I’m a long way and many years from an incident in that fair city, if so it may be called. In the 1960s, I had declined nomination as president of a Pennsylvania branch of the NAACP because I felt African Americans should hold its top post. While a person of “color,” I was […]
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
I REMEMBER BALTIMORE
June 19, 2015“MEND THINE EVERY FLAW”!
June 19, 2015I was once part of a populist movement to change the national anthem to America the Beautiful. The Star Spangled Banner is eminently unsing-able, and is even trumped on July 4 when we set off fireworks to strains of the 1812 Overture— composed by a Russian and nothing to do with us. It […]
UNENDING REBELLION
June 19, 2015Given all recent attention to the end of the American Civil War and the death of Lincoln, be it known that there is among you a Southern transplant to New England, but one lacking the revisionist views of those for whom that conflict will never be over. My Yankee acquaintances however doubt that […]
WHAT SCARES ME MOST
October 28, 2013llalloween’s here, and I am reminded: Some people are scaredy-cats, and I’m one of them. We order our lives so as to feel in control, to be captains of our fate, masters of our destiny. So who are we kidding? Herman Hesse said we live in the realm of the uninsurable. Freud said it’s […]
WORK, WORK, WORK
September 2, 2013Thoughts on Labor Day 2013 Hesiod said the first mortals were made of gold. That would be totally good news but Kronos was king of heaven and had a habit of eating his own children, so it was wise to exercise caution. Otherwise these […]
BLACK HISTORY MONTH
March 20, 2013(This was an earlier post, for March 1, 2013 following the M.L. King, Jr. Day post titled, “Long Live the King”) Yes, this is Black History Month or, what white folks call, “February.” Few persons use this time to find out things they don’t know. What was Jim Crow? Who was Frederick Douglass? […]
LET’S SEE: THIS MONTH IS…
February 21, 2013…Black History Month or, what white folks call, “February.” Few persons use this time to find out things they don’t know. What was Jim Crow? Who was Frederick Douglass? How on earth did this country, “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” come so soon to tolerate […]
TITANIC ILLUSIONS
April 14, 2012This is April 14, the day in 1912 that the world’s biggest metaphor hit an iceberg. On board, John Jacob Astor, the fourth by that name in the family dynasty, was heard to say: “I rang for ice, but this is ridiculous.” The Boston Red Sox had just built a new ballpark that would […]
Ichabod's Kin 