Yes, I’m a liberal drinker, isn’t everyone?

Last night after work I went to the meeting of Drinking Liberally, a group of ne’er do wells who meet at the Transfer Pizza to socialize. and kick back a few drinks in a comfortable atmosphere.Getting there represented a logistical challenge since I worked at 27th and Loomis and needed two buses to reach 1st and Mitchell St. I walked several blocks down Mitchell because I expected the bus to arrive at 8:45.

I wanted to meet the featured speaker Mahlon Mitchell, a confident young African-American man who is running for Lieutenant Governor. He was sought out as a candidate three months ago, far before the recall election was certified by the Government Accountability Board. Mitchell is president of the Wisconsin Firefighters Association and lives with his wife, April and their two children in Fitchburg which is just outside of Madison. He was born in 1977 around the time I was graduating from the University of Buffalo as a non-traditional student. He’s even younger than all of my nephews.

To say that Mahlon faces an uphill battle would be understating the case. This is a very white state and only one African-American Vel Phillips has ever been elected to state wide office. In the state’s largest city, Milwaukee, fewer than half of the black men are in the labor force, according to a report published by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The state is still reeling from the unjust killing of Bo Morrison  a bi-racial young man who was shot while standing on a porch by a man who claimed he  was defending his castle.

Moreover, we are more likely to find African-Americans behind bars or  in bars than working at the construction sites around town. In some ways, as bleak as things may be, this is the right time for new leadership to emerge from the community. Recently Eyon Biddle a first term county supervisor with a union background, ran unsuccessfully against incumbent Willie Hines. At the same time G. Spencer Coggs became the first African-American elected to city-wide office in his victory to become Milwaukee City Treasurer. His niece Milele Coggs continues to impress as a young leader on the Common Council.

Things are changing, though far too slowly. I encouraged Mahlon to press for change in the way Wisconsin uses its federal mental health block grant. In the weeks ahead I will be contacting him about my concerns. It seemed fitting that I met him the day that the Walker administration trashed the state’s contract with Talgo, the Spanish train manufacturer. Despite the fact Wisconsin had invested millions of dollars under previous governor Jim Doyle on upgrading our rail infrastructure, soon to be recalled Scott Walker made killing this deal a priority once he took office.

If all goes well, we will have an opportunity to reverse those job killing policies in Madison and set an example for the rest of the country to  follow.

Related articles

• Drinking Liberally – Seattle (horsesass.org)
• Reprint: Mahlon Mitchell: Best Wishes (showedupandshowedout.wordpress.com)
• Mahlon Mitchell, Wisconsin Firefighters Union President, To Run For Lieutenant Governor (huffingtonpost.com)
• One of the 44% (kenyatta2009.wordpress.com)

Bully!

It Gets Better Project: 2011 NYC Pride (Photo credit: Jason Pier in DC)

J. Reuben Clark Law School (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

bullying (Photo credit: annavanna)

I just wrote about and shared the video that Brigham Young University students did for the series It Gets Better. And I realized that an important part of the struggle young people face is bullying and I’m here to say you can overcome bullies because I did. I was bullied in my old mostly African-American neighborhood and in the white community where my family moved. I was a small, skinny dark boy with glasses and acne and I was definitely a target. I didn’t sound or act like anyone else.

Some guys boasted about girls, smoked and wore the right clothes. I preferred going to the library, finding a book and reading. I identified with the character in the book Loneliness of a long distance runner.

So what did I do to survive and how can my experience help anyone else?

1. I had an involved mother. She recognized that I was having trouble with the kids in my neighborhood and even took  them to court to force them to leave me alone. Eventually she moved us to protect me from them.
2. I had a younger brother to whom I was a role model. I helped him fight his battles and that meant I had to stay strong.
3. I recognized that I had talent. Despite the discouraging comments of teachers and other students I discovered that I was smart, a good writer and athletic. Later on I became a listener.  Listening became especially important when it came time t develop a career.
4. I learned as Gordon Parks said that I had a choice of weapons. I could stand my ground and fight, run away get help from the American Civil Liberties Union or seek out people whose ideas were similar to mine.
5. I was not always available. We had just one house phone when I was growing up and I didn’t give out my number to a lot of kids.  It’s hard to imagine the days before facebook, twitter and cell phones which keep us connected to friends and may make us vulnerable to enemies. Today I ask people who seem vulnerable why they gave out their phone numbers to so many who mean to harm them.
6. We had fights where we made our points but we didn’t go out to kill one another. The one time that I was pounding a kid’s head into  the ground surprised and frightened me.
7. I developed allies. I have written a few times about the importance of my first white friend in school. When you are lonely and small you are more likely to be cornered and beat up. So even if you are “a nerd,” someone who likes to study, read books, write poetry and go for walks, there’s  probably someone else in your school who likes doing those same things. It’s a matter of picking up on the subtle things they may say or do. In my case, I discovered that my friend’s sense of humor resulted from memorizing several Bill Cosby albums.
8. Start dating. I think that there are some many positives from dating they outweigh almost any negatives. For me, it meant that a girl had found me attractive. Even though I was not good looking to the kids who disliked me, I met a wonderful Irish catholic school student  at a political campaign headquarters not far from where I lived. She played guitar, sang and was a wonderful girl. She liked the features tat my detractors found so repulsive. While some people prefer the small thin lips that a lot of white people have, she enjoyed kissing my dark, full African-American lips. Trust me on this, because it’s part of self acceptance. As you learn to develop who you are and what you believe, you will find romantic opportunities available.

My advice is to use all of these techniques so that you can get beyond the point where you have to fight people on the street because you can defeat them with your mind.

Related articles

• What Should I Do If I’m Bullied? (education.com)
• What are the signs of a “bully-victim”? (education.com)
• The Bully Project (kumuconnect.wordpress.com)

And so, Bo’s Killer Goes Free

Today it was announced that the killer of Bo Morrison, a young man who stood on the wrong porch at the wrong time became a victim of the right to defend one’s castle. In a news report, it was discovered that the 20 year-old had been drinking. Since he had been at an underage drinking party that was hardly surprising. But as I suggested in my earlier blog entry Judge, Jury and Executioner, there was no evidence that Bo had done anything except try to avoid being found. It was a matter of his bad judgment.

Before I was old enough to drink, I bought some gin and cola with a couple of friends and drank until I threw up. That pretty much cured me of alcoholism. there’s noting worse than shame, guilt and a lousy stomach to make you realize this is not where you want to be. We were in our neighborhood, we were young black boys and the judgment was faced was that of our parents.

I think that’s the way it should be. I would have loved to hear Bo’s parents discuss with him their hopes and dreams for him and why he needed to remain alcohol-free. But, unfortunately thy never got the chance.

I have read stories of teen underage drinking parties where no one was killed. In fact, in white communities, the police are not always guaranteed entry to check identifications and determine who who should be ticketed.

I never met Bo Morrison and his family. I probably would never have heard about them if Bo had  not been killed in a rush to judgment. There is a vast difference between a young unarmed male on a porch and one who poses an imminent danger requiring an armed response. What the reckless legislators and governor of Wisconsin Scott Walker have done is to leave it up to any Mary, Jane, Harry and Doe to decide on a split second whether that difference matters.

Bo Morrison should have been alive and well and studying today and the man who killed him should have had reason to pause and wonder, is this the right thing to do?

Fatherhood

Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

I met a strong black man on the bus Friday morning who I need to tell you about. Months ago I told a story about something ordinary. A poor black man with his daughter waiting at the bust stop. But Friday I was at the bus stop, got on and a black woman driver asked me, “where is your smile?” Mind you the black repugnant sheriff of Milwaukee keeps talking like the sky is falling and you are absolutely risking your life by riding the Milwaukee County bus system.

Despite a series of fare increases and service cutbacks, our buses still get people where they need to go. I have noticed there are many more African-American bus drivers than there were 20 or 30 years ago. Including the young woman driving the bus Friday who asked me where was my smile. My smile went from her to the tall, distinguished man sitting in the first seat. He was wearing alligator shoes and his bag indicated he was a veterans counselor at the state job service office. He was on the way to work.

As I spoke with him I learned that he had served in Vietnam a few years after I had left the military.  His job had been assisting diplomats evacuate the war ravaged country. He was wounded and was compensated by the government. War was very much on our minds. In this era of the all-volunteer army people have a choice whether to go to war. I thought about  the young man who died in Afghanistan at the end of last year a few days after re-enlisting. I thought about the family he left behind, his wife and children mourning his loss.

I also thought about the Obama administration updating the American military posture and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta reassuring war hawks that we will maintain our ability to fight two simultaneous wars. Only a few days after we closed out (but not really)  our disastrous involvement in Iraq, we’re reminded that we may still blunder around in search of enemies somewhere else in the world. I shared my concerns with my fellow rider, Mr. Jones. He told me that he had his wife had raised several adult children to be strong educated civilians. They had engineers, therapists and other accomplished children of whom they were very proud. And none of them are going into the military.

We talked about the military as an unofficial jobs program, especially in our present climate of high unemployment. And Uncle Sam will come calling offering young people an opportunity to come in a box. As Mr. Jones left the bus I thought about the lessons fathers teach their children regarding service to their country. He had done his job well, in instilling values that led them to succeed. You don’t need to join the military to serve your country. You can do just as well helping to build bridges, healing the sick and raising your children.  Thank you for your service, Mr. Jones.

Image via Wikipedia

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• Milwaukee County Bus Stops…Now Featuring MPD Patrols (themilwaukeedrum.com)
• Lamar Tyler: “The Wire” Star Tray Chaney Promotes Fatherhood in New Music Video (huffingtonpost.com)
• Federal grant helps ‘Concerned Black Men’ put fatherhood first (thegrio.com)

Christmas with Grace

Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

Tomorrow morning I will be on the flight back to Milwaukee via Detroit. In the afternoon I will be seeing my cat and getting a lot of stern looks from her for my absence.  I hope that by next Christmas I will be living in a better environment and be able to hire a trainer to help her open a few cans of cat food by herself when she gets hungry.

But this message is about Christmas in Buffalo, a place my friends always associate with snow and bitter cold. As I sit here typing the sky is gray, the winds are calm and there are buds on the trees. Surely, you were all dreaming of a balmy Christmas.

Some years, Christmas has meant the end of relationships and sorrow. Dinners consisted of stone soup flavored with angry silence. Other years, the holiday was filled the hope and the beginning of a new job. This time around, it was filled with grace. There was my nephew John correcting a problem on on his mother’s  computer by writing three sentences about his love for his 2 1/2 year old daughter Grace. As she saw what he had written on the computer screen, she responded “I love you too, Daddy.” This girl may go from day care to high school.

I can’t begin to tell you how proud I am of John and seeing the husband and father he has become. He was born the year that I graduated from Lafayette High School and his photos are on my Facebook and other pages. I saw John and his wife Jen facing issues together, I hugged them and Grace as they left and felt so glad we were part of the same family.

I enjoyed having my sister and mother fuss over me because that’s just part of what they do. We all fretted over the trials and tribulations of my nephews, cousins and my younger sister.  My future will be filled with more stories of the other people in my life. I am looking  forward to being the proud uncle, attending graduations and other celebrations. This Christmas has already begun receding into the past.

At our Christmas dinner I declined an invitation to say grace, because I am a secular person and have been so for many years. I find grace in every day life, not by thanking all powerful beings for our lives. This is the day, this is the one, wild and precious life we are given and I take time in word and deed to rejoice and be glad in it.

Related articles

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Have yourself an inclusive holiday

Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

This is a holiday shared by many different traditions. Jews, Christians, pagans, capitalists, con men and war planners have all found December to be fruitful. I am a man for all seasons and I don’t mind sharing. I am celebrating the holidays with my family but we have not said grace. They respect my non-religious beliefs. If you are secure in what you believe you don’t have to push them on others like a brand of soap.

For me the winter solstice celebration speaks to my mind. Songs like Sleighride, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas and Izat You Santa Claus feel more meaningful than Hark the Herald Angels Sing. I enjoy listening to Sammy Davis Jr. Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra as part of my holiday tradition.

But these end of the year celebrations are mostly about family. Today I will see my niece Grace for the first time. It will be only the second time that I have seen her mother. I am visiting my mother and sister for the first time in four years.  Even at 60 years old I got up at 3:30 not long after Santa’s helpers retired and looked at the Christmas tree I had helped to decorate.

When I shopped, I heard the voices of children asking for their parents. As I stopped at the Detroit Airport I spoke with the earnest young man from Delta Airlines who seemed determined to sell me some kind of preferred flyer membership tied to using American Express credit cards. I had lunch at a restaurant in  the airport and gave a generous tip to the waitress. At the stores I have contributed to the Salvation Army bell-ringers. And I have wished my Facebook friends a Merry Christmas.

The ways that we celebrate have changed and we create new traditions with each passing year. This is the first Christmas of marriage equality in my old hometown of Buffalo. And a gay time was had by all. So many seasons, so many reasons to celebrate in our hearts. Spread the love and put down the hate for we are all our parents’ children.

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“Seriously!?” Saturday: “Goooooooooooo Incest!”

“Seriously!?” Saturday: “Goooooooooooo Incest!”.

 

Reposted from a young woman Kimberly Back about a prank in which students were kissed and groped in an odd contest at school

Things My Family Taught Me

Image by epSos.de via Flickr

Image via Wikipedia

I come from a beautiful and proud African-American family. My mother is the one who kept us together but for various reasons, including the economic changes in America in the 1970s and beyond we have split apart. I can remember a time of togetherness and the first Christmas in the first house my mother bought. When I recited this story about the first Christmas, I could not remember any presents she bought us that year. But the best thing was that she gave us a home.

I’ve been writing a lot about home recently these days. My family has been on my mind a lot too. The first thing was the song Grandma’s Hands. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv5pagal-ls My Grandmother was not very wise, in fact she  was  barely educated at all. She married two different men, both of whom died before her. There was a very brief marriage to the first and the second was to a man who worked on the railroad. He was a drunkard but the fact he worked  on the railroad gave him a pension.

My Grandmother sat in church a lot and she had a lot of symptoms of mental illness- dementia, they called it. But my mother, being a nurse, wondered whether her mother was being over medicated. Once her meds were reduced, she could talk coherently and remember to go to the bathroom by herself. So the first lesson she taught me was about mental illness and medication. Not all mental illness is actually a mental illness.

The second lesson I learned from my grandmother was about seeing our elderly parents for who they are, not what we want out of them. I mentioned the railroad connection from my grandfather. Well, the railroad pension and social security made my grandmother a valuable person. And her daughters fought over who was best qualified to take care of her.

I think that after she was free of the dementia she lived a better quality of life. But the struggle with my aunt has always haunted my mother. It was one of those lessons I never wanted to learn. Imagine if my mother became incapacitated and I suddenly developed the desire to take care of her. She has retirement income. And what if I struggled with my sisters instead thinking about what would be best for our mother?

From my mother I learned many things. The value of hard work, for one thing. She worked well into her late 70s. And she never treated anyone differently based upon the color of their skin. She worked with people of any kind of skin color but she did not let patients abuse her.

My older sister taught me the value of standing up for myself. She was always there for her sons even as her body failed her as lupus set in. She and my my mother taught me to listen even when I sometimes didn’t feel I was being heard. This quality helps me in my role as a peer specialist. It’s difficult for me to put some fancy title on what I do, because a lot of the time it really is listening and giving people the space to feel that they are being heard.

After  reflecting upon the holiday that I just spent with my family I have some more thoughts and clarity  about  this subject.

1. My family did not raise me to be poor.  Nor was I in a poor household. This statement cuts a lot of different ways. we never wanted for anything.  We were never evicted or had the lights turned off. Quite the opposite, in fact. My mother took in her sister and her children after they were evicted. Our house was always warm because mom hated cold, drafty homes.

2. My family taught me to respect others’ opinions. They’re Christian, but I’m not. They have come to understand my boundaries. I was not grabbed by the scruff of the neck and taken to church.

3. We demonstrate our love by the things we do. I just told a young man (he’s 40 and I’m oh my gosh 60) at the barber shop just a few minutes ago that 75% of life is just  showing up.  And the other 25% is what we do when we’re there. We’re not highly demonstrative but I now that I am loved and how deeply I love them.

4. Family is the  beginning and the end. They are there when you emerge from the womb and their mark will be upon you as you are leaving this earth.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

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• My Mother’s Mental Health (mizreelmikkoi.wordpress.com)

Octo More Babies Than Anyone Can Take Care of

In high school I had a relationship with a sweet poetic woman named Kathleen. Unfortunately I also had a tendency to be all or nothing in my relationships. I would love you one day and want someone else the next. In other words I was a typical hormonal driven kid. My  mother had warned me against getting girls pregnant. Given the state of girdles in those days it  would have been difficult not to follow her advice.

After high school I saw Kathleen one day and she was visibly pregnant.  was devastated and said something about her ending up on welfare. Fast forward to the story of the so-called octomom.  Nadya Suleman was a young American woman with few skills who decided that having had 6 children and no husband she would have a  lot more children. The only other thing she had going for her was a resemblance to a movie star. Better living through plastic surgery.

More children turned out to be eight and 15 minutes of fame.  Never mind that there were wars (which are still going on, by the way), innocent people on death row, and crazy people trying to turn America into some kind of theocracy (yes they’re still at it!) octomom was big news. I was in a class at a local community college taught by an instructor who devoted several minutes of each session to updating us about the octomom. How do you know you’re in a bullshit class? Your teacher shows you videos about current events that have nothing to do with your subject, or anything else.

Fast forward to today where yahoo is presenting information about the plight of Ms. Octomom  who had bought a huge house for herself and all those kids, the house has holes punched in it but she has to move fast because the bank is going to foreclose on her. Will Child Protective Services be far behind?

How do these things work out? I found Kathleen through Classmates.com and learned she had struggled, had 6 kids in all but graduated from college. For the woman with the overactive womb, the sky is the limit. Any clinic that considers working with her as a client should lose its license immediately. Children are not playthings but human beings who deserve to be brought up in an environment surrounded by emotionally mature adults. Not people who are trying to fill voids in their own lives.

I hope the octomom never has another child and I hope her present children end up in foster care. Just because it is possible to impregnate a woman man times over does not mean it should be done. Nadya, stop in the name of love.

Related articles

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Early diagnosis is most important

I wrote a blog about the importance of writing in my life. One of the people I tried to inspire with my writing was my younger brother James. For me writing provided an equalizer with the white students in my classes. I could write and tell stories which temporarily made them forget or overlook the color of my skin.

But James was not as lucky. He probably had some kind of learning disability such as dyslexia but it was not until he was in the 7th or 8th grade when we saw his handwriting that we discovered the problem. He had been pushed along by the school system. Ironically I was temporarily put in a speech program that I didn’t need. I spoke perfectly well. But my brother could barely read or write. The damage was done by the time we found out. He was angry, confused and alienated.

He spent what should have been his high school years in something called “Boys Tech” or on the run points west.

I think of this because my great-nephew was diagnosed with autism. As many of you will know, autism is a spectrum disorder. So there can be a wide range of outcomes. The most important think is that he was diagnosed early. I have heard about children on the spectrum having relatively happy lives free of stigma. Let’s hope that we don’t repeat the mistakes of the 60s that happened to James.