Monthly Archives: October 2009

Fighting for Our Lives

Posted on by
Reply

None of us have been in the same room as perfection and none of us ever will be. But I would like to think each of us has the capacity to fight for our lives. The question is, will we? Will I? Will you?

We all know people who, for reasons that can be hard to understand, won’t fight for their lives. People who leave their medical conditions unaddressed, or live with medical conditions they don’t know about because they don’t go to the doctor. I am one who is guilty of not going to the doctor enough. Remember, in this blog, I promise you honesty, not perfection.  Many of us know people who battle with substance-abuse addictions; sometimes they wear the face of booze, sometimes drugs, oftentimes both.

I have known and know people who are stopped by something or someone when it comes to declaring war against the forces that are intent on ending their lives. And if these forces can’t end life right away, they’ll damage the hell out of it in the meantime. These forces are relentless. They possess evil tenacity and zero conscience. They don’t give a rat’s ass if you are a nice person. They’re not going to leave you alone because you have a good job or nice car or because your family and friends love you.

But what stops so many of us from issuing this declaration of war against an addiction or the possibility or presence of deadly disease?

I think the answer is found in this observation. Somewhere along the line we lost sight of our value.

If we were raised in abusive households, we may never have experienced our value in the first place. If you are a member of a minority, it is not unlikely that you’ve been given the message that you are worth less than others. The reason I would urge all of you to declare war, not just against any force designed to end your life, but against influence of your history, your society or your present that stops you from seeing your value is because your value is really there. It has always been there.

Just because you can’t  experience yourself as being a worthwhile human being yet, doesn’t mean you are not a worthwhile human being. It means something or someone is stopping you from experiencing yourself accurately.

Who do you think deserves control over your experience of you? You or your history? You are something or someone in your present who gives you the message that you are worthless? I vote for you. After all, if I am right, and I am, that you truly are a valuable and extraordinary person, don’t you think you have a right to find out? I do.

When a Friend Dies

Posted on by
Reply

This evening I find out a friend of mine died on October 9. He was 57 years old. I learn this and my insides fold inward, as if they are in some primal embrace.

There is no escaping from this loss. The sound of his laugh, his rapier sharp humor, his hefty wisdom streak, though I think he avoided digesting the wisdom he so generously shared with others, including me, the fact I loved him, as did many others, nothing will bring him back. The light is out.

For a time there is less oxygen in the air when a friend dies, a little less light in the day, the sun seems to dim and the stars in the sky seem hazed. It’s as if all of life is diminished by the loss. And then, as life is, you are given a chance to remember to live. You are allowed the chance to open doors and, as Thoreau said, live the life you imagined. The sun regains its strength and the air it s oxygen and the stars their luster. Life is present, and so are you. Live it.

Time will still all our voices. Until then, live. Don’t let those who wounded you in your history stop you from living your life now. I don’t care who they were. My message to you is live, remember to live. And remember to tell your friends you love them. Thankfully, my friend knew I loved him because I told him.

Rest in peace, J.B.

Dream So Bold

Posted on by
Reply

*

In soul muscle moments our hearts unfold

Daring dreams long thought lost

And days we’d thought long gone by

With wounds paid at such a cost

*

In heart smiling moments eyes glow hope

And hands glance into full hold

And here comes another sunrise

That welcomes this dream so bold

*

Walk with me near and walk with me far

The rhythmic wonders of your jazz like eyes

Sends me smiling in joyous dancing

Thinkin’ maybe just maybe we’ve won the prize

*

Wakeup, Ross Douthat – Reality is Calling

Posted on by
Reply

If anyone ever has the gall to accuse New York Times columnist Ross Douthat of eloquent use of the English language or an iota of humility, please let me know ‘cause I’d like to set’m straight.  I’m not sure what the Times is paying Mr. Douthat but I suspect he’d get better pay and feel more at home in the seedy enclave of Fox News.

In his column today he suggests President Barack Obama should have turned down the Nobel Peace Prize because, the somewhat delusional Mr. Douhat writes, it was “an opportunity to cut himself free, in a stroke, from the baggage that’s weighed his presidency down — the implausible expectations, the utopian dreams, the messianic hoo-ha.” Hoo-ha, now there’s a word that dazzles the imagination. I bet the Bard would’ve jumped at the chance to use it. Macbeth to the witches: “Whassup with all that hoo ha?” 

And while I am at it, I wonder what implausible expectations Delusional Douthat is referring to? The end of torture? Healthcare for all? Accountability in the executive branch? Making sure we don’t, say,  start any wars based on information we know is, well, in a word, bullshit?

Delusional Douthat doesn’t stop there. He says the president wasn’t brave enough to say no to the prize. Let me clue you in on a rather obvious, though not to you, truth,  DD. It takes a level of courage deep and powerful  for a black American to run for my country’s highest office. I suspect if you’ve ever been in the same room with that kind of courage, it wasn’t yours.

Folks like DD would actually be funny were it not so sad and truly tragic that some good people are taken in by them. Delusional Douthat actually says Mr. Obama missed a chance to “draw a clean line between himself and all the overzealous Obamaphiles, at home and abroad, who poured their post-Christian, post-Marxist yearnings into the vessel of his 2008 campaign.” Total trash from the pen of DD.

There is an insidious and dangerous phrase in Delusional Douthat’s column today. A phrase reflects the despicable arrogance inflicted on the world by the Bush-Cheney administration that caused enormous damage to my country and my country’s relationships with other countries. Listen closely.  DD writes, “Here was a chance to establish himself, definitively, as an American president — too self-confident to accept an unearned accolade, and too instinctively democratic to go along with European humbug.” European humbug? You are talking about our allies nitwit, countries whose people and communities are just as valuable as ours.

Listen closely, DD, it is, in part, Mr. Obama’s remarkable efforts to undo the damage caused by this arrogance that led the committee to award him the Nobel Peace Prize in the first place.

Wakeup, Mr. Douthat – reality is calling.

Congratulations Mr. President

Posted on by
1

President Barack Obama is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and there are minds among us so twisted and or self-absorbed that they see this as a negative thing. Pardon me? The leader of your country is awarded the most prestigious peace prize in the world and this is a problem?

Some claim it may impede the country’s ability to reach its goals. Are you shitting me? If a Nobel Peace Prize makes things more difficult for my country, we are in worse shape than I thought. And God forbid anyone gives credence to Mikhail Gorbachev’s and Nelson Mandela’s praise of the Nobel Committee’s decision. Hell, what would those two know? (Answer? A lot more than most.)

That Obama, a president I genuinely love and the first president in my lifetime that I’d genuinely like to meet, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, makes perfect sense. Moreover, it is a stark and blisteringly accurate reminder of how much damage and destruction the Bush-Cheney Cowardice Cartel did to my country’s relationship to the world and its relationship to the very principles it was founded on.

Bush and Cheney were typical bullies. Both were cowards. Deferment Dick and Wimpy W did anything but step up to the plate when their country’s military needed them. Once in power they went around challenging everyone to a fight. You’re either for us or against us, you cretins! they bellowed, like the two spoiled brats they are, their fists clenched tight with a bravery that exists only when you know anyone but you has to do the fighting.

My country is arguably the most powerful country in the world. So just imagine what it was like for those in the world community when the leaders of the most powerful country in the world abandon their nation’s principles and swagger around like a drunk at a frat party looking for a fight. Imagine the relief in the world community and, by the way, in the large majority of the American Community, when an American leader emerges who is rich in strength, integrity, courage and, a trait that continues to baffle both sides of the aisle in Washington, honesty.

Congratulations, Mr. President. Your Nobel Peace Prize is richly deserved.