Notes from a Boy @ The Window

A Message to My Readers

2010-03-27T07:04:00.002-04:00

In recent weeks, Blogger.com, my host for my blog "Notes from a Boy @ The Window," has been informing me that they will no longer support my regular FTPs from Blogger.com to my website Fear of a "Black" America.com as of May 1. Given the limited options available to me from Blogger.com, I have decided to migrate my blog to Wordpress.com between now and May 1, 2010.

But there's a bit more to it than this. I've contemplated the idea of another website or domain over the past year or two. One, if you're engaged in promoting another book manuscript or idea as Boy @ The Window, it probably doesn't help to have a blog about it linked to the website for your first book. Two, despite number one, it's problematic to migrate any blog when the number of visitors and the amount of traffic that it has attracted has grown steadily over the past three years. Three, so many things besides my blog are on this website that it felt both risky and expensive to have two websites with the same blog running at the same time. After looking into it, it seems like Wordpress (in .com or .org form) is my best option for migration and other options, including FTP if I so choose.

So here's my plan. I will create a new domain/blog at Wordpress.com in the next week or so, and maintain the blogs at that domain and fearofablackamerica.com simultaneously until April 30, 2010. At that point, I will have either made the decision to also have Wordpress.org in order to FTP my blog to fearofablackamerica.com or decided against it, using the new domain (which will likely be www.donaldearlcollins.com) as my primary or, possibly even, only domain presence beginning May 1 of this year. Either way, my online presence is in transition. I hope that all of you will be supportive and patient as this transition occurs. Thanks a bunch.

Doctoring History

2010-03-25T15:26:00.003-04:00

One of the worst teachers I ever had was my eighth grade history teacher. There were a few others in my Mount Vernon K-12 days -- and certainly in my times at Pitt and Carnegie Mellon -- who were worse. But the absolute worst history teacher or professor I ever had between '74 and '96 was in a classroom in the corner of the new wing at A.B. Davis Middle School from September '82 through June '83.

His name was Mr. Demontravel, our American history teacher. Or as he preferred in the last three months of eighth grade, Dr. Demontravel (he had finished his doctoral thesis on the Civil War, on what beyond that, I wasn't sure, and, given the way he was to me and us, I didn't care either). Or as I liked to call him throughout that year, "Demon Travel." His was a class that sucked the life out of history for most of us. Like most teachers of K-12 social studies or history, it was a dates, names, and places class. Unlike most social studies teachers, his teaching methodology was the epitome of lazy. Every class, five days a week, Demontravel would put up five questions on the blackboard for us to copy down and answer using our textbook. At the end of every two-week period, we’d get a fifty-question multiple choice exam, helping Scan-Tron stay in business.

Demontravel rarely stood up to lecture or do anything else. Lectures for him might as well have been appearances by Halley’s Comet, only the lectures were far less memorable. This process went on unabated for forty-weeks, four marking periods, an entire school year. Calling this boring would only get you into the door of the intellectual famine Demontravel subjected us to in eighth grade.

He wasn’t particularly helpful on the rare occasions when someone did have a question. When a classmate did ask him something, the portly Demontravel would stand up from his desk, which was to our right as we faced the chalkboard, slowly walk toward it, point to a question on the board, tell us in his best Teddy Roosevelt voice what page to turn to in looking for the answer, and then, just as slowly, return to his seat at his desk. Of course, the page numbers he gave us were usually wrong. Demontravel was truly an unremarkable man, virtually bald in all of his pink salmon-headedness, skinny and potbellied beyond belief. His shiny bald head had a Gorbachev-like spot on it. In his early fifties, Demontravel was so boring that it was a wonder that I noticed him at all.

But there was the fact that there was a prize on the line for us nerdy middle-schoolers—the eighth-grade History Award. “Something I could actually win,” I thought. And Demontravel was the sole arbiter over the award. My favorite and easiest subject was in the hands of this hack of a teacher. That made me downright angry whenever I thought about it.

What made it worse was that I was in competition with a classmate who cared for history in the same way that a semi-suburban boy like me cared for milking cows. For most of the year, we were separated by less than a point in our overall grades as we fought for the award. I guess I should've known that I wasn't going to get it, regardless of my grades in Demon Travel's course. My competitor, female and White as she was, was doted on by Demontravel for most of the year. I guess my near-exact same grade just meant that I was slumming in the A+ zone.

Then there was Demontravel’s demand for a typewritten three- to five-page essay on a World War II topic of our choosing, at the beginning of April '83. It wasn’t something I could just write at my leisure and in my own handwriting. My father Jimme had to go buy a typewriter for me, one of those where you have to punch the keys to leave lettered ink on a page. I didn’t know how to type, and I knew no one else at home did either. So I used the two-index finger method, gradually figuring out how to type in double-space, to add footnotes and references, to write without using a pen. I chose to look at the Battle of the Philippines and the almost comical errors of both the Japanese and the U.S. there in 1942 and again in 1944-45. Demontravel gave me a 95 or 96 on it, helping me pull away of my friendly competitor at the beginning of May.

This was when we had our little incident, me and “Demon Travel,” in which I showed up the newly-minted PhD in his classroom. Ours was a discussion of World War I, one of the few times he actually attempted to lecture. He somehow managed to get wrong a key treaty on the Eastern Front that declared Germany a victor, gave them parts of Belarus and the Ukraine, and took Russia out of the war. Demontravel managed to get the parties involved in the treaty incorrect as well. I raised my hand, and when called upon I politely pointed out his error. He immediately became angry and told me that he couldn’t be wrong. Since I also could never be wrong, especially about an historical fact, I quoted the book directly, pointed out the name and date of the treaty, the parties involved, and the significance of the treaty to boot.

At that point he told me that if I ever corrected him like that again I would go Assistant Principal Gentile’s office. Gentile, a hard ass, would’ve been better off as a correction’s officer in Shawshank Redemption or in the HBO series Oz than as an administrator at Davis. I still didn’t want to see him, so I got quiet, quiet but fuming. Demontravel looked like a redneck after a day of labor in the hot Mississippi sun. All he needed was a shotgun in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other. My classmates were cracking up, excited even because they saw me as having put Demontravel in his place. I kind of knew then that it wouldn’t matter if I did finish ahead of my competitor. I wasn’t going to get my much-deserved award.

The lesson that it would take me until my thirties to learn was that life and learning isn't just about how much you know and how well you exhibit such knowledge and wisdom. It's much more about politics and being able to read people and situations before speaking and acting in such situations. I knew, but pretty much didn't care, that Demontravel didn't like me. He probably knew, but didn't need to care, that I thought that his class was a joke, a cheap version of the short-lived contest show on NBC, Sale of the Century. Bottom line -- especially in having gone through the experience of earning my own doctorate in history -- you don't mess with a boring yet overworked teacher who just finished earning a Ph.D. Even if his reach has exceeded his grasp of it.

Can Do No Wrong

2010-03-22T22:49:00.002-04:00

I wrote this piece several months ago, as a way for me to think through why such a stark split regarding those who do and don't support President Barack Obama. Unfortunately for me, I sent it to TheRoot.com, which apparently receives and rejects about 50,000 manuscripts about Obama per hour. But given President Obama's major political victory in the passage of the historic health care bill, it seems appropriate to post this piece (with some minor changes) considering the obvious divisiveness that this bill and the leaders who represent it have allegedly inspired, at least according to some of our more unhinged American narcissists.

What does it mean to us as a nation – and Black folk especially – if President Barack Obama fails? Now, I don’t mean failure in an absolute sense or failure as defined by the radical conservative fringe. Nor do I mean failure approaching the proportions of President Bush 43. Failure for President Obama in the sense that the change he promised in 2008 and 2009 doesn’t occur by 2013 or 2017. For millions of us, though, Obama can do no wrong, for he’s already done far more than we would’ve expected.

So, what approximately does failure for Obama look like? It depends on how much his promises for change are fulfilled. If unemployment falls below five percent. When the US has adopted a strong policy on climate change, alternative energy and universal health care – and not just universal health insurance. And even with the passage of the health care bill on March 21, we don't even have that. It's better than no overhaul at all, but nowhere near universal.

Other meter-sticks for change fulfilled include the possibility that geopolitical tensions in the Middle East, South Asia and North Korea have been curtailed, if not abated entirely. When the growing debt crisis the federal government and the nation faces have been solved. Or if the administration rolls back the expansive powers of the executive branch around intelligence gathering, detaining potential terrorists or use of torture methods. These are the signs of success, and for many, falling short of most of these would constitute failure. Even achieving half of this ambitious but necessary agenda would make Obama one of the top seven presidents of all time.

But for some African Americans, that would hardly be enough. Especially if they feel they’ve been left behind. If communities of color remain besieged with poor schools, poor health care, high crime and high unemployment, Obama’s work would remain wholly unfinished. If African Americans continue to experience inadequate access to living-wage jobs, affordable apartments and homes, and public services across the board, Obama’s presidency would be about what could’ve been. Without addressing these issues – for some African Americans and the rest of the country – Obama’s status and popularity would surely drop.

Yet, President Obama will still be one of the most popular presidents since FDR and JFK. Many, if not most Blacks, would see Obama as a towering beacon that lit up their early twenty-first-century world. So many will take pride in his achievements – however limited – that it would be as if Obama could never fail His serving as president is – and likely will continue to be – seen as success by default.

That truth is the reason why few African Americans criticize Obama in the public eye. Nobel Peace Prize, a strong State-of-the-Union speech, honorary degrees, meeting with foreign heads of states. Every step is an achievement, every speech an accomplishment. White progressives and conservatives of every stripe fail to understand. Progressives may be invested in Obama. African Americans, though, have doubled down on the president over the past two years. For so many, anything that President Obama makes happen in terms of domestic policy and statecraft is icing on the cake. President Obama will be seen as successful because millions of us will refuse to see any of his mistakes as failures, to see him in any other way.

Even the reactions that I've seen to the health care bill's passage reflect some of this "can-do-no-wrong sense" among African Americans, a mixed blessing reaction among progressives, and signs of the Apocalypse among teabaggers. It is what it is, and there's not much more to say than that. Except that post-racial America looks very much like the America that I grew up in and have worked in for the past forty years. President Obama can do no wrong. But as Americans, we still seem unable to do much right as a people or by our people.

Our American Narcissism

2010-03-17T19:22:00.003-04:00

America is the land of "it's all about me." Without a doubt, our economic, military and geopolitical imperialism has made all of us as narcissistic as Napoleon at the height of his power in France. Or as self-centered as Ted Bundy in the middle of a misogynistic killing spree. Or as self-absorbed (minus any self-reflection) as Steven Colbert appears to be while in character on The Colbert Report. It's a shame, a symptom of sixty-five years as a superpower, as well as a history of propping up this land of ours as one of abundance, spinning fables about it all along the way.

It starts, of course, at home. With parents who face tough choices between balancing their own wants and needs with those of their kids, their spouses, and their family as a whole. Many of us fail to do so, and many of us do so spectacularly. It's not just adultery, or serial adultery, or even divorce. It's family annihilators, who, upon losing their jobs or some other calamity, choose to not only kill themselves, but their spouses and children, refusing to give them any choice at all. It's folks who would prefer to talk on the telephone at the park while their kids play by themselves or who believe their babysitters should spend more time with their kids than they do. It's parents who've been remarkably successful in their careers and terrifically unsuccessful in teaching their kids what they know about life.

Of course we grow up in a world of narcissism as a result. Even as much as we swear not to be like our parents, we can't help to be. Not with TV teaching us that winning is everything, commercials that crap on losers at every turn, winner-take-all reality shows, individual archetype heroes in animation shows, and on and on. While cultural critics, corrupt politicians and priests, and parents complain about our corrupt culture and how it's turning our kids into selfish and apathetic humans, keep one thing in mind. The bling-blingers in music videos and the 'roid-rage-athletes on our TV, iPhone and computer screens are a reflection of us as much as we are a reflection of them. We all think that if we work really hard and get the right breaks (a.k.a. "know the right people"), we too can live the American Dream of riches and excess, of bills paid and endless amounts of goods to buy and accumulate.

College for many and high school for so many more teaches us as much about being self-centered and self-absorbed as anything else in our lives. High school history is mostly about great men (and I mean "men") in all of their egotistical glory, especially great men as military leaders and empire builders. And why not? Despite all of the claims to the greatness of American democracy and American exceptionalism, ours is a country whose myths are all about great men and whose history is one of empires. Manifest Destiny, slavery, robber barons, the Spanish-American War, the Cold War, Iraq Wars I and II. Make no mistake, centuries from now America will be seen more as an empire than as an exceptional democracy, especially with the way we act, speak and live as a country these days.

Higher education, liberal or illiberal, is a place that fosters individualism and group identity in and out of the classroom. Even knowing the tensions between the two ideas doesn't necessarily prevent narcissism. In fact, both ideas exacerbate our national obsession. Individualism in a post-industrial, consumer-driven economy and society leads to people borrowing the equivalent of a downpayment for a stately manor to pay for school. It leads to unreasonable expectations for a high standard of living, the lack of understanding around the need for robust public policies and services, and the need for a constant high. From drugs and alcohol, music and food, to the latest car, the best house, the finest clothes, the greatest sex. Even God for the spiritual and religious among us has become an enabler for our individual desires, without regard to the resources used, not to mention the future.

Group identity, especially in our era of neo-conservatism, exaggerates differences and minimizes similarities, making it difficult to relate to others' ideas and perspectives on life. Blacks often act as if it's us against the world on predominately White campuses, even on ones that have become decidedly more welcoming in the past two decades. Whites act as if individualism is all that matters, and buy into too many stereotypes about Blacks and other groups, including Blacks needing handouts and liberal Whites who will always be there to help hapless Blacks. Women talk as if men truly are a different species, while men act as if the First Amendment gives us the right to misogyny. Let me not get started on gays and straights, Latinos and Asians, and other groups on campus.

By the time we graduate, we've learned so little about being empathetic and sympathetic toward others that we go into the adult world with our chests puffed out (male and female, literally and figuratively, steroids and surgery). It's about the same as our government acts toward the rest of the world. We believe we have the right to consume whatever we want, to tell others "Too bad" when they complain, and to step on others' toes in the process For us as individuals, it's jobs, money, cars, iPhones, spouses, children, other women and men. For the government that represents us, it's oil, tin, rubber, trade agreements, borrowed money, cheap labor, and so much else to consume in a country full of consumers but increasingly devoid of producers.

It almost makes me ashamed to be an American when I see folks complain about immigrants (as if most Americans aren't immigrants on some level), or talk about climate change as fantasy, or act as if the Rapture will come before all of the oil runs out. The common link between the viable and current solutions to all that ills us is that we have to begin to behave as a "we" and not as an "I" or a "me." But if we can't stop for someone who's in the crosswalk crossing the street when they have the right of way, how do we make it possible for our older selves and our kids to live in a world of universal public healthcare, equitable use of resources, environmental justice, geopolitical accountability, and quality education? In a society as selfish as ours, we might as well be talking about "Peace on Earth, good will toward man."

The Land Before Time

2010-03-13T07:43:00.002-05:00

Before I veer off into another enchanted story about my past and its relationship to the universal search for truth, justice and understanding beyond the American way, I want to issue a brief apology to my regular readers. I'm down to about one posting a week right now, and for that, I am sorry. The 3,000 and more visitors (and 8,500 hits) this blog and website receive each month serve as part of my motivation to keep writing, to keep pushing to publish Boy @ The Window. Your comments, good, bad and ugly, are all appreciated. Because I've touched someone's heart, or a nerve, or tapped into a deep well of rage for many of you. I've been swamped with work, looking for work, and otherwise stuck with a variety of other projects that have kept me from posting more. All I can say is that I will continue to post at least once a week, as I originally promised when I started this back in June 2007, and more as time and my schedule allows.

And because of my schedule of late, I didn't post nine days ago about the event twenty-eight years ago that led to my first true crush, my first glimpse at love beyond myself and my family. But this is not a story about Crush #1, one that I've probably told too often over the past three years as it is. The fact is, I've had other crushes, not nearly as long, as deep or as enduring, probably because I hadn't started puberty in my pre-Crush #1 crushes. They did exist, though, and two of them may have foreshadowed what would and did occur in early March of '82.

There's nothing like having a crush in first grade. Most boys run as far away from girls as possible, even tomboys. Even my son Noah has decided that he'll never kiss a girl, after spending most of kindergarten batting off potential kissers between his class and second grade. I went the other way in the spring of '76. The first girl I ever kissed was named Diana. She was a delightful beauty, with both of upper front teeth growing in at the same time. Our seats were assigned so that we were right next to each other, so I saw her every day, with dainty clothes, pigtails and barrettes. One day she walked right up to me during recess, sometime in April, when the trees had flowers and pink and white petals would take off in the wind. She told me she liked me, and we were "boyfriend and girlfriend."

And so we were, in our little six-year-old minds. We'd sometimes hold hands on the playground or she'd walk me the three doors down from Nathan Hale Elementary to my house at 425 South Sixth. But my favorite part was the "French kissing." Mouth, tongues, and sometimes teeth collided between her and me as we struggled to kiss the way we figured adults did. Looking back, it would seem about as disgusting as me making out with myself after having not brushed my teeth for two days. But back then, it was heaven-on-Earth. Until Diana told me at the end of the school year that her family was moving away. I was sad after I waved and said "Goodbye!" to her on the last day of first grade. I don't remember crying, though. I pouted, and missed her for all of a day or two. Such is the life of a kid whose memories may have been solid, but emotions remained fleeting.

Three and a half years later, I had another brief crush on a girl, this one in my fifth-grade class with the late Mrs. O'Daniels. "T" was the only girl my age that I liked in any way between Diana and Crush #1. I really don't know why, I just did. She seemed both feminine and tomboyish at the same time, I guess. Long and lanky, cool and calm, pretty yet not beautiful (although she always smelled pretty good to me). Who knows what was in my nearly ten-year-old mind that would've allowed me to have a crush on her?

Mrs. O'Daniels (and, I presume, Ms. Bracey, the other fifth-grade teacher at Holmes Elementary, but I'm not sure about this) allowed us to have a party sometime around Halloween '79. It was a candy and dance party, from what I remember. Michael Jackson's "Rock With You," from his Off the Wall album, was playing on Mrs. O'Daniels' record player. I was dancing -- sort of, in the way you can imagine someone being half a beat off dancing, anyway. "T" was dancing too, and completely coordinated. The girls danced with the girls, and only a few boys were brave enough to dance too, though more in a Soul Train-kind-of-way. Though I didn't dance with "T", the fact that we were on the dance floor of our classroom at the same time made me feel as if we had.

Of course, "T" went away as well. Right around Lake Placid time, in February '80. Her family was moving to Philadelphia. We had talked, but it was all small talk, nothing about crushes or the big philosophical arguments I got into with male friends like Starling. But she did specifically say "Goodbye" to me. I wondered about that for a few days after "T" and her family moved to faraway Philly. I did miss her, miss whatever longings I had for her, but, I was only ten, and I had other things to think about, like buying more Matchbox cars or arguing with Starling about what Carter should do about the Iran hostage crisis. I had time to wonder about those things without the pressures of family dissolution and religious confusion back then.

When I add my half-year-long crush on my third-grade teacher Mrs. Shannon to this list, it seems to me that my crushes back then were on people that were just beyond my grasp (or well beyond the attainable, as the case may be). Maybe that's the point though. Not that love is fleeting, or that I should've been more assertive in the case of "T" or Crush #1. Maybe I should take a line from Shakespeare about knowing that I could really fall head over heels for anyone, for a few days, weeks or months anyway. Better that than having my nose stuck in a book or the World Book Encyclopedia all the time, right?

Who's A Worse Actor

2010-03-06T09:49:00.002-05:00

The Oscars are upon us again, taking place tomorrow evening, a four-hour extravaganza of great actors, right? Well, sort of. The weekend is so much more about glitz and style over substance and acting chops. While there are plenty of great and good actors who've turned in solid to spectacular performances over the past year, most of them aren't even in the running, as is the case every year.

Who's a great actor, and not just someone whom men and women get autographed pictures from or make screensavers out of? Don Cheadle is a great actor. Charlize Theron is a solid actor who can turn in a great performance. Liam Neeson, Morgan Freeman, Paul Giamatti, Philip Seymour Hoffman, even Patrick Stewart turn in many more great performances than bad ones. Not to mention folks like Terrence Howard, Kerry Washington, Rob Brown, Dennis Quaid, Kurt Russell, Hilary Swank and so many others. Of course, there are the regular standbys who open movies every year, like Will Smith, Michael Caine, Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie, but this is where the distinction between solid, consistent and good acting ends and where acting to a money-making formula begins.

I could name so many others who've turned in wonderful performances over the years, ones whose abilities to put me in the moment have made me laugh until I choked, or made me cry like a baby or left me with an anger that brought me back to my teenage years. Even in bad movies, like Dreamcatcher (2003) and Road House (1989), Band of Brothers star Damian Lewis and late actor Patrick Swayze turned in such great performances that they rose above a bad script and the other poor acting performances turned in by others. Still, there aren't very many actors who have the ability to act, to deliver a realistic performance on film -- or as the case may be -- on stage or TV or in other settings.

This is why a few years ago I began to play a game with my occasionally movie-obsessed wife that I call "Who's a worse actor?" It started originally with Halle Berry, Steven Seagall, Treat Williams and Dolph Lundgren, but it has expanded over the years. Sir Laurence Olivier (especially in The Jazz Singer with Neil Diamond), James Cagney, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Chuck Norris, Rutger Hauer (who actually can be pretty good sometimes) Ernest Borgnine, Anthony Quinn and James Woods, among many, many, many others. They've chewed the scenery so much that they've left teeth marks all over the upholstery. Or they're of such low talent that porn stars look like Meryl Streep as an actor by comparison. Plus, these bad actors look worse with lousy plots and scripts, and present less emotion than I did in six years of Humanities.

But the absolute worst, unbelievably horrid acting that me and my wife have both witnessed we wholeheartedly do agree on. Vin Diesel, Ice Cube, Megan Fox and Jessica Alba should never be allowed near a movie, TV or theater set. Heck, I'm not sure if any of them should be allowed out in public. Vin Diesel lost me in his xXx (2002) action flick, in which he could barely express anger (the easiest emotion to emote in an action movie), much less anything else. Ice Cube, well, he hasn't turned in a decent performance since Boyz N The Hood (1991), and probably hasn't attempted to improve his performances in the same amount of time. His work in Ghosts of Mars (2001) was beyond abysmal. There are no words to describe how bad his acting was. All I know is that I would've done a better job as a third-grader. As for Fox and Alba, one has zero potential to act (or think, apparently), the other has apparently forgotten how to act. But they are also cashing in. So sad, so sad.

In the process of figuring out the worst of the worst, we also managed to think about the overrated in the acting world, folks who have awards for turning in a good performance in a good film -- but seem as great by the overly-made-up-Hollywood elite. Like Sean Penn in Mystic River (2003) or in Milk (2008), both of which were good, but not great films. Or, much more often, like Jolie or Brad Pitt in anything, Martin Lawrence, Eddie Murphy since he became Disney-fied, Renee Zellweger, Kirsten Dunst, and Sir Anthony Hopkins. Sometimes folks in the business see through the hype, sometimes they don't, but all are thought of much more highly than they likely deserve.

Surprises as actors tend to be folks with a bit of a comedic background, if not as stand-up comedians, then as folks who've used comedy in their work in music or in other fields. Tom Hanks, Kevin Spacey, Jim Carrey, Whoppi Goldberg, Greg Kinnear, Ludacris, all good, all consistent in their work, all hard workers in the craft. Of course, there are many more from the world of comedy or connoisseurs of it who have as much business being on film as I have working in construction.

I have no opinion on this year's prime Oscar awards. I haven't seen most of the movies, and those I did make it to see I didn't like all that much. But between taking tequila shots for each time you hear the word "fabulous" or the phrase "...and the Oscar goes to," you may want to play the game "Who's a worse actor?" with your family and friends.

My Aiwa CD Player

2010-02-27T08:51:00.004-05:00

This weekend marks two decades since I finally managed to catch up with the times. Musically speaking, that is. After much mulling over, I ordered a new piece of technology, joining the '90s just as they had begun. That last Saturday in February, I received a UPS shipment of an Aiwa CD/cassette player combination boombox, with AM/FM radio access to boot. It all came at a cost of $198, not including the five dollars for shipping and handling.

It was in the middle of a period of major growth for me as a person and as a college student. I started hanging out more, much more than I had in the past, going to concerts and clubs, going to movies almost every week or weekend, finding time to do more than just work or study. It helped to have a great group of friends who were willing to put up with me, as sober and as goofy as I could be.

But in the midst of all of that, I began the '90s happy to see the '80s go when it came to pop music. Heavy metal was at the tail end of an era of dominance, thank God, and serious rap from PE had temporarily taken hold. New voices of real singers had broken through, including Lisa Stansfield, Caron Wheeler (of Soul II Soul), and, by April of that year, Mariah Carey. Old and more recent standbys like Phil Collins and Richard Marx had new albums out, and Quincy Jones' multi-genre compilation album Back on the Block was all the rage. Even new and less strange New Age music like Enigma had begun to reach beyond the Andy Warhol-weirdness of Philip Glass. Between that and my friends, I had finally recovered enough of myself to no longer feel like the outcast I was made into by my family and by my school during the '80s.

Of course, it helped to be able to turn over the calendar in another state, a different city, with folks who knew next to nothing about my life before the second half of '87. Folks who thought that being smart was cool, and being a bit weird wasn't a turnoff. People who actually listened to more than just Prince, Run DMC, or Ready for the World in the midst of some alcohol or drug-induced haze. My friends by '90 including serious jazz enthusiasts, fans of everything from The Beatles to PE, Frank Sinatra to Freddie Jackson, and were as eclectic in tastes then as I am now.

Let me not beat up too much on folks from my first hometown -- they were in high school at the time, after all. But I must admit, I think that it's ironic that so many of them ended up doing something related to music. A fair number started rap groups or other music projects. Some broke into the industry as producers of folks like The Tony Rich Project, or got to know up-and-comers like Groove Theory and Amel Larrieux. Some are in the TV and movie business, weaving music in and out of scenes for our emotional benefit over the course of watching movies like The Cell or shows like Medium. Still, most of these folks were without an eclectic musical side, and certainly didn't tolerate folks like me, who was often a year behind the times when it came to music, and years behind when it came to technology that would've helped me be more current.

I guess that by the time anyone would've thought about introducing me to anything new, I was already too far gone into strange-land for my fellow classmates. I was behind for sure, though. First AM/FM radio, September '84. No cable TV until September '85, so my first MTV video was Heart's "What About Love," and my first BET videos were Sade's "Sweetest Taboo" and Run DMC's "My Adidas." My first Walkman knockoff I bought in March '86, and my first true Sony Walkman followed in June '87. To this day, I've never seen a Soul II Soul, Doug E. Fresh or Grandmaster Flash video. I never got into the dress of the times, mostly because I never had the money to dress that cool back then (unless I borrowed my mother's somewhat manly clothes).

But one thing I did do once I began to catch up with my musical side again was to join Columbia House in the summer of '86, as I couldn't constantly run down to the city every time I wanted a tape. Everything that I had missed between '81 and '84 I ordered, and everything that I thought I least needed to listen to, I ordered. That included Glass Tiger, Janet Janet, and Philip Glass, Thompson Twins and Sade. By the time '88 rolled around, I decided to order these things known as compact discs. I knew a couple of folks at Pitt who owned a CD-based stereo system, so I tried out these discs on their equipment. The sound quality wasn't as good as vinyl, at least that's what they kept saying. These shiny discs were much smaller than albums, though, and had much better sound than even the chromium-coated cassettes that I had in my collection.

The bias in CD production toward classical music was obvious, but I knew that folks would have to adapt eventually and that the technology would get better. So I bought about a dozen or so CDs in all between '88 and the beginning of '90, just so I'd be ready when I finally got around to buying a CD system to play it on. The funny about all this was that I did this on my own, without any advice, and only because I wanted to take the time out to work this aspect of me. I had no idea that my all-over-the-place music tastes could also be a conversation starter, or that buying CDs a year before buying a CD player would lead to friendship. Moving forward in my own interests in music and music technology helped me find myself, and in the process, meet people more like myself.

There Will Be Blood (and other cultural connections)

2010-02-20T08:31:00.006-05:00

My two favorite scenes from the instant movie classic There Will Be Blood are probably favorites for many moviegoers. Both scenes involve the two main characters: a drunk and an oil magnate (whose mannerisms reminded me of my father when I was growing up), aptly played by Daniel Day-Lewis, and a charlatan preacher played expertly by Paul Dano.

Scene one was the moment that Daniel Day-Lewis' character forced himself to grovel for the last land tract in a small town in central California as part of an embarrassing baptismal display. In wanting to build a pipeline independent of Standard Oil that linked his oil wells to the Pacific for shipping elsewhere, the character needed the Bandy tract in order to ensure that the pipeline would remain below ground. In the process of begging-as-baptism, Paul Dano's preacher character practically drowns Day-Lewis in water, slapping him over and over again as hard as he could, no doubt because of an earlier scene, in which the oil magnate beats Dano's character to a pulp.

Scene two was set some fifteen years later, as the character Daniel played by Day-Lewis exacted his revenge. The now floundering and impoverished Paul brought his preaching ways to the now wallowing millionaire drunkard in hopes that he would throw him a few thousand dollars. Instead, Daniel forces Paul to denounce God, only to then tell him that all the oil that was in Paul's town -- including the oil under the Bandy tract -- was gone. "Drainage!" became Day-Lewis vengeful refrain before he clubbed the idiot fraud Paul to death with a bowling pin.

Although there isn't yet a scene two, millions of us had no choice but to witness scene one of Tiger Woods' version of There Will Be Blood at his public soul-bearing session. I was stuck at my orthopedist's office following-up on my high ankle sprain and healing hairline fracture in my fib-tib. I'm a medical miracle, according to my doctor, because I never needed a cast or extensive rehab. Moving on. Sitting in the waiting room with the TV set to CNN's Headline News as the media frenzy unfolded, I had no choice but to listen to the nutjobs as they spewed their verbal vomit all over my eardrums. Talking about how the public must judge Woods' speech and behaviors on stage. How the public has been in shock and disappointed over Woods for nearly three months. About how they scooped the fact that the press conference would begin at 11:01:30, and not at 11 am! It was ridiculous, and should give The Daily Show and The Colbert Report much fodder next week.

The public statement itself was as excruciating as inflamed hemorrhoids left too long without treatment. I watched my fellow patients become moved by Woods' speech, which I found quite fascinating. I listened to the tortured nature of Woods' voice (I sat in a seat away from the screen, but not the sound, of the TV) as he confessed to things in public that most of us don't admit to ourselves in private. All I really wanted to know was when Woods planned to return to playing golf. That, in the end, was all the media and public was entitled to know.

As I watched, I couldn't help but think of that baptismal scene from There Will Be Blood and the sense of utter rage -- Eightfold Path believer or not -- that Woods likely had to tame in order to give his statement. For nearly three months, his sponsors, media talking heads and fellow golfers have played the roles of shocked public, disappointed fans, disgusted judges and Freudian pop-psychologists in attempting to explain his philandering ways. Twelve weeks of this would make Paul Dano's character's slapping around of Daniel Day-Lewis look like me getting into a fist fight with a six-year-old by comparison.

I understand that for his foundation, sponsors and maybe even for his wife, Woods needed to give this speech, to show and speak of his contrition. I still don't think that it's anyone's business, and Woods certainly doesn't need our forgiveness -- we didn't exchange wedding vows with him, after all. I doubt that a single person bought a Nike golf club or Buick vehicle or enrolled their kid in a Tiger Woods Foundation program thinking, "Gee, that Woods is such a swell guy, he doesn't cheat on his wife or have any marital or personal problems. That's why I'm buying his products. That's why I want my kid to excel academically through his foundation." I still think that he doesn't owe the public a darn thing.

Still, after I got into my car and turned on my iPod, I couldn't help but think how silly I am. Coldplay's Vida la Vida came on, with the words "I used to rule the world, seas would rise when I gave the word," almost as if they had written the song about Tiger's rise and "fall from grace." From the media's perspective, I'm sure their favorite refrain would be, "there was never an honest word, but that was when I ruled the world." That then made me think of Cleveland Cavs guard Delonte West's troubles with guns and guitar cases and Bon Jovi's "Wanted Dead Or Alive," where they sing, "I walk these streets, a loaded six-string on my back" while riding on a "steel horse." Or, Soft Cell's "Tainted Love," which I've turned into "Tainted War" three times in the past thirty years (in '82, '91 and '03), especially with the line, "once Iran to you, now Iraq from you." You could say I'm a lovable yet lame-ass goofball who has a morbid habit of taking current events and turning them into song.

But rest assured, there will be blood, although not in a literal sense. Woods' nemesis golfers, his media detractors will all have to eat their words. Sponsors will continue to line up with Woods so that he can hawk their wares. Even TMZ will eventually come groveling, looking for a little financial love, only for Woods to metaphorically yell, "Drainage!" multiple times. It will be glorious!

Hire Learning

2010-02-18T18:55:00.002-05:00

I have a bit of a beef with folks who think about higher education in only the most practical of terms. A few months ago, I attended an Al Jazeera taping at the Newseum in DC about the level of blame the Obama Administration should take regarding the economic plight of Americans of color since the Great Recession began at the end of '07. Besides the ridiculousness of the questions and comments from the panel -- not to mention the relative irrelevance of the topic -- a middle-aged Black male stood up to make a comment. He argued that the reason why so many highly educated African Americans and Latinos were out of work was because they only had degrees in African American Studies or History or English.

This esteemed member of the audience believed that only more practical degrees, like ones in business management, business administration, and information systems and technology would be the only ways for folks of color to get good-paying jobs and make their way economically in the twenty-first century world. But he wasn't alone. In the two years that I have been teaching at my most recent post, about seventy percent of the students I've taught fall into four majors. Business management, IT, accounting and human resources management seem to be the most popular majors in my neck of the woods, and the majority of students with these majors are of color. A smattering of students major in criminal justice, and then a select few in the humanities and social sciences.

There's nothing wrong with this on the surface. Students -- especially adult learners -- should have the ability to choose their majors early on. Universities like mine can and should concentrate resources toward majors that students want to pursue. The problem I have -- especially when one brings in the current funding emphasis on STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) -- is that it suggests the humanities and social science fields, the arts and literature, aren't serious or practical pursuits.

For the average student, the best majors can only be the ones where there is a one-to-one correspondence between the course of study and the job that could be waiting for them in the real world. If you major in business or HR management or accounting, you can -- you guessed right -- get a job as a business manager, HR manager or accountant. If you declare a major in civil engineering, you're first job should be as a civil engineer.

If you major in history, what the heck do you do for a living? Starve to death? Get a job as a barista at Starbucks? Stay in school an extra semester to earn certification teaching high school social studies? Spend an extra two years working on a masters degree in history to get a better-paying job as a high school social studies teacher? Spend years earning a doctorate -- like yours truly -- so that you can starve to death, hope for a full-time tenure-track or tenured position at a university, or get certified as a high school social studies teacher?

The problem with this kind of thinking is that it's unnecessarily short-sighted. There isn't such a thing as a one-to-one correlation between degree, major and future jobs and careers. At least when it comes to most undergraduate degrees. Most successful CEOs and business managers have bachelor degrees in -- you guessed right -- English, history, and political science. Most future law students and lawyers majored in humanities and social science fields, not in criminal justice or law enforcement. Many a mathematics major has ended up in the education and medical fields. And there are plenty of sectors in our economy -- the public sector, the philanthropic sector, the nonprofit sector -- that hire over-educated Negroes like myself. Not to mention with jobs that pay well.

What you want in an education is flexibility more than anything else. The more flexibility you build into your undergraduate education early on, the more options for employment and advanced education you have as you grow older. Humanities and social science fields, because they aren't directed at a specific job for the month after marching down the aisle for a piece of parchment, provide flexibility. Even if your first job is as an over-educated administrative assistant at some small organization on the brink of going out of business. Majors as specific as business management, IT and accounting don't offer the same flexibility. This all matters, especially if you reach your thirties and forties ready to move into, say, a writing or other soft career.

The reality is, no matter what one majors in, given the volatile economic times, we can all expect to change our careers a number of times over the course of forty or fifty years. To act as if practical majors are a magic bullet for economic success and are recession-proof is simply foolish. Just look at how many real estate agents, investment bankers, accountants, business managers and human resources managers are in line looking for work these days. What really is necessary is for all students to choose majors that they can get the most out of in terms of higher learning. Then fight as hard as they can for the kind of work they want after graduation, and if necessary, to go back to school for an advanced degree that further ensures employment in a field of interest and passion. All practical matters aside, this is the most practical way to guarantee a productive and prosperous life and career.

Boy Fight

2010-02-16T07:19:00.002-05:00

Twenty-eight years ago this week was the fight that kept me in the gifted track known as Humanities. To think that, with the possibility good grades, forming friendships, crushes, teachers, the needs to be around peers of a similar ilk all before me, and it took a fight for me to finally begin to feel that the move to this strange magnet program might still be good for me? This story is about a fight, but it's also about being a tweener boy who's trying to find a way to cope in two impossible worlds, between a deteriorating family life at home and semi-academic and social ostracism at school.

But it's not like I wasn't without fault. I spent my first five month in Humanities intimidated by the group of super-smart and affluent White students who had been in the elementary school version of the program since as early as second grade. Or with White students who lucked out when the elementary program moved to their school a year and a half before the first day of seventh grade in September '81. No, I spent a considerable amount of my verbal resources attempting to convince everyone around me how smart I was. After the way things went in sixth grade, I firmly believed that no one in the world was smarter than me. It wouldn’t have been any funnier if I were on SNL as Ana Gasteyer’s “Celine Dion” yelling that “I’m the greatest singer in the whole world!”

And I tried to let as many people know how smart I was at every opportunity. My arrogant assumption — based completely on my insecurities — was the reason that I was initially overwhelmed by the Humanities Program. Many of the seventh-grade members of Humanities had taken classes together since the second, fourth and fifth grades at the Grimes Center for Creative Education. Teacher after teacher had told them about their genius and potential for the previous six years. Admittedly, I was unprepared for this reality of privilege and entitlement, much less the kinds of diversity that it brought. My Polyanna-ish attitudes about myself and the rest of my peers were difficult for even the most arrogant and affluent overachievers among us to put up with for long. I couldn’t keep my mouth shut in those first days of intimidation and the flaunting of upper middle class experiences by others in our classroom.

My first sign of real trouble came at the end of October. I was not only about to earn my first C+ in math since third grade. I was sub-par in all of my other subjects. It wasn’t so much that the material was any more difficult than it’d been the year before. I didn’t exactly feel at home in 7S. My classmates called me “stupid” and “idiot” so many times that ever so often I honestly thought I was dumb at certain choice moments. I was already all by myself in a class of thirty students. I had no friends, and that really did make me feel stupid.

Now, I also knew that the main barrier between me and most of my classmates was the kufi, the fact that I was part of the bizarre Hebrew-Israelite cult, as they probably attributed most of my weird behavior to it. But the combination of my mouth and my multi-holed woven white cap attracted the attention of a group of who I came to call Italian Club boys, led by a Fonzi-type Italian tweener. They made fun of everything I did. Or, to put it in the language of today's it-generation, they clowned on me as if I were a cartoon character in South Park! The way I walked, talked, smiled (which was rare), laughed, chewed my food, answered questions. If they could've, I'm sure they would've beat up on me about my bathroom routine. Instead, two of the Italian Club boys instigated the beat-down I received in November ’81, the one where about half of 7S watched or participated. They jumped me on my way out the door after school. They grabbed, punched, and kicked me, and called me everything but a child of God for about five minutes.

So I should've have felt like I was part of the in-crowd after all of that, right? I seriously thought about quitting the Humanities Program by early February ’82. My grades were unimpressive. I struggled in every subject except in dumb Paul Court's social studies class, where three years of reading World Book Encyclopedia and forty books of all kinds on World War II made me a nerdy standout. I barely averaged a C+ in math, my Italian teacher Ms. Fleming told me that my “Italian sounded British” when I attempted to speak it, and I was averaging a C+ in art. In Art! All because Doris Mann, who was about as effective a teacher as the late Michael Jackson was at being normal, explained that she didn’t “give A’s for effort. I give out grades based on your ability to create good art.”

It had gotten so bad that folks who wouldn't have dared to mess with me at the beginning of the year -- guys significantly shorter than me and guys who were so superior to me that they didn't even notice me -- started messing with and threatening me. Mr. OshKosh was one of those classmates. The week before the mid-February winter break, our homeroom/English teacher Mrs. Sesay was home with the flu. Our substitute’s idea of managing a classroom was reading a newspaper while the class engaged in verbal and physical combat. It seemed that no one was safe from strife that week, including me. Mr. OshKosh decided that it was his turn to give me a hard time. A ten-second scuffle took place on Tuesday over the usual tweener issues of communism versus capitalism, or to use more sophisticated language, neo-Marxism versus Keynesian economics. He also didn’t like that I had corrected him the month before about Australia’s official language, which he said was “Australian.” I learned that day that you should never correct a tweener contrarian when they think that they’re right.

When I walked into the boys’ locker room for gym class that Thursday afternoon, I was greeted with two punches to my chin and face. He walked away and went through the green double doors to his locker, arrogant enough to think I wouldn’t respond. He muttered “stupid” as he walked away. I think it was the combination of being caught by surprise and being called “stupid” by Mr. OshKosh that got the better of me. Or maybe it was five months of enduring public humiliation combined with the sense that things at 616 were spinning out of control. Whatever it was, I finally snapped. I stared blankly at the red lockers, green doors, and depleted beige-colored walls for a couple of seconds, and then my mind exploded in violent colors. I threw my entire being into Mr. OshKosh as he had started to undress at his locker, knocking him to the floor.

I choked and punched him until I had bloodied his mouth and made his nose turn red. Mr. OshKosh attempted to fight back to no avail, as I kept my weight on his legs while I head-locked him with my left arm and wailed away with my right hand. Just as I began to run out of energy, the gym teacher came in to break us up. He yelled at us and asked “Do you want to be suspended?” When I got off the floor to go my locker, I almost couldn't believe that I had won that fight. I went into the break with an emotional boost, one that I hoped would lead to better things for me at school.

You could say that only a nerdy tweener boy like myself would find academic motivation in a fight. That's definitely true. But, where else would I have found it in February '82? It would be another three weeks before my love of Crush #1 would begin to take shape. And I didn't have any emotional support from home, much less the spiritual or psychological grounding to persevere. No, boys especially often need to find a spine, to fight their way out of a slump, sometimes literally, to get where they want to go.

Imagination At Work

2010-02-07T16:48:00.003-05:00

Sunday, January 31, 1988. Super Bowl XXII. Doug Williams, Gary Clary, Timmy Smith, Art Monk and the Redskins beat down the Denver Broncos that glorious evening, 42-10. I remember it pretty well. Although I've never been a Redskins fan, I was a Doug Williams fan, and more importantly, a fan of underdogs. Williams was the ultimate underdog for this game, because of his career and race, and because John Elway, was, as then NBC announcer Dick Enberg put it, "the man with a golden arm." Just as important was the fact that I was living down my underdogness vicariously through Williams' play in this game of games. His performance was part of a series of events that set the tone for my second semester at Pitt, and led to me finally beginning to find myself twenty-two years ago.

That Super Bowl was the same month as the start of semester #2 in po-dunk Pittsburgh. I came back angry but with a sense of sober clarity, like I had been on a drinking binge for the previous six or seven months. The day I had left Mount Vernon to get back to Pitt, my first semester grades had come in. I had earned an easy A in Astronomy, a B- in Pascal, and a C in Honors Calc. All three of those grade I expected. The C in East Asian History was completely unexpected. My grade point average for the semester gave me a 2.63 to start my postsecondary career. That might’ve been good enough for most folks. But of course not for me. My Challenge Scholarship absolutely depended on me maintaining a minimum 3.0 average at the end of every school year in order for me to stay eligible.

That was my wake up call to what I’d allowed Crush #2, and my thoughts of her and me — and of her with me — to do to me. I didn’t even give my mother the chance to see my grades. I said my good-byes, which was easier to do the third time around, took the cab to 241st, the Subway to midtown, and the Carey Bus to Newark.

Once I registered for classes and dumped my first-semester drinking buddies (see blog post "Resolve" from January 2008 on that), I channeled my anger by putting everyone in my life in two categories. All guys were “assholes” and all women were “bitches” until they proved otherwise. I didn’t call anyone that, anyone except for Crush #2, of course. It was my way to begin channeling my anger in a way that I could laugh at myself and concentrate on the task at hand. I needed to laugh, because there wasn't much funny to me about my life in early '88.

What carried me through that first month -- besides a reservoir of anger about the size of all five Great Lakes combined -- was a battery of new music that helped focus my anger and reinvigorate my imagination. Richard Marx’s “Should’ve Known Better” and Paul Carrack’s “Don’t Shed a Tear” were two songs that were close enough in lyrics, meaning and emotion to my situation with Phyllis that I smiled a silly smile every time I heard or played them both. Silly, even not quite applicable, I realized even at the time. But they fit my mood just fine. I "should've known better than to fall in love with" Crush #2. Yet, as the refrain from Carrack "Don't Shed A Tear" goes, "all that I saw in you, now I see through." If there had been an actual relationship with my second crush, I probably would've played Alexander O'Neal's "Fake" that month instead.

That semester, I eventually added Michael Bolton, Brenda Russell, Sting’s latest album Nothing Like The Sun, and Michael Jackson’s Bad to my collection. But for the first time in two years, I started paying attention to rap again. Rob Base, Salt ’n Pepa, Big Daddy Kane, and Public Enemy all began to seep into my consciousness that winter and spring. Geto Boys’ “Mind Playin’ Tricks on Me” would’ve been nice to hear six or eight months before when I was waist-deep in obsession over Ms. Triflin’ Ass.

One other thing I decided to do that semester was to be as much of myself as I felt comfortable being, which was a step up from hiding myself altogether. So, for the first time since I had left for Pittsburgh back in August '87, I decided to cook dinner as part of my Super Bowl Sunday. I spent the day looking for quality spaghetti (you couldn't find Ronzoni in the 'Burgh back then) and Ragu, as well as cheap pots and skillets for the meat sauce and broccoli.

By the time I reached the tenth-floor lounge of Lothrop Hall, there were four guys in there watching the last minutes of the pregame. The adjacent kitchen didn't provide a good look for the game, but I heard the boos of my fellow dormmates during the first quarter, as the Broncos jumped out to a 10-0 lead. A couple of them even wanted Joe Gibbs to pull Williams from the game. I rushed through the cooking routine so that I could watch by the end of the first quarter.

Once I sat down, Williams, Clark, Smith and the Redskins offensive line completely lit up the Broncos from that point on. Williams tossed four touchdown passes as if he were Dan Marino and Joe Montana combined. Smith might as well have been Marcus Allen, and Denver looked like the team that was too old.

Besides having Carrack's "Don't Shed A Tear" in my head throughout the evening -- not to mention second and third helpings of my cooking -- I thought about how much Williams must've had to overcome to get on the field to play in the Super Bowl, much less win the game. I thought about all of the media hype and hyperbole in the weeks leading up to Super Bowl, and how little Williams and the Redskins were part of that wave.

Williams' performance confirmed for me that what others deem impossible isn't not only possible. It also showed how small-minded naysayers can be whenever they believe that your reach exceeds your grasp. Like me, not a whole lot of folks gave Williams -- an allegedly washed-up quarterback whose best days had already passed -- a shot at performing like a Super Bowl MVP. I knew then and I know now that it doesn't really matter much what other people think. It only matters what I imagine, as well as what I do to make the imagined real in my life.

From Ernie and Bert to Wilbon and Kornheiser

2010-02-05T06:13:00.003-05:00

What do Bert and Ernie, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon have in common? They all remind us of our youthful sides, of how opposites can banter on and on, of what two friends passionate about working together can accomplish. That, and the reminder that a skinny and a round Muppet have helped define our ideas about unique friendships for more that forty years.

About a dozen or more years ago, someone finally did an article that drew interesting parallels between Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street and the late Siskel and Ebert of Siskel & Ebert and The Movies/At The Movies. It helped that Bert and Siskel were skinny, Ernie round, and Ebert rounder. Although Bert was a skinny banana with slightly more hair on his head than Siskel, and Ernie's body type was built on a really round orange, there were a number of similarities. Bert was the more intellectual one, Ernie the more laid back and fun-loving. Ernie would come up with insane ideas that Bert would shoot down. And then, of course, Ernie would get distracted by his rubber ducky. Siskel, with his generally more critical and conservative takes on films, would balance the slightly overreaching Ebert, who occasionally exhibited the same appreciation for comedies and other zany films as he did for epic dramas of cinematic significance. It was a great combination, cut all too short with Siskel's death in '99.

About the only thing on TV that's replaced the Bert and Ernie parallel in the past half decade or so has been ESPN's Pardon the Interruption. I had already known about Wilbon, as I'd been reading his reports and columns since the early '90s. Kornheiser's stuff, not so much, although I remembered liking his Washington Post columns in the Style section. But PTI wasn't the first time I'd seen them work together. It was on another ESPN show, The Sports Reporters, where I watched the two of them duke it out with Pope Lupica on a number of occasions. Anyone willing to stand toe-to-toe with that piece of work is pretty good in my book. Remembering all of this was how I came to watch PTI in the second half of the '00.

As I watched, I recognized how much Wilbon and Kornheiser reminded me of Siskel and Ebert -- and by extension, Ernie and Bert. Wilbon brought a sense of the laid back, of charisma and hipness to the table. But unlike Ernie and Ebert, no rubber duckies or falling in love with movies that are so bad that they're good to watch. Just good critiques, something through the lens of race and class, of sports and related issues in society, although too many comments on the supposed beauty of flat-butt blonds to my taste.

Interestingly, Kornheiser is the more unhinged between the two of the them. Although the slightly more thoughtful of the two -- which, by the way, provides the appearance of being more intellectual -- in many of his comments about the sporting world, Kornheiser often has to be talked down from his emotional high chair by Wilbon. Maybe that's a sign of a New York or Long Island upbringing, maybe not. Still, the two of them provide an entertainment that's rare on TV and even rarer for sports.

Why rare? Because it isn't fake or planned. It's spontaneous, it's completely caught up in the moment, like kids opening up Christmas presents, like, of course, Bert and Ernie, Ernie and Bert. We need more Wilbons and Kornheisers in the media world, not set up to disagree, to juxtapose, to manipulate the biases and passions of the simple-minded folk of our world. No, Wilbon and Kornheiser, Kornheiser and Wilbon provide an education in the art of entertainment as two friends attempting to help us understand a world that many of us can only glimpse. Like Bert and Ernie, they provide the sharp-tongue wit of adults with child-like enthusiasm, tantrums included. For someone who occasionally needs the dessert that entertainment and sports can provide, Wilbon and Kornheiser -- my current Ernie and Bert -- are my creme brulee many a day.

On Being An "Ignit" American

2010-02-01T10:07:00.002-05:00

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote "On Being An Ignorant American," mostly about folks in power, privileged, entitled folks, who display their arrogance and ignorance to the world every day. As a matter of fact, I made the argument that it was our hubris as American that has made us ignorant and defined our ignorance. In honor of Black History Month, I'm putting a spotlight on "Ignit" Americans. For those who don't know, it's a colloquial Black term that refers to folks who wallow in their ignorance like pigs who, in searching for water to cool off, choose mud instead.

Although I'll mostly discuss Black "ign-ence" here, you don't have to be African American to be ignit. You just have to be the type of person who loves to not know anything, to not care about not knowing. You have to be the type of person that feels entitled to being as close-minded as a stereotypical eighty-year-old who believes that they've learned everything there is to know about living, even though life has been passing them by since the end of high school for them six decades earlier.

Ultimately, being Black and ignit comes down to isolation and bigotry. Not the kind of bigotry that is equivalent to institutional racism, for the most part, but needless and hurtful bigotry nevertheless. African Americans are nearly a half-century removed from the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Yet we still have skin color issues -- redbone, high yella, cafe au lait, light-skinned, dark-skinned -- that remain a holdover from the Jim Crow era (not to mention American slavery itself). All manifested in our relationships and friendships, in bleaching products, colored contacts and other beauty products. In the past year, we witnessed the death of Michael Jackson, who himself struggled with this very issue, all references to a skin disorder aside. Although I'm sure most of us aren't trying to be White -- whatever that means anyway -- but I do think that African America still tends to validate the lighter folks in our group.

If only being an ignit American was only melanin deep. We have prejudices toward so-called others, a heightened sense of bigotry when it comes to Afro-Caribbeans, Africans and Latinos. Of course, the same can be said for many first, second and third-generation immigrants from all three groups, as I have experienced firsthand. And even though this kind of other-persons-of-color bigotry has declined in the past two decades, it's hardly gone. For so many of us, a different accent, a different look, a different way of seeing the world seems about as non-threatening as the fear of losing a good job. This is a reality for so many of us, despite intermarriage between these groups, not to mention the shared experience of racism and living in the same communities. This kind of ign-ence, unfortunately, includes my mother, who blames "West Indies," "Spanish people" and "Orientals" for the loss of jobs in my first hometown and in New York City as well.

The big one in terms of ignit Americans revolves around homophobic and heterosexism. Blacks are hardly alone in treating the subject as if it were radioactive waste without the proper lead lid and lining around it. But we are notoriously silent on the issue, as if there are few Black gay and lesbian folk around us. Except at many of the megachurches. There, our pastors and other spiritual leaders can blame the Black LGBT community for the spread of HIV/AIDS among heterosexual Blacks -- not to mention other diseases -- as well as high rates of crime and poverty in our poorest neighborhoods.

We still use the limp arm and hand motion to call something someone did or said as "gay," use idiotic terms like "no homo," and make a point of being overtly masculine or feminine in public and private to prove that we're as heterosexual as the biblical Adam and Eve. It's disgusting and disappointing. Despite all evidence, science and friends and family to the contrary, we still engage in the mythology that anyone gay or lesbian, anyone overtly different from the hyper-heterosexual model is a social pariah and should and will go to hell.

All this is a function of the less obvious but ultimately the root cause that leads to Americans becoming ignit -- the shunning of intelligent Americans. This is one that even the most enlightened of African Americans participates in every day. Although most of us believe education is important, the idea of being academically successful scares both many parents of academically gifted kids and those kids blessed with academic awareness. And for Black males, academic success at an early age can lead to social and soul destruction. Boys and young men especially aren't supposed to display in any way their academic talents, their analytical abilities, or their keen insight on the world around them. Those of us who do are automatically weird, nerds, even seen as "gay" -- as discussed in the previous paragraph -- because we don't fit in with the other guys who learned at an early age to embrace ign-ence.

Speaking in standard American English without learning how to code switch, having dreams that you may make it to the age of thirty with a college degree, wanting to experience the world beyond your neighborhood, city or country isn't allowed in the world of ignit Americans. It's better to learn a jump shot, work on running fast, or figure out how to rap or sing with rhythm and harmony, so as to cover up your constant striving to learn. There's little tolerance for Black kids who aren't cool, especially when they're smart. No wonder even many of the smarter ones act as if they are as dumb as a door post. No wonder many of our dreams remain unfulfilled.

No one wants to feel isolated, to be alone, to be ostracized. It takes truly unique individuals to break through the traps set by those ignit Americans who may determine cool, but can in no way determine success. Otherwise, so many Americans, Black and otherwise, will succumb to the not-so-blissful ign-ence of our peers, to their cool and unimaginative ways of thinking about and going about living in this world. This is the thing that Black History Month must yet take on and continue to strive against. History and education is the work that our society must continue to emphasize, even as we strive in ignorance to make nine-month-olds read and sixteen-year-olds ready for Harvard.

Art Rust, Jr.

2010-01-27T11:50:00.002-05:00

Two weeks ago, sports talk radio pioneer Art Rust, Jr. passed away at the ripe old age of eighty-two. Other than a few short obits in the New York Times and Daily News and a few other choice newspapers, hardly a word was said about Rust's passing. Almost no mention on WFAN in New York, or on other sports radio talk shows in places like DC or other parts of the country. I guess for even knowledgeable reporters, columnists and talk show hosts on the sports side of the media, Rust's passing was as remarkable as mine would be to the academic, nonprofit and writing worlds in which I inhabit. It's much more than a shame. It's all too typical that we as a people and media types especially forget about trailblazers in the field.

That Rust was Black only makes almost total blackout of news of his death all the more atrocious. I'm in no way suggesting that race is the reason why there was almost zero coverage of Rust. Most of this has to do with generational differences and timing. Rust because a vanguard of sports radio talk some two and a half decades before most forms of talk radio were the norm on AM or FM. He was sometimes a cutting-edge figure, other times an over-the-edge and controversial figure, as evidenced by his first book, Get That Nigger Off the Field (about the history of Blacks in baseball). Rust could be a bit over the top in his comments and corniness, constantly using the term "poppycock and balderdash" with generations of fans who had never seen nor heard the term before. But if it weren't for Rust, whole generations of sports talk radio hosts -- especially ones of color -- wouldn't have had the opportunity to make an impact on how we view and participate in sports Americana.

Rust was as much as personality as much as he was a voice imparting views and information about sports like baseball and boxing. His work in Harlem and the rest of New York in the years between '54 and '81 had given him the opportunity to know many an athlete, from Joe Di Maggio and Joe Louis to Muhammad Ali and Darryl Strawberry. If you wanted insight beyond a sports writer's column or article about an athlete -- especially a Black athlete -- you had to listen to Rust. He either interviewed them, or knew the person well enough to play pop psychologist about them. It's what made him a minor icon long before I was born and the folks who host now were aspiring to be beat reporters anywhere.

I started listening to Rust during his WABC-770 AM days, between '81 and '87, during the last of his good years on talk radio. He could talk about any sport, about the connections between race and sports, about any issue that came up, really, because he believed that he had lived long enough to have seen it all. One of the reasons I came to appreciate baseball so much in those days was because I had to listen to Rust wax poetic about the game time and time again, bringing a perspective and knowledge to it that didn't exist on the airwaves otherwise. Long before I read books about Satchel Paige or Josh Gibson or the Homestead Grays and the Negro Leagues, I could at least listen to Rust talk about such things in airy remembrance or in interviews with former players. Heck, Rust might've been the reason I stopped liking baseball, as I came to understand the sport's ugly history.

So too was I turned off to the Yankees and the fans who'd call in to Rust's show. Besides the fact that the Mets would always be underdogs as long as they shared New York with the Yankees -- no matter how many good things the Mets did -- there was one simple fact. The most delusional sports fans in all of the world in the '80s were Yankees fans. And Rust would patiently, then impatiently, set Yankees fans straight about the abilities of a team with Pags, Winfield and Mattingly but little else -- as they traded away minor league talent year after year -- to have a winning season, much less win the AL East. And, of course, there was the more than occasional caller who would call in with a racist comment or a racial epithet directed at Rust. But Rust would respond with dignity and courage and hyperbole and disdain, something that probably drove the drinking-caller-public nuts.

I didn't get into his conversations about boxing as much. I could care less about Larry Holmes or Marvin Haggler or Sugar Ray Leonard or a host of others. It was already a dying sport, and Rust knew it. Rust spent a lot of time on his show going after Gerry Cooney and his promoters in the mid-80s. Too bad Cooney turned out to be one of the highlights in Michael Spinks' career.

The end of Rust's run came with the emergence of 24-hour sports radio talk in '87, turning my beloved Mets station WHN (which also played country music, and really old country music at that) into WFAN. WABC let him go to WFAN. Unfortunately, with the mercurial idiot Howie Rose leading WFAN into this brave new world, Rust's age and his lack of appeal to a younger audience made his short time on the station an unsuccessful one. I lost all respect for Rose, by the way, when he would critique Lionel Richie's music as "boring." For me, the end of my relating to Rust came in '87 as well, with my move to Pittsburgh and college that summer.

So much reminds me of Rust in the radio world now. At least, anything that's any good. The Tony Kornheiser Show and his moodiness and his friendly chats with his chummy guests. The constant interplay of music on The John Thompson Show. Interviews off the beaten path on the Tom Joyner Show. Of course, Rust wasn't the only pioneer, but so much of what Rust did is now commonplace. So much so that it's disheartening to know that so many have made nary a mention of the man and his work. Which is why I have today.

Nightmares and Daydreams

2010-01-25T09:15:00.001-05:00

There's another side to what happens in my mind and heart when I'm asleep. And with the work in putting together Boy @ The Window, when I'm lost in thought in between new sentences, deleted paragraphs, and old emotions. Just because my life's turned out much better than expected in the years since Humanities and Mount Vernon doesn't mean that I don't have any baggage from my lost years.

Even now, precious sleep can be hard to come by as rain is for a desert. Even with all the accomplishments, accolades and affections, sleeping well remains a difficult thing. When I finally do sleep, my dreams and nightmares are populated by others’ threats and my fears from my past. My ex-stepfather, my ex-crushes, the beatings and the longing. The scars and the people whom those scars represent are still there to draw upon, seek wisdom from, and occasionally respond to with justified retribution.

I’m often naked in my nightmares while fending them all off. My high school classmates, my ex-stepfather and my mother, and a cast of others who represent the physical and psychological violence of my growing-up years. For years, I could count on fighting my ex-stepfather in my dreams and nightmares. Sometimes I won, sometimes I lost. A few times, I managed to kill him. Most of the time, I woke up before I could do anything at all.

Then there was Crush #1. She seemed to show up in my dreams at the most inappropriate of times. No girlfriends, girlfriends or marriage, somehow a younger version of her would show up periodically to give me sage advice. As much as it felt good for her to show up in my dreams, her presence usually left me out of sorts. I knew that a part of me loved her, but that part could never be fulfilled. Not with so many other nightmares associated with her.

The one I have most often is one of me metaphorically exposing myself, and not just ones where I’m down to my birthday suit. It’s a dream — but more often a nightmare — where I’m being interrogated about something I said that particular day or week. No matter how wonderful a day I’ve had, I find myself in a room or in a public place being questioned about something I’ve said or done. By God. Or by one of my former professors. Or by friends and acquaintances from my past.

If there was only a way for me to turn it all off, to not wait for the other shoe to drop. To forget about all of the hurt, the bitterness, the betrayals from my childhood, if not the actual events themselves. To have a completely clean emotional state, to be able to start over would make sleep much easier to find, and rest as common as the air itself.

I understand that I’m the ultimate questioner, but it sure would be nice if I could stop beating myself up with the regrets I have about the Humanities years. Not to mention the lean and mean times at 616 and in Mount Vernon, New York. It was the prism through which I understood my Reagan years world.

These nightmares and daydreams aren't ones that happen every day or night, nor are they the majority of my images and events that populate my asleep world. But they are there, laying in wait, ready to pounce upon me from time to time. Although I don't see myself as a five-foot-four and 125 pound tweener anymore, and haven't for at least twenty-one years, that person is a part of me. Instead of ignoring or suppressing these "bad" or "evil" dreams, I've decided to learn something from the avatars embodying them. At least when I'm asleep. I've stopped running in these dreams, and I've stopped being embarrassed at my nakedness in them.

I guess that this may coincide with having put a moratorium on revisions for the book. Maybe yes, maybe no. What I do know is that my conversations with my tweener and teenage years avatars make more sense than almost all the actual conversations I had with them in the real world. I guess that, despite the baggage, these nightmares and daydreams are a good thing, for they present a wisdom, an insight or a foresight that I wouldn't have otherwise.

Where's The Beef?

2010-01-20T06:49:00.003-05:00

I have a beef with those who make a job search into a tryout for American Idol and Top Chef wrapped into one. It seems to me that job recruiters, human resource managers and search committees have become lazy in their approach to sifting through the resumes and cover letters that they receive for jobs. I guess that a ten percent unemployment rate and seventeen percent underemployment rate would make anyone involved with the hiring process confident to the point of arrogance about how they deal with applicants. As someone who's teaching part-time and has had a feast-or-famine time as a consultant over the past two years, I've applied for full-time, part-time and consulting work to bring in a decent income. I have been through some indifferent, even bizarre moments on phone interviews and in face-to-face interviews, with for-profits, private foundations, universities, and think-tanks. But nonprofit entities are truly a unique animal when it comes to process, so unique that the beef of their processes really add up to nothing more than beef-flavored tofu.

This isn't sour grapes over not being hired. I could've written a dozen postings about the unfairness of life, about my not knowing enough people in high places to help find the work that I want. I haven't, mostly because I understand that even people with the best of experiences and credentials get rejected for jobs. It's part of the job search process, and it's necessary, especially since I might not always be happy at a job I end up accepting. No, this is about some of my more unusual moments over the past few months in dealing with really strange job search processes in the nonprofit world.

Take my experience with the Posse Foundation. I applied for a position with them last year, and did two interviews with staff before they decided to move on with another candidate. Not unusual in any way. Except for the fact that this wasn't their typical way of hiring folks. Usually they do a group interview in a big room, for every position. From the administrative assistant to director-level positions, applicants compete in a room for the attention of interviewers, as if these were applicants for the show Job Search (no such show, although it would likely be on NBC if it did exist). Somehow I managed to bypass that bit of humiliation. Yet, more characteristic of my previous job searches, my second interview was an afterthought, with another candidate already with staff for lunch while I was being interviewed. I had to contact them some two weeks later for an official rejection for the position.

Of course, Posse's explanation for this is that its group interview process will give applicants a feel for what potential Posse Scholars will go through to obtain a slot for a four-year scholarship to a university through one of their university scholars. Maybe so. But at least the students receive a rejection letter or other assistance after the process is over. Nor do students sense on some level favoritism during their interview process. Not to mention the fact that most of your applicants are well above the age of seventeen or eighteen.

Another example of the unusual in a job search was a job I should've never applied for with The Washington Center for Internships and Academic Seminars. I managed to get an interview with folks who had all the professionalism of college students working at Jerry's Pizza and Subs. For an hour, they asked me all kinds of questions about what I knew to be a part-time position, based on their own job advertisement on Idealist.org. I guess I should've been more curious, given that five people were in the room grilling me. When I finally asked a question about the flexibility of their schedule, they looked shocked. The folks finally got around to tell me that I was interviewing for both a full-time and a part-time position at the same time, with the full-time one being the priority. Then one of their directors quickly herded me outside a side gate -- I guess he wanted to make sure that I felt sufficiently humiliated as a Black male -- to end the interview. Needless to say, these un-professionals never did send me an official rejection notice.

But nothing, absolutely nothing, is more irritating than doing extra work for a position per the request of a potential employer, completing it and then not being interviewed at all. This was the case with The New Teacher Project (TNTP). I applied for a work-at-home position in data and policy analysis with them. The original application asked for a writing sample, but I couldn't attach one on their application webpage. A few days later, I received an email from TNTP asking me to complete a series of exercises crunching and analyzing data regarding teacher effectiveness. This included writing a memo to prospective funders based on one set of data, importing another set of data into MS Access, running queries, filters and calculations, filling out tables and making appropriate suggestions based on this other set of data. I received this assignment Thursday evening at 6:18 pm a couple of weeks ago, but TNTP wanted my completed exercise by Sunday. I managed to get an extension for Tuesday and completed the assignment, only to receive a generic rejection from TNTP thirty-six hours later. It turned out that others "more closely fit" the position requirements.

I was miffed, and sent them a note saying so. It was lazy -- to say the least -- to push applicants into an exercise process before being interviewed, only to reject them based on something other than the exercise itself. I could've just as easily provided my published writing samples of my use of data on education policy related issues. To use valuable time to work on this when I could've applied for other jobs made this process ridiculous. Not to mention the fact that in going this route, TNTP should've paid folks for their time and effort. They gave me a generic excuse equivalent to the rejection note, saying that this was the best way to identify the best candidates. I have a better idea -- how about interviewing folks first, then asking them to complete an exercise!

Academia and other fields have their own quirks and nuances. But at least you know going in what those are. The nonprofit world just makes up stuff or pulls ideas out of a "How To Do a Wacky Interview" book and expects its applicants to roll with it. I don't expect a job search to be fair -- after all, I live in a who-you-know world. What I do expect is for the search process to make sense, be consistent in its unfairness and a bit of transparency in terms of what these entities are looking for. That some haven't even met this minimal requirement says a lot about how far professional standards have dropped, and why nonprofits are often seen in a bad light.

On Being An Ignorant American

2010-01-18T08:54:00.002-05:00

What do E.D. Hirsch's books on Cultural Literacy, the commercials about nine-month-olds who can read, Harry Reid's comments about President Obama and Pat Robertson's admonishing of Haitians and Haiti have in common? They're all about us, ignorant Americans, arrogant and all-assuming in our cultural norms. They all contain seeds of Whiteness, maybe even Whiteness as an assumed sense of right and wrong, of good and evil, of better intelligence, benevolence and wisdom. There may even be a touch of eugenics involved in all four, as if the White American way (which unfortunately is still one and the same) is the only right to speak and think in this world.

It's amazing that we're still dealing with the idea that there is only one path to intellectual development and growth in our society. This despite all of Howard Gardner's work on multiple intelligences, and the work of so many others like Gardner. We still think that we should buy Mozart, Beethoven and Bach mp3's, put them on our iPods, and put the headphones on the bellies of pregnant American citizens so that their children can be proficient third-grade readers before the age of five. We still believe that behaviors that promote individuality and unthinking critiques of everything are the best behaviors for our often lonely and uncritical thinking children to grow up with.

Hirsch was the main guru of a new movement of American intellectual development with his books on Cultural Literacy back in the '80s. Now we have a series of commercials exploiting the worries of suburban and White parents with YourBabyCanRead.com. Nine-month-olds, two- year-olds and five-year-olds of the world unite in the unyielding quest to become voracious and critical readers, writers and thinkers. An all-consuming task in front of all other goals, like potty training, learning how to use a fork and a spoon, and learning how to listen to parents without whining or throwing a tantrum.

These commercials hearken back to the thinking of the first half of the twentieth century, to the wonderful world of the eugenics movement, in which scientists and pseudo-scientists sought to improve the intellectual and athletic skills of the human race -- at least the "pure" and White part of it -- by experimenting with those most pure. Or, more often, by experimenting (and ultimately, exterminating) those who were deemed much less pure or even dangerous to keep in the human gene pool. Blacks, Jews, gays, developmental disabled and mentally retarded all found themselves in the latter category. Most of the derogatory terms we use today as youth and adults -- retard, moron, dull-minded, imbecile, even nerd -- were spawned by leaders of eugenics and its off-shoots between roughly 1900 and the '50s.

Now, I'm not arguing that a kid under the age of five can't become a proficient reader. My older brother Darren -- who learned to read without any assistance by the time he was three -- is a case in point. But he didn't do it through coaching, flash cards or Mozart. Heck, my mother -- when she played music back then -- would play Al Green, Diana Ross and the Supremes and The Temptations. So why the emphasis on classical music, coaching, flash cards and the pseudo-science of the baby brain here? Because it has been ingrained in the minds of most Americans -- especially White Americans -- that intelligence is a White thing. And in a world of increasing educational competition, that intelligence no longer has time to develop. What will Jill or Johnny do if they won't be ready for a gifted and accelerated learning program in school by the time they're seven years old? How will they ever get into Harvard, Yale or Princeton? How will they ever be ready to be a neuro-surgeon or a corporate lawyer?

Of course, the commercial shows one example of a kid whose interests included basketball and other sports, and not just literacy and mid-elementary level books, a nod to the need for physical stimulation (and indirectly, a nod to eugenics as well). But isn't it interesting that not a single person in the YourBabyCanRead.com commercial was of color? Not one, not even a token one? As the late Art Rust, Jr. would say, that's a bunch of poppycock and balderdash.

So too are the witticisms of Sen. Reid (D-NV) and televangelist Pat Robertson. Between "light-skinned Black," "Negro dialect," and two-century-long deals "with the devil," we could just write the comments off as the bleating of stupid White guys. That's far too easy. Because they were and are communicating and connecting mostly with other people like them -- folks in powerful positions to influence our culture. Even though Sen. Reid didn't mean his statement to be one for public consumption, it was meant for a private group of powerful people. And Robertson knew full well that his argument about a wrathful Old Testament God seeking vengeance on darker-skinned people who didn't obey their masters (not to mention the Voodoo stereotype) would resonate well with his "White is Right" audience.

How does this make us ignorant? We assume that we're the richest and most powerful country on Earth for two reasons. One, because we're smart and hard-working individuals from mostly immigrant (and White) backgrounds, taking advantage of this nation's resources. Or two, because we're God-fearing Christians, faithful to the core, and because God blessed us with the bounty of this nation's resources. That is to say, we're good enough, we're smart enough, and doggone it, God loves us. But apparently, not all of us, and certainly not folks who aren't White and outside of the US. Our quest for a singular culture, for super-intelligence, for a world that only makes sense to a select and powerful few has left tens of millions of Americans as ignorant about the world as Americans would believe those in Port-au-Prince are these days. Except that with the ignorant and powerful people to their north, Haitians never were as ignorant as us.

Dream Sequence

2010-01-15T06:15:00.002-05:00

It must’ve been everyone I’d come to know. About twenty-five or thirty of them in all. Led by Crush #1, her eventual first love and my Italian Club tormentors, they all were marching down East Lincoln near where I lived, sticks and stones in hand. More like bricks and baseball bats and chains as they got closer. They were all dressed in Sergio Valente and Jordache, Benetton and OshKosh, Levi’s and Gap attire. They were all after me, my kufi, my life, my eternal soul. They weren’t running after me. They were marching in formation, like Soviet troops in Red Square, only with ridiculous smiles of mayhem giving away their intentions. I felt scared. But I had resigned myself to my fate. If I was goin’ down, gosh darn it, I was gonna put up a fight and take some of them with me!

Dreaming about your classmates in any other way than out of adoration or infatuation isn’t healthy. They served as a metaphor. They were an obstacle between me and my inner peace, a constant reminder that the odds were against me escaping 616 and Mount Vernon for the brighter pastures of a life and education elsewhere. They were symbols all right, symbols for everything from abuse and fear of abuse to undying and unrequited love. I woke up, sweating and with a panicked heartbeat from the nightmare. I looked at all of my body parts to make sure that I still had them in place before getting out of bed.

Later that snow-melt Saturday in early ’84, my mother sent me to the Fleetwood Station post office in the northwest corner of Mount Vernon to pick up a certified package. She had a PO box there, set up originally to protect sensitive documents from thieves in the building. I assumed that she was using it now to keep Maurice from getting his hands on any checks or other sensitive information. This was yet another task that I’d become the go-to-child for. I got dressed in my hand-me down winter coat and blue sweats and began the slushy trek to Fleetwood.

Then deja vu struck. I found myself standing at the northeast corner of Lorraine and East Lincoln, unusually quiet because of the snow and the cold front that came with it the night before. This was where the metaphorical forces of destruction had lined up and marched against me. I laughed out loud, hoping at the same time that no one saw me. I looked down at the curb and sidewalk as the slush-ice was turning into mini-glacial streams and rivers, all blending as they ran toward a storm drain. In a semi-frozen pack nearby lay ten dollars. It had been trapped by the icy H2O. “My luck is getting better every day,” I said to myself. This happened to me, someone who never found more than a penny at a time on the streets and sidewalks of Mount Vernon.
_____________________________________

It's funny how things like this happened to me at the beginning of a year. A dream, nightmare or vision that helped to guide me or gave me no choice but to gird my loins. A crisis, financial or otherwise, that left me so motivated and focused that the work that followed helped bring the crisis to an end. Maybe it's because at the beginning of a year, whatever baggage I've brought from the previous year has left me open to wisdom and understanding beyond my actual abilities. Maybe it's been in the quiet of a cold month of January or a cold winter season that I'm most susceptible to a quiet voice of reason and imagination, insight, foresight and hindsight that works better in a calmer mind.

I had planned to discuss this nightmarish dream of twenty-six years ago this week, but the cataclysmic events in Haiti and other issues have distracted me. To imagine that so many people -- through no fault of their own -- lost their lives as quickly as it would take a nuclear bomb to knock out electricity and send out a devastating blast wave. It's saddening and chilling right down to the marrow in my bones. Except that I don't have to imagine. The BBC and CNN have done much to make sure of that. So many are considered dead that it's hard to see Haiti ever recovering from this earthquake.

Except that this is more than about a 7.0 Richter scale shaking of the ground. The poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, and one of the poorest on Earth, was hit by this quake. A nation that has struggled with the scorn of idiot imperialists like Pat Robertson specifically, and the economic imperialism of the nations of Europe in general since those once enslaved there revolted against their French owners nearly 22o years ago. The richest colony in the French Empire quickly became as poor as anyone in the US Delta region or a Hurricane Katrina survivor from Ward 9 can imagine.

Civil wars and warlords and a light-skinned hierarchy, informal embargo-enforced economic inequality, and natural disaster have practically been a part of Haiti's history ever since it officially became independent in 1804. With poverty and economic and political instability comes poor building structures, limited public infrastructure in terms of doctors, nurses, police and firefighters, and a lack of the construction and demolition equipment that we take for granted in the US. Just across the street from us is an almost-finished high-rise and state-of-the-art, solar-powered office building. There's enough there to help dig out dozens of still trapped Haitians buried in rubble -- the living and the dead.

Even in the midst of all of this horror, even with the smells of rotting corpses, the moans and screams and blank stares of the injured and living, and the sights of collapsed buildings and chaos, there is hope. For I'm certain that there's a kid or an adult whose dreams remain unshaken. A tweener whose vision for his or her life remains their guidepost. A man or woman whose hurt, upset, and devastated, but refuses to surrender their wisdom and their hope because of this. And as those who hold out in hope that we can help in some way, we must not surrender our dreams either, for Haitians or for ourselves.

"Minority" Report

2010-01-06T09:51:00.005-05:00

I have a beef with the world of folks who still use the word "minority" to describe people like me. Most of them are White, a small minority are Black or Latino or Asian. Almost all of them are from Generation X or older generations. The final straw for me was the past week of listening to sports reporters talking about the NFL's Rooney Rule, the one that requires teams with coaching vacancies to interview at least one "minority" candidate before making a final hiring decision. Although I think that there are many benefits to the Rooney Rule, I don't think that calling one group of people Whites and everyone else minorities, especially if done continually, sets up the so-called others/non-Whites as outsiders, not the norm, people who need a handout from the dominant White folks who own the teams and control the hiring process.

I suppose that if the roles were reversed and we were calling all Whites "minorities" that there would be some gnashing of teeth on the part of White folk. Not necessarily. There is a power relationship issue that goes well beyond the numbers aspect of majority vs. minority. Financial, economic, social, military and cultural dominance that won't depend on Whites continuing to be the majority of the nation's population. This is something that folks who use this term without any regard to the diverse groups that they've lumped together don't understand. For those people, White is normal, White is powerful, White is dominant. "Minorities" are the other, in constant need of help, have little regard for our nation's cultural norms, deserve little in the way of educational, economic or other kinds of opportunities. Our individual and group identities are inconsequential and irrelevant, as they have little to do with the White world.

So Whites who use the term "minority" are racists, while the "minorities" who use the word are misinformed old farts, right? Absolutely not! I think that folks who use the term are lazy more than anything else. Even though the more appropriate term for people who aren't White is "people of color" -- and the term's been around for at least three decades -- many don't know it or refuse to use it even if they do. "Minority" or "minorities" is one word, "people of color" or "persons of color" is three. It takes up too much space in a newspaper article and takes too much time to say those extra two words. Saying "people of color" sounds too politically correct, because it actually makes folks see in their minds' eyes people who are Black, Latino and Asian in background. I would argue that this isn't true, that using the term "minority" is the more sterile -- and thus more politically-correct -- term being used, but used in a casual and lazy way to describe 110 million people.

This is something that's bothered me since the middle of my junior year in high school. The term "people of color" was in its infancy then, but I knew that I didn't like being called a minority, as if someone White could call me anything they wanted without my input. It was bad enough that the powers that were at Mount Vernon High School could tell me what to wear, where to go, when I could read my Bible in school. But to also be called a "minority" as a lazy substitute for Black or something else I found insulting in '85. These days, it remains lazy and insulting, and shows a disdain for the consideration for how those who are so-called minorities see and characterize themselves.

The same is true on the issue of the use of the term racism and race. Although I do see the issue of race involved in many issues that at first glance might seem to not involve race, that is hardly the same thing as saying that something is racist. There are folks who scream "racism" whenever a Black public figure finds themselves in hot water, and there are folks who scream "this isn't about race!" to every claim of race or racism, which for them is the same thing. This happened again, this time with the emerging evidence that Washington Wizards scorer and flaky idiot Gilbert Arenas semi-threatened one of his teammates with supposedly unloaded guns in the locker room of the Verizon Center in DC. Folks have spent the past few days calling Arenas' much-deserved vilification in the media "racist," and commentators denying that any of this anything to do with race.

The folks who are calling the Arenas coverage "racist" are as idiotic as Arenas. To say that what Arenas has done is typical of what Blacks from our generation grew up with are dumb asses who couldn't have an honest conversation about race if they were kneeling at the throne of Almighty God on Judgment Day. Those radio, TV and Internet commentators and bloggers whom say that this isn't about race or culture are correct, of course, but they miss one point when they make that point. That is, that anyone who is of color and learns about another famous person of color who gets themselves in legal or media trouble experiences a cringing moment. These few examples of successful individuals of color, once they become public pariahs -- like O.J. Simpson, Tiger Woods or Gilbert Arenas -- reflect badly on everyday people of color, especially Blacks. That is the backdrop to the moronic comments of folks defending Arenas against "racism."

So, do things like the Arenas situation or the revealing of Woods' recent affairs involve race? To say that it does means accusing Whites of racism, at least according to White mouthpieces. To say that it doesn't completely discounts that feeling of weariness that Blacks and other folks of color experience when rich and public people who look like us screw up legally or otherwise. Perhaps the bigger point here is that Whites who refuse to understand the dynamics of race are so tied to the notion of individualism that they're blinded to the realities of race, while folks of color are double-bond to their individual and group affiliations. Until those in the public arena can understand and articulate these tensions, we will continue to talk past each other as if one group is speaking Russian and the other is speaking Mandarin Chinese.

Comedian Chris Rock probably put it best in his Bringin' The Pain concert in '96. He said that "there are two kinds of Black people -- there are 'Black people,' and there are 'N____s'." I'm not so crass as to use the N-word to describe the likes of Arenas or jailed Louisiana ex-congressman William Jefferson (the guy with $90,000 in cash payoffs in his freezer), nor so naive as to think that these imbeciles represent me and what I'm doing with my life. But I'm also not so tied to the White notion of individualism to think that no one White doesn't equate the behaviors of prominent people of color with the millions of everyday people of color. Between the lumping together of peoples of color as "minorities" and the refusal to acknowledge that race (not racism) plays a role in our perceptions and perspectives on individuals' words and deeds, our public world needs to get into the '90s before the '10s get here. Oh wait a minute -- I guess I should revise to "before the '20s get here!"

The 40 F-Its

2009-12-31T06:28:00.002-05:00

A few years ago, a former classmate of mine -- Crush #1, in fact -- had this to say about the eventual turn to forty. She called it the Forty F___-Its, because when you turn forty, "you should just say 'Fuck it'" to the stuff that doesn't matter. I know full well that she didn't create this saying, but it sounded original coming from her. Of course, the more common saying is that forty is the new thirty. Tell that to former professional athletes who are in their forties! There is a qualitative difference, because even if our bodies are tuned up, our bones don't lie.

But my one-time crush and now married mother of two is correct. By the time we reach our forties, we should realize that there are some things we should just say "F___ it" to. I have a list of what I need to say "F___ it" to now that I'm firmly on the other side of forty.

1. Hiding my intelligence. I've been a miserable failure at this anyway. Still, I can be incredibly conscientious of the words I use and how I speak in situations and settings in which my intellectual skills are shunned, including the workplace. No more of that! I learned long ago that people are fickle, and that those who have problems with the occasional fifty-cent word should use their mobile phones to look up Dictionary.com instead of laughing or pretending to understand what I've just said. I'm not talking about talking over people's heads. I'm talking about being truer to myself.

2. Being ever more truthful about my life. For the most part I can't complain about the directions I've gone in my life over the past twenty years. Between my educational journey, teaching, nonprofit management, dating, marriage and my son, things have been pretty good for a while. But the past two or three years have been tough on us financially, despite prayer and effort. My life is far from perfect, yet from the outside looking it, I guess it looks better than what I think it is. That's fine for others. As for me, I can't look at my life through others' eyes. I don't have that luxury. We have a bit less than twelve years to get things in order so that Noah can have real choices as a young man, from the college he wants to attend to a used hybrid car to drive. That means seeing where we are now and knowing where we need to go so that all of our futures are secure.

3. Career vs. calling. For most of my time in the workforce, especially in the years since finishing my doctoral thesis at the end of '96, I've "been stuck in a moment," so to speak (thanks U2!). I've been ambivalent about academia as a full-time profession, and over the years, have discovered myself as a writer. I've also worked for a decade with one crazed nonprofit entity after another, picking up plenty of management and program development skills along the way. In the past couple of years, I've attempted to reconcile my calling with my career and job aspirations. To little avail.

One thing I have decided is that my doctorate can hurt me as much as help me on the job front, and that it matters only somewhat if my job or next job fits with my authorship aspiration. What does all of this mean, anyway? Should I go back to school and earn a law degree, a degree much more flexible than a doctorate in history? Should I decide to teach high school history for a steadier income and the ability to reach students before they go to college unprepared for its rigors? These are questions in need of an answer, but in order to answer them, I have to say "F___ it" to all of my assumptions about my career up to this point.

4. Live my dream and not just dream. Okay, this sounds weird, because I thought that for most of the past two decades, I had been doing this, and doing it well. Not quite true. Between our finances, my career goals and Boy @ The Window, I feel sometimes as if I've gotten close, but not nearly close enough, to making my visions for my life real in my life. It's clear to me now, though, what else needs to happen. I have to step up my efforts just one notch more, to recognize that I need to be bolder and more willing to network than I ever have before. At the very least, this will get me out of the house and classroom more often.

5. Move on. Sometimes I can be obsessed with a project or a person or an idea, sometimes all at once, as was the case with Crush #2 in '87 and '88. At times this has been the case with Boy @ The Window. I'm convinced that one of the reasons that it's taken me two years to make significant revisions to the manuscript is because working on it has caused me to relive many of my memories and emotions from all those years ago. Not so in the past few months. I've been able to do substantial revisions, to imbue the manuscript with words and emotions that might not have come through in previous drafts. Now that folks are reading it and liking it, now that I've revised or rewritten every section of the book at least five times (and the first chapter at least eight times), it's time to move on to other writing projects, even as I seek publication of Boy @ The Window. Let the chips fall where they may, although I think they'll fall in the right order this time.

6. You can't go home again. Nothing has borne this out better than in my work on Boy @ The Window and in my communications with former classmates and teachers on Facebook and through email correspondence. This isn't a knock on them or on me. There were good reasons for why I didn't become friends with them growing up, and going on twenty-three to thirty years on, I can see why through our expressions of thoughts and feelings now. But, Facebook and other correspondence have also reminded me about the good friends that I did and do have in my life in the years since Humanities and leaving Mount Vernon, including a couple from Mount Vernon. That good friends are hard for anyone to find, especially if you tend not to trust the people around you. And, at least in my case, why would I want to go home again anyway?

These are the ideas about where my life should go next as we enter a new decade. While the shape of things to come remains as uncertain as our world as a whole seems to be at the end of '09, I'm certain of some things. That I'm creative enough, smart enough, successful enough and spiritual enough to get where I want to go, and that it won't take until my son's in college to get there. That the people I'll meet -- including the people I need to meet -- will be ones who add something positive to my life, to the lives of my wife and child. And that there will be enough faith and wisdom, love and grace along the way. Happy New Year and decade, everyone!

Tiger's Issue, My Issues

2009-12-19T08:37:00.004-05:00

It's a shame to see what's happened to Tiger Woods in the wonderful media over the past three weeks. At the rate things are going, I could claim to have had a tryst with the man the week of the '01 US Open in Tulsa because I did a site visit for one of my previous jobs there. Of course, much of this is his own fault. Rampant infidelity. No Jordan-esque rules of sexual engagement, including a legally-binding contract. A certain lack of self-control in his personal life. And his refusal to face the public, not because we demand it, but ultimately, to protect his brand, his image. Yet none of those things are ones I want to discuss. I feel more compelled to discuss the race rules of interracial relationships and marriage in America.

As biracial -- or Cablinasian -- as Woods is, he is for all intends and purposes in this country, a Black man. Between the Choctaw and Irish blood (and who knows what else is in my genes), I can claim to be Cablin myself. Yet I know full well that I'm seen and see myself demographically speaking as Black or African American. Because of this, once one of us enters into an interracial relationship -- especially with a White woman -- smooth sailing is the only option we have in order to not be seen as pariahs. No financial problems, no hitting and certainly no cheating is allowed. There's little to no margin for error, and any major ones will be met swiftly with retribution. By the White wife or girlfriend, their family, your White friends (and some Black ones, too), and if a public figure, the media and the blogosphere as well.

What makes Tiger's transgressions worse for him are two additional components. One, his wife Elin is a blond, and not just White. Two, unlike many of the White women Black men tend to date or marry, she is perceived as attractive by many folks, if not most. The combination in our zero-sum race rules around Black men with White women means that someone like Tiger Woods can't act like anything other than the perfect husband. I'm not condoning his cheating one iota. All I know is that we were less hard on John Edwards, a guy whom was only running for President of the United States, and could've brought the Democratic Party down with him if he had made it to the nomination stage. We're harder on Tiger, not just he projected a solid image, not because he let the media and the public down, but because he's a Black guy cheating on an allegedly beautiful and blond White woman.

If you think that this is all poppycock and balderdash, anyone remember O.J. Simpson and Nicole Brown between '92 and '97? Those were the years that it was painfully obvious that White guys I knew were ready to form a mob, march over to Santa Monica, and kill the Hall-of-Fame running back for first hitting Brown before their divorce in '92, then killing Brown in '94. The last three weeks have been about the same issues. The media just refuses to see it that way. Sure, there's shock and outrage about what Tiger's done, and Tiger should go public to protect himself. But this is about race, and not in way Rush Limbaugh would yell about it either.

It's funny. There's no outrage about the fact that Tiger's wife smashed in the back window of his Cadillac SUV with a golf club. That he was obviously attempting to get away from her. That he was treated for more injuries than running into a fire hydrant would account for. Yet, I guess, it's okay for a blond White woman who's been cheated on by a Black man to flip out and commit an act of domestic violence. If the tables were turned, billionaire or not, best golfer on the planet or not, Tiger would've gone to jail, and might still be in jail.

I'm not exactly speaking from my own experience in dating White women, because I haven't. Not because I didn't have the opportunity to do so. Mostly because as enlightened as I am, I'm also a bit old school on the issue of interracial dating and marriage. That it should be more about who I am than what I look like, what I stand for and not just how much money I have in my bank account this morning, love and not just lust. But my own experiences, going back to the end of high school, have shown otherwise. Getting accused of sexual harassment after a White female co-worker had made several advances toward me was a learning experience. One of many in which my interests were primarily platonic and theirs sexual in nature. One of at least half a dozen where once my intentions were clear, I faced harassment and berating, as if I was supposed to be attracted to a White woman because they're White.

I could be crude and say that butt shape, or the lack thereof, is the reason why I never sought to date anyone White. I could be a bit more honest and say that the prospect of having to deal with their baggage while having to constantly explain my own would be another reason. Let's face it. There aren't a lot of folks who do get me, but most of them are of color. The full truth is, though, that in the area of relationships, I haven't trusted the words and deeds of White women. Not friendships, just relationships. Now, maybe that's prejudice on some scale, or maybe that's preference. It may even be a bit of both. Still, given responses I've seen to folks with way more going for them than me, like O.J. and Tiger, can you really blame me?

At the same time, though, I don't believe -- like a lot of other Black folk -- that Tiger would've been okay had he married a sista. Infidelity is serious and marriage-destroying, after all. He likely would've been better off not getting married at all. If you couldn't keep it in your pants before marriage, then it is highly unlikely that you could after getting married. Marriage is hard work, no matter how beautiful and attractive you think your spouse is. Perhaps the biggest lesson here is that Woods didn't have the capacity to work more on his marriage than his golf game.

But for me, part of the lesson here is related to race. Maybe it's important in a multicultural society for all of us to date outside of our primary demographic group before settling on a mate. Just not to the exclusion of folks that are most physically similar to us. Maybe it's not. It's not like there's a rulebook for this. It just seems that there's way too much emphasis on Tiger's cheating and not enough on the class, gender and racial dynamics of his marriage. Not to mention the fact that we can't possibly know what that marriage has been like from the outside looking in. My issue here really is about how we as a public get to sit and judge someone else's mess when most of us are wallowing neck-deep in our own crap. It's ludicrous and a shame -- on us.

The Starving Writer

2009-12-10T13:23:00.003-05:00

The other day, a student of mine made a reference that very much reminded me of, well, me, the person I was twenty-two years ago. It was as part of a conversation about looking for work. She didn't want to be another starving artist, living in some basement apartment somewhere, "smearing paint on a canvas" while waiting for a big break. I thought that the idea of a starving artist had all but died out in the era of bling-bling.

But it made me think for a while about the choices I've made with my life and career in the years since the middle of my senior year at Mount Vernon High School. As I talked about in a posting a few weeks ago, I once said to my AP English teacher Rosemary Martino that I didn't want to be a starving artist "like Edgar Allen Poe" all those years ago. Now a student had made a similar -- although better developed -- reference. I think I understand better the momentary look of shock on my teacher's face now.

It made me wonder if the quality of my life and career would be better these days if I had embraced the promise Martino saw in my writing back then. I mean, I was already a slightly malnourished six-foot-one and 160-pounder at that point anyway. The inner struggle to put thoughts to paper creatively would've been much easier at seventeen than it is as a forty-year-old.

Maybe so. But until Noah or one of his progeny design a time machine, I can't rewrite my history in order to make me embrace what I now see as my calling. All I know is that those words I uttered in March '87 have stayed with me for nearly twenty-three years. The question of finding and following my calling has always been juxtaposed with my need to eat and pay the rent and other bills. How do I do both without dropping one of the balls that I'm juggling?

The issue for more than half of my adult life was finding my calling. Along the way, I spent the summer of '88 unemployed, the first week of my sophomore year at Pitt homeless and three weeks in May '91 losing sixteen pounds for lack of food. Not to mention six weeks of unemployment in '93, walking to Carnegie Mellon many a time in the snow with holes in my sneakers in '94, and two and a half years of underemployment from December '96 to June '99. I was a starving writer long before I saw myself foremost as one. When one doesn't follow their calling and doesn't follow a typical path to making a buck, the tendency is insufficient funds.

The point is, we as Americans in a post-modern, post-industrial world have to get paid and pursue our dreams in order to succeed and survive. For educated folk like myself, "we have to get a little bit crazy," as Seal would say. If it takes a pay cut or less job responsibility to find the time to write, then maybe that's what it takes. Or maybe it's a bunch of all-nighters (non-consecutive, of course) with your manuscript, only to drag yourself into work for a full shift the next morning. Or maybe it's risking your spouse, your comfortably uncomfortable way of life, your financial present, for a more fulfilling and profitable future. Maybe it's all of these things, maybe it's none of them. There isn't a single formula or one simple path to both, not as an artist and certainly not one as a writer.

Creative abilities, even genius, may well drive people mad, but most folks in pursuit of their calling aren't fools. No one, including the starving artist, wants to starve. Some of us, though, have a desire for much more than the ability to get a job, any job, and hold one long enough to see our own kids graduate from college and meet someone they truly love. Even with the responsibilities of adulthood, we shouldn't give up on our own aspirations, for it's those things that we reach for (although not at all costs) that will help others -- including the most important folks -- in our lives pursue their own calling.

The Jobs Are Gone

2009-12-02T16:07:00.003-05:00

Like the song "The Thrill Is Gone," popularized by B.B. King in the month and year that I was born, the jobs that so many of our leaders alleged that they are holding onto for Americans are gone. Going, going, gone! Like a steroids-driven Barry Bonds home run into San Francisco Bay, the jobs that Americans have expected to be their birthright for the past six or seven decades no longer exist. For any American with less than a bachelor's degree to expect to get a job paying more than $30,000 a year with limited job experience is foolhardy. For any undereducated American to expect a manufacturing job that pays enough to support a family of four (about $50,000) with a full slate of benefits needs to be committed!

About two weeks ago, I attended a studio taping of the AlJazeera program Faultlines with the topic of "The Color of Recession." The premise -- that the Obama Administration wasn't doing enough to help Americans of color recover from the worst economic recession since the Great Depression. While that could be true, the panelists, especially talking heads like the Rev. Jesse "Keep-Hope-Alive" Jackson and Linda Chavez argued about the failures of the Bush 43 Administration to avert the crisis. It was a zoo, and the host of the show might as well been a tamer whose head was already in the lion's mouth.

Besides ridiculous arguments about the overthrowing of capitalism by folks like '08 Green Party Vice-Presidential candidate Rosa Clemente and counterarguments by Chavez about socialists not being patriotic, one thing clearly stood out. Jackson, Chavez, and even Clemente agreed on one thing. That jobs in the industrial sector ought to be saved for Americans, and that the Obama Administration could somehow play a role in saving them. That simple fact proved the one thing I've known about American politics since high school. That the distance between most Americans on the ideological scale is about the same as the distance from my right thumb to my right index finger.

But it also shows how significant the leadership deficit is in our great nation when folks who should know better spout rhetoric that hasn't been true in places like Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati and Indianapolis since '84, and in places like Buffalo, Rochester, Camden, and Newark since the mid-60s. This is a post-industrial economy, one that is dependent on the Information Age. While there will always be some manufacturing jobs in the US -- we still have a military-industrial complex, after all, not to mention Southern right-to-work states -- the days of factories with a workforce of 50,000 and 100,000 people has long passed. Unless we can turn the clock back to about 1890, we will never again see the days of steel mills and auto plants that single-handedly provided work for an entire city or region.

With more than eighty percent of all new living-wage jobs produced in this country requiring the equivalent of an associate's degree or some postsecondary credential, it's time we stop lying to the public about how any government can protect certain kinds of jobs for their citizens. We need more nurses, teachers, radiologists, engineers and chemists, not more young folk who can't even find their home state on a map. And that's with the name of the state on the map! Bill Gates may well be right in saying that high schools as we know them today are obsolete. But that's only true because our mentality about the kinds of jobs we can get after high school hasn't changed with our ever-changing economy.

It's a shame that our leadership can't be more honest about where we are these days on the job front. Our official unemployment rate is 10.2 percent, meaning that in reality, it's closer to 20 percent. Meaning that times are hard even for folks with at least a bachelor's degree as an educational credential. But the vast majority of our educational haves will recover from this downturn, find work -- mostly good paying work -- and put their lives back together. Those whose lives were once or ever dependent on the manufacturing world are already a part of the have-nots.

I don't care how many articles discuss the fact that there are people in this country who are making good money -- and are even rich -- and don't possess a postsecondary degree or certificate of any sort. That group is a small and shrinking one. These days, your odds are better with Powerball or Mega Millions than they are venturing into the job market for a non-service industry (read "Rite-Aid," "CVS" or "Walmart" here) job without a degree.

Bottom line: the sooner we as a people accept that the jobs of the past are gone, never to return, the sooner that we can get on to another central issues to jobs in education. We need to put pressure on our federal and state officials, nonprofit entities, and religious organizations to stop acting as if a high school education is the limit for most of America. We need to assume that most of us have the ability -- if not the training -- necessary to obtain some sort of postsecondary credential. We need to make our 15,000 school districts into ones that prepare our children for a twenty-first century, post-industrial economy. Without this pressure, we will expand our permanent underclass by the tens of millions in the next decade or two, weighing down our economy in the process. That America isn't the one I want to get older in, nor is it one I want my son growing up in.

December To Remember

2009-12-01T15:34:00.004-05:00

December, my favorite month of the year. Usually. For most of my forty years, it has represented a time of sighing relief that another year was about to pass, another twelve months of imperfection gone, a chance to reconfigure and gain momentum to have a better next year. But Decembers at the end of decades have been of even more significance for me, because they represent the precipice of the start of a new decade not only on the calendar, but for my own life. Turning ten, twenty and thirty gave me more food for thought than I would normally have in a typical twelfth month. Now it's happening again, as I officially turn forty (most of this year, I've forgotten that I'm still technically thirty-nine).

Ten years ago, I realized that I hadn't planned to live past thirty when I was a teenager. I saw my life as such a tragic and fragile one when I was fourteen that the idea that marriage and parenting would be anywhere in my future would've been about the only thing to make me laugh out loud back then. My aim in life from about twelve and a half and twenty was to finish college, and from twenty to twenty-six was to go to grad school, finish those degrees, and publish my first book. Cars, houses, specific career aspirations, a wife and a son, none of those were in my plans. Heck, I didn't even know who my true friends were until a December contemplation session in December '89, much less love and marriage.

The sad truth is, I've achieved just about everything I intended to achieve ten and twenty Decembers ago. That's good, but it also shows how limited the first visions for myself were. Being an assistant director of a social justice fellowship program and publishing a book on multiculturalism shouldn't have been the only things that I hoped to achieve in the first seven years after finishing my doctorate. Getting married in '00 was a major achievement, considering how many folks I grew up with thought of me as "asexual." But staying married and making the marriage work is the real achievement and the real work, something I've learned this decade. Having Noah around is both a labor of love and really hard work, but actually not as hard as watching after my four younger siblings would've been twenty Decembers ago.

Even putting the finishing touches on Boy @ The Window, finding an agent and publisher, and then getting it published, as great an achievement as that will be, is a limited one in the end. Even in the worst case, the manuscript's published before I hit my mid-forties. Even if the book hits the bestseller list, what do I do after that? Write more books about the imperial narcissism of everyday Americans, about the need for universal postsecondary education, about the lives of other, not-so-famous people? I know I'll keep on writing, but that's about all I know for sure.

So what will my life look like as I prepare for decade number five? Where do I want to be by December '19? For starters, steadier and better paying employment would be a goal. Making sure that Noah's education and quality of life stays on track so that he can get -- but doesn't necessarily need -- an academic or athletic scholarship for college. Supporting Angelia as she finishes her master's degree in interactive journalism, and in moving from there into a career of her own choosing and making. Freeing ourselves once and for all from debt. Those are goals, most or all of which should be met long before I can no longer jump high enough to dunk a basketball.

But what I really want in the end is a sense of happiness and peace that I've experienced only on rare occasions in my life to date. Some of that will come as some of the near-future goals get met. Still, I know even with a great job, an enviable savings account, a great kid and a wonderful wife that happiness and peace are forces that come from within. No amount of money, financial stability or independence can give me or anyone else real happiness and a sense that, no matter whatever else is going on, I'll be fine. Some would say, only God can give us that.

I would say in response that this isn't completely accurate, because we have to be willing to be happy, to be at peace, to be successful at not creating drama for ourselves and others. Or we could do what Bruce Springsteen says in his introspective "Tunnel of Love." We've "got to learn to live with what [we] can't rise above," not only in marriage, but in all of our lives, for we aren't perfect, and not every imperfection has a permanent cure. Maybe this is the thing I need to remember as I go through this end-of-the-decade December.

Sharing Is Caring

2009-11-26T21:26:00.003-05:00

A few days ago, the BBC reported a sickening fact on one of the provisions of the the Kyoto protocols from '97. Of the developed countries that did agree to them -- the US being the great exception -- one provision was for them to contribute to a fund for developing countries in order to help them with environmental cleanup and to make the adjustments necessary to combat climate change. According to the BBC, a fund that should have $1.6 billion in it by now only has $260 million in contributions. Mouthpieces for the developed world apparently said in response that, well, "we given money and helped in other ways," just not through this fund.

This may be true, but this isn't much different from what my father once said to me when I confronted him about twenty-three years ago about his overall lack of child support. "I giv' ya money every week," he said. It was true. But only because I went through a Friday night or Saturday morning ritual for nearly five years to collect $50, $60, $100, or even $200 from him at a time. In all, Jimme have given me, my brother Darren and my family at 616 (indirectly, of course) about $3,500 between October '82 and August '87. If he had paid his proper share in terms of child support (at least twenty percent of income), in those years alone, the child support payments would've been about $25,000.

No, neither I nor Darren lived with him. Still, my father had an obligation because he was our biological father and therefore was part of the reason we existed at all. It's not much different when it comes to international issues like environmental protection, alternative energy and climate change. The developed world eats up most of the world's energy resources, had exploited the resources of the developing world so that they could be developed, advanced nations. And has used the developing world and the oceans to dump much of its waste. It's only fair that the developed world should bear the brunt of paying for all of these things that the world as a whole must face.

This kind of talk makes me sound like a socialist I suppose. Not really. More like a social democrat. It's a shame that Western Europe, China, Japan, India and the US have yet to formally agree to reduce emissions substantially, to bring online new energy platforms on a massive scale, to clean up the messes made around the world. The geopolitics of this situation is like watching my six-year-old son Noah try to negotiate his way out of doing the right thing, because sometimes he can only see his own needs and wants. So much of what our world does is about looking out for self and only self, knowing full well that this deliberate ignorance hurts us all.

Of course, the US is the worldwide leader in narcissism. We act as if taxes are like cyanide pills laced with traces of plutonium, especially for the wealthy. We talk as if the progressive income tax is a penalty for success, and that the poor are poor only because they're dumb and lazy. Yet it wasn't all that long ago when the system actually worked, when government could be trusted (for the most part) to do the right thing with public funds and revenues.

And yes, after the Nixon, Reagan and Bush (both) years -- not to mention the flaws of JFK, LBJ, Carter and Clinton -- we have good reason not to trust our government to invest our tax dollars properly. But it's not as if the rich are going to employ people to fix the US's roads, bridges and rails. Or that the affluent will build a new power grid, solar collection stations, provide incentives for building cars that run on hydrogen, or create a system of postsecondary education and healthcare that is truly universal. That's what our government is for. This is why we pay taxes.

Yet all neocons and others of a selfish nature somehow still believe after all of these years that it's every man, woman and child for themselves. That taxes are bad, that giving more and more tax cuts to richest five percent will create an atmosphere of investment rather than one of greed. Didn't we already go through this in the 1920s and 1930s? Isn't this why the New Deal had to happen in the first place? To have a government that responds to all the people, and not just the ones with the ability to line politicians' pockets with checks and cash?

In the end, we get the government that we deserve because sit in stewing envy and awe over the richest folk in our country while those folk have the ears of our leadership. We need to force the government to do its job of raising all boats, of holding politicians feet to the fire, of sharing and spreading the wealth of the nation so that even the poor actually have real opportunities to rise out of poverty. Only if we make our government care about these issues will those with major means actually care to share in tax dollars.

Ironically, by insisting on more loopholes and tax cuts, the rich in many ways are working against their own interests. As they should know, they can't -- or at least shouldn't -- take their riches with them when they're dead. And as average folk, we need to pay our fair share as well. After all, to those of us who have reason to give thanks, we also have reason to share what we have for our own -- as well as others' -- benefit.