Op-Ed

America’s beloved, desperately needed Pacifica Radio is at the brink of avoidable death.  It needs a miraculous but do-able progressive uprising to overcome the toxic, outmoded structure that’s killing the Network.  

In July, 2021, the Pacifica Voting Membership voted 6820-5471 to revise the Network’s failed old by-laws (FOB).  

But their legal team refused arbitration and pre-emptively sued, at financial costs they refuse to reveal…while demanding still more!!!  Individual “New Day” reformers have been threatened with personal liability.  

The result has been a horrific year of abject failure.  Rightfully elected board members, irreplaceable staff and many of the Network’s most popular hosts have been purged.  Basic operations have deteriorated into failed state chaos.  Phone lines have crashed, utility bills are unpaid, and Pacifica’s listenership has crashed along with its finances. 

My friends Scott and Betsey gave me a drum a few weeks ago. I played it as I sat with them . . . and I certainly mean the word “play” as childishly as you can imagine. I’m no more a musician than I am a nuclear physicist, but I played along with them and, well, this is what happens to me: I notice big things emerge in incredibly small moments.

10/30/22
City of Ft. Lauderdale seeks to privatize the drinking water of the Central Broward Region to a foreign corporation. The city owns and operates the Fiveash Treatment Plant, serving Ft. Lauderdale, Oakland Park, WIlton Manors, Lauderdale-By-The-Sea, Sea Ranch Lakes, Port Everglades, and portions of Davie and Tamarac. The reason for the proposed public-private partnership (P3) is to build a new treatment plant at the Prospect Wellfield, just west of the Executive Airport, in the flight path at the end of the runway. This will involve replacing a two-mile drain well currently in use at the Prospect site, installing miles of pipes to connect the new location to present infrastructure, plus multiple studies, approvals, and permits required for building a water treatment plant so close to an airport.

I’ve been haunted by a phrase for almost a month now: “morality police.”

The news has been global. A 22-year-old woman, Mahsa Amini, was arrested as she was leaving a subway station in Tehran on September 13 by an Iranian police unit known as the Islamic guidance patrol, a.k.a., the morality police, because she was an inappropriately dressed female. Maybe her hair was showing. Who knows?

There they were again. The dangling irony of memorial Nikes . . .

I was walking home from my neighbor’s house. They’d just had a piano recital and I was still full of music when I saw the pair of tennis shoes flung over the telephone wire that crosses my street – instantly redefining, at least for me, this moment, this piece of earth and sky. Oh my God. I don’t believe it.

Here?

In front of my house?

Every now and then I see a pair of tennis shoes flung over a telephone wire – that wire stretching through a nearby McDonald’s parking lot, for instance– and every time I do, I think about a 12-year-old boy named Jose, who shoved a bit of reality in my face twenty or so years ago. He did so as a student of mine.

I was a volunteer writing teacher at the time. This was part of my decade-long struggle with the Chicago Public Schools, which my daughter attended. One day, when she was in third grade – this is when the school system begins the farce known as standardized testing, and “education” started to mean teaching to the test – she came home angrily and declared: “Dad, I hate writing!”

Michael suggested the name Bob’s Rhubarb Lounge.

I couldn’t stop laughing, at least on the inside. I imagined commissioning someone to make a neon sign with those words, maybe ten feet high. I’d place it in front of my house, of course.

Why not? The point of the lounge would be to serve as a place where people can explore the meaning of life, just as I once explored the meaning of rhubarb. The imagination has no limits! At the same time, it has all sorts of limits, some of which are deeply painful.

All this emerged from an event at the house last week. My daughter, Alison — the Stained Glass Poet — who came to Chicago from Paris, is the one who organized it. “We should do a reading, Dad.”

Close your eyes and try to envision the two wolves.

Imagine yourself as a terrified child. I think that helps bring the myth to life . . . this myth, said to be Cherokee, of humanity’s two choices. The wolves are engaged in a vicious fight.

The wise grandfather explains to the child that the two wolves are inside all of us. One of the wolves is an arrogant narcissist — a jerk, an egocentric idiot. You know, evil. The other is the embodiment of joy and empathy, kindness and love.

The trembling child asks in alarm: “Which one wins?”

And Grandfather lays it on the line: “The one you feed.”

In 2022, Pride month — June — gave way to an explosion of invective against LGBTQ rights, helped along by allies in right-wing media, particularly Fox News. But there’s also rising anti-trans sentiment in the liberal-left sphere, and it’s being driven by some elements of what might be called the “post-left,” onetime champions of progressive outlooks who have now tilted to the right. Former Intercept writer) Glenn Greenwald is one of those leading the charge, turning his audience on to fringe elements of a growing hate movement.  

It wasn’t always like this. Greenwald was once a stalwart defender of trans rights — perhaps in connection with his advocacy for U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning and his friendship with since-assassinated Brazilian politician and activist Marielle Franco. “If you want to get a taste for how widespread warped & creepy hostility against trans people is, mention Chelsea Manning & survey the bile,” Greenwald tweeted on Sept. 10, 2016.

Why does the United States have more civilian gun deaths t​​hen the entire rest of the world combined?  Is it because people in the US are more violent? NO.

Is it because people in the US are more unstable, have more mental problems, and we have more sociopaths? NO.

Is it because more people in the US are mean, vicious, deadly? NO.

There is only one thing that the US has more of than any other country – guns.  Easy and simple. We have more guns, a lot more guns, and far more deadly guns. And they are often easily attainable and accessible.

Texas and Arizona have begun busing refugees at their border – at a cost of millions – up to a couple liberal Northern cities . . . let’s see how they like it!

Texas, according to Gov. Greg Abbott, “has had to take unprecedented action to keep our communities safe” – you know, from the hordes of rapists or whatever storming across America’s insecure border, which of course is 100 percent the fault of President Joe Biden.