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Reflecting on What Could Have Been

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Reflecting on my 80 years I find myself still dreaming of a better world. Not some “Kumbaya” singing fantasy world, but one where people, at the very least, try to find ways to understand and appreciate each other. A loving world.

But that was not the dream of my generation. Getting our hands dirty in pursuit of a world where concepts like “peace and justice and equality” rang true, just wasn’t something we cared to do.

We were called the “Silent Generation” and that we were, through and through, as quiet as an opossum playing dead.   [Read more…]

Oh, If We Could Listen With Heart Like Nipper

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When I was a child there was a commercial about a dog named Nipper who was supposed to be listening to his “master’s voice” on a windup disc gramophone. I thought about him early one morning recently.

On this morning I woke up a little earlier than usual because my iPhone SE startled me awake, vibrating and buzzing like crazy, kind of like those European police sirens.

And, hey, I’ve got to say I didn’t know I had an app for such as all that. I shut that little device up by grabbing it like a cowboy wrestling a steer he’d just roped only to find out that its histrionics was regarding an article about a book Arizona Senator John McCain had written.

I was forced to question the very notion that I was in possession of anything approaching a smartphone.   [Read more…]

Putting My Love in Play

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I recently wrote a rhyme about all the love I’ve enjoyed for 80 years, and now I’d like to share how I’ve put that love in play.

Regarding that, I have to say that loving has been easy for me because my life’s work has been dedicated to schools which are perfect places for spreading love.

And my intent, all along, has simply been to make my world more just for all human beings – beginning, in a moment in time, when I was in grade school myself.

I can still picture the day. There was a sweating fan blowing across a little container of water as though that could affect the temperature in a classroom in Tucson, Arizona, the first weeks of school.
  [Read more…]

Still Loving After All These 80 Years

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If I’m breathing April 18th, 2018,
I will be 80 years old.
And to brag a little bit,
I lived those years
with a lot of love in my soul
and that’s quite an ac-com-plish-ment
for someone with
COLORED written on his birth cer-ti-ficate   [Read more…]

Shedding Tears of Hope and Joy As Children Make America Great

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I’ve lived a life
among children,
as a child initially, obviously,
and who knows how many
young ones there are
with whom I’ve had the honor
of being in their company
as their teacher
or their vice-principal
or their principal
or as Mr. Ernie   [Read more…]

Overcoming Gloom In a Grand Canyon State of Mind

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The other day
I sat in my living room
caught up in thoughts of my daughter,
feeling a kind of gloom
that seemed to loom
over me
like a petrifyingly dark full moon
in a horror movie
that levitates over a chillingly mysterious tomb –
and I sought to overcome
this melancholy
as it was such a nice
sunny breezy afternoon   [Read more…]

Oh, I Love Those Children

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Oh, I love those children.

Those beautiful bright young
high school Floridians,
boldly taking
the leadership
so needed to dampen
our warped relations with guns,
standing steadfastly
as one,   [Read more…]

An Email to NewsManager@FoxNews.com

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Laura Ingraham’s put down of LeBron James on your network was so out of line and unnecessary and ridiculously insulting and dismissive. What does his grammar have to do with anything or his perceived “lack of education”? Why should he, in a country where he has the right to express himself, “Shut up and dribble”?

As a 79-year-old black man, it’s refreshing for me to see young black people like this great athlete speak out on what’s happening in the world — in this case, expressing his views on our president — who really “doesn’t give a f**k about the people” as he pointed out.    [Read more…]

Yahoos on a Saturday in Chicano Park

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Last Saturday a bunch of yahoos known as the “Bordertown Patriots” decided to have a “patriot picnic” at Chicano Park because they were under the illusion that the park excludes people who aren’t Chicano or Mexican.

What that says to me is they had never ventured into the park before with their families and just sat down to a regular picnic and enjoyed themselves -– like so many “normal” people of all ethnicities have done for years.

As for me, Chicano Park is one of my favorite places to take friends and family from out of town, folks who after their visit to the site, leave loving the park as much as I do.

I get so weary of narrow minded white supremacists like these people and their tired off-the-wall “reverse racism” take on the world.   [Read more…]

Way to Go, Wildcats!

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Every now and then in this world that seems to be spinning out of control, something comes along that literally energizes my soul and gives me hope.

Like just a few days ago when I clicked onto Wildcat Wednesday, the newsletter that University of Arizona Athletic Director David Heeke sends out to the school’s sports fans.

What he wrote about on January 17, “The Sumlin Era Starts Now,” really resonated with me because when I was an athlete at the UofA and a member of a group called Students for Equality trying to talk to fellow students and the community-at-large about eradicating Tucson’s Jim Crow Laws we were looked at as though we were a communicable disease.

A lot of the response to what we were seeking was the same as groups like Black Lives Matter receive today, all about how we, with our colorful signs highlighting our “Blacks and Whites Together” sentiments, were going about our mission in the wrong way, with not a word about what the right way might be.   [Read more…]

Surviving 2017 Looking Like a Palm Tree Bent Over By the Wind

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I am so glad to say “Good riddance” to 2017 because it was a bit unearthly to me.

I mean, on top of being barraged by all the abject buffoonery in D.C. that was unleashed by that fool who occupies the presidency, I had to go around most of the year looking like a palm tree bent over by the wind.

All due to some life-threatening vicious form of bacteria that found its way into my body and started whacking away like a field hand taking a machete to the stems of sugarcane, devastating my belly and tightening and weakening my muscles, making an absolute wreck of my lifelong bad back. It made standing and walking upright kind of an aerobic exercise that took all my might.

And let me tell you, trying to struggle to get your health back in a world that’s out of whack isn’t easy by any means.   [Read more…]

A New Years Wish for My People

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I dream a New Years Wish for my fellow black brothers and sisters, one steeped in my yearning for a country that truly is committed to the mythical land of “liberty and justice for all” we Americans pledge loudly and proudly in classrooms and public gatherings.

I just wish we actively pursued such ideals.

Now, I realize that we, like all other “individual” citizens of the country, can rise and shine and fulfill the loftiest of hopes and dreams.   [Read more…]

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