The "i" word

Nancy Pelosi finally said the 'i' word--impeachment.

Nancy is, thank heaven, one of the most competent, thoughtful and cautious of politicians and struggles to keep the progressives and moderates in the same boat.

The fear that an impeachment by the House, which won't pass the Senate, would give the President a fine talking point, is a fair one. But after all that has gone on for these 2 1/2 years, enough is finally enough for Nancy.

(If you think this White House isn't incompetent, realize that along with the memo about the President's call to the President of Ukraine, they sent a copy of the President's impeachment 'talking points' and then emailed Congress to please, please not read them!!!)

Who knows where this will go?

37% of Americans favor impeachment, but 57% don't--many of them Democrats afraid it will strengthen the President's base.

But when the Watergate investigation began, even fewer Americans favored that--less than a quarter of all voters. But see what happened after that....

We shall see, we shall see, we shall see.

It's going to get good.

My friend, Ray, sent me a cartoon today of the President reading the headline about impeachment, pulling on his shirt collar and sweating profusely. The tag line was him saying, "Maybe climate change is real. I'm starting too feel the heat!"

My Aunts

Sadly, all dead now, but an amazing group of women.

Juanette, though my spell check tells me that's not right, it's how she spelled it, was married to Uncle Lee who built their house in Bluefield. She was the least outgoing of my mother's sisters, quiet and unobtrusive. She had four children and lived across the dirt road on the hill in Conklintown from my grandmother Jones. She, unlike Mammaw, had indoor toilets. Grandmaw had an two seat out house. Though who would you ever sit there with?

Georgie was named after the doctor who delivered her--George. She was married to Uncle Jim who suffered so from WW II. She was a school teacher--like my mother and Aunt Elsie. She smoked and drank (in moderation) and moved from her home half-way up the hill to Grandmaw and Juanette's houses, to a trailer. She had a parakeet named Petie, who could say more words that I could count. She was the rebel of the Jones family.

Elsie taught school at first but eventually got a doctorate and taught at a evangelical seminary. Harvey, he husband, was the Nazarene minister. Elsie was the 'proper' one of the family--very polite and organized. I spent a week each summer with Elsie and Harvey in Dunbar, WV, a suburb of Charleston, the state capital. Each night before bed we knelt on the living room floor and prayed aloud...or they did. When I was a teen they adopted a neglected child named Denise. Denise stayed faithful to them though she had an illegitimate Mixed-Race child who my aunt and uncle (God bless them!) fully embraced.

Aunt Elsie Taylor--we always called her that--married my mother's only living brother and had eight children. She was quiet and shy and they lived across two mountains from us and I never really thought I knew her.

Uncle Russel, my fathers oldest brother, married Gladys. They lived in the house behind our apartment and I saw them every day. Gladys didn't much like children, so I gave her a lot of space. She ran the dry goods store while Russel ran the grocery store. I remember when she died when I was not much into my teens, her coffin was open in their living room for two days. I couldn't figure out how uncle Russel slept with her down there. After my mother died, Russel moved into my parents' home in Princeton. One night my father told Russel he was of to be and Russel said, "I'm going to watch the Ed Sullivan show." Next morning my father found him dead in a rocker I had until we cleaned out our basement last year.

Callie was Uncle Sid's wife. She was funny and sexy and full of life. She had two children and kept Sid happy. Once he was at my dad's house--Callie and Sid lived in Princeton too--when I was visiting him. He looked at his watch and said, "I have to go. It's time for Callie's bath and sometimes she lets me watch." That was the affect Callie had on men.

Aunt Ola was Uncle Del's wife. They lived in Anawalt and she was my 7th grade math teacher. She was tough but fair. They moved to Florida when I was in college and I never saw them again.

Wonderful women. I miss them all...Gladys not as much.

OK, I've decided

Keep in mind, I will vote for any Democrat--any competent adult--who runs against the President I will not name in this blog.

But I have decided who my dream ticket would be: Warren and Wang. They could even have a poster that said W+W+W...Warren Wang and Winning.

I'm ready for radical change that Warren stands for. And Andrew Wang makes more sense than any of the candidates about what needs to be 'fixed' for America to truly be 'America'.

The President wouldn't know what to do against Warren in debates. He would have jibes and she would have policy.

And I'm not sure the Vice-President would want to debate clear-headed, fact-based, Truth-bearer Wang.

Like I said, I'll vote for any Democrat for President in 2020.

But I've decided Warren and Wang are my choice.

Donny Davis

(Ok, I wrote this years ago, but there is still a rift in the Anglican communion....)

Donny Davis & the Episcopal Church/Anglican Communion

          Ok, so Donny Davis was mine, though I’m pretty confident in thinking that anyone reading this had one of their own. He was the bully who terrified and oppressed me for almost two years in the fourth and fifth grades at our school in Anawalt, West Virginia. Everyone—or almost everyone (bullies excluded) had a bully who terrorized them for some period of time while growing up.

          Donny Davis was lots bigger than me. I’d been a sickly only child and weighed, I remember this, 47 pounds in the third grade. Besides that I couldn’t see and wore these huge, Coke-bottle bottom glasses in plastic frames that always slipped down on my nose so I was constantly pushing them back up. I did this mostly with the middle finger of my right hand since I am hopelessly and profoundly right handed. One of the things Donny Davis would do is smack me when I pushed my glasses up in his presence.

          “Don’t give me the finger you little needle dick-ed bug fucker,” he would say when he smacked me on my ear, causing my head to ring for several minutes. I didn’t know what ‘the finger’ was or how I was ‘giving’ it to him when I was just trying to see. And, though I could reason it out, being ‘a needle dick-ed bug fucker’ wasn’t part of my normal vocabulary or self-image.

          Finally, Arnold Butler told me about ‘the finger’ and showed me how to push my glasses up with my index finger. And since we didn’t have gym in fourth grade and take showers together, Arnold couldn’t tell me if I was, in point of fact, ‘a needle dick-ed bug fucker’; however, he told me it most likely wasn’t true.

          Don’t you dare tell me that children aren’t the most cruel of all human beings. For almost two years of my life, I lived in mortal fear of Donny Davis—his slaps, his pushes, his robbery (I actually gave him my ‘lunch money’ most days), his insults and his cruelty.

          Bullies are the worst part of human interaction. Bullies defile and diminish and degrade those smaller, weaker or, most often of all, just too scared to stand up to them. Donny delighted in pushing me down in the hallways of our school when Anna Marie Osborn, who I loved with the passion only a 10 year old can possibly contain or control, was around. He demeaned me, I later grew to understand, because I was smarter and kinder and ‘dreamier’ than he could ever be. There was that, and the fact that I was afraid of him and what I imagined he could do to hurt me, humiliate me, harm me in some unknown way.

          It all ended like this: one day in fifth grade, when Mrs. Short, the teacher went out of the room, Donny came over and took my Geography test from me and tore it into shreds. I’d made a 100 on my test and he made 46 or something like that. In that startling moment, I realized the reason he bullied me so unmercifully was that he, in his own way, ‘feared’—little, scrawny, half-blind me! I don’t know why I realized that in that moment and no other—I’d call it the Holy Spirit today—but then, in that moment and no other, I had an epiphany. “Donny is afraid of me,” is what the epiphany relayed to me.

          I stood up and picked up the pieces of my geography test off the floor. (I’m still fascinated by geography, by the way, and can’t get enough of maps or National Geographic.) I picked up all those pieces and put them in my notebook, knowing I would carefully scotch tape them back together into one sheet of paper later that night. And then I said to him—not knowing where it was coming from or how I was saying it—“I’ll be waiting for you down by the underpass after school.”

          Everyone in the class heard me say it and their collective gasp sucked most of the oxygen out of the room. And just then, Mrs. Short returned and told Donny to go back to his seat. And in his eyes before he did that, I saw a flicker of something I never expected or dreamed of from Donny—I saw ‘fear’.

          Arnold Butler and Kyle Parks and Billy Bridgeman tried to talk me out of the showdown at the underpass with Donny. I’m sure they thought he would maim me if not kill me. And I half-listened to their advice, but in the end all I could remember is the flicker of ‘fear’ I’d seen in his eyes.

          The ‘underpass’ went below the Norfolk and Western Train tracks where the nearly eternal coal cars carried the black gold most of our fathers mined each day away to Pittsburgh to make the steel that built most of the buildings all of us on the East Coast have come to take for granted. There were 123 steps down from the school to the underpass and a little stream ran out of the hill beside the walkway under the underpass. On the other side of the underpass was the place where school buses stopped to take us all home. And that was my Armageddon, that was where I would meet the enemy, that was where I would either die or begin to live.

          It was February, I remember that, and cold as only the mountains can be cold. But I ran down the steps and took off my coat and shirt, revealing my chicken-skin-white chest devoid of muscles. And, after handing my glasses to Arnold Butler, I stepped into the stream and picked up two rocks that fit in my hands. Freezing and wet, I awaited Donny Davis in that grade school Rubicon.

         

          When he came down, I walked up to the sidewalk. I was fully prepared to die rather than continue to endure his abuse. I was willing to crush his skull with those rocks I carried and drown him in the three inches of water in the chill mountain stream.

          He was with two of his friends—bullies all—and all the people from our class were risking missing their school bus to witness the showdown. He paused and looked at me—fierce and freezing and unafraid. Not a word was spoken. He and his friends crossed over to the other side of the walkway and went quietly to catch their buses. And none of my friends spoke either. Arnold gave me back my glasses, Billy took the rocks from my hands, Kyle helped me put my shirt and coat back on and we all went home.

          And never again did Donny Davis try to bully me, or anyone else for that matter. It ended that simply.

                                                ****

          Donny is like the AAC and the ‘third world bishops’ (I know it is politically incorrect to call them that—‘southern hemisphere bishops’ is more acceptable—but they are from another world than the one I live in and that needs to be made clear…they live in another place from me, just as Donny did.) And I am sick and tired, finally, of trying to appease them. We, in the Episcopal Church have given them our lunch money and been pushed down in the hall and slapped on the ear for far too long. There is nothing they want from us but our ‘fear’ of them and our illusion of being able to ‘get along’ and not be bullied if only we ‘give in’ enough. It is far past the time we should have picked up the scraps of our geography test and told them we’d be waiting at the underpass.

          It doesn’t take much courage—though it takes a tad. What it takes is reaching the point when death (or disunity) would be preferable to being the victim of bullies.

          There’s an underpass down the steps and a stream with some flat rocks and the possibility of finally, finally, finally saying “no more…no more…no more.”

          Death, disunity, the total collapse of the Anglican Communion…there comes a time when that would be preferable to not being able to truly live out the lives we’re called to by God.

          That time, I think, is long past. But it might as well be today.

          The water is chill but the rocks fit right in your hands and I can almost guarantee you, bullies won’t stand up to a half-naked victim who will be a victim no longer…..

Jgb/ January 2007

My Uncles

I had a lot of them--uncles, I mean. Uncle Lee, Uncle Granger, Uncle Jim, Uncle Harvey on my mother's side, and two uncles, my mother's brothers, who died before I was born.

On my father's side there were Uncle Sid, Uncle Russell, Uncle Del--all my father's brothers--and Uncle Les, who married my father's older sister. She died before I was born, but Les was around for a while.

Ten Uncles. Not bad for an only child. Good, in fact.

Uncle Lee and Aunt Juanette had four kids--three boys and a girl. Marlin is dead, Duane joined a cult church and cut off all contact with his family, Joel is having the onset of dementia and Gail, I believe, is in an emotionally abusive marriage. Lee was a farmer and a brilliant builder. He built a home for him and his wife in Bluefield, 30 miles from where they lived next to my Grandma Jones. He built a live in basement first and they moved there, then over several years, he built the house above it, almost totally by himself--plumbing, electricity, walls and roof. Amazing,

Uncle Granger and his family lived in Falls Mills, Virginia, just across the boarder from West Virginia. They had 8 children, two of whom are dead. I was never sure what Granger did, but he did well to raise such a brood. They were all members of a evangelical church I never quite understood either.

Uncle Jim suffered greatly from WWII in the Pacific. We have names for what he had now, but not then. He left when his two children, Mejol and Bradley were in their teens and was gone for 8 years until he woke up in San Diego, unable to fully remember what he'd been doing for those years, but back in touch with the life he'd left behind. He spent most of the rest of his life in a V.A. hospital in south-western Virginia. He was married to Georgie.

Uncle Harvey was a preacher, first in the Pilgrim Holiness Church and then in the Nazarene Church. He and my mother's youngest sister, Elsie, adopted Denise when she was 8 or 9 and she turned out fine. Elsie eventually had a Ph.D. in education, My mother, Elsie and Georgie were all school teachers for their whole working life.

Sid was an insurance salesman and a furniture maker. He made amazing furniture and one day, in his basement, accidentally cut off his right hand. He put the artery between his teeth and drove himself to the hospital. As they were fixing the wound, he suddenly started laughing and the nurses thought he was going into shock. But he told them he was just thinking about Callie, his wife, coming home to find his hand in the basement. He and Callie had two children, Greg and Sarita. Callie was the daughter of my grandmother Jones' brother so they always called me 'their double first cousin'. That wasn't true--I was their first cousin and third cousin. But my father's family didn't get into details like that. I called lots of cousins 'aunt' and 'uncle' on that side of the family until I figured out they weren't. My mother's family kept all that straight.

Les died when I was a child. I remember his voice like a voice from the radio when I was a kid. That's all I know about him. One of his sons lived with my parents until I was born. I grew up in "Pat's room". He became a preacher too.

Russel and Del both lived in Anawalt like we did. Russel owned a grocery store and a 'dry goods' store and Del owned the Esso station. They are embedded in most of the memories of my childhood. As a teen I worked in the H&S supermarket. Russel and Aunt Gladys had no children. Del and my 9th grade math teacher had one girl. I was never close to her.

All my cousins, except Mejol were quite a bit older than me. I knew them, but not intimately. My parents had me when Dad was 41 and Mom was 39--an outrage back then, normal today. Since they never imagined a child, Mejol was a big part of their--and my--life. Mejol and I still call almost weekly.

Uncles. Aunts. Cousins. Pretty special.

400 years of ignominy

Ignominy means 'disgraceful or dishonorably conduct'.

Africans were brought to this country on slave ships 400 years ago.

There have been 400 year of ignominy for this 'land of the free and home of the brave'.

The Dred Scott decision was not until 1954--the Supreme Court decision that should have ended segregation forever.

I graduated from high school in 1965 and had only been in a classroom with a black student for one year of all those 12 years of education.

The ignominy continues today under President He Who Will Not Be Named, He is trying to outlaw vaping because white kids are getting sick--but he thinks nothing of keeping brown kids in cages, separated from their families or letting black kids live in poverty and get no education worth anything.

"Separate but Equal" was the byword in the South. The truth is were are still there, except the truth is, we are separate and not equal.

Our ignominy continues today--400 year later.

Disgraceful and Dishonorable for four centuries.

God help us.

I'm addicted to 'hint'

OK, I know I have an addictive personality. I smoke, drink too much Pinot Grigio and thank the Lord in Heaven I never got into drugs.

I remember a party in college where I smoked some dope and sat in a corner, so no one could get behind me, paranoid as I could be.

I also remember driving down High Street in Morgantown, higher than a kite, wondering how many people I would kill.

So, drugs were not for me.

But I am an addictive personality.

And I'm addicted to 'hint'. It's a flavored water with no calories. My favorite is Watermelon, though I can also love green apple, mango and several berry flavors.

I drink two a day--one with lunch and one with dinner.

I was feeling guilty about spending money for water when there is plenty in our tap, until I realized the 'hint' was a sponsor of National Public Radio--the only station I listen to besides the occasional Yankee game. NPR is an addiction as well, I suppose.

Try some 'hint' next time you're in your supermarket. See what you think.

I love it.