Op-Ed

It was the guacamole’s fault!

That’s the guy’s defense, anyway — that plus his right to carry four handguns, an AR-15 and a 12-guage shotgun into a supermarket in Atlanta. Oh yeah, and he was wearing body armor. This was in March 2021, barely a week after an actual mass shooting at several massage parlors in Atlanta, in which eight people were killed. And it was only two days after a mass shooting at a grocery store in Boulder, Colorado, where ten people were killed.

American football has always been a blood sport.

It needs to change or die.

Tackle must end.  Flags must come.

And they will.

Why?  Because human lives are at stake…and with them, a trillion-dollar industry.

A century ago, football players were maimed and died in droves.  The college game was a cross between rugby, mixed martial arts and all-out trench warfare.

Merciless scrums brought on bloody body piles in which players did their very best to gouge and permanently harm their opponents.  Often they succeeded.

Where helmets were worn, they were virtually useless leather gloves, perhaps functional in keeping cracked skulls from falling apart during a game, but that was about it.  The death toll for a given year of the college game was substantial and undeniable.  Long-term post-season repercussions were undiscussed, unstudied…and permanent.

Two a.m. Boink! My eyes pop open. It’s Christmas Eve, but it’s not that I just heard Santa wandering through the house. It’s far more banal: gotta use the bathroom. I crawl out of bed, step bare-assed into . . . oh my God . . . a learning experience.

Another one!

The heat was off. The furnace had shut down. And it was below-zero outside – apparently way below zero. The previous day, weather advisories had flowed in: lots of snow, cold as hell. And now here I was, naked in a house that had lost its heat. Uh . . . now what?

Step one, of course, was to complete my intended task: go to the bathroom, which I did. But at 2 a.m., I couldn’t envision any further productive action. I crawled back into bed, pulling the covers around me. I fell back to sleep, returned to the coziness of dreaming, at least for a while. But eventually I got up for real. Getting dressed didn’t stop with putting my clothes on. I also wrapped myself in a winter jacket. Then I called the furnace guys. Problem solved, right?

My friend is not an elitist. To the contrary, he has spent decades of his life fighting social inequality, racism and championing the rights of disadvantaged groups. Therefore, I was taken aback when he surmised that “football is the opium of the people”. 

 The reference, which summons a famous Marxist maxim about religion written in a specific historical context, suggested that governments use mass sports events to distract from political problems or social conflicts. 

 He is partly right. Not only do governments invest in sports as a form of distraction, but they also often turn sports into a form of political legitimization. While all governments play this game, the US excels in it.  

FacebookTwitter"How exactly is ‘diversity’ our ‘strength’?”

Oh, the smug ignorance of Tucker Carlson! Sometimes, in his certainty of rectitude, he asks questions that actually matter — or would matter if they were asked with any sort of honesty. The above quote, blathered on his news show, recently started flickering again in my brain, when I read about a Florida teacher who was fired after sarcastically interrupting the prayer session of some Muslim students at their school, declaring (as per a Tik Tok video): “I believe in Jesus, so I’m interrupting the floor.”

Uh, how exactly is diversity our strength? Or is it just an infuriating nuisance?

"Ducey insists Arizona holds sole or shared jurisdiction over the 60-foot strip the containers rest on and has a constitutional right to protect residents from ‘imminent danger of criminal and humanitarian crises.’”

OK, he’s a politician — Doug Ducey, the exiting governor of Arizona, who recently began erecting “hundreds of double-stacked shipping containers topped by razor wire” along Arizona’s eastern border with Mexico, including through the Coronado National Forest. Is this not his right: to blather, lie and give his constituents an enemy? And what keeps us safer from that enemy than a wall, especially one topped with razor wire?

Two dogs walking. One of them says to the other: “I bark and I bark, but I never feel like I effect real change.”

This is the caption of a New Yorker cartoon by Christopher Weyant from several years ago. It keeps popping up in my head — I mean, every day. Like everyone else, I want what I do to matter, to “effect real change.” What I do is write. Specifically, I swim in the infinity of possibility. Humanity can kill itself or it can learn to survive. Most people (I believe) prefer the latter, which is all about discovering how we are connected to one another and to the rest of the universe. This is what I try to write about.

Then Congress passes another military budget. And once again, there’s the New Yorker cartoon.

Damn those Marxists!

You know their game, right? They want to spew truth and real history at our kids. No doubt they’re also in favor of dropping charges against Julian Assange, who (as all real Americans know) deserves 175 years in prison for exposing — with the help of the New York Times, The Guardian. Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El País — embarrassing realities about U.S. foreign policy.

How do I know the Marxists are behind this? The Heritage Foundation tells me so. In their dismantling of good old Critical Race Theory, they explain that it’s “an academic discipline founded by law professors who used Marxist analysis to conclude that racial dominance by whites created ‘systemic racism.’”

A dark cloud will threaten the future of Pacifica until it re-establishes good faith and trust with its listener-supporters, and with the public at large.

Along with the staff of KPFA, KPFK and KPFT, a strong majority—more than 6800 voters—approved a change of by-laws in July, 2021.

That clear majority voted in the well-founded belief that the previous by-laws had failed, and that the structure of Pacifica’s management needed to be reformed if the Network were to survive.

In denying that rightfully approved change of by-laws, and then denying the rightful election of a number of candidates to the KPFK board, Pacifica broke its good faith and trust with its listener-supporters, and with the public.

The results have been painfully obvious.

As Myla Reson has pointed out,  Pacifica INITIATED the lawsuit against New Day---and a number of individuals--- in direct opposition to the wishes of the majority of listener-supporters.

Money donated by those listener-supporters was somehow paid to the legal team to deny those very listener-supporters their own clearly stated mandate for new by-laws.

Can a poem transcend fury — fury combined with helplessness? Can individual property owners join NATO?

Having no other options than simply to continue seething, let me tear myself psychologically open for a moment here and see what happens. Yeah, this is personal. And yeah, I live in Chicago — part of what would, I presume, be called the “inner city,” which is where trouble happens, right? A lot of people avoid the inner city. Watch out, it’s dangerous.

But it’s been my home for the last 45 years and I love it for many reasons — but, essentially, for its complex, evolving diversity. Back when I was a reporter with a neighborhood beat in this city, I had an astounding realization: The whole world passes through Chicago! Thus, though my beat was a few square miles of teeming neighborhood, I was, in effect, covering the whole world — not from the top down but from the bottom up. It was a world of struggle and squabble, crime and empathy. It was the melting pot of peace.

Or whatever.