San Diego Free Press

Grassroots News & Progressive Views

You are here: Home / Archives for Ernie McCray

A Call For ‘1HOOD’ Kind of Thinking at San Diego City College

by

Some places in our lives resonate with us in special ways. San Diego City College is one of those places for me, a place that always seems to be about creating a better world. My kind of place.

Along these lines I heard City College’s Interim President, Denise Whisenhunt, say to an an overflow audience at the school’s Saville Theatre that the campus was “at the forefront of the social justice movement.”
Those words in her short welcoming speech seemed evident as I looked around me at all the attendees at the school’s “3rd Annual Social Justice & Education Conference,” a gathering that just gets better and bigger every year.   [Read more…]

Weathering Storms

by

A hawk flies on gentle breezes outside my window, crowing away, perhaps seeking its prey or a mate, all unfolding on one of those “Reasons Why I Live in San Diego” kind of days: so lovely and warm, giving an appearance that, when it comes to weather, all is well with the world.

Then I think of the other day when my son and I ducked into the theater at the Reuben H. Fleet Museum to see “Extreme Weather,” an IMAX movie that took us on a breathtaking 360-degree tour of scenes that remind us that, climate-wise, we earthlings are in deep ca-ca.

All is definitely not well. We’ve jabbed and danced around and clowned, burning coal and oil and natural gas and bulldozed and chopped down our rain forests, backing Mother Nature up against the ropes, leaving her no choice but to come off those ropes and huff and puff and blow us and our houses down!   [Read more…]

The Man Who Skipped Breakfast and Found a World of Love

by

Charlie Chatman woke up one morning saying to himself, as he had for so many mornings, for eternities: “Lord, give me the strength to put up with these damn peckerwoods one more day.”

The only thing he cared about in his godforsaken life, on a Hawkinsville, Georgia sharecropping plantation, was breakfast, whatever it happened to be, cornbread and scraps of pork, a potato or two, a cup of milk (maybe) – or some stolen boiled corn that the pigs were fed.

Anything to sustain his body and spirit to stand up against the insults to his humanity he had to put up with each day. What kept him alive each day were his daydreams, simple imaginings: sleeping in a nice bed, walking leisurely down a country road, meeting Gabriel on Judgment Day.   [Read more…]

An Enemy of the People

by

All I can say about the early weeks of Donald J. Trump’s “First 100 Days” is that he has shown himself, in that time, to be an “Enemy of the People” in so many ways.

And there are those of us who keep saying “Give him a chance,” a rather non-sensical idea considering how he abuses chances every chance he gets.

He’s had and still has an enviable chance, as the most known person on the planet, with microphones and video cameras at his beck and call, to guide us in a spirit of love, so that we can be the kind of people Americans should be: tolerant people; caring people, people the rest of the world should be able to depend on.   [Read more…]

We’ve Got to Stay Ahead of This Devil Named Trump

by

I was watching Stephen Colbert the other night, laughing away at his brilliant witticisms and daffiness, and a segment came on wherein a visual, referring to Trump’s “ban,” read, in part, “…a five year old was handcuffed…”

I stopped chuckling for a moment in reaction to such a terrible statement, trying to picture a five year old being shackled. But Colbert was on a flow so I had to let that go and next up on the show was White House Press Secretary, Sean Spicer, commenting on the little boy’s inhuman predicament with these words: “To assume that just because of someone’s age and gender that they don’t pose a threat would be misguided and wrong.”   [Read more…]

Love Really Does Trump Hate

by

I could have never imagined a president like the one we’ve got today. Is there anybody who is anybody on the planet as hateful as he is?

I saw him on TV the other day and he was spewing hate every whichaway, talking to the Homeland Security employees in his signature pose: his index finger and thumb forming a circle in the shade of three fingers that seem embarrassed to be on his hand, still basking in the glow of having made a sucker out of a country, a land, that has no idea as to who or what it is.

He spoke in “gloom and doom” tones of a country that’s breaking down at the seams, riddled with crime, overrun by “illegal immigrants” – but don’t worry he was going to take care of them and build a wall that will keep vermin like them where they belong and Mexico was going to pay for the wall after we paid for it first. Yeah, and it doesn’t snow in Minneapolis in the wintertime.   [Read more…]

A Little Bit of Aristotle’s Philosophy for the Ethically Challenged GOP

by

Aristotle was of the belief that “Achieving good character is a process of clearing away the obstacles that stand in the way of the full efficacy of the soul.”

He came up with such an ethical notion somewhere between 384-322 B.C.E. And here we are, as a nation, in the 21st Century, facing GOP powers-that-be in Washington D.C. who, instead of seeking ways to ethically tend to our society’s political and social needs, choose to do whatever they desire whenever they please.

“To hell with the rules,” is their operating policy. I mean first the Republican House tries to weaken the power of an office that keeps an eye out for unethical behavior, and now the Republican Senate just bypasses the “background checks” and “ethics clearances” that traditionally a president’s cabinet nominees have had to go through throughout our modern history before they’re even considered for confirmation.   [Read more…]

On the Topic of the GOP and Ethics

by

It makes perfect sense to me that the House Republicans tried to secretly curtail the powers of the Office of Congressional Ethics because, if you have no ethics, you damn sure don’t want some nosy person poking around documenting it.

And these GOP characters are as to ethical behavior as a sea turtle is to Death Valley. They’ve demonstrated for decades, which anyone can google, that they are not, by any means, on speaking terms with anything anywhere near synonymous with “ethics.” They are, in a word, ethic-less, if you will.

And their leader – The Donald – twittered some jive that supposedly caused these alleged “representatives” to back away from their devious deportment.   [Read more…]

The Hip School Where the Arts Rule

by

By Ernie McCray

I had moments not too long ago when I thought that I just might not be around in 2017 – based on the complete lack of energy I was enduring day after day, with my belly under siege by some bacteria that just didn’t want to leave.

But I’m still here on the scene, happy as a lark, slowly getting back to my routines. Wanting to write something regarding my making it to 2017, I checked a writing prompt website and chose number 17 of the choices, as a symbol for 2017, and it read: “In 400 words create your ideal place.”

That put me in a nice place because the prompt could have been something like “Write a 150 word profile on somebody named ‘Margaret Mallory’” or write about “something wrapped” which would have called on more creativity than I wanted to own. I just wanted to kick the new year off in a nice tone.   [Read more…]

We Have to Stop Lamenting and Keep Hope Alive

by

The last two months of this year have been a living hell for many people, including me, considering our social and political sins but I’m definitely not going to classify 2016 as the worst year of my life – as a lot of people seem to be doing.

I mean by nature I tend to give very little value to my crummy times and tons of bonus points to the moments wherein my soul is filled with hope. Where there’s hope there’s got to be a good year. And I’m pretty much hoping for this and that all the time.

All that to say that for most of the year I was riding high, living comfortably, grateful for having reached age 78, happy to be breathing above ground and privileged to enjoy luxuries like trodding on ancient grounds in cities like, to name a few, Madrid and Barcelona and Arles and Gay Paree… No bad year material in that experience.   [Read more…]

Trying to Climb Back to the Mountain Top

by

On the Sunday before the election I felt so good, sitting on a rock at Mt. Palomar in the sun. The day before I had gone on an invigorating hike as woodpeckers stored acorns and wasps and gnats and flies flitted about with critters unseen on the run.

I was on the top of the world, my usual self, full of humor, and get up and go.

Election night came along and after the results were in I had evolved into somebody I didn’t recognize. It seemed as though I had been shot with a taser gun that had been designed to take down a Tyrannosaurus Rex.   [Read more…]

It’s Time to Let Our Light Shine

by

As I more and more awaken from the shock to my body and soul as a result of Donald Trump being my president, I keep thinking back to my Sunday School days in the 40’s singing a song our teacher, Mr. Chandler, taught us:

This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine
This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine
This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine
Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine…

Mr. Chandler, a beautiful man, with a voice like Paul Robeson’s, would tell us: “Children, no matter, what comes your way in your life, and, Lord knows, you will have trials and tribulations that sometimes will make you feel like giving up and maybe make you lose your way on your path to righteousness. But you have a power in you, a light, a powerful light, that you must let shine, that you must use to help yourself and your world to stay on track the way God wants you to.”   [Read more…]

©2010-2017 SanDiegoFreePress.org

Code is Poetry