EQUALITY

     Those who think equality is essential might take a lesson from spiders. They spare no corner of opportunity. Despite adversity they persist.

caged by identity

       He was always alone, off to the side. I figured he was shy. I was not so much shy as reserved, content to watch and study, learning who was who and what was what. It was an integrated elementary school and we studied and played together, but he seemed somehow adrift. Let's call him Mark.

      The term in those days was "mulatto." He was light skinned though a bit darker than white kids and had an unusual kind of freckling. I liked him. He was athletic, neat, had good manners and was the kind of kid my parents said I should associate with. But on the playground he stood back and, as I began to observe, he was shunned by some of the black kids who knew him and by a couple of the more boisterous white boys. 

      Mark lived on the other side of the park and though it was nothing we thought much about, it was the boundary between black families and white families. Mark lived black. I lived white, but we were a lot alike and a natural friendship developed. Mark came to my house, though I was never invited to his. He didn't like to talk about his mixed race parents or the struggles he faced. We just did the kind things a couple of athletic and active young guys did. We were friends. 

       In a couple of years we were in separate classes and a year after that my family moved to another city.

      His older brother became a noted educator and administrator courted by universities for executive positions. He was an advocate for equality, across the board. He had  been an outstanding student and athlete and not shy nor deterred by his birthright. That is as it should be. 

      I don't know what became of Mark, but I thought about him as I read about an incident in a nearby California town.

      The police department is being sued over claims of racial bias. A black man who's family had been to the beach was on the way home when he stopped in front of the police department to stretch his legs and smoke a cigarette. He figured the police department would be a safe spot. He says as he got out of the car he was "accosted" by a policewoman who said he looked "suspicious." The officer asked his white wife "why she was there and if she was OK?" The couples two children observed this. You get the idea. 

       There have been victories in the struggle for human dignity and equality but the war is nowhere near being won. While unenlightened attitudes persist so do efforts to carry the light and build webs of understanding, regulation, law and  political culture to deliver on the promise of our democratic republic. Here, every birthright is guaranteed equality, regardless. No cage of identity. Or we are collectively a fraud and a failure. There is work to do.

a champion napper

 Hemingway is a cat after Garfield's heart! 

scout's honor
On my honor I will do my best
to do my duty to God and my country
and to obey the Scout Law;
To help other people at all times:
To keep myself physically strong,
mentally awake, and morally straight.

Physically strong, mentally awake, morally straight?

sexual predator, serial adulterer, habitual liar 
business cheat, slob?

Sad!
"Fake leader"
Failed man

     The Scouts apology for the travesty of the jamboree helped clear the air, but only slightly. 

      See you down the trail.

       

LIVING FREE-POST PARIS, CHEERS AT 700, MEN BEHAVING BADLY

LIVE FREE

     Hanging around a 700 year old Oak was a good place to absorb the shock of Paris and to think of life.

     Don't you think there have been millions of conversations framed by how do we live free but safe? I hope most of us desire freedom over a safety that comes in the form of eroded liberty. Giving up even a centimeter of civil liberty hands a victory to terrorists. 

     The British during the blitz are models to emulate. Stay calm, carry on, continue with life as free people. That is as much of an in your face rejection of the terrorists as we can demonstrate-to live freely, cautious, careful even, but by not ceding liberties. 

    The French, our longest ally appear ready to fight back by that course and by applying military strikes at the dark and evil core.

     After 9/11 we responded with the Patriot Act that we have since learned went to far, gave over too much and we've adjusted. Those who protect us in law enforcement and national security need room to work, but when citizens lose freedom and privacy we begin an erosion of a free and open society and we lose the high ground. We also lose our sense of purpose. 

     Thoughts on understanding the enemy follow below.

     

     Looking at things from the top of an old volcano lends a perspective. We close this post with a return to calming nature.

      Besides wrestling with the Paris attacks I've been thinking about how badly my sex can and too frequently behaves.

 MEN AS SLOW STARTERS?

     That is way too kind. Men have been too frequently cowards and weasels. 
     To our positive, history records some who have been reasonable, fair and committed to equality, but when you examine the right to vote for example and the evolution of suffragettes you see men failing to do the right thing, nefariously and repeatedly. 
      Fear of change, animosity at losing the club house lordship in relations with women, no longer able to plunder or abuse. Women with the right to vote, they worried, would change everything. Men feared it so they fought it.
      The battle was in England where women tried for decades to gain the vote. The struggle birthed suffragettes who made the fight larger, public and persuasive. The marvelous film The Suffragette tells a personal story in that time. Strength, forbearance and suffering under maddening inequality. It took courage to risk what they did. In this axiom men were thugs, cheats and liars. Women won, eventually.
     So now in the second decade of the 21st Century with worry that a regressive strain of politics targets hard fought rights, a little history is helpful. The battle for the right to vote commenced mid to late 1800's. The movement gained force in the early 1900's though stymied by British Parliamentary politics and a heavy press management. That is when women stepped up the fight and it is the setting for this film that is one of the years most important. 
     Carey Mulligan creates a laundry worker who's life leads her to the movement and through her we see the struggle, told personally. Helen Bonham Carter, Ann Marie Duff and Merryl Streep with a small role of an historic character paint a vivid portrait of the passion, determination, suffering and character of the women who earned the right to vote. Prison, beatings, hunger strikes, forced feedings and family separation were the cost horrible at the time, little known today.
     The American Suffragette movement paralleled the British.
In 1918 English women over 30 could vote and could be elected to Parliament. Voting rights were later extended. American women's rights came two years later. The obstacles were the same on both sides of the Atlantic. Too many men failed to see that in extending full citizenship to women you create a more valid and extended public square and private commerce. It broadens experience and perspective in both deliberation and industry. Aside from making sense, it's right. 
      This kind of historic remembrance is important. Rights are precious and fragile.

REJECTED BY THE HUMAN RACE

     There is no place in the 21st Century for ISIS. They are puppets who wish to make war on modernity. They are not religionists and they are not political strategists. They are a cult of death, manipulated by zealots and self appointed fanatics who pervert aspects of a faith founded by a man who had revelations in a cave and then who built a religion that required war fare.

     Even the most open minded of Christians or Jews have questions about some aspects of Islamic belief, but the true deep thinkers in each of the three largest religions in the world have found ways to coexist and learn from each other. So at the risk of angering some of you, we should separate Islam, Judaism and Christianity from conversation about ISIS.

     They may claim to be doing war for their god, but they are really all about imposing a world view that goes back perhaps as far as the third century. They are ignorant. Their leaders are dysfunctional sociopaths incapable of navigating the complexity of a modern life. They can't handle reality so they try to create their own vision of an imagined history. And they recruit the uneducated, unemployed young. Being on social media doesn't mean enlightenment.

    Fundamentalists of every stripe are arrogant in their assumption of rightness and are by nature close minded. But few are such retrograde jackals as to worship death and to make God an angry, vengeful force incapable of anything but destruction. When you consider their destruction of history, their hatred for art, culture, music, their inability to relate to women, their barbaric penchants you are reminded of the personality profile of the sick young men who perpetrate mass shootings in the US. Both behaviors are beyond the bounds of civilization. They are very much alike.

    Everything about them is illegitimate including the god they've created and who they use as an excuse to be brutal thugs, patriarchal bullies, sexual miscreants, simple minded rejects and failures at almost everything in life. It is life they can't handle and so they soak in death. Their leaders bastardize a belief system to justify their own demented dreams and to make up for their own personal weaknesses.  

    This world is troubled enough. There is no place for a cult of curs. There is nothing about ISIS that should survive. There is not one idea they speak that is worthy of negotiation or serious reflection. They deserve the death they celebrate. It should be the task of all nations to destroy them.

AND NOW A MOMENT OF PLEASURE

    A group of friends, boomers all, grouped in this Land Rover from South Africa for an excursion of Halter Ranch in the Paso Robles appellation. 

     Here atop an old volcano that created soil conditions perfect for grapes.

    Another stop at the Ancestor Oak.  700 to 750 years old and believed to be the oldest in the US.

    Autumn color apparent in the acres of vines.

     As you admire the long view of Halter Ranch consider the extraordinary back story. That long road in the left of the frame was the landing strip of a previous owner of the land.
     The man who built the winery purchased some 2000 acres, but planted on only a little more than 200. The rest of the land is a nature preserve and includes a three mile animal safety habitat. A man of means, he has a history of buying land around parks and preserves and giving it away to create larger areas. Ecology, sustainability and walking the talk.

 Cheers to life, love and the freedoms that sustain us.

   Peace!

   See you down the trail.

AND WE AVOIDED THE GUILLOTINE

 MADAME DEFARGE WOULD NOT BE PLEASED

   Oh how the queen of revenge would spin if she knew how so many of us choose to celebrate Bastille Day.

    The celebrants above, Larry, Mary Margret, Tom and Lana, cases in point, have reveled in the delights of France and by some force of nature have been drawn to the American Provence'. But there are limits and so in form from which Madame DeFarge and the Jacques' would recoil as decadent, we civilized the process.  After all who wants to toast the Great Terror which followed the storming of the Bastille?  If you are lost I refer you to either Dicken's Tale of Two Cities, or a precursory read of the French Revolution.  

     Being an artful and adventurous crowd we worked our way into the Paso Robles appellation to take up residence at an Olive Farm with true French management.  Loyal they are to their history, Bastille Day was celebrated with a light feast beneath the spreading Oleander blooms and gracious shade of Olive and Mulberry trees. Wine? Yes. And a never ending supply of Pommes Frites, done in olive oil of course.

      Sun kissed, blessed by breeze, beauty and American oenology, Bastille day was recorded as probably Thomas Jefferson would have appreciated.

     And just to show good form, the merry party meandered to a nearby vintner of Cal-Italia wines.  Salute! A votre sante! Cheers.

       After such international merriment a bit of the breeze along the Cambria coast was a sweet tonic. 

       Liberte', égalité, fraternité!  Noble still, though easier in notion than nation. 

       To history, then….

    

      See you down the trail.

MEDITATION ON BUDDY MILES, JIMI HENDRIX AND DAVID BOWIE

CH-CH-CH-CHANGES

     The great Buddy Miles wrote it first "My mind is going through them changes..." Hendrix did his version.  David Bowie created his own anthem to change with the lingering chorus, 
         Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes-Turn and face the Stranger
           Ch-Ch Changes-Time may change me...
            Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes-Turn and face the Stranger"
       The lyrics of both have been the score as I've settled into a rumination. Still thinking and haven't achieved a great cosmic break through. This I know, some of us handle change better than others. 
       Chaotic change is rampant in the middle east. The climate is changing. The efficacy of American government has changed so drastically in the life time of boomers as to beget a desire for revolutionary change. The economic climate has changed so fundamentally the middle class is disappearing, the poor are growing and the richest become more exclusive and insulated. Change often seeds even greater upheaval. Bigger changes are coming.
       Not all change is bad. Nor is it cataclysmic. But doing it, changing, adapting, learning new ways, even accepting it seems a mission impossible for some. I was the architect of a massive change in a large media company.  It was needed and it paid off positively in all ways, but oh boy was it difficult to manage the change.  Time and time again I heard myself saying, "some people simply cannot abide change."
      Some changes we can temper, manage, even attempt to direct-cultural, ethical, political, even environmental. If we don't, then forces beyond our control will be in control.
      We need to be proactive, or we will be pounded. 
      You can't run from it, you can't hide from it, you can't ignore it.  As a significant chunk of the population, the boomers, reach the approach to our dotage, we must live open to change, in all ways. There is never a path back.
The force of life is forward. We are curious, experimental and searching. We should harness those drives for positive change. Humans are destined to seek and offer greater individual dignity and liberty even when forces conspire against it. Repression sparks liberation.
      We tend to think of things only on a human scale.  This blue sphere, and the star nations in which it rides have yet another scale of change. We need to embrace the reality of a planetary awareness.
        Ch-Ch-Changes-Turn and face the stranger. 
        We are constantly a work in progress. Stay tuned. Heaven only knows where this thought train is bound!?

Training the Trellis

     After about year, it is time to introduce our front gate, complete with vine.

   It has taken a while to get that Cambria look.  Here's the proof.

Now the mission will be an occasional trim.

 See you down the trail.  

THE WAY TO FIGHT BACK

THE COUNTER PUNCH

     Bostonians, as New Yorkers before them, will no doubt evince the right American response to the cowardly act of terror, denying victory to those who would seek gain.

     As the courageous Brits demonstrated during the blitz of World War II when nightly bombs killed thousands, life must go on as normal. Refusing to cede liberty or freedom is the democratic response of defiance.

      A premeditated violence against civilians by clandestine means is the tool of those we loosely call terrorists, either foreign or domestic.  I have written and argued these acts are a continuum of guerrilla warfare.  Though Mao and Che are the best known practitioners of our age, guerrilla warfare's great proponent was Sun Tzu, in the Art of War.

     An objective of the tactics of guerrilla war, and I include terrorist bombing, is to create a crisis in the population. What the warrior or terrorist hopes for is a forced over- reaction, a compromising of the feeling of security, a lack of trust in the capability of the government. In short a paranoia and fear.

     As nightly bombs fell on London, the English went on with their lives, even conducting theatre, dinners and social life, albeit with blackouts and air raid shelters.  New Yorkers responded to both World Trade Center bombings with getting on with life, even while mourning.  The Bostonians I know are tough and I trust their getting even includes not budging an inch on life as normal.

     There will be a natural call by some to fight back with measures that further erode individual liberties by surveillance, control, intrusion and other "security measures."  We need to be extraordinarily careful to examine any such idea with a cool eye and diligent scrutiny.    I am one who believes the Patriot Act response to 9/11 went too far.  I understand that it has given intelligence, security and law enforcement a greater tool set.  I have friends and contacts in that community and I know the challenge of the work they face and their need to gather and analyze, but it is still a delicate balance.  Each time we cede a bit of freedom, as an aftermath to an attack, we give ground, a small victory, to those who attacked us.

      I trust that Boston's famed "in your face and up yours" toughness will lead and guide how we counter punch.

      By the way, I have given away many copies of the Art of War. I always had a copy on my desk. It was surprising and even amusing the conversations that would ensue.

      Link here for an interactive map of the London Blitz

THE PRIZE AND THE PURSUIT

    Our raised bed lettuce crop has been especially bountiful this spring.

    So, naturally, the ridge line marauders have been lustful.

   The fence has kept them out and assigned to working the 

  ample  open acreage.  Still they edge near the tomato 

  shelter and a lower raised bed out side the defended perimeter.

   Despite the rain deficit, the slopes remain green with plenty of "deer food."  On the higher slopes directly opposite, cattle are being well grazed.

   See you down the trail. 

LIBERTY'S LIGHT AND A LEGEND

A LION FALLS

The entire affair is sad.
A terrible allegation followed by apparent inaction
leads inevitably to a bad ending.
The board of trustees has acted now, but where 
were they before now?
Paterno was a legend. This is not how it should end.
Everyone looses here.
Responsibility, accountability and honor 
are more important than a game.


FREEDOM AND THE MUSE

PUBLISHED IN PUNCHNELS
Link here to Punchels  to read
Liberty's Light-An American Tribulation,
a new poem inspired by the 
10th anniversary of the Patriot Act
and the ongoing Occupy Wall Street movement.
CHEERS TO FREEDOM
UNFETTERED.
CHEERS TO PUNCHNELS 
AND TO YOU!

See you down the trail.