Author Archives: oinsketta

Why would it bother me?

My father never bought products made in Germany.  It was because of German industry’s involvement with the death camps.  IG Farben paid the SS $1 a day for slave laborers from Auschwitz, they were marched from the death camp to the nearby factory until they couldn’t be profitably used anymore, then they went into a gas chamber.  Mercedes-Benz, according to my father, a student of history who read the NY Times every day, built some kind of killing machine (I forget exactly what he told me), possibly the gas chambers or ovens for The Final Solution.  I may have them confused with BMW, who also used slave laborers from the death camps.  The drivers of both brands, to this day, tend to be unyielding at crosswalks, I’ve noticed.

“Is it right to hate the children and grandchildren of people who made money working for Hitler?” I asked, a bit rhetorically, when I was in high school.  

“It’s justified,” said my dad, “and I hate them.”   

“Would Viet Namese people be justified, 50 years from now, in hating us and boycotting American made products because of what the government of the USA did to their parents, grandparents, their countryside?” I asked him.  

“Yep,” said my dad.   I think he was right, too.  Particularly if you live in a democracy– the government speaks for the electorate.   In spite of literally millions turning out to protest Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Bush’s march toward war against Iraq, our government visited hell on that nation.  Do Iraqis have a right to hate America?   You bet your ass they do.

One of my problems is that I never get over certain things.  I find myself thinking of the calculated and bogus case that was made for raining death and destruction on the population of Iraq.  I think of how President Obama generously turned the page on recently committed American war crimes, while justifying his own highly classified murderous practices.  

The final “evidence” of the connection between Saddam and 9/11 that was trumpeted by the Bush Administration was from an al-Queda prisoner we’d secretly shipped to Egypt to be tortured.  In order to get the torture to stop al-Libi said Saddam was training al-Queda in the use of poison gas and other chemical WMD.   When he was released by the Egyptians he immediately recanted, admitted he told them that to make the torture, the super-super enhanced interrogation, stop.  Yet his information, extracted under torture, was the lynchpin of the entire falsified case for invading Iraq.

Then you have the war, the debates, the traitors, the people who hate our freedom, freedom on the march, torture redefined as necessary to use against people who hate our freedom, we call it “enhanced interrogation” now and we only did it a few times, destroyed videotapes of the worst of it, pretended (as Cheney continues to) it had extracted “actionable intelligence”, though it’s highly unlikely it ever did, classified memos relating to its use, blah blah, economic disaster in 2008 orchestrated by powerful elites who profited handsomely from systematic fraud and were never punished for any of it …. so really, who today can be expected to get excited about this paragraph?

 There is a sad postscript to the story. Al-Libi is the only “high-value” detainee who was not sent to Gitmo for eventual trial before a military tribunal. Instead, he was quietly turned over to Moammar Gadhafi’s henchmen in Libya, and just days after being visited by Human Rights Watch, was found hanging from his neck inside a Libyan prison. His family believes he was murdered to cover up the true story of what happened to him. We’ll never know the answer to that, but we do know with certainty that an American president used bogus intelligence from a tortured detainee to make a false claim to the American public and to the world.

source

Ho hum.  Maybe some day I’ll grow up, I can only hope.

Paul Krugman chimes in

It is now generally admitted, most recently by the brother of former President George W. Bush,  that the decade long Iraq war was a wrong-headed trillion dollar disaster (that killed and permanently disabled tens of thousands and displaced millions).   Now, we are told again, by a profit hungry media eager to get on to the next sponsored event, to simply move on.

Not so fast.  Here’s Paul Krugman, jumping in with some intelligent points worth making.   At least from my constantly griping point of view.

NY Times on the importance of play in early childhood education

A friend sent me an article from today’s Times, making the same point I’ve been trying to make for the last few years.  Play is a key to getting young kids interested in learning and interacting as part of an inventive, inquisitive group.  I was glad to get the piece, which supported my thesis, though it also aggravated me slightly to read it.  

Written by a freelance science writer in the well-balanced style that is the Times’ trademark, it quoted several educational researchers who believe that more play should be part of early schooling, instead of the accelerated academics pushed by our country’s misguided, corporate-driven educational mandates.  “No Child Left Behind” (surrrrrre…), the article suggests, may underestimate the academic value of young children discovering learning in joyful play, rather than by forcing them to do cognitive tasks at an age when they cannot fully understand or participate in them.

True enough.  Play is crucial for a lot of reasons, at all stages of life, but particularly for kids beginning school.  Glad to see the NY Times printing an article about it.  Here’s the thoughtful, well-written piece.

A sardonic tendency, ingrained by my father, no doubt, twitched after reading an article which, to me, stated the painfully obvious and brought this unfortunate analogy to mind:

“Seven-year multimillion dollar Harvard study of 100,00 children and young adults strongly suggests that children forced by abusers to engage in sexual activities are far less likely to be enthusiastic about sexual intimacy later in life.  Researchers debate….”

I know, I know.

We get to the heart of the discussion on play vs. academic tasks for tykes with this paragraph:

The stakes in this debate are considerable. As the skeptics of teacher-led early learning see it, that kind of education will fail to produce people who can discover and innovate, and will merely produce people who are likely to be passive consumers of information, followers rather than inventors. Which kind of citizen do we want for the 21st century?

The answer really depends on who you ask, as many answers do.  Those who profit from a passive, easily manipulated consumer society have a vested interest in keeping masses of Americans as stupid and gullible as possible.  Which kind of citizen do we want for the 21st century?  It depends on who “we” is.  If it’s the good folks who make billions on ever more sophisticated standardized tests for tykes?  No brainer.  If it’s those who believe that democracy can only work properly with an educated, thinking populace able to intelligently discuss and creatively tackle problems?  

Well, you and I know which side we’re on– but then, nobody is paying us the big bucks to be on the side of profiteers at any cost.  Easy to condemn educational profiteers, I suppose, but, on the other hand, everybody’s got to make a living.

Grow Up or Throw Up

 A child raised by angry parents spends a lot of time wondering what they did wrong.

“You did nothing wrong,” a rare, compassionate friend of the parents might eventually tell the kid.  “I love your parents, you know they’re my best friends, but they are unhappy people.  Unhappy people get mad a lot.  There is nothing you could have done differently.  It’s not you, it’s important for you to know that.  It’s just that your parents have their own frustrations that have nothing to do with you and they often took them out on you.”

Holy shit, you think, I’m fifty years old and just finding this out.  Wow.

My father remained in his terrible twos until he was eighty and hours from death.  Then it hit him.  “Goddamn it,” he wheezed, “I’ve been a horse’s ass.”  Never heard him use the phrase before, but he was at a loss, I suppose, to explain why he’d been such an implacably choleric two year-old his whole life.   A few moments later, there it was again: “I feel like a horse’s ass.”

It hit me recently, how destructive, if understandable, my anger at my father was.  Once I realized how much it hurt me to carry it, how reasonable I was to feel hurt by his actions and refusals, how incapable he was of doing any better, I was able to start letting go of it. Not of the damage his rage had done, only a bit of that ever slipped away, and it waits like a nightmare to leap out at me in moments of weakness, but I was done with my need to carry anger at a father who was not able to do any better than he did.

“He was a grown man, a father, he lived an otherwise responsible and moral life, why let him off the hook after he cursed at you and your sister every night, screamed and threatened and undermined, did his best to make you cower, even if you didn’t cower, even if you turned the rage against yourself sometimes, even as you banged your head against a wall.  Why let him off the hook for what he did?” says an angry friend.

Because he’s dead, dude.  Because, based on what was done to him when he was a baby, he couldn’t have done otherwise.  Because, lucky for me, and for him, I had let go of that anger at him by the time I was standing by his death bed hearing his last confession like a priest who’d never dream of fondling a parishioner.   He was contrite, apologized for the first and last time for his inhumanity.  I reassured him that he’d done the best he could.  I have gone over this many times in my head, here on this blagh.  The main thing, though, was that seeing him as incapable of doing better made me realize how pointless it was to be mad at him for it.  It’s like being mad at a cat for not addressing you in perfectly accented French.

I thought of it just now because I’ve been angry sometimes at people who have not helped me advance my idealistic plan.  The insight came late — they have no idea how to help me advance my idealistic plan, nobody helps them, life is hard.  Their incapacity to help makes it ridiculous for me to be disappointed that they don’t help.  They cannot help, even if they wanted to, except in the rare case when they actually can, but the rare case is extremely rare.  They have less of an idea than I do about the best way to proceed doing something that is most likely impossible for one person to do.

“But what about me?” snarls an angry former friend. “You pretend to be Jesus Christ to everybody else, you talk a good game about mercy and forgiveness, but you could hardly have been less merciful to me.”    

Ah, yes, there is that.  Aware of the harm that was done to me I’m determined never to be treated that way again.  My father apologized as he was dying, an apology that was perhaps 45 years overdue.  My sister never got any apology.  If I tell you time and again that you are harming me, and you justify yourself and plead your case instead of acknowledging that a friend should have acted less hurtfully?  

Well, my father was my father, I had strong reasons for trying to look beyond his faults.  But in the case of someone I am friends with, someone I’ve told multiple times that just because I can take a punch doesn’t mean I like being punched?  Well, “but, I don’t get to hit anybody, and I’m mad as hell, and you can take a punch, and I really didn’t mean to hit you in the face again…” only means one thing to me in the end.   Time to go.  

But that popped into my head just now in answer to an obvious question.  What I really intended here was to acknowledge, in black and white, how silly it is to expect people to do things they are not capable of doing.  If they don’t do something they have no idea how to do you can’t be mad about that.  They can do many other things, many of them good.  Don’t get hung up on the one bad one, I remind myself.  It is a relief to remember this.

Unless the hurtful thing they do is bad enough, objectively, and they make a habit of it and won’t acknowledge they’re acting hurtfully.  Then it is probably best to take a two second break from trying to be Ahimsa-Boy and say, with all necessary mercilessness: sayonara.

FaceBook friends

I saw the movie about the invention of, and legal battles over, faceBook when it came out.  I believed the portrait of a smart, angry, now billionaire Harvard nerd initially motivated by revenge on a girl who turned him down.  I left the movie house feeling confirmed in my mostly queasy insights into the heart of the alienating thing called Social Media.  

There are excellent and handy uses for social media, it can’t be denied.  But having pages where we post things about ourselves (he said silently, writing the words on a page where he posts things about himself) with the aim of becoming the coolest and most popular kid in virtual high school by amassing the most disembodied avatar friends?  An invitation to the illusion of intimacy and friendship with virtually none of the risks or rewards.

I know a tortured soul, a brilliant guy who has survived untreated bulimia for decades, with literally thousands of friends on faceBook.  When he leaves his computer and walks on the street, you can see loneliness radiating off him like spokes of despair around a downtrodden comic book character.  He’s a classic case, no doubt.   I’m sure there are many otherwise well-adjusted, self-loving people with robust social lives, friends they talk to, have dinner with, laugh and cry with in person, friends they’d leap into traffic to help out of a tight spot, who casually maintain faceBook pages and have many faceBook friends who are not bravely posing portraits of alienated desperation.

Here’s what got me thinking about faceBook today.  I was forced by the marketing arm of fezBook, now energetically monetizing itself as all great things in our society must, to create a personal page in order to continue maintaining my wehearyou.net student-run animation page.  Reluctantly, seeing that they’d made good on their threats not to allow me to post things to the business site I’d created, I set up a personal page.  

I put up one recent photo of two goats kissing a demurely smiling young man and left my own avatar a dashing grey silhouette with a shock of Conan-like hair coming to a jaunty soft-serve ice cream cone point at the top. At least that’s my memory of my avatar.  Good to have my hair back, I thought idly.

Literally one minute after I put up the page I had my first friend request.  Within hours a small flurry of friend requests from people I’d be glad to be friends with: in real life.  There were several from people I’d never heard of, faceBook friends of the two actual people I’d friended at first.  

I wrote a personal email to each person I otherwise knew explaining that I wouldn’t be active on facebook, had set up the personal page as a requirement for continuing to run my business page.  I asked each how they were, hoped they were doing well.  Told each one that I’d be happy to be in contact.  I noted that my “likes” on the kids’ animation page had oddly fallen from 92 to 87 in recent months and that I was trying to get to 100.  I asked them to please click the link and “like” the animation page.  You can do that here, if you like, dear reader, and afterwards, for a more fun experience, pop over here.

Alas, though predicable, of the dozen or so who asked me to become fezBag friends, only one clicked the link and liked the page.  She also sent me an email saying “Done.  Like these links, if you like,” and sent me two links to her pages to like.  Quid pro quo, fair is fair, like and like, done, and it took me about 15 seconds.   None of the others I’d emailed wrote back.   Perhaps I’d violated the first rule of Social Media– nothing personal!   So much for being friends on faceBarf, I thought, folding one half of my face into a Popeye-like smirk.

Truly, I prefer to talk to Siri.  At least you can have something like a conversation with that adorable robot.  She actually tries to respond to what you say; when she’s stumped she’ll say “wait, I don’t understand.”   That statement is one of the most intelligent and currently under used replies in human interaction.   It shows, in very short order, that you are trying to understand.  No small feat.  

It’s not hard to imagine from Siri’s enthusiastic, sometimes whimsical replies, that she has a cute little personality and, if not smart as an actual whip, is smart as a virtual whip and a better friend than people who reach out to be friends with no strings attached and can’t be troubled to click a link to perform the smallest of kindnesses to a potential facebook pal.

The importance of creativity

Adaptation of something I wrote two summers ago, all bitter references to unhygenic assholes removed, for marketing purposes:

Think of a world without creativity.   No music, comedy, repartee, great food; no movies, books or even articles, no television worth watching, no mischief, nothing worth laughing at, no cause for that good cry that is sometimes so needed.

Creativity, much spoken about by educators today, has always been at the heart of learning and good teaching.  

All creativity involves a certain amount of spontaneity.  It is play. The great John Cleese describes the essential conditions for creativity in a wonderful clip, unfortunately no longer available on youTube.  The five factors he talks about are:  place, start time, ending time, confidence and humor.   

For young children, who are naturally creative when given the slightest chance to be,  we’ve reduced the formula to this:

Have fun and help each other.

You can’t have fun if people are bothering you.  Don’t bother anyone. If you can’t help, don’t hurt.

When it’s time to be quiet for a minute or two, be quiet.

Cleese locates the creativity, you need a space to do it.  How about a room filled with art materials and a camera stand to shoot frames? With a recorder to make soundtracks and a computer to assemble the animations.

Cleese discusses the importance of a time set aside, a time with a beginning and an end, ideally about two hours.   He points out that it takes up to a half hour to leave the pressures of life outside and begin to play.  With luck you will play for 90 minutes or so.  Then play must end, as play always does, because it doesn’t feel like play forever. 

This is exactly what happens in the animation workshop.  For ninety minutes the kids have all the time in the world.

The other aspect of time is patience, taking your time, having a block of time you can use for play and dreaming up ideas.  You cannot be very creative while watching the clock, just like you can’t productively meditate keeping an eye on time.  You have to let things develop in their time, comfortable with not much happening sometimes.  

Asked what she liked best about the workshop, the Idea Girl said “it gives you plenty of time.”    

Confidence is necessary, because if you think you can’t dance, or sing, or draw, or animate, you probably won’t be able to.   What gives a person confidence?  Another one smiling and giving a thumbs up when the idea is presented.   What takes away confidence?  Critical comments, ridicule, skepticism, indifference to your best efforts.

The last part, humor, happens quite naturally in a room where children are playing, relaxed, involved, having fun, trying out the craziest ideas they can think of, not worried about anyone bothering them.

The nature of the straw that breaks the camel’s back

The straw does not have to be any special straw.

In the fable the man piles straw on his camel’s back until the camel is at the limit of what he can carry.   The man wants to bring just a little more straw on the journey, to make it worth his while.  Seeing the camel straining, he decides to add just one more straw.  Camel’s back breaks.

This is how accretion, the adding on aided by gravity, can bring down many things.  Resentments, for example, grow by accretion if we do not resolve them.  I am strong, we may reason, I can look past this insult, this betrayal of trust, this small injury.   We carry this one, and the next, and believe we can be philosophical about it.   Most of the time we can be, but we must continue to carry whatever we do not resolve, it has a weight and causes a certain drag and friction.  

A trauma of some kind comes up, the other party, arguably intending no great harm, does one more thing that weighs in on top of the pile of grievances we already bear on our backs.  Boom!  Done, broken.

When times are relatively good we can carry more without breaking. At the breaking point, the final straw can be relatively light, it will tip the scales and the thing will break, whatever it is.   Forgiveness has its place, and it is a wonderful and essential place in a good life, but only if the thing forgiven is not endlessly repeated.

Otherwise the thing forgiven, papered over, minimized, agreed to disagree about, ignored, lost but not forgotten, is carried on an already burdened back.  The straw is waiting to fall on to the pile, as it is always poised to do.

So, in a nutshell

“I didn’t wind up painting yesterday,” she said, “but I looked at the colors and the brushes and I had a thought.”

“OK,” he said.  

“I realized what frustrated me so much the other day when you were probing about something that had made me angry.  I don’t mind the probing, but I object to the premise– ‘you believe you were wronged but there is another possibly equally valid side to the story and isn’t it possible that you are completely wrong, and in fact, the one who wronged the other person?'” she said.

“Not an unreasonable premise,” he said.  

“No, not unreasonable. Even something worth discussing.  Only there was one thing missing– you jumped to that premise without recognizing how hurt I was and that, possibly, I was entirely in the right to feel hurt.” she said.  “Even if I later realized I was wrong to be hurt, after reconsidering in light of your new insights, I was badly hurt at the time and you brought up something that was a painful experience for me. And brought it up with no expression of sympathy before trying to convince me I could have been wrong to feel the way I felt.”

“Yes,” he said, “but isn’t it equally possible that you were wrong?”

“Possible?  Yes, particularly if I was a thoughtless and emotional person who reacts to things impulsively.  Equally possible?  No, not even remotely equal.  If you heard my side of the story, which you did, and couldn’t admit you’d feel hurt too, which you eventually did allow, after an hour of batting back hypotheticals, you would have to recognize that I had good reasons to feel hurt.  You would have felt hurt too.  Might have acted much like I did, maybe better, maybe worse.  In the end, you might have convinced me to reconsider, but not if you didn’t at least acknowledge that I had a right to feel hurt.”  

“So this is all about you?” he asked.  

“Listen to me carefully: I am going to paint now,” she gave a wan smile and turned to head out into the garden.

“I will never have true peace with this person,” he thought hopelessly as she went.

What do you do with your rage?

“And what,” he asked, “do you do with your rage?”  

“What makes you think I fucking have rage?” she asked.  

“OK,” he said, “not rage… anger.  What do you do when you get angry?”  

“When I get angry I get silent.  I don’t believe in yelling any more, it doesn’t help.  The only thing that helps me when I’m angry is being silent.  I need to process it, think through what exactly is hurting me, why I am so angry, see if I can discover a way to not react with the violence I sometimes feel when I am hurt by someone I trust.”  

“What if the person you’re angry at needs to talk things out?” he asked.  

“Fuck him,” she said, “I truly don’t care when I’m hurt or angry what the person who made me angry needs or wants.  What I need and want is an apology, or failing that, silence.”  

“But that’s not very fair, I thought you’re trying to be mild and peaceful,” he said.

“The world is a circle of people justifying everything they do– everyone does it and here in the West it is a reflex, a tic.  We have to be justified, will argue hypotheticals to the death, we live in an adversarial system where every idiot makes his most vigorous argument.  There is always a reason somebody accidentally forgot, or was careless, or stupid, or hated themselves too much to realize you had troubles too, or got sick and couldn’t keep a promise, or was confused, or underestimated the harm they were doing, or said the wrong thing at the exact worst time, or acted like an asshole, racist or shithead believing sincerely that they were in the right the whole time.  Very few people do things believing they’re wrong, they do things they feel justified in doing, even if their justification is objectively feeble or even insane.  The first thing I need when I am hurt by somebody I know is the simple acknowledgement that they fucking hurt me.  It’s called empathy, also, taking responsibility instead of making an excuse. Does not seem like a huge thing to expect, if the person is concerned with my feelings, as I expect my friends to be, as I try to be toward them.”

“But you are capable of violence,” he said “and it scares people.”

“When have I ever been violent?  If people are scared they don’t know me, they are defensive, maybe, they’re scared how they would act if they were as angry as they think I am.  They compare their anger to mine and imagine what terrible things they might do.  I have no idea what people are scared of.  I use words and I try to use them as precisely as I can.  I often write them down and revise them until they are as clear as I can make them.  Words can sometimes hurt more than a punch in the face, worse than an arrow, I know.  I try to measure my words before I let them fly,” she said, “I make every effort to do better with my anger.  And anger, as you know, is a devilishly challenging emotion.  In fact, I see you can refer to it, and talk about mine, but not actually talk about your own.  It is easier to speak of mine, I suppose, since I express it more freely.”  

“Well, you do speak your mind,” he said.  

“Yes, I speak my mind,” she said.   “I would recommend the same to you, don’t be mad, don’t be passive aggressive, don’t dissemble, don’t complain I’m not listening while assuming you know what I’m about to say based on some memory of something I may have once said.  Don’t give me another hypothetical I can’t use while parsing and finding flaws in the one I give you.  Listen.  Use your great brain to hear what I am telling you, use your sensitive heart to feel the feeling I’m talking about– that’s more immediately important than the intellectual part.  I am not fucking Gandhi, it’s true.  Who knows if Gandhi even was Gandhi.  If there’s an afterlife Martin Luther King, Jr. has an excellent reason to be mad as hell.  MLK would be right to be raging up there at God’s right hand, in light of the almost ridiculous symbol he’s become in light of how little has changed for the masses of those he struggled for in the almost 50 years since he died. I couldn’t blame Martin for coldcocking God right now.  Gandhi too, for that matter, I wouldn’t blame him for kicking St. Peter in the balls.  I’m not them, or what they represent, but I’ve gone a long way toward becoming more like them.”

“Maybe not as long a way as you like to think,” he said.  “You’re still pretty goddamned angry, and scary too.”  

“As El Gato Ensombrerado said to the querulous fish in The Cat in the Hat, Spanish version ‘no temas, pececito’– ‘don’t worry, little fish’.  My father was an angry man, my mother was an angry woman, both of my grandmothers raged, one of them whipped her infant in the face, the other broke yardsticks over her kid’s ass.  I come from a home where people raged at each other, in a world with many styles of expressing anger including, frequently, deadly ones.  It is a daily challenge to do better, to get as far as I can toward being more patient,  more reasonable, milder.  It is better to forgive than to be stubborn about being right, it’s true.  But there is also a time when another person tears the fabric of trust and friendship, and argues like a lawyer, or a cornered rat, instead of empathizing with you for the harm they’ve done, and that’s the time to leave the room.  Only bad things can happen if you stay in that room, it’s a room where the air becomes toxic and never clears.”  

“Or you can work it out, truly be committed to being mild, forgiving, even when you have every right to be mad,” he said, “as you yourself are fond of writing in calligraphy.”  

“That’s true,” she said, “it is a good and noble aspiration and something I might do more if I was a fucking saint able to repair the torn fabric of a relationship that had grown toxic.  Which I am not.  Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go paint now.”  

“Wow,” he said, “right in the middle of our conversation.”  

“I’m sorry,” she said, “what exactly are we discussing that we are in the middle of?”

A whiff of fear stirred on the air around him and he said nothing.  Without any noticeable expression she went into the other room, presumably to paint.

Oh … bama

Obama’s a cool guy, don’t get me wrong.  Smart, funny, gives thoughtful speeches he probably has a hand in writing.  Check this out, to get a taste of what I mean.

Presidents only have so much power, Washington is a corrupt town, money owns all American politicians.  No politician can obtain even local office without being financed by the wealthiest citizens, a presidential candidate least of all.  It has always been thus, although recent rulings about the coolness of undisclosed “dark money” make it much more in-your-face than ever before.  

The privileged few have a much greater say in our democratic republic than the masses of poor and working people, always have, always will.   George Washington, we learn, was the wealthiest man in America and, naturally, the father of our country.  Don’t want some poor boy as your dad, obviously.  The super-rich decide elections openly now — 97% of American elections go to the candidate that has the most money to spend on the best ads.  Go fight City Hall, boo hoo for you.

Yet, if Al Gore had insisted on fighting the unsupportable Supreme Court one-off that decided the 2000 election, as it was in his power to do as president of the Senate and person in charge of the official count of Electoral College votes, and somehow become President instead of the challenged George Dubya Bush, many terrible things would not have happened.   There would have been no preemptive attack on Iraq, with its massive, almost incalculable, octopus tentacled harms, for one thing.  It’s unlikely Americans would have employed torture against those suspected of hating our freedom.   So the president, the grievous similarities between the two highly compromised political parties aside,  does make a big difference and the buck often stops with him, or her.

Like it does with President Obama.  A man who sells his brand as brilliantly as Mr. Obama does while campaigning, speaks as convincingly as he does on many important issues– I hold him to a higher standard than a president who winks and smirks and has trouble not mangling his own sentences while doing the most damage in the shortest amount of time in the sincere belief that God and Jesus have his back and that he is doing their work.

Nobody alive today is to blame for slavery, except that practiced by our corporations — and most of those slaves are not Americans. Likewise, the hundred years of lynching and terror that followed the end of Reconstruction after the Civil War– nobody alive now had any say in that dark and brutal age of human rights.   Today protesters march against the same things that were in full force and effect fifty years ago– systematic, widespread police brutality against underprivileged (I love that word) non-white citizens.  Now a couple of cops are going to stand trial for what appears to be depraved indifference and the possible deliberate torture of a man they killed with a rough ride in a police van after an arrest that was possibly for no good reason except that he had an attitude of some kind.  Obama gave a couple of thoughtful speeches.   It’s a process, as he thoughtfully points out.

It’s churlish, I know, to point out how many of Cheney and Bush’s worst policies Mr. Obama has allowed to continue.  Pointing out, for example, that he’s massively escalated the once highly controversial policy of extrajudicial killings worldwide, signed off on the murder of an American boy not charged with any crime or associated with any threat?  Churlish of me!   I have to stop doing that, stop hating our freedom to love a president who came to office advertising Hope and Change.  Churlish and immature.  I hang my head and hope to grow up one day, like the rest of my friends.