The Value of Values
by Susan Schaefer
This above all – to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou can’t not then be false to any man [sic].
It is important that people know what you stand for. It’s equally important that they know what you won’t stand for.
Standing up for our beliefs is a singular and heroic act. Yet, whether in personal or business life, Western culture has inculcated most of us with a sense that compromise is the extraordinary high road. The fancy MIT-Harvard courses I’ve taken and books that I’ve read advocate: Getting to Yes and Breaking the Impasse. Now don’t get me wrong, compromise is a worthy quality. I’ve spent a good part of my career helping others to reach it. Our current deadlocked government is a prime example of what happens when we can’t achieve this hallowed common ground.
However, there are times when compromise simply isn’t a choice. As the quote above from beloved American author and editor, Mary H. Waldrip admonishes: You’ve got to know what you stand for. Another famous quote from Edmund Burke, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing," comes to mind.
How the heck do we zero in on what our beliefs are? Is there a surefire way to identify our personal values so we can draw the lines we won’t cross?
Many 21st century organizations have spent tens of thousands of dollars on fancy consultants going through countless creative exercises to identify their values. Once done, they proceed through multiple courses of action to convince themselves, their boards of directors, stockholders, stakeholders, employees, partners, clients, customers and others, that these truly are their values. Some organizations post them prominently for all comers to see when they enter the various brick and mortar portals of the enterprise. They hire clever writers, graphic designers and web site developers to declare these values in annual reports, newsletters, and web pages.
Values are sacred, and despite the fact that many of us have been programmed to accept the blanket values of our society or religious affiliations, there remains a highly individual threshold for determining our own primary set of values.
In his book, Ethics for the New Millennium, His Holiness the Dalai Lama submits that establishing binding ethical principles relies not solely on religious faith, but rather on ordinary common sense. Coming as he does from the Buddhist tradition of non-violence, he suggests, “That one of things which determines whether an act is ethical or not is its effect on others.”
In defining our own set of values we therefore seek to detail deep-seated principles that guide our behavior towards others and ourselves. Values establish the criterion against which we make almost all of life’s major choices. All of us have values.
When the Big Cheeto basically hijacked the Presidency of this country with (maybe complicit, maybe not – we’ll soon learn more) undeniable interference from Russian hackers, I had to reach deep down to rearticulate my values. In those early post-inauguration days I found I was treading some thin ice with friends and family who owned up to voting for this man whose behaviors burlesqued the very concept of values. His garish self-interest and willingness to bend any fact to his self-serving purposes astounded and shook me to my core. I found myself locking horns with more than a few folks who I wanted to win over to my point of view.
As I found myself facing off in discussions and arguments, I realized I’d better go through my own exercises to re-examine my values. Not wanting to lose life long friends, I tried to figure out what my fundamental beliefs are so I could have civilized conversations about our differences. Pissing matches here in Minnesota tend only to yield yellow snow, after all. And then, sigh, there’s Minnesota nice to contend with.
I began by asking myself the question I ask of my clients: What makes me stand up in a crowd to voice a point of view even when I don’t want to? What gets me out of my chair, my office, my home, and my safety zone to speak out against what I won’t stand for? Here’s my list:
Human rights: I’m a vigilant proponent of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), a milestone document drafted by representatives with different legal and cultural backgrounds from all regions of the world, proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on 10 December 1948 (General Assembly resolution 217 A) as a common standard of achievements for all peoples and all nations. It sets out, for the first time, fundamental human rights to be universally protected and it has been translated into over 500 languages. I encourage you to read it.
Social justice: All human beings are born free and equal in dignity, endowed with rights and freedoms without distinction of race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin or social status. Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person. No one shall be held in slavery or subjected to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. I believe all our citizens should have access to food, affordable housing, good education, clean air, fair trials, etc. I am appalled by institutionalized racism, sexism, homophobia and religious phobias that brand the United States as a backwater and backwards nation.
Women’s rights: I single this out because women remain at the bottom of the heap, regardless of race, tribe, religion or political beliefs. We represent over 50% of the world’s population but our power and voices fall in the bottom 1%. Of the all the world’s poor over 70% are women!
Voting rights: The number one goal of a true democracy should be to make it easy and essential to vote. In Belgium if you don’t vote you cannot collect your social security and other benefits! An educated and engaged electorate is where democracy begins.
First Amendment rights: Our First Amendment sets this country apart from all other democracies, especially our freedom speech and of the press – these fundamental rights are the warp and weft of the American fabric.
Strict gun control: I have lived in the Netherlands, a modern Western democracy where gun ownership is NOT a RIGHT, but a privilege with VERY VERY strict and enforced ownership rules!
Environmental rights: We have this one planet to sustain us all. I believe in science over profiteering. Business interests have raped our forests, poisoned our water sources, and snuffed our bio-diversity.
Animal rights: Humans must end their foolish belief in the dominion over these creatures upon whom our very existence depends.
Certainly, I’ve taken a road less traveled. I’m highly educated and have loved every second of my advanced education in many fields. I’ve traveled the world, lived in India, South America and Europe, speak three languages, and understand two more. I enjoy deep friendships with people from the all over the world – people of color, different religions, sexual orientations, and beliefs. My values reflect a broad and inclusive worldview. I see and understand that American is but one culture. In this I differ greatly from many mainstreamers who’ve never ventured past their own front gates, or if they have it’s with trepidation and suspicion.
I abhor racism and racists. How can we judge an entire group of people, Muslims, for example, by a few of extremists? More people in this country are killed everyday by white people who own guns than have ever been killed by terrorists!
I don’t believe that businesses or businessmen have the best interests of citizens at heart. That is the role of government – to protect its citizens, the environment, etc. As I said, I think the environment is being raped by big business whose sole interests are to make a profit for their stockholders.
I believe this country and our values must morph to accept that in less than 20 years whites will be the minority and our jobs/education/government need to reflect this and stop trying to go backwards 400 years! White people originally took this land from red people, then brutalized, plundered and raped the entire African continent to forcibly import its black people to groom and care for their land and children. Cruelty, barbarity and slavery are the rocks and foundations of this country.
And then there’s the multitude of religions whose members think their scriptures hold a high and mighty right over women. Only women have a say over their lives and bodies. Crawl out of the cave!
Above all else, the value I hold highest is a belief in telling the truth.
I cannot stand when people lie to me, and hate it even more when those lies impact an entire nation or worse still, the world, which is currently the case with the new regime. Big Cheeto is the Emperor of One, “All for Him, and Him for Him” – a master manipulator and a transparent liar. Right? Crazy, but true. This madman loves lying. He brags about it. He’s the biggest big time liar to ever hit the big time, yet, his minions don’t care, or don’t see, or both.
So can I find common ground with people who voted for someone who openly distains my fundamental values?
Like dear Mary H. Waldrip, I know what I won’t stand for. Do you?
Susan Schaefer is a creative & strategic thinker and verbal & visual storyteller who crafts articles, books and blogs for clients and various publications, and guides clients to find answers for their communications problems in unexpected places through her unique Insight Sessions©. Her Creative Class monthly column is featured in the Southwest Journal and Mill City Times.
We must be willing to get rid of the life we planned,
so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
- Joseph Campbell
We must be willing to get rid of the life we planned,
so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
- Joseph Campbell
________________________________________________________________________
Face Hate: After Shirin Neshat’s “Speechless”
By Susan Schaefer
©2017Susan Schaefer
As a portraitist I seek ever-evolving ways to capture the essence of my subjects. I use ‘available’ or natural light as both a challenge and a deliberate artistic statement. Available lighting forces the artist towards deep thoughtfulness and concentration. It requires sacrifice and considered selection of time and place. It means that an initial plan may have to be scrapped due to insufficient or inferior light. While this may seem wasteful or ill conceived, I find that it prods me more deeply into my subconscious realm of decision-making. I must stop to reconsider my mission and subject. This contemplation often produces a more intuitive fine art photographic result – a happy collision of intent and passion that is the essence of creativity.
Academic assignments also produce such “innovative stretch.” The photographic diptych presented here entitled, Face Hate, is both an homage and direct reference to the work of Shirin Neshat. (Please click to learn more about her.)
Our University of Minnesota professor, Edie Overturf asked students to use historical reverence and relevance. Reverence: we were asked to find an artist whose style we admire, whose work inspires; relevance: from this work’s style or genre, we are sincerely to imitate that work and to make our own unique political statement.
The title of this diptych, Face Hate, is a double entendre requiring the viewer both to stand up to hate and to behold a face literally inscribed with anti-hate rhetoric.
My derivative choice for this assignment is Neshat's 1996 work Speechless (the right side of the diptych) from the Women of Allah series. The left side is my own portrait. A friend photographed me using an iPhone and existing light, then in Photoshop I converted the shot to black and white and spontaneously wrote text on my portrait, recasting Neshat’s context from Muslim suppression to the horrendous recent reemergence of anti-Semitism in the United States, specifically here on the University of Minnesota’s campus, a theme that touches my Jewish heritage right where I live, work and play.
My text isn’t clearly legible, just like anti-Semitism itself – it lurks in the hearts of those of ill will. They are cowards whose defiling and destruction of property is akin to dogs pissing to mark territory.
One of the most ill willed of all men currently walking this planet is the presumptive president of this country, whose name need not be mentioned, but who inspires this blog.
My Face Hate handwritten text is a loving rant, unlike his. I speak of humankind’s oneness, our sameness, the identical seed from which all humanity springs. I speak of my childhood, raised a secular Jew, wet nursed by my next-door neighbor, a beloved Irish Catholic. We are one. I speak of the hate and strife faced by my ancestors who fled the killing pogroms of the 1890s Pale of Settlement that forced Jews further and further into ghettos until the killing machines began to exterminate them or kindly expelled them from their homes. They became the backbone of this country – its intellectuals, builders of universities, its tailors, maker of clothes, its producers and directors, makers of film, its publishers and writers, founders of the free press, authors of novels and philosophy, its physicians and lawyers and jurists, healers and seekers of justice. My ancestors acclimated and became America, just like the German, Dutch, British, Irish, Italians and countless others. We are one. My text questions hate, never condones it. I quote the Kabbalah. And, I boast that Judaism is matriarchal, carried by the mother. I speak of the strength of women to overcome hate.
Neshat’s black and white Women of Allah photographic portrait series presents conceptual narratives on the subject of female warriors during the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979. On each photograph, she inscribed calligraphic Farsi text on the female body (eyes, face, hands, feet, and chest); the text is poetry by contemporary Iranian women poets who had written on the subject of martyrdom and the role of women in the Revolution. As the artist, she took on the role of performer, posing for the photographs. These photographs became iconic portraits of willfully armed Muslim women. Yet every image, every women’s submissive gaze, suggests a far more complex and paradoxical reality behind the surface.
Face Hate, too, asks each of us to find the complexity of life that the current administration wants quashed. They agitate, beguile, bewitch and bewilder with falsehood and simplicity. I ask, please don’t turn away: face hate.
Susan Schaefer is a creative & strategic thinker and verbal & visual storyteller who crafts articles, books and blogs for clients and various publications, and guides clients to find answers for their communications problems in unexpected places through her unique Insight Sessions©. Her Creative Class monthly column is featured in the Southwest Journal and Mill City Times.
____________________________________________________________________________________
by Bob Levin
A short temper, inability to focus, impaired judgment, delusional thinking, grandiosity, squinting, and hair loss are signs of late-stage syphilis.
But that doesn’t prove Donald Trump has it. Sure, many people have been saying that.
But you’d have to be... Why, you’d practically have to be late-stage syphilitic to think that people saying shit made it true.
Besides, I don’t think we have to worry. He won’t last long enough for the pox to eat his entire central nervous system. I may hang with too many conspiracy buffs, but I don’t see him lasting a year.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is I think he was a Trojan Horse. The Dark Forces knew Mike Pence couldn’t win a national election, so they grafted him onto Agent Orange. With him gone, they still get licensed to plunder and poison, plus the Born Again Pence will stomp harder on gay rights and abortion – and be less likely to blow up the planet.
Already top drawer Republicans, plus significant spooks in the CIA and FBI think Trump unfit to flush a toilet. Plus, allowing for overlap, you’ve got those for whom he seems as tasty as a stomach-purge and others whose backyard bunkers have been stocked with canned peas since John Foster Dulles ran amok who fear Mr. T’s cozying up to the Russkies.
The sole brake on the Donald’s removal is that the legislators who can pull out his chair fear his rabid, red meat-scarfing supporters if they act too quickly. So this will play out leak-by-leak, rumor-by-rumor (Did I mention the syfy?), gradually bleeding Trump, driving him mad. Think picadors’ lances. Think bandilleros’ barbs. (Does anyone really believe Mike (“No Fool”) Flynn didn’t know his phone calls were being recorded and would be leaked?) Then will come the estocada in the form of the Moscow connections or (I can’t wait!) the tax returns.
Only a terrorist attack – real or Reichstag fire variety – will keep God from speaking to us through Mr. Indiana.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Liars Lair
by Susan Schaefer
His robe is insecurity
Wrapped from head to toe
His goons they vow white purity
With every row they hoe
His daddy never liked him
So his path in life was cast
Pummel all who come before him
With outrageous lying blasts
But scariest, most horrible
Are those who cast their vote
For this villain most deplorable
Who swims his swampy moat
Then flies and rises from it
Like Grendel from her lair
And scorches life below it
Burning foul what once was fair
©Susan Schaefer 2017
Susan Schaefer is a creative & strategic thinker and verbal & visual storyteller who crafts articles, books and blogs for clients and various publications, and guides clients to find answers for their communications problems in unexpected places through her unique Insight Sessions©. Her Creative Class monthly column is featured in the Southwest Journal and Mill City Times.
________________________________________________________________________
Face Hate: After Shirin Neshat’s “Speechless”
By Susan Schaefer
©2017Susan Schaefer
As a portraitist I seek ever-evolving ways to capture the essence of my subjects. I use ‘available’ or natural light as both a challenge and a deliberate artistic statement. Available lighting forces the artist towards deep thoughtfulness and concentration. It requires sacrifice and considered selection of time and place. It means that an initial plan may have to be scrapped due to insufficient or inferior light. While this may seem wasteful or ill conceived, I find that it prods me more deeply into my subconscious realm of decision-making. I must stop to reconsider my mission and subject. This contemplation often produces a more intuitive fine art photographic result – a happy collision of intent and passion that is the essence of creativity.
Academic assignments also produce such “innovative stretch.” The photographic diptych presented here entitled, Face Hate, is both an homage and direct reference to the work of Shirin Neshat. (Please click to learn more about her.)
Our University of Minnesota professor, Edie Overturf asked students to use historical reverence and relevance. Reverence: we were asked to find an artist whose style we admire, whose work inspires; relevance: from this work’s style or genre, we are sincerely to imitate that work and to make our own unique political statement.
The title of this diptych, Face Hate, is a double entendre requiring the viewer both to stand up to hate and to behold a face literally inscribed with anti-hate rhetoric.
My derivative choice for this assignment is Neshat's 1996 work Speechless (the right side of the diptych) from the Women of Allah series. The left side is my own portrait. A friend photographed me using an iPhone and existing light, then in Photoshop I converted the shot to black and white and spontaneously wrote text on my portrait, recasting Neshat’s context from Muslim suppression to the horrendous recent reemergence of anti-Semitism in the United States, specifically here on the University of Minnesota’s campus, a theme that touches my Jewish heritage right where I live, work and play.
My text isn’t clearly legible, just like anti-Semitism itself – it lurks in the hearts of those of ill will. They are cowards whose defiling and destruction of property is akin to dogs pissing to mark territory.
One of the most ill willed of all men currently walking this planet is the presumptive president of this country, whose name need not be mentioned, but who inspires this blog.
My Face Hate handwritten text is a loving rant, unlike his. I speak of humankind’s oneness, our sameness, the identical seed from which all humanity springs. I speak of my childhood, raised a secular Jew, wet nursed by my next-door neighbor, a beloved Irish Catholic. We are one. I speak of the hate and strife faced by my ancestors who fled the killing pogroms of the 1890s Pale of Settlement that forced Jews further and further into ghettos until the killing machines began to exterminate them or kindly expelled them from their homes. They became the backbone of this country – its intellectuals, builders of universities, its tailors, maker of clothes, its producers and directors, makers of film, its publishers and writers, founders of the free press, authors of novels and philosophy, its physicians and lawyers and jurists, healers and seekers of justice. My ancestors acclimated and became America, just like the German, Dutch, British, Irish, Italians and countless others. We are one. My text questions hate, never condones it. I quote the Kabbalah. And, I boast that Judaism is matriarchal, carried by the mother. I speak of the strength of women to overcome hate.
Neshat’s black and white Women of Allah photographic portrait series presents conceptual narratives on the subject of female warriors during the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979. On each photograph, she inscribed calligraphic Farsi text on the female body (eyes, face, hands, feet, and chest); the text is poetry by contemporary Iranian women poets who had written on the subject of martyrdom and the role of women in the Revolution. As the artist, she took on the role of performer, posing for the photographs. These photographs became iconic portraits of willfully armed Muslim women. Yet every image, every women’s submissive gaze, suggests a far more complex and paradoxical reality behind the surface.
Face Hate, too, asks each of us to find the complexity of life that the current administration wants quashed. They agitate, beguile, bewitch and bewilder with falsehood and simplicity. I ask, please don’t turn away: face hate.
____________________________________________________________________________________
by Bob Levin
A short temper, inability to focus, impaired judgment, delusional thinking, grandiosity, squinting, and hair loss are signs of late-stage syphilis.
But that doesn’t prove Donald Trump has it. Sure, many people have been saying that.
But you’d have to be... Why, you’d practically have to be late-stage syphilitic to think that people saying shit made it true.
Besides, I don’t think we have to worry. He won’t last long enough for the pox to eat his entire central nervous system. I may hang with too many conspiracy buffs, but I don’t see him lasting a year.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is I think he was a Trojan Horse. The Dark Forces knew Mike Pence couldn’t win a national election, so they grafted him onto Agent Orange. With him gone, they still get licensed to plunder and poison, plus the Born Again Pence will stomp harder on gay rights and abortion – and be less likely to blow up the planet.
Already top drawer Republicans, plus significant spooks in the CIA and FBI think Trump unfit to flush a toilet. Plus, allowing for overlap, you’ve got those for whom he seems as tasty as a stomach-purge and others whose backyard bunkers have been stocked with canned peas since John Foster Dulles ran amok who fear Mr. T’s cozying up to the Russkies.
The sole brake on the Donald’s removal is that the legislators who can pull out his chair fear his rabid, red meat-scarfing supporters if they act too quickly. So this will play out leak-by-leak, rumor-by-rumor (Did I mention the syfy?), gradually bleeding Trump, driving him mad. Think picadors’ lances. Think bandilleros’ barbs. (Does anyone really believe Mike (“No Fool”) Flynn didn’t know his phone calls were being recorded and would be leaked?) Then will come the estocada in the form of the Moscow connections or (I can’t wait!) the tax returns.
Only a terrorist attack – real or Reichstag fire variety – will keep God from speaking to us through Mr. Indiana.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Liars Lair
by Susan Schaefer
His robe is insecurity
Wrapped from head to toe
His goons they vow white purity
With every row they hoe
His daddy never liked him
So his path in life was cast
Pummel all who come before him
With outrageous lying blasts
But scariest, most horrible
Are those who cast their vote
For this villain most deplorable
Who swims his swampy moat
Then flies and rises from it
Like Grendel from her lair
And scorches life below it
Burning foul what once was fair
©Susan Schaefer 2017
Susan Schaefer is a creative & strategic thinker and verbal & visual storyteller who crafts articles, books and blogs for clients and various publications, and guides clients to find answers for their communications problems in unexpected places through her unique Insight Sessions©. Her Creative Class monthly column is featured in the Southwest Journal and Mill City Times.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
You Can’t Fix Dumb
by Frannie Bertholet
Note: The writer is a high school classmate of Bob Ingram of 'Travels With Trump.'
Bobbie, I know you like to take things to the shock level. Well, please notice that, after a couple of days, this is the first response to your recent hocus/pocus crap that I have seen. I notice that no one has responded, ergo the subject Silence is Deadly, yet Golden, and I am pointing out that you are not getting any shock reaction. Rather, it appears to me, and I must own my own reaction/evaluation/ critique of your most recent email...I felt dead inside when seeing the end of that swill... hocus/pocus is an excellent name for it, because it can only be associated with the evil thinking that goes hand in hand with a Manson hocus/pocus piss poor outlook of life and of the United States. Sad.
However, I, like the rest of the class of '55 silent majority receiving your last email hocus/pocus, am taking the high road...not the Clinton or Obama high road--they don't know what the high road is, but the high road that has class and encourages, expects and wants us to have the respect for our elections, laws, election results, and the electorate who have the right to their votes and the right to be proud that they voted and to be proud of those for whom they voted. And we have the right to expect those who did not vote right (pardon the pun) to undergo riots in our streets knowing that our taxes will have to pay for repairing all those damages and knowing the world sees these things and knowing that many, many thugs will get off without reparation, without being accused, tried and convicted, without having to endure the disgrace of what they did and of the consequences they should be made to suffer due to their poor choices and dastardly deeds. We should not have our country to be the continued laughing stock of the world - eight years was long enough. We have a wonderful system in this country and the freedom and free elections are a part of our history and system and I, for one, take exception when I see jerks try to destroy what it took so long to build. And, whether you like it or not, Bobby, this man, OUR PRESIDENT, in less than three weeks, as President, has done more for this country than any other president has done in our history in at least a year. He will bring back the respect our country, and we, deserve, both by and for its citizens and for its place in the world. Plus, this is just the beginning, oh ye of little faith.
Whether we liked the last eight years, we hoped (and prayed) for the best and gave the President time and the benefit of the doubt. Granted, it did not take long to realize the mistake of the voters back then, but we continued to hope for the best; we did not engage in riots that so many of that administration's supporters had come to make as part of their lives, i.e., Trevon Martin, Baltimore, Missouri, etc., etc., etc.,... riots/riots/riots and the cop killings, and then we became a country forgetting to support its allies, i.e., Israel. And the lies, Bobby. Remember... ...there's no al qaeda -- do you remember that one, Bobby? Straight from Obama's mouth while running for second term. And, I do recall in one of your writings how disappointed and down trodden you were with, who the hell remembers...was it the poor results of that administration and that the outcome of that administration was not an ongoing hope and change, transparency (at least transparency of positive and constructive results); or was it economics and depressing results...that you were not sure how soon you would, again, be voting, if ever. That was long before this election, and it was when Obama was in office. Actually, I had hopes for you after reading that. That was when I realized how liberal your were and I thought you were seeing daylight and I began to have hope for you. How quickly one forgets. Well, Bobby, we haven't forgotten and we have at least four years, hopefully eight years and who knows after that, to correct the last eight years and grow, improve and, above all, keep our country and our citizens safe! Remember, KISS -- keep it simple stupid. Stupid is as stupid does; stupid can learn. BUT, you can't fix DUMB, and that's what we've been dealing with for the last eight years
Damned...I didn't mean to go on and on. Sorry, all. For a lot of the recipients I am preaching to the choir...but for Bobby and his hocus/pocus friends and cohorts, I hope you read it all. It's time to pay the piper, grow up and accept the consequences and/or rewards of our electoral college...don't be DUMB!
Okay…for Bob’s readers I add the following: I grew up in a small town in a Christian family with two brothers and European raised parents…I have no idea what my parents’ politics were inasmuch as politics/government/etc., were never discussed out of fear of what children might say/report/share(my parents were European and they knew what Hitler was doing). When my Mother realized we understood German they immediately discussed everything behind closed doors (my mistake because I was the one who made her realize we understood what they were saying). I moved to Ohio and became Unitarian. A far cry from my Christian upbringing. I’m sure many of you are familiar with Universal-Unitarian – I believe many of you are Unitarian yourself, or Humanists, or whatever. I was Unitarian and Liberal for more than fifty years…as were my politics, friends and lifestyle. I became increasingly aware, as time went on, that the superior attitude with which one lives as a liberal is dangerous to our society. Ergo, the mass demonstrations, selfishness and unhealthy behavior we see in the news almost daily. I realized that as much as I was entitled to my opinion/beliefs/belief system/whatever, so was the next person as unacceptable as it or they may have seemed to me at the time. Prior to going into business for myself, I worked in the aerospace field (50s), homemaker (60s and volunteer worker (70s), field of law (80s/90s) and then I was self-employed, first with my own restaurant then self-employed with a welcome wagon business (late 90s). I began realizing how our (believe it or not, I am trying to make this short) society was losing ground – values/honor/respect/consideration/quality of life. I watched as Librarians no longer cared that parents had rights, as parents, to be watchful and diligent in their parental duties. Rather, the kids had the rights…the rights to go to the library and do research on who knows what…I’ll tell you what…how to build bombs/how to diss our system/our parents/how to build guns/turn on friends, kill members of society, whether it be parents, siblings, teachers, anyone in authority, Cops, you, me…tear down and destroy and above all, not to recognize anybody else’s rights and values. When we grew up in school we were taught right from wrong and, as far as I am concerned, were, rightfully so, punished for the wrong. We were encouraged to be respectful to each other as well as ourselves, to enjoy each other and do it with a sense of humor and consideration of each other. After I realized that not only did librarians practice and encourage this societal destructive philosophy, it became part of the teachings of our education system: teachers, schools and colleges. Then, of course, I had to review ME and my values, lifestyles and personhood. Ergo, I reentered the Christian way of life. Am I different? I hope so, for the better, but I still continue to have a somewhat liberal soul. Granted, less than my former self, yet far more liberal than many of my Christian friends. I still continue on as a person, eating/breathing/loving, etc., but now I have GOD back in my life and I believe I am a better person and, perhaps above all, I BELIEVE AND I CARE! WE MATTER and OUR LIVES MATTER.
So, your vote doesn’t count any more than my vote and if I am smart enough to now vote RIGHT, so be it…that is my choice and right…Don’t diss me, don’t deny me my vote and don’t dismiss me and I won’t diss you, dismiss you, or deny your vote, or your right to vote. That I chose to be less smart in my younger years, i.e., I categorize it as the stupid phase of my life (but I learned a lot about people, etc.), at least I was educable and could smarten up, which is what I did, in other words, I became less stupid.
At least it was a stupid phase and not a dumb phase, BECAUSE, remember, YOU CAN’T FIX DUMB.
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By Clark Deleon
Clark Deleon is a longtime Philadelphia Inquirer columnist and recovering rugby addict.
He'll be contributing to Travels With Trump on a regular basis.
Garbage Truck Blues
When I woke up this morning (January 20, 2017), Trump was on my mind. Yeah, he was on my mind. I got troubles, whoa-o-oh. I got worries, whoa-o-oh. I got wounds to bind.
I'm sitting in Dirty Franks as the clock ticks toward high noon and America's rendezvous with dystopia and I felt oddly excited and ashamed, like I had scalpers seats at a public execution. A gaudy necktie party for the Republic as we've known it. That song starts running though my brain on a loop, like a peppy funeral march. I look around the bar and there are three other customers watching the unfolding horror on TV, four of us drinking hard liquor on his morning in America. Behind the bar was the fifth, Gail, the daytime bartender. We five.
You couldn''t make up symbolism like this.
My first glimpse of Trump from a distance. He's wearing a bright magenta power tie that looks like an obscene wet tongue hanging down to his belt because his suit jacket is unbottoned in a most unpresidential manner. He looked paunchy, almost slovenly. Like Ed Rendell taking a pole position at an all-you-can-eat sausage and egg breakfast buffet. Trump looked through the members of the honor guard like they were busboys at Denny's.
Roy Blount Jr. starts his historic facts from past inaugurals remarks and I suddenly remember a black hood I left in my car, which I wanted to wear as a shroud on this day of national mourning. I dressed in black from hat to socks for the occasion. So I walked out the side door opened for the beer delivery guys, then across 13th Street where my car was parked, illegally, in that private lot on the northwest corner of Pine Street.
As I approached my car I noticed this balding guy behind it writing my license plate number into his phone. I've gotten reported by this prick before and nailed with a $200 private tow truck ransom. It was a very hail-Gestappo-well-met Trumpian moment. On the job at at ten to noon, making America great again. So I get in my car to leave, and the tow-Nazi makes a point of standing in the middle of the driveway exit and glaring as I swing wide to get around and past him. Seig heil, dickhead. Have a nice day.
I still had seven minutes before the cum shot with the Chief Justice and Lincoln's Bible. Plenty of time to find somewhere legalish to park nearby. I go north on 13th, turn left on Spruce and then another left on Juniper. I'm almost to Pine when I realize that the trash truck straddling Juniper has it blinkers on and nobody shouting "M'on back" anywhere in sight. By the time I check the rearview mirror two other cars have joined the parade behind me.
How long could it take? I listen to the radio as Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Long Dong Silver swears in Vice President Dick Pence, followed by a choir singing "America the Beautiful" as I stared into the business end of an idling trash truck with Jersey plates. And that's exactly where I was and what I saw when Donald Trump became President of the United States.
The trashman finally appeared with a rolling dumpster, hooked it up to the hydraulic lift that groaned on longer than necessary, which was not half as long as it took the trashman to return the dumpster half a block away where Cypress Street dead ends east of Juniper. I was in no hurry, overtaken as I was by the spectacle of a private trash hauler from across the Delaware single-handedly doing the job of three unionized Philadelphia municipal sanitation workers.
He did all the heavy lifting and pushing and then he hopped in the cab and drove that hulking trash truck south on Juniper all the way to the other side of Pine Street before stopping again. And it only cost me 12 minutes out of my life, as morning turned into afternoon, on the first day of Donald Trump's American odyssey.
When I woke up this morning, he was still on my mind.
Sad.
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