cars and trucks, streets nearby began to erupt in repair. Lanes and avenues that had become nearly impassible after years of neglect were finally getting their due. Some of the streets that were lavished with this asphalt attention were the same ones that I had become used, over a quarter of a century, to using on my daily shuttle to and from work. And after fearing that every other thoroughfare but the one closest to my house would be renewed, the time had finally come. 

That hill that has for all these years been the way I woke up and later called it a day was stripped down, leveled and repaved to a smooth path. At last. In the final stages or this process, I had to dart and dodge the machinery of change, which gave me pause because I welcomed it but was still annoyed at the hassle of having to bend that most direct route to accommodate what would eventually become that roadbed I had always imagined. I never strayed too far from my well-beaten path, preferring instead to hop onto sidewalks to skirt the ongoing reclamation. I watched it happen, five days a week, with the occasional pause for holiday or appreciation. 

Until one day, the signs came down. These were no longer the rugged trails of the frontier. This was just another street in a great big city, coincidentally the one I had become familiar over a long haul. A long haul of just a couple miles, but ten times a week for twenty-five years. You do the math. I'm enjoying the ride. 

Tragedy Plus Impeachment Equals...

California recently recorded record warm temperatures for March. Tornadoes touched down in New Orleans. Donald Trump would like us to believe this is "weather." A clever observation from a man whose previous experience with science had him staring at a solar eclipse. Still, one might imagine that this man was truly interested in ramping up for a rerun at the White House in 2024, he might do well to temper his blather. 

Nope.

“In my opinion, you have a thing called weather. And you go up and you go down. If you look into the 1920s, they were talking about global freezing. OK? In other words, the globe was going to freeze. And then they go global warming, and then they couldn’t use that because the temperatures were actually quite cool, and it’s many different things. The climate’s always been changing.”

That last little bit may stand as the only tacit confession that the former game-show host and twice impeached "president" will ever make. As for the "global freezing" in the 1920s, well it doesn't seem as though there is any science to back that up. Rather we have the opposite, but this should not deter those who follow this disgrace. Instead, you can bet that somewhere in a concrete bunker there are minorly skilled minions cranking out "The climate's always been changing" T-shirts while social media flacks are using their limited familiarity with technology to promote this weak train of thought. 

Because it makes those people feel better about this wreck of a planet that we are handing over to our kids. My wife heard me grousing about the most recent Marjorie Taylor Greene rant about vaccines, and she asked the obvious question: Does she have any kids? A quick check let us know that she has invited three children into her death-spiral of a world. 

Which seems unconscionable. This of course presupposes the existence of a conscience in any of these folks, but it continues to mine the potential for the next generation being our last. Which is not sad. It's tragic. 

Please don't let that happen. When you see the cliff ahead in the distance, don't accelerate.