Category: Columns

Not too long ago I stood in a line at a grocery store with two men who were old and tall like me.

I was captivated by the scene and found myself reacting out loud, in a spirit of goodwill and levity, with: “Wow, it looks like National Old Tall People’s Day.” One of the men smiled and the other, as though he had just chugged a gallon of lemon juice, managed to say: “Yeah, if you want to call yourself old.” And being one who is tickled pink (picture that in a man the color of coffee without cream) to be old I had nothing else to say.

With all that is going on in the world today, this little problem I faced today is a small one. None-the-less, I have never liked being screwed without a climax and I think that screwing almost took place today.

Like most residents in San Diego, I receive several monthly advertisements offering me discounts, free gifts, reduced price items. This is not about those advertisements; rather it is about one particular advertiser.

Every year I spend Thanksgiving and the weekend after it with my family and friends in the Anza Borrego Desert. On hikes with my seven-year-old son, we are grateful for our chance encounters with roadrunners, jackrabbits, coyotes, beetles, and the occasional lucky sighting of a big horn sheep. We have a friend who is a birder who can tell us what kinds of birds we are near from the sound of their calls. When we go back to eat, we break bread with another friend who beat cancer and whose presence reminds us that life is short and precious.

More than anything else, it is the beautiful stillness of the desert that brings us there—the way the landscape seems to listen. At night you can still see stars and think about the vastness of the universe in a way that reminds you of your smallness and your connection to the largeness of all that is. It is humbling and enlarging at the same time.

Last week Adbusters, a publication that was important to the birth of the Occupy Wall Street movement, put out the following:

TACTICAL BRIEFING #18
Occupy the High Ground!

Hey you creatives, artists, environmentalists, workers, moms, dads, students, malcontents, do-gooders and aspiring martyrs in the snow:

The last four months have been hard fought, inspiring and delightfully revolutionary. We brought tents, hunkered down, held our assemblies, and lobbed a meme-bomb that continues to explode the world’s imagination. Many of us have never felt so alive. We have fertilized the future with our revolutionary spirit … and a thousand flowers will surely bloom in the coming Spring.

But as winter approaches an ominous mood could set in … hope thwarted is in danger of turning sour, patience exhausted becoming anger, militant nonviolence losing its allure. It isn’t just the mainstream media that says things could get ugly. What shall we do to keep the magic alive?

Last Tuesday citizens of the bellwether state of Ohio handed Republican John Kasich a crushing defeat as they voted overwhelmingly to repeal Senate Bill 5 that would have undermined collective bargaining rights for public sector workers. This and other Republican losses across the country last week has excited many Democrats who are hoping these elections are a signal that the Tea Party wave has crested and the gloomy horizon for President Obama and his party may be brightening.

This week’s story is the utter appalling hypocrisy exposed in how the police responded to two protests on November 9. The first took place at Cal Berkeley, where a thousand students protested the steep hikes in student tuition and the ongoing administrative tilt toward privatization. They attempted to establish an occupation on the campus with tents. The police viciously lunged with their batons at students who had linked arms. There were 39 arrests that day and no one knows how many of these young people are still walking around with welts on their body from that barbaric attack. As a post script, we now know that linking arms is a form of violence that justified the police response.

….and lobbing tear gas canisters and shooting rubber bullets at us?

“And so, demonstrating like this is as American as apple pie. We have been marching up and down and demonstrating throughout our history…” Former Secretary of State Colin Powell

Why is there the footprint of a jack boot in the America pie?

We’ve all seen by now the “people’s” videos of non-violent women in NYC being surrounded with orange net and pepper sprayed by the police…

A little note: I told this story of being separated from my mother when I was six years old in “Say What? (Remembering a Childhood Experience),” OB Rag, November 2, 2011. After writing that piece I asked myself: What would my mother say about that year in our lives? And I started seeing her in my mind, standing with her hands on her hips, feet firmly on the ground, her natural stance for baring her soul – and from this image of her there came these words of recall – in her voice:

What a moment. Pulling that little boy of mine to my chest and telling him that we were going to have to live apart was the most heart wrenching experience of my life. I don’t know if I could do it again.

We are weeks into the Occupation of America and, despite struggles with police in numerous cities the public discussion of economic injustice and inequality persists. At the nation’s paper of record, The New York Times, the debate continues with David Brooks furiously trying to belittle and dismiss the message of Occupy Wall Street. In his latest column he bemoans that we are focused on “the wrong inequality” and tells us:

That’s because the protesters and media people who cover them tend to live in or near the big cities, where the top 1 percent is so evident. That’s because the liberal arts majors like to express their disdain for the shallow business and finance majors who make all the money. That’s because it is easier to talk about the inequality of stock options than it is to talk about inequalities of family structure, child rearing patterns and educational attainment. That’s because many people are wedded to the notion that our problems are caused by an oppressive privileged class that perpetually keeps its boot stomped on the neck of the common man.

This week’s news of the movement takes place against the backdrop of two reports also released this week that detail how the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer .” We knew that already. Now we can update our signs…

The leading story is Occupy Oakland’s successful general strike and temporary port shutdown this past Wednesday. Estimates are all over the map about how many people participated over the course of the day to protest the violent eviction of Occupiers and wounding of an Iraq War vet by police during the previous week. Check out this raw chopper video of the march to the port and do a head count yourself!

It was a “Say what?” moment if there ever was one, you know one of those moments where the words coming through your ears reach a brain that can only go: “Did I hear what I thought I just heard? Are you kidding me?”

I don’t recall what I was doing when the moment arrived but it was the first “Say what?” moment of my life, but being a six-year-old boy, all boy, as they say, and the year being 1944, I was probably chasing bad guys, ala “Geronimoooo…!” or “Hi-Yo, Silver, Away!” But, in the midst of whatever I was doing I heard my mother say: “We’re moving away.”

RIYADH, SAUDI ARABIA – I think most Americans have little idea of the climatic conditions here in Saudi Arabia. We, with the exception of those who have experience in small desert towns, have nothing with which to compare this environment in Riyadh. It is stark, barren, bright, superheated, and dry to the nth degree. It is unforgiving, mean, murderous, virtually without plants, animals, water or shade. Somehow, Saudi Arabs have managed to adapt to and survive in this ultra-difficult setting for, I’m guessing, 5,000 years. It seems fair to say that’s worth a tip of the hat.