Personal Musings category archive

It’s not black folks who are afraid to confront racism in America. They confront it every day.

It’s we white folks.

That’s the reading on the electronic thermometer on the deck, which I have calibrated. It may not be the official reading, which I think comes from closer to the beach. We are within a couple of miles of the Norfolk Airport and our temperature is usually closer to theirs.

When I was a young ‘un growing up on the other side of the Bay, it would get this hot.

But it wouldn’t stay this hot for weeks at a time with no break.

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It would be easy to denounce this as a “blame the victim” article, but it’s really more than that.

. . . who is to blame in the story of the U.S. Agriculture Department employee who got fired for being a racist for a few hours and then became an apology sponge when everyone everywhere realized how wrong they had been?

I think it’s us.

(snip)

Nope. It’s us.

The thought that people get the government they deserve also applies to media: People get the media they deserve. We seem to be fleeing substance at every opportunity, perhaps because substance is painful and hard to read and understand.

In its place, we embrace whatever is put in front of us and treat it as real and bathe in it for a while until another reality presents itself. Remember health care? Death panels were a big part of that debate until they weren’t. Then there is our compelling Kenyan president. Tea party people still believe that one.

Part of what makes a cliche a cliche is that it states a truth so well that repackaging that truth is difficult. Two cliches:

• Don’t believe everything you hear (though a chestnut too many ignore). These days, it’s a good idea also not to believe everything you see, even if you see it in person (research shows that eyewitness testimony is quite unreliable).
• Consider the source, especially when the source has a record of unreliability and an ax to grind. Even reliable persons of good will can make mistakes. To an ax grinder, everything is a new sharpening wheel.

I make no claim that my choice of topics here is fair and balanced. This is a hobby; I’m a loudmouth with a website. I don’t claim to be a journalist.

This blog is opinionated; I have my own axes that I sometimes grind.

I do try

• to pick axes that deserve grinding,
• to get facts straight (and correct errors when I learn of them), and
• to make clear where facts stop and opinion begins.

One thing I’ve learned in 50 years of following news is that, if it looks like it doesn’t make sense, it probably doesn’t.

Serendipity is needing to mend something and finding a needle already threaded with the proper thread in the sewing box.

I’m much less offended by language I hear on the telly vision (the stupid is far more offensive) than I am by the language I hear from middle schoolers at the school bus stop.

And it’s a pretty good bet that they didn’t hear it on telly vision first.

The “middle” is not between Republicans and Democrats.

The middle is where the Democrats are. Republicans have left that building.

Voting is not a right. It is a duty.

Several weeks ago, I was chatting with an acquaintance about politics (imagine! me talking about politics).

He was most distressed with a local Democratic candidate for Congress over the candidate’s votes on several major issues and was planning to express his discontent by not voting in that race in November.

(Frankly, I share his distress. Indeed, I had pointed out to one of the Congressman’s staffers that “. . . not voting for the health care bill because it doesn’t save enough money is like a surgeon’s refusing to operate because he can restore only 70% of a patient’s vision, rather than all of it.” The staffer was not happy.)

As Hamlet points out, there is a rub. We agreed that a victory by the Congressman’s opponent would be far more detrimental to the public good than the Democrat’s continued incumbency. Yet, he was willing to support through inaction the opponent.

It is simply not true that all politicians are alike and that there’s no difference between the parties. Anyone who believes that has slept for the last three decades or looks to avoid responsibility for his or her inaction.

Furthermore, anyone who expects a candidate, even the best candidate, to reflect perfectly his or her own views is living in WackyWorld. (John Cole has an excellent musing on that today.)

I cannot understand how persons can consider withholding a vote from a better candidate to the implicit benefit of a lesser one to possess any legitimacy as a protest. It’s “I’ll shoot the polity in the foot so I can feel virtuous” reasoning.

In the American electoral structure, the election goes to the candidate with the majority (actually, in most jurisdictions, with the plurality) of votes. Sometimes, indeed, the choice is indeed between worse and worst. In that case, worse is still better than worst.

Someone is going to win. Not voting at all because you don’t like one amounts to voting for the other.

The only choice may be to hold your nose and vote for the better of the two, even though, in your eyes, the better may not be good enough.

Worse is still better than worst.

Voting is not a right. It is a duty.

A truth that seems to escape some persons is that private actions do not always benefit the public good.

Covering every available bit of land with housing and shops, while destroying the wildlife and wildlife living space that helps make living in the part of the world enjoyable, does not benefit the public good.

The city, in partnership with several conservation groups, plans to buy 122 acres of environmentally sensitive land off Shore Drive that had been marked for a housing development.

The purchase would guarantee that the last major tract of undeveloped land along the Lynnhaven River, which boasts oyster beds, wetlands and a maritime forest, is preserved. It also means an end to Virginia Beach firm L.M. Sandler & Sons controversial Indigo Dunes project, which called for more than 1,000 homes.

Some things do belong to all of us and should be protected from marketeers. That’s why we have parks, and that’s why this is a good idea, even when times are tight.

When merchants reconstitute concentrated fruit juice, must they hold a reconstitutional convention?

I glanced at the stories regarding the recent report on Gatesgate and they did not stir my blogging nerve. Today, Joan Vennochi’s column in the Boston Globe helped me figure out why:

A NEW report on last summer’s arrest of a black Harvard professor by a white Cambridge Police sergeant ducks the main theme of their famous face-off.

Skin color.

That’s what made it international news. That’s what drew in President Obama, who got caught up in the story when he said the Cambridge police acted “stupidly’’ and then wiggled out of it by hosting a White House beer summit.

But the 60-page report on the show-down between Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sergeant James Crowley barely mentions race. Instead, it’s all about respect and the need for more of it from citizens and law enforcement officials.

It is not just that color is what made it news.

It is very likely that color–a white cop and a black citizen–was a big part of what made it happen in the first place.

The flour, sugar, salt, and water in the recipe may have come from other sources, but I am certain that race was the yeast without which the loaf would not have risen.

Any “analysis” that avoided the issue of race was no analysis at all.
.

If your cat won’t sit still, give your catatonic.

Dick Polman looks back at the America John Boehner wants back. A nugget:

Boehner was born in 1949. In the America he grew up in, southern blacks got arrested or beaten if they tried to share a luncheonette counter with whites. If they tried to eat at Lester Maddox’s restaurant in Atlanta, he brandished an axe handle and chased them into the street. Up in New York City, jazz great Miles Davis was beaten on the street with a blackjack by a city cop who saw him escorting a white woman to a taxicab. I am proud that America today is a place where such human rights abuses would be unthinkable.

Read the whole thing and ask yourself, do you want that country back?

I don’t.

I was cutting grass along the highways for the state–funnest summer job I ever had. I hit a drainage ditch that was completely obscured by honeysuckle with the right front wheel and the tractor went over to the right. I hit the dirt and headed into the soybeans on my belly.

Didn’t know I could move so fast on my belly.

My buddy, who was on a Ford, wrapped a chain around the frame and pulled the tractor back upright.

We continued cutting grass.

Decades ago, a John Deere tractor flipped over on Silas Fralin.

At the time his son Franklin Fralin, now 73, was in his early teens and working the family’s farm in Union Hall.

“It broke him all up and a rib went through his lung,” Fralin recalled. “I had to stay there after that. Daddy didn’t have but one lung. He didn’t have much breath.”

The Fralins, like many other row-crop farmers in Franklin County, often relied on the smaller Farmall tractors manufactured by International Harvester.

And Franklin Fralin’s restored 1949 Farmall Cub was among the antique tractors displayed Saturday during the seventh annual Southwest Virginia Antique Farm Days at the Franklin County Recreation Park.

What a great movie.

Simple, straightforward, lots of car crashes.

What more could a guy want in a movie?

Those who consider wind farms to be unsightly have likely never seen an oilfield.

Remember Billy Graham?

Agree or disagree with his theology, he was and is the real deal, a sincere guy who did not use his talents to get rich (though he did okay in an upper middle class sort of way) or found a television empire or sell books.

He evangelized. That was what he did.

He also publicly opposed segregation at a time when most Southerners who did feared to do so publicly, one time even bailing Martin Luther King, Jr., out of jail, and he fought South African apartheid.

He screwed up by tying himself too closely to Nixon and later apologized for that.

During his public career, he was not perfect; none of us are. On balance, he has done much more good than bad. That would be a good epitaph for any of us.

Unlike lots of folks who call themselves “evangelists” and especially those who call themselves “televangelists,” he actually tries to live the values he professes. He did and does so imperfectly, as do we all, but he tried.

That’s more than many can say; many profess values and don’t try to live them and neither apologize when they fail, nor learn from their experiences.

It just does not seem right that Billy Graham is in reruns.

The despicable and hateful demonstrations of the Westboro Baptist Church appall almost everyone (you can google Westboro Baptist; I shan’t link to them).

Through their very name, their existence insults churches, baptists, and even westboros.

Indeed, to those who believe that the central message of Christianity is to “love they neighbor,” Westboro Baptist Church blasphemes. (As someone who was raised Baptist, I must say that Westboro is not affiliated with any respectable or even semi-respectable Baptist convention. One of the embarrassing things of having a Baptist heritage is that any crackpot who wants to set up some nutcase church sticks “Baptist” into its name.)

Nevertheless, saying hateful things is an American right and, in the United States and blasphemy is not illegal (nor should it be).

It is one thing to require that protestors maintain a specified distance from the targets of their protests. The chants and shouts of protesters can sometimes be considered fighting words. I think such separations are often enforced, not because the protesters are actually using “fighting words,” but to emasculate the protest; nevertheless, I believe that the words that the adherents of Westboro Baptist say (rejoicing in the deaths of soldiers), combined with the places where they say them (at the funerals of soldiers), easily qualify those words as fighting words.

God forbid, should it be my son, I should not want their presence to soil his funeral.

As despicable as Westboro Baptist is and as much as I find many of Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s positions wrong-headed and even comical, I have to say that I think he got this one right.

There’s a stretch of Shore Drive (US 60) not far from these parts which has seen 10 pedestrian fatalities in the past eight years.

Now the city is lowering the speed limit from 45 to 35 for the stretch in question.

The City Council on Tuesday unanimously instructed staffers to reduce the speed limit on the busy road to 35 mph from 45 mph. The change will affect the four-mile stretch of Shore Drive between Pleasure House Road and North Great Neck Road.

I spent 45 minutes googling (well, actually I was startpaging because Startpage is more secure) for statistics on the causes of pedestrian accidents. I found one link to a study (PDF) regarding the relationship of speed and pedestrian injuries (the faster the vehicle, the more severe the pedestrian injuries; duh.), but mostly the search was overwhelmed by ambulance chasers personal injury attorney websites and safety brochures.

The eastern end of the stretch in question, the most dangerous portion of it, is lined with houses, condos, apartments, eateries, and little shopping centers; most of the accidents have happened late at night and involved persons crossing the road to get to another nightspot or to go home.

The road is four lanes, sometimes increasing to eight at intersections with left and right turn lanes; it’s one of three major roads connecting Norfolk and Virginia Beach and consequently heavily travelled. Even at a crosswalk in daylight, a pedestrian with a green light can take the duration of the green to get across the road. (I watched one just Monday as she was heading toward the beach.)

Crosswalks are few and far between, especially in the most hazardous area, which is also the area most cluttered with shops and eateries. Depending on the starting and end points, using a crosswalk could add as much as 15 or 20 minutes to crossing the road.

I hope that lowering the speed limit helps, though I fear it won’t.

I suspect that visibility, the distance between crosswalks, and the width of the highway has more to do with the accident rate than does the speed limit.

I wish I weren’t so pessimistic, but I would place more more hope in a crosswalk or two with on-demand stoplights.

Please say a prayer for my son, currently on his third tour in a war zone, that he remains and honorer of Memorial Day, not an honoree.