By Ernie McCray

When I was a child there was a commercial about a dog named Nipper who was supposed to be listening to his “master’s voice” on a windup disc gramophone. I thought about him early one morning recently.

On this morning I woke up a little earlier than usual because my iPhone SE startled me awake, vibrating and buzzing like crazy, kind of like those European police sirens.

And, hey, I’ve got to say I didn’t know I had an app for such as all that. I shut that little device up by grabbing it like a cowboy wrestling a steer he’d just roped only to find out that its histrionics was regarding an article about a book Arizona Senator John McCain had written. I was forced to question the very notion that I was in possession of anything approaching a smartphone.

Still Loving After All These 80 Years
(The Formative Years: More to Come)

If I’m breathing April 18th, 2018,
I will be 80 years old.
And to brag a little bit,
I lived those years
with a lot of love in my soul
and that’s quite an ac-com-plish-ment
for someone with
COLORED written on his birth cer-ti-ficate
if the truth be told,
considering I first said “Hello”
to the world
in Tucson, Arizona,

By Ernie McCray

Overcoming Gloom In a Grand Canyon State of Mind

The other day

I sat in my living room

caught up in thoughts of my daughter,

feeling a kind of gloom

that seemed to loom

over me

like a petrifyingly dark full moon

in a horror movie

Laura Ingraham’s put down of LeBron James on your network was so out of line and unnecessary and ridiculously insulting and dismissive. What does his grammar have to do with anything or his perceived “lack of education”? Why should he, in a country where he has the right to express himself, “Shut up and dribble”?

As a 79-year-old black man, it’s refreshing for me to see young black people like this great athlete speak out on what’s happening in the world — in this case, expressing his views on our president — who really “doesn’t give a fuck about the people” as he pointed out.

The “people” being those who don’t support his hateful, racist, mysogynist, sexist, xenophobic, abusive, disgraceful, dictator-loving, ill-informed, unintelligent, illogical, jingoistic, bewildering, divisive, predatory, blow-harded, clownish, non-Christian,

by Ernie McCray

I dream a New Years Wish for my fellow black brothers and sisters, one steeped in my yearning for a country that truly is committed to the mythical land of “liberty and justice for all” we Americans pledge loudly and proudly in classrooms and public gatherings.

I just wish we actively pursued such ideals.

Now, I realize that we, like all other “individual” citizens of the country, can rise and shine and fulfill the loftiest of hopes and dreams.

We can find ample proof of that in our history as we’ve accomplished a little of everything. We’ve won Nobel Peace Prizes and journeyed beyond earth’s skies into outer space.

By Ernie McCray

Some dude on television was trying to make a case that the president is not a white supremacist.

But, hey, I’ve dealt with white supremacists for 79 plus years and I have to say that Donald J. Trump is not only one, he’s the best example of such a being I have ever seen.

Take what he did with Jemele Hill, the ESPN sportscaster, my latest hero. She called him out on his white supremacism and he wants her fired and wants the network to apologize to him for her “untruth.” Scratch the prefix “un” and you see what he really wants her to apologize for.

By Ernie McCray

Tina Turner once sang “What’s love got to do with it?” And, ordinarily, as one who is a “love my neighbor as thyself” kind of guy, I’d answer: “Everything.” Giving my love is pretty much how I’ve managed to survive in the Milky Way. I don’t know any other way. But how loving am I? Really? I had never asked that question before receiving an email recently from an old friend, a high school classmate — in response to something I had written about The Donald. She wrote:

Dear Ernie. I believe that Mr. Trump is a deeply disturbed man. The only way I know of to soften that pain in my heart and gut is to send him love.

By Ernie McCray

Jim Comey. My man! I wish I could shake his hand. I mean I’ve got to put aside my deep deep deep disdain for the FBI to give props to a man who has come through with something I’ve so much wanted somebody from a high place to do — call Donald J. Trump out for what he is: a liar. For all the world to hear and see.

Of course he was stating the obvious but it needed to be said just as he said it: out loud – because some of us and the media keep cutting him slack with witty intellectualizing about what a lie really is, how a lie might not be a lie if it wasn’t intended to be a lie. What a lie all of that is.

By Ernie McCray

I don’t know about y’all but, with all the Three Stooges kind of shenanigans going on in the White House, I feel like we’ve entered the Trump Zone.

It’s definitely not the Twilight Zone, that’s for sure. The Trump Zone’s stories go way beyond any episode I’ve ever seen on the Twilight Zone.

No character in the Twilight Zone comes close to the main character in the Trump Zone, an orange faced villain with hair a scarecrow would refuse to wear, a man who, wherever you look, he is there.