... and the Pursuit of Happiness

Several years ago, an African-American student in one of my classes complained to me about a classmate who was wearing a Stars and Bars baseball cap. I asked him what the problem was, and he said that the symbolism of the Confederate flag and what he believed it had come to mean made him feel uncomfortable around the other student.

I asked him what it was specifically that bothered him about the emblem.  He said that it stood for racism and hailed back to a time when slavery was the rule of the land. I told him that the other student might argue that he was supporting states’ rights, and how he might not see it as a racist emblem at all.

He quickly attempted to assure me that the Stars and Bars in this particular case was intended as a racist comment, and that it made him and his friends defensive just by its very presence.

I pondered this for a bit. Then I said, so basically his wearing that emblem would identify him as someone to watch out for? To which I got a hasty, “Yes!” So, if I made him stop wearing that hat and had him put it in his locker, that would make you feel somehow safer? Another affirmative answer. And doing that would make that student change his feelings about racism? Well, no, not really. Would it make him harbor an even bigger racial grudge? Well, maybe.

So then I would ask you, would you rather have people walking around with those kinds of beliefs and ideas and you not know it? Or, would you rather they wear an emblem of their beliefs and tell the entire world exactly where they are coming from?

My student thought about that for a bit.  Then he said it was probably better to know what that person thought and be prepared for what might come than it would be to go through life not knowing and to be unaware of a potential attack.

Which, of course, brings us to the current state of matrimonial affairs in New York. New York is my home state, for those of you who don’t know, and its current stance on same-sex marriage gives one such as me pause. I don’t know how I feel exactly about same sex unions, maybe it’s a bit like “don’t ask don’t tell,” but it isn’t so much that it undermines my beliefs. It has little effect on what I believe.

For instance, I don’t believe that same sex unions diminish or tarnish in anyway the relationship that I have had with my wife over the past 24 years. There are plenty of legal reasons why same sex partners might want to be legally hooked up; insurance not the least of these. And, while marriage has seemed to work out for me over the years, I can also attest that for many people it is not what it’s cracked up to be. The divorce rate in the US is astronomic, somewhere around 50 percent, and adding more marriages doesn’t seem to be the right answer to amend that statistic. What I believe will happen is that many of these same sex unions will end up on the same scrap heap along with those of hetero marriages that don’t make it.  That seems more logical than a sudden drop in the divorce rate.

What I think bothers us about same sex marriages is that it undermines our basic religious and philosophical tenets. We are, at some level, so dependent upon those beliefs that anything that seems to run against them creates a bit of uncertainty and insecurity within ourselves. It’s as if so much as one apple is upset, the entire applecart will tip over.

I have yet to see any argument against same sex unions that doesn’t devolve into personal beliefs. Remove emotion from the equation, and it seems a fairly straight forward thing. The Declaration of Independence states that we citizens have inalienable rights and that among them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It seems to me that those rights extend to all U.S. Citizens, and not just a selection among them.

For me, my marriage has been exactly that, a pursuit of happiness. While at some level I am uncomfortable with same sex unions, I certainly believe all citizens have a right to be happy. And, if that’s what makes you happy, then so be it.

In some ways, it’s like my student who felt concerned about the Confederate flag symbol. See it, recognize it for what it is, and move on. I don’t see same sex unions as an erosion of my beliefs.

When the Declaration of Independence was first written, it included the statement “all men are created equal.” The founding fathers understood well how that statement clashed with the idea of slavery. They opted not to address the slavery question at that time, since they had bigger fish to fry. Instead, they left the question open for a future generation to deal with. It took 90 years to come about, but that question was finally answered. Can this be so much different?

Danger, Will Robinson!

It came upon a post-midnight clear, that incessant ringing in my ear. At about 4 a.m. one morning, a few months back, I woke to the sound of my home phone ringing away. It interrupted my sleep, but with kids away in college and overseas, and an elderly parent living in Florida, I felt it was one of those horror calls about an accident or an illness.  At that hour of the morning, all the evil things come to mind that you can do nothing about except absorb the report.

But guess what, it wasn’t. Instead, it was the City of Colonial Heights, which in its infinite wisdom felt I needed to be awakened and warned about a thunderstorm. I really didn’t need a warning about the thunder storm; I have been through hundreds of them. Actually, I have slept through hundreds of them, but after the call, I found I couldn’t get back to sleep and just as I felt myself starting to drift off, KABOOM the first salvo of thunder rattled the walls. So, I guess it was nice of the city to wake me up so I wouldn’t be able to sleep when the storm actually hit 20 minutes later.

I really don’t understand why the city thinks this warning system is a good idea in the first place.  Perhaps some people appreciate being called at all hours of the day or night, but not me. Take me off the list. In my mind, this is worse than an advertising call or a prank caller. At least with them I am afforded the opportunity to harass them. With the city, all you get is some pre-recorded message and advisement to take cover.  If I am in my house answering the phone, what better cover could I have?

Sorry, but I was under cover before you woke me up. And, you know what, it turns out that that storm was not much different than any of the other storms I lived through in my nearly 5x years.

Whose grand idea do you think this was?

I can just imagine some city staffer being approached about early warning systems to save the people of Colonial Heights from potential dangerous storms.  So many residents have been killed in the past by lightning strikes and trees falling, you know. Jeepers, too bad they didn’t have this device in place during the war of Northern Aggression. Who knows, it might have taken US Grant an extra couple months to break through the lines at Petersburg had Gen. Robert E. Lee been able to rouse his troops in advance.  So much for technology, anyway.

Now, I am not going to say that I don’t appreciate some of the things that the City does in the name of serving the citizenry.  The parks are nice, they are trying their best to spruce them up. I like the trash pickup and the recycling is my wife’s favorite thing all time. But this particular service, to me, is more than a waste of time and money, it’s an outright nuisance.

Now I am learning that the city has decided the original version wasn’t good enough. Now they are going to use a new system called CodeRED Emergency Notification System, and that will start on August 1, as if the former system wasn’t enough of an annoyance.  So, they will be testing this system out on July 18 by making a “test” emergency call to everyone in the city.

The intent is to give city personnel a chance to operate the system before it is put into action a few weeks later. Oh boy, just what I wanted!

Not only that, but the city isn’t satisfied with just having my home phone number. No, they want me to go to their website and add in all kinds of other numbers and contact methods so that they can annoy me in oh so many ways.

Really, I appreciate the thought behind what you are trying to do. But sometimes I don’t want you insinuating yourself into my daily life. The best thing about thunderstorms, twisters, hurricanes, and heavy snow is that it’s random. There are numerous ways in which news of big weather or emergency events get out. Listen to the radio, they will make that annoying bleeping sound and interrupt that with even more exciting news about the coming foul weather. Or you can just turn on the TV and watch the ticker tape streaming across the bottom third of the screen. What’s even better is when one of the talking head weather people break into the show you’re watching in order to tell you that a storm is in Dinwiddie and heading to the Tri Cities. Wow, exciting big news.  What did we do before we had that kind of coverage, look at the sky?

I suppose there are people in the community who don’t think these things are a colossal waste of money, and there are probably people who are grateful for those early morning calls.  But they aren’t me. As far as I am concerned, this isn’t some public service it’s a waste of public finances.  Keep the money spent on this system and use it for something more important, like a memorial for City Councilors who have outstayed their usefulness.

Carving my own universe thanks to NASA

It seems a shame that NASA is about to close its doors after lo these many years. It saddens me in a way most people probably wouldn’t understand, unless they knew more about me than most people do.  They would unless, in fact, they knew as much about me as my older siblings, and especially my brother Mike, does.

I am sure it is like this with any family with multiple children.  There are family stories and then there are FAMILY stories, and then there are favorite family stories.  It seems each sibling probably has a favorite family story about each of their brothers and sisters, and normally that would only be a good thing to talk about among the rest of the family. But this story, and how it involves me, is so directly tied to NASA and the history of the United State’s space race that it might be worth telling despite the personal nature of the event in question.

Oh, did I tell you it was a funny story? No? Okay, it’s a funny story. At least, it’s funny from my brother’s perspective, although I have to admit that it does have a humorous end to it even for me.

To hear my brother tell it, it starts well after the fact and runs something like this. “What I saw initially was this whole group of kids in one big crowd, like a scrum or rally or some huge event.  As I got closer, I realized that David was the center of this huge crowd and he appeared to be holding a desktop with all of his books on it, and smiling as big a smile as you can imagine.”

It gets worse from that point on, but is best if I describe the situation, as I am the one who was closest to the reality. Sorry Mike, you just weren’t really there.

The whole thing started out when our Third Grade class at Waltoffer Elementary School on Long Island was watching history unfold. We had watched history unfold many times in our classroom, like when the Pope came to New York and when Kennedy was shot.  But this was different.  This was the most exciting thing that was happening back then, and we were all glued to the black and white screen, trying to get just the right angle to see the Apollo rocket with its capsule perched way up on top.

Then as now apparently, there were delays. I don’t know how long a delay we had that day, but it was quite a while. And being the kind of industrious lad I was, I started to get a bit bored.  Turns out, I had the exact tool in my pocket to relieve my boredom. A pen. But more than a pen, it was a pen with a pocket clip. And, somehow, I knew if I broke the stem off just right, I would have sort of a miniature adze.

Now with adze in hand, I could start my life as an artist by carving a bas relief depiction of said space craft into the wooden desk at which I sat.  For a third grader, I thought the rocket looked pretty good. I can’t say that my teacher felt the same way. After much haranguing and the obligatory trip to the school principal, Mr. Verdi, the administration en toto decided such a great and wondrous piece of art work needed to shown to may parents.

To tell the truth, I don’t really know which part of the ensuing events were worse: carrying the desk top with all my books the mile or so I had to walk home, or trying to explain to my father why I was carrying my desktop home with all my books. I thought, at first, the idea of having a lot of studying to do might fly, but I was in third grade and he already had a lot of experience with things like my report cards. So I nixed that idea, and decided brute honesty was the only way to go. That, and the fact that my brother wasn’t about to let me off the hook for this one.

Surprisingly to me, my father and I discussed the situation without resorting to beatings or fisticuffs, and we decided that I would refinish the desk top. Over the next few weeks or so, I would sand down the desk and then re-lacquer the surface.  My dad, who always seemed to know exactly the right thing to do, would come down to our workshop every night after he got home from work to see how I was faring in this project.

In order to remove any remnant of the rocket ship, I had some sanding to do. Working my way through a myriad of sand paper grit and using a fire brick to ensure the desk face was level and smooth, I eventually finished the project. The desktop looked great.

Finally, the day came and I carried the desktop back to school. For the remainder of the year, I sat in what had to be the nicest looking desk in the entire school. It shined and put all the other desks to shame.

Over the years, I have come to appreciate my father’s ways of “getting back” at people one way or another. The stories are too numerous to number.  There was the hair cutting incident my brother was involved with (he had long hair at the time, a big no-no in the early ‘60s), the picture drawing incident in which, again my brother, turned in a picture for a 1000-word essay assignment and claimed that the picture was worth 10,000 words, and way too many incidents more for this column.

Suffice to say, there were unconsequences from the work I did on my desktop that year. Living on Long Island, there weren’t a lot of places to play. Not a lot of lots, not a lot of parks, and our back yard really wasn’t big enough for any kind of large scale play. So we kids would often traipse to the elementary school to play on the swings, slides, seesaws, ball fields, or whatever. During that summer, I noticed that the janitors appeared to be carrying all the desks outside the building, class by class.

For second, I wondered what they were doing. But then, I noticed that they were using a belt sander to sand down the desktops. It started to look a lot like my own little project from earlier that year, but on a much grander scale.  Now, I can’t tell you that they were refinishing those desks because one desk in the school looked better than all the others, but it’s awfully suspicious that they would choose that summer to do something I had never seen them do before. And, I can’t tell you that my father had that in mind when he sent me to the basement to begin working on the desktop. But I can tell you that things like that happened pretty often when my father was involved. And so it goes with childhood memories. What might have been all bad memories instead has that slight upturn in the end. It’s sort of like having your toast hit the floor Butterside up.

Trial by media

If the chloroform don’t fit…

It seems that the entire world was stunned by the outcome in the Casey Anthony trial.  Anthony was accused of murdering her two-year old daughter Caylee about three years ago.  The press already had Casey drawn, quartered, and hung on gibbets all around Orlando. What was reported, as usual, was rife with individual reporters’ opinions. They reported those things that they felt were important, and not necessarily what the jury thought was important.

It’s strange how juries work. Having sat through several capital and first degree murder trials, I can tell you that it’s sometimes impossible to know what a jury is thinking. There are groups of people, mostly psychiatrists, who are paid enormous sums for “reading” juries and also for helping to coach defendants and others for when the appear on the stand.  And then, in this case, you have to suspect that the prosecution may have been influenced by the public hue and cry over the apparent murder of a two-year-old and perhaps brought the case forward when it needed more time to mature.

I can tell you that whether the victim is two or 10, there is always public hue and cry when murder involves a child.  One of the capital murder cases I covered back in the day involved a 10-year-old. It was extraordinary, although once they caught the bad guy there wasn’t really much hope for him. He was a thoroughly useless specimen of the human race and got what he deserved, although he might have deserved it a bit sooner than he eventually got his one way ticket to Ol’ Sparky in Greenville.

In that case there was tons of evidence that pointed directly at the defendant. Apparently in the Anthony case there was little or none. It is extremely hard to make a circumstantial evidence case stand up. And, when you add into it the fanfare and high profile character of this case, the difficulty in prosecuting it expands geometrically.

By comparison, in the case of Everett Lee Mueller, who was put to death for killing 10-year-old Charity Powers, the prosecution allowed five days for the entire trial and jury deliberation. It was over in four days, and only took a matter of hours for the jury to return the death penalty.

The Anthony trial was an online and on TV spectacle for the past six weeks. It was nearly impossible not to hear something about the Anthony case even before the jury trial started.  And for all intent and purposes the media already had Casey filleted and ready for a quick trip down (up?) to Florida’s renowned Death Row super highway.

But juries make those decisions and not the media. The media always seem to want to impose their opinions nowadays, instead of just reporting the facts. You don’t have to travel very far to see that kind of reporting in action.  Pay attention to the adjectives used to describe things, or better yet, if you can do such a thing, read the tone of the writing. There has been a change in the manner in which reporting is done. It is now okay to take sides, and also to help out the side the reporter favors or thinks is right.

In the case of high-profile murder trials, it’s difficult to make up your mind if you only have the newspaper, TV, and Internet reports to go by. They all seem to be focused on the same thing, and more often than not, it’s the wrong thing. There’s nothing like sitting through a capital murder trial to get a feel for what is really being presented.  The jury’s perspective is often way different from that of the audience. For one thing, the audience is not privy to the interaction of the jury at all. We get their report, but we have no idea of the deliberations. We also have no idea what the jury thinks about the presentations by the prosecution and the defense teams.

Believability has a lot to do with how the case turns out.  And ultimately, which pieces of evidence ended up being the critical pieces won’t be known for some time. There will be speculation.  Already, the chloroform information has been brought forward, and the defense team’s ability to spotlight alarming things like incest, sexual abuse, and other seemingly off-topic issues may have clouded the facts in the case.

But in the end, we have to trust the jury. The jury is a group of people like us, a jury of peers.  We have to trust that they made the right decision in this case, as we have had to in many cases before this.  Certainly, we are all swayed when justice for a nearly three-year old child is involved. But the jury is charged with looking at the facts and applying common sense to the evidence presented.  It’s the system of justice we Americans believe in, and therefore the one we will follow.

Still, we can’t help but feel that Caylee in some way was cheated.  In the death of a young child, we want to be able to blame someone, to make someone pay.  So we have to trust the jury did their job.  We have to believe that what they decided was in fact the right decision.  Still, it doesn’t help much.  Maybe defense attorney Jose Baez said it best, "While we're happy for Casey, there are no winners in this case."