San Diego Free Press

Grassroots News & Progressive Views

You are here: Home / Archives for Columns / From the Soul

Millennials Are a Beautiful Sight to See

by

Millennials. So many of us see them as lazy, naïve, un-motivated “Me-Me-Me” kinds of human beings who somehow threaten to bring the world to an apocalyptic end – all while taking a selfie.

But from all I’ve ever seen, it’s the millennials, the 20 year olds and 30 year olds — and to think of it, the 40 year olds — of any time who are at the forefront of societal change.

I mean, Thomas Jefferson was thinking, “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” when he was 33.

On behalf of the Lakota Sioux people, Sitting Bull — a spring chicken at the time, and being no Tonto — said to the powers-that-be: “Reservations? I don’t think so!”   [Read more…]

Everybody’s Talking About the ‘I’ Word

by

Hey, y’all, have you heard?
Everybody’s talking ‘bout the “I” word.
“Impeachment,” in other words:
throwing The Donald to the curb;
finally fed up
with him on our last nerve
like a cowboy riding a wild bronco
wrangled from the herd;   [Read more…]

What’s Love Got to Do With It?

by

By Ernie McCray

Tina Turner once sang “What’s love got to do with it?” And, ordinarily, as one who is a “love my neighbor as thyself” kind of guy, I’d answer: “Everything.” Giving my love is pretty much how I’ve managed to survive in the Milky Way. I don’t know any other way.

But how loving am I? Really? I had never asked that question before receiving an email recently from an old friend, a high school classmate — in response to something I had written about The Donald. She wrote:

Dear Ernie. I believe that Mr. Trump is a deeply disturbed man. The only way I know of to soften that pain in my heart and gut is to send him love.
Love, Katie

The words “send him love” jumped out at me like a very well smashed tennis ball coming at me at the net. I had to duck as I sat at my iMac. The thought of sending this president love practically gave me a heart attack.   [Read more…]

Stream of Consciousness as a Brief Getaway

by

By Ernie McCray

PRELUDE: What’s written here are words that poured from me when I tried to, just for a few moments in time, air my mind of all the mania that seems to come from the White House from time to time aka all the time. It’s as written, word for word, with punctuations added to tidy it up a bit.

Ready, set go! Whew! What a world! What’s up, girl? Hard to breathe, easy to see, and hear, though, don’t you know. But it’s a mess at best. Some kind of crazy ass test. Lord have mercy on all the rest that has to exist with whatever this is. Whatever this is. Some crazy kind of show biz. Tis. T-I-S. Tis. What is the universe to think of this experiment that’s run into a ditch, a sink hole, where there’s a risk of not getting out?   [Read more…]

The Truth Can Set Us Free

by

Jim Comey. My man! I wish I could shake his hand. I mean I’ve got to put aside my deep deep deep disdain for the FBI to give props to a man who has come through with something I’ve so much wanted somebody from a high place to do – call Donald J. Trump out for what he is: a liar. For all the world to hear and see.

Of course he was stating the obvious but it needed to be said just as he said it: out loud – because some of us and the media keep cutting him slack with witty intellectualizing about what a lie really is, how a lie might not be a lie if it wasn’t intended to be a lie. What a lie all of that is.

Now, to be fair, I’d say that kind of logic might be the case with your typical run-of-the-mill fabricator, but Donaldo is a master liar. He can’t open his mouth without lying, the lies flying off his tongue like bullets from a machine gun, it seems. I mean forget “liar, liar, pants on fire” this man’s entire wardrobe is on fire. His closet is ablaze.   [Read more…]

Keeping a Neighborhood “Be the Best” Spirit Alive

by

Recently I received an email from a friend asking me if I would lead a conversation that would begin with a piece of art, next April, on issues important to Dunbar, the neighborhood in Tucson, where I spent the first 24 years of my life.

I couldn’t get back to her with the answer, “Yes,” quick enough. I can’t think of anything I’d rather do, in life, than take part in a rap session on behalf of a community that resides at the core of who I am as a human being.

I mean, I am Dunbar personified. I long ago bought into the neighborhood’s esprit de corps, “Be the Best” which was our motto at Dunbar School, the K-9 all-black school. Such thinking has pretty much been my life’s Golden Rule.   [Read more…]

A Cactus Speaks of Persistence (Thoughts about the Restorations of the Murals at Chicano Park)

by

I shakily tried to take a picture with my AT&T 3G cell phone of a cactus painted by Mario Chacon. I acquired it from him a while back in Chicano Park. I had to shade the painting from the glare of a blue sky with the sun shining high and bright and far and wide and finally I got about as good a picture as I was going to get no matter how hard I had tried.

Trite as it may seem my persistence in getting this snapshot was based on Mario telling me that the protrusions reaching out from the cactus spoke to the persistence of the indigenous people.

Being a simple minded person, that colored my thinking as I walked around the park with other people who were there, like me, to celebrate the restoration of the murals. Murals, as I see them, that stem from the long trail of heartaches that have plagued the Americas since the Spanish came by in drive-by style and created a reality wherein folks who had hunted, farmed, and gathered on those rich lands for thousands of years suddenly found themselves in poor standing in the only world they had ever known.   [Read more…]

Happy Birthday, Ernie McCray: Still Pushing for What’s Good in the World at 79

by

Streams of Consciousness the Day Before Turning 79

By Ernie McCray

Tomorrow. April 18th. If I make it I’ll be 79. 79.

Can’t wait to jam as a 79-year-old man. No, indeed. Time flashes at some kind of supersonic speed. Glad I’ve got me a beautiful woman and some mellow weed…

And there’s so much greed with people in need… And they choose to shoot at each other and drop bombs on each other in all kinds of weather, no thoughts of whether a timeout should be called at some point in human history…   [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…]

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…]

©2010-2017 SanDiegoFreePress.org

Code is Poetry