Category Archives: Philiosophical

Life will sometimes throw you a little. Then you start thinking, and…well, that’s always a dangerous moment.

So true

I am out of the memoir mode for the moment.  I happened to see this quote from Mohandas Gandhi in A.Word.A.Day today:

“The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.” -Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948).

Given the experience of my last few years, and the insight I have gained into some of the people around me, I have come to see the truth of this statement.  The truth of it has, in fact, become clear to me in rather painful ways.

Edit:  Happy birthday, Mohandas (Oct.2)


[googleMap name=”Porbandar, India” description=”Ganhi’s Birthplace” width=”500″ height=”400″ directions_to=”false”]Porbandar, India[/googleMap]

The day I punched Buck Blalock in the stomach

Seventh grade isn’t tough for everybody–just the geeks.  Of course, most seventh graders are geeks, at least intermittently.  I was one of the geeks more often than I would have liked, so I should know.

Seventh grade was tough as hell for me.  It was tougher for Buck Blalock.  He was a big, doughy kid in my class, way too mature and sensitive to live in the world with the rest of us on the island–the Lord of the Flies island we all inhabited back then.

He was “Piggy,” all right, and I might have been Ralph or Simon and been his friend, but it seems I didn’t have the nuts for it.  I had just moved back to Atlanta the year before, and I didn’t want to be “the new kid” forever.  A lot didn’t depend on what I wanted, though, and that became clearer and clearer as time went along.  Several of the boys were just as happy to keep me “the new kid” forever if they could manage it.

So, here I was, kinda big and doughy and sensitive myself, and the teachers must have thought Buck and I were a match made in Heaven.  They kept arranging for us to be partners in this and buddies in that.  Maybe that plan was working out fine for Buck, but I started looking down the road, and I didn’t see any promising forks.  It wasn’t that I disliked Buck and liked the other boys–Buck was fine, and some of the other boys were jerks of extravagant proportions.  It’s just that the choice, at least in my mind, became a matter of throwing in with Buck and being a social outcast for life, or putting up with the annoyances of trying to be “one of the guys.”  Even a seventh grader can do a simple deduction like that, and hey, some of the guys were all right.  Some of the girls, too, but I could see that wouldn’t be happening for any friend of Buck’s.

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The day Randy Robinson’s dog was killed by a car

Mutts are just the best, aren’t they?  That has been my experience, anyway.  One of the better ones I’ve known used to follow my group of childhood friends on the fishing expeditions we took all around our homes on what was then the outskirts of Tulsa, Oklahoma.

He was a small dog, mostly white with three or four black spots covering maybe a third of his body.  He hardly ever barked, but he was always alert, always calmly watchful–well, except for that one day when his trusting obedience led to his death crossing a wide-open rural road.

We usually avoided the roads and took the overland route everywhere we went.  When we did walk along the roads, the noise and heat made it a big chore.  We had a much better time walking along creeks and fence lines that always seemed to lead somewhere interesting.

This particular day we did the unusual and made our way along a rural road, single file, wandering along.  We crossed the road at one point, the dog remaining on the far side, sniffing at something in the ditch.  My friend Randy called him just before he realized a car was heading toward us at high speed, something people did all the time on the straight, flat roads of Oklahoma.

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Share the road?

You’re driving along. You occupy an unyielding metal vehicle weighing a ton, more or less. You overtake a bicycle rider. You have a stripe of paint on the road to your left. You have a human being riding a bicycle on your right.

What kind of mind can’t decide which of these should be accorded the greater degree of inviolability?  Whatever type it is, we seem to have lots of them among us.  “I can’t cross that paint stripe!  It’s a double yellow!  I’ll just grit my teeth and take a chance with that human life over there!”

You’d think people could figure this out a little better, yet time after time this odd pattern evidences itself. Not only do we get obscure glimpses into the minds of single individuals this way, we also see how humanity tend to act when in “herd mode.”  On the positive side, when one person in a line of traffic swings wide to give the bicyclist some room, the rest tend to follow along. This vice works versa, however, since the opposite pattern is just as likely to appear. One person deciding to “play chicken” with the bicycle rider will lead a string of drivers to engage in similar behavior. Apparently, we are only about as good as the people around us. Continue reading

Quite a Trip

I just got back from Charleston, SC.  It was a great long-weekend trip.  I went down to see my first son who will be opening a deli tomorrow.   The project looks like a winner, and I am so happy for my son. It is kind of a momentous time for him. Like his Dad, he has “explored his options” for quite a few years before actually kicking in and making some choices.   I’m completely behind him on this project on so many levels.

My little family and I had a great time on the trip.  Despite the 60-degree water, my younger son had a fine time swimming in the surf.   I don’t know how or why he does it, but he does, and he loves it.   I love watching him, too, so alive in that mother water that birthed us all–all life forms on earth, as far as we know, anyway.
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I’m Sorry: 21st Century Style

The translation here, 21st century style, is, “I know I did something to inconvenience you, but I don’t really want to have an unpleasant exchange with you, and I certainly don’t want to change my behavior in any way, either, so I am saying this meaningless thing I learned in elementary school so you’ll go away and not say anything unpleasant to me to try to get me to actually take responsibility for my actions.”

Do I sound grumpy? Maybe I am.

But the translation is almost Hemingway-esque, in a way, isn’t it? I mean in terms of sentence structure.  Content and meaning be damned. Hemingway nor his characters would have said anything so insincere.  Imagine one of Papa’s characters making a false apology.  I mean, really.  They were more likely to leave a righteous apology unsaid than to make one insincerely.  But the compound sentences, Man! Look at the sentence structure!

But back to the issue, I am “apologized” to almost daily in this way.  I have occasion to run and ride my bike on a series of paved trails just miles from my house.  The trails are marked with a center stripe designed, I suppose, to keep everybody in line.  Still, I am constantly coming up behind pairs and groups of pedestrians and cyclists who have arranged themselves across the entire width of the trail, blocking it rather quite completely with their wide, wide, butts, their canine companions, their double-wide strollers, their colorful magnesium bicycles and associated festive costumery.  There is a plenitude of what-all out there, believe me. Continue reading

The Founders – Not Godly, But Wise

Tonight’s A Prairie Home Companion impressed me as a pure and joyful celebration of the election of Barack Obama–perhaps the best expression of that joy that I have heard thus far.  In the opening minutes, Jearlyn Steele and Garrison Keilor teamed up for a rousing rendition of “America the Beautiful,” and as they sang, I found myself thinking back, impressed at the genius of our Founding Fathers.  Against some pretty steep odds, and after an uncomfortably long period of foundering, the ship of state has righted itself, but not through any random miracle or massive act of violence; it has righted itself through the foresight and devotion to reason shown by that intrepid group of 18th century philosopher-poets in their attempt to create a utopia and bequeath it to the generations yet to come.

If you need something to cheer you up, you really should hear the show, and it might be available by the time you read this.  Check HEREContinue reading

Where Is Your God Now, Libbie?

Having plumbed a new low in North Carolina politics–and, let’s face it, a low in NC, the home of Jesse Helms, is by default, a national low–Elizabeth Dole has managed to lose her senate seat, perhaps primarily by accusing her opponent, Kay Hagan, of being (gasp) an atheist.

Well, in point of fact, she lost by merely occupying her senate seat instead of actually doing anything productive for the state and nation, and by being more closely associated with her husband’s home state of Kansas than with her native state.  But still, the political ad, which New York Magazine, in their supplement entitled “Our Super-duper, Ultrasimple Election-Watching Guide,” called “the single worst ad by any candidate in 2008″ did not help her desperate cause.

This development is really kind of encouraging to one who has lived in the state for almost 40 years–not that North Carolina political ads continue to be so debased as to leave only disgust in the minds and hearts of thinking people everywhere, but that this last foray into the muck has not succeeded in bringing victory.  This stuff usually works great here!  What happened? Continue reading

Good ol’ boy network? I hardly think so

The recent anti-élite campaign jargon of the McCain-Palin camp has made use of a most annoying–but ubiquitous–malapropism.  Palin, especially, refers rather often, and rather annoyingly, to the “good ol’ boy network.”  If anything could solidify one’s status as outside of the élite, this off-target utterance would be that thing.  See, there is a world, or at least a continent, of difference between a “good old boy” and an “old boy,’ and rest assured, it is the old boys who have the network to which one really wants to belong.

You’d never be able to buy your way in to either network, however.  An “old boy” is a graduate of one of England’s “public” or independent schools, someplace like Eton College.  While good ol’ boys have quite the little network of their own, membership will cost one very little.  All one has to do is be among the fourth or fifth generation of a respectable, church-going family living in some region of the rural south, and you’re well on your way.  True, this membership will only take one only just so far.  Still, A “good ol’ boy” need not have graduated from anywhere, even an American public high school.  One need only possesses a spectrum of traits, which make one worthy of the title, rendered somewhat lovingly in one’s absence.

The term signifies one’s apparent humility, one’s apparent basic decency, as well as one’s obvious tendency to withhold any forthright opinion on any particular topic in the presence of strangers.  This is the central trait of the good ol’ boy, and one he holds in common with many of his upper-crust British cohort.  He leaves people free to hold, and even to express, the most outlandish positions on matters many and various.  He’ll never tell anyone they’re wrong; he’ll never tell people what he thinks about that topic, but you will never win him over to your line of thinking, no matter how solid your argument.  Oh, you will think he agrees with you, but you will want to be a fly on the wall when next he gets together with others of his ilk to know the truth.

Although he is a man of no apparent opinions in the presence of people he doesn’t know that well, one finds he is also a man of rigidly held, dogmatic beliefs once one gets to know him.  It is this trait, and perhaps this trait alone, which he shares in common with the old boys of Britain.  It is this trait, perhaps, that serves as a marker of his common heritage with the ruling élite of the United Kingdom.

On a related note, one has noticed how natives of tiny, overpopulated island nations have a way of taking politeness to the next level.  Look at Japan and England, for example.  I mean, they come by this trait naturally, it seems, and it is easy to see why.  How uncomfortable would it be to spend time with someone once one had established a source of disagreement with him or her?  Best, then, to keep all such disagreements from ever surfacing, to keep one’s own counsel, to state forthright opinion only among those one knows already hold the same opinion.  It only makes sense.

Identity: What’s Race Got to Do with It?

picture of bikeIt was bound to happen, and it did, early in the campaign so that measures could be taken.  I refer, of course, to the calls from various entities that Barack Obama is “tryna ac’ white.”  I don’t know exactly what the Obama campaign did to quell this particular complaint, but it seems to have gone away as quickly as it came.

The issue makes one wonder, though.  For example, how would a person go about doing such a thing?  If he or she did so successfully, how would another person tell if he were doing it and if it were intentional?  Apparently, many people see no problem making such judgments.  Also significant, though, is whether a person can be judged too harshly for doing it in the first place.  I mean, lots of white people do it every day, apparently, and it’s hard to condemn a whole race without coming in for some condemnation yourself.

Another question occurs as a natural outgrowth of the conversation:  Assuming that certain behaviors and attitudes still can be recognized as “white” or “black” in 21st century America, why do such racial distinctions still exist after centuries of racial coexistence?  Wouldn’t you think, under normal circumstances, that a certain blending and mellowing would have taken place over the centuries?  Wouldn’t you think that whatever differences existed historically would have by this time become almost imperceptible?  That, clearly, is not the case.  Something must be going on here.  One wonders how intentional this something might be.

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