This is such a great idea. It should be done for Bar and Bat Mitzvahs (though there will be far fewer of those) and confirmations . . . at any rite of passage. Isn’t citizenship and participation at the very heart of a strong, functioning democracy? Isn’t it?
For a few moments, Aleida Ramos, wearing her rose-colored tiara, coral dress with the scalloped bell skirt and cowgirl boots, floated above family and friends, uplifted by tradition, community and family.
It was Aleida’s quinceañera — her 15th birthday celebration — and at this moment, the men and boys had lifted her straight up as her guests applauded, a high point in a day dedicated to her.
But even though she had permission to soak up all the attention, she dedicated a part of the event to a bigger cause. In the entry of the family-owned event hall where her party was being held, Aleida had made room for the Latino youth advocacy group Jolt Initiative so it could register her mostly Hispanic guests to vote.
As I have noted previously, I am seriously considering working on a book, either of my memoirs (my whole life) or one about my activities in the Peace and Justice movement of the late sixties and early seventies. Most of that work was in protesting the war in Vietnam, but some of it was in protest of racism and inequality. If fact, I just found this document I authored about six years ago, which I called “20 things about me” and I can see it doesn’t say a word about my work with the Committee to Free Angela Davis. Clearly, I’ll be adding to this list, which I believe I will use to help me organize my thoughts about my life.
This is two views of one of the casts that were put on my left foot beginning 2 days after I was born. They must have put it on loose, because I kicked it off. My mother asked me to save it so, even though she’s been gone for about a decade, they’ll probably get cremated with me.
I was born with club feet, one of which was corrected with casts, the other of which was corrected with surgery at 5 years old.
When I enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1966, I failed my physical because of my foot, but argued successfully that you don’t march in the Navy. Big mistake; it’s about all you do in boot camp. Was subsequently discharged when they discovered I had arthritis in my ankle.
My father, fearing I would become a bum, bought a small snack shop for me when I was 19 and a half. I was there during the Summer of Love (1967) and ended up having him sell it at a loss so I could go up to Haight-Ashbury and find out what the hell was going on.
It took me 3.5 years to complete High School because I cut so many classes and just didn’t want to be there. I subsequently gained admission and graduated with a Juris Doctorate from an accredited Law School ten years later, without having attended undergraduate school.
I provided armed security – as a bodyguard and with a team doing bomb searches, etc. – for numerous groups and individuals during the height of the anti-Vietnam War movement, including Jane Fonda, Arco Iris, Hortensia Bussi, and Vietnamese students in the U.S.
I, along with my brother and my roommate, provided armed bodyguard services for Roger MacAfee and his family after they had put up their ranch for Angela Davis’s bail. They were guests of honor at a fundraiser called “In Concert For Angela,” which was held at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. His family, and the three of us, were about the only white people there.
I was a bartender at the Ash Grove in Hollywood, a venue distinguished by having been burned to the ground numerous times by anti-Castro Cubans (Gusanos).
I spent two months in Cuba as a guest of the Cuban government and a member of the sixth contingent of the Venceremos Brigade.
I taught myself Spanish for the trip.
My first wife was Cuban (totally unrelated to my trip many years earlier) and my current (2nd) wife is Sansei (3rd generation Japanese-American).
I’ve smoked pot since I was 19. I’m currently 66 (and my brain still functions pretty darn well).
I love good single-malt Scotch.
My last dog was a Rottweiler who was given to me as a gift from a girlfriend who couldn’t handle him. He loved to chase shadows and stomp ants.
I have had at least a dozen cats throughout my life, including two right now – Zack and Weezy.
I accidentally ended up working on the Space Shuttle Main Engine program beginning a year before the Shuttle’s return to flight after the Challenger disaster. I stayed there for 23 years.
I accepted an early retirement package in 2010, as the Shuttle program was winding down and the space program was contracting.
I earned a Masters degree in Knowledge Management from CSUN in 2009, at the age of 62.
I became a first-time, adoptive father at the tender age of 55 and, in a stunning display of higher intelligence, did it again at 59. I feel responsible, but not guilty, for the part I have played in IA.
I attempted to provide social media marketing services for small businesses after retiring, but soon discovered nobody could afford to hire me and most were abysmally ignorant of what was possible.
At the end of last year I decided to offer my services as an editor and proofreader and my efforts are beginning to pay off.
I just signed two contracts to write for a couple of organizations I have a great deal of respect for.
The Simi Valley Democratic Club—of which I am a member, as well as the duly elected Corresponding Secretary and Chair of the Social Media Committee—had its 3rd annual Independence Day picnic this past Saturday. It is held in conjunction with our brothers and sisters in the Moorpark Democratic Club and we alternate between their City’s locations and ours. We’re right next to each other IRL.
As Corresponding Secretary, my duties range from publishing (which means writing, editing, and finding—or creating—graphics for) the club’s monthly newsletter, posting to our Facebook page and group, conducting meetings of the Social Media Committee, and a few other ancillary activities.
One of those ancillary activities is taking pictures at events I attend and, in the case of this picnic, putting together one or more useful posts for our FB page/group. Since I had taken a picture of all the elected officials who had addressed us (save for State Senator Henry Stern, who showed up late enough that I had already taken my 15-year-old, very bored, daughter home and, therefore, couldn’t take a photo) I decided to work on my Photoshop selection and layering skills. This is the result, which I posted to our page/group.
With the exception of the aforementioned State Senator (who I ghosted into the shot), these are the officials who joined us for a meal of hot dogs, chips, macaroni salad, and soft drinks/lemonade/iced tea. From left to right, they are:
I can’t take credit for this concept, but I can take credit for executing it in my ongoing quest to get better and better at Photoshop. I think I saw something like this on Twitter and I wasn’t happy with how it had been done, so I thought I would take a crack at it myself.
This is only two layers, but it took a bit of work to get Air Force One selected cleanly enough to delete everything else that was in the picture with it. That’s what takes the most patience at this point; selecting what stays and what gets removed when layering a series of photos.
Frankly, I wouldn’t wish this on the crew or staff along for the trip, but if Trump was on it alone, this represents one of many scenarios I’d love to see. A massive aneurysm is another. My favorite, however, will be arrest, trial, conviction, disgorgement of ill-gotten gains, and imprisonment. That would be ideal.
Not quite three weeks ago Ben Carson was being question by Katie Porter, a member of the House Financial Services Committee. For those who haven’t heard about it, or (assuming you’re reading this long after it happened) hadn’t heard about it, she asked him if he knew what REO stood for. It is a technical term that the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development should have known.
Instead, Secretary (or is it Buffoon?) Carson thought she was asking him about Oreo cookies. Hilarity ensued, especially on Twitter. My response was to take to Photoshop for a moment and whip together what went through my mind when I heard of this.
The original anti-fascist movement prepares to disrupt a large Nazi gathering.
In an interview with Piers Morgan that aired on June 4, two days before the 75th anniversary of the D-Day invasion of Normandy, in France, Donald Trump was asked if he wished he had served in Vietnam. His response: “Well, I was never a fan of that war, I’ll be honest with you. I thought it was a terrible war. I thought it was very far away. At that time, nobody had ever heard of the country.”
I wasn’t a big fan of the war in Vietnam either, but I enlisted in the U.S. Navy in the Spring of ’66, just as things were beginning to heat up again. I failed my physical, as I was born with club feet, which required surgery to correct my left foot when I was five years old. The doctors saw the four large incision scars on my foot, ankle and shin, and nixed my service.
I argued that sailors don’t do a lot of marching and I should be able to make it. They let me in. When I arrived at the United States Naval Training Center in San Diego, I immediately suspected I had made a mistake. As the bus I was on drove into the camp, I could see numerous company’s of men marching on the largest blacktop (we called it a grinder) I’d ever seen. As it turned out, marching was one of the things we did a lot of . . . and it was hell on my arthritic ankle and my shortened Achilles tendon.
There was on thing, one punishment that was meted out to us that sealed my participation and my eventual discharge. During graduation ceremonies, we would be required to bend our left leg at the knee so we could rest our rifles against the inside of our thighs (so the rifles wouldn’t clatter to the ground) while we screwed our white hats onto our heads in preparation for demonstrating some physical exercises with those rifles.
When our Company Commander thought we needed some admonishment or straightening out, he would make us stand in that position for up to a half hour. It required me to bend my left ankle in a way it just wasn’t capable of doing, as I have a shortened Achilles tendon. Needless to say, it was becoming quite painful after a while. All the marching wasn’t exactly helping either.
I decided to go to sick bay, where they x-rayed my left ankle and, after reading the film and seeing I had arthritis in my ankle, I was offered an honorable discharge. I declined. When I went back to my company, to a man they all told me I was an idiot and that I should take the discharge. Two days later, I decided they were correct and by early July I was a civilian, with a DD214 that said I served 1 month and 23 days. It also said I had been awarded the National Defense Service Medal.
I don’t think of myself as a veteran. I have never attempted to get veteran’s benefits, making a conscious choice after my discharge to not use benefits that others needed far more than I did. I know I wasn’t officially in long enough to quality, but I believe I could have made the case they should never have let me in and the hours and hours of marching and painful standing at “five-and-dive” exacerbated my medical issues . . . but I chose not to try.
After I was discharged, I became more and more opposed to the war and, by 1968 I was involved in the anti-war movement. I also joined a group of leftists, including a bunch of lawyers from an organization called Bar Sinister, in a Hapkido class. I could do most everything, but kicks that involved using the heel of my left foot were problematic and I almost broke it sparring one time.
We eventually morphed into a security team, doing everything from protecting demonstrators to armed security work for people like Jane Fonda, Roger McAfee, Hortensi Bussi Allende, and Vietnamese students in the U.S., among many others. I believed then, and I believe now, I was serving my country by opposing a cruel, illegal, and unjust war; a war that was killing my friends, one of whom it was my solemn duty to serve as a pall bearer for not too long after graduating High School.
I’m proud of what I did, though I frequently have wished I had tried a little harder to stay in the Navy. I do believe my work in the anti-war movement was important and valuable. Nobody paid us, and hardly anybody ever thanked us, but we prevented a lot of bad shit from happening . . . and helped, in many small ways, to end the war in Vietnam.
I just came across this tweet from Teh Donald™, which I’m quite sure is part of the collection of tweets where he has previously said something about someone else (usually Obama) that is actually applicable to his presidency. Donald John Trump has severely wounded irony and satire. It remains to be seen if we’ll ever recover a normal, decent sense of humor.
I’m also (not sure this is the right word) “pleased” to see this very special one was originally born on my 67th birthday and will now follow me all the days of my life . . . which are far fewer than they were even then.
A friend of mine on Facebook shared the following quote by Bertrand Russell, which was sent to Sir Oswald Mosely in response to a request by Mosely to debate the merits of fascism.
There is no doubt in my mind the Trump administration, and the bulk of the Republican Party that’s currently enabling him, are fascists. They have every intent of restricting our freedoms and keeping us in relative poverty and misery, all so a few may get wealthy at our expense. We must not allow this to happen. We must not give away those precious rights and freedoms we’ve won, and that so many have suffered to gain.
The original anti-fascist movement prepares to disrupt a large Nazi gathering
Dear Sir Oswald,
Thank you for your letter and for your enclosures. I have given some thought to our recent correspondence. It is always difficult to decide on how to respond to people whose ethos is so alien and, in fact, repellent to one’s own. It is not that I take exception to the general points made by you but that every ounce of my energy has been devoted to an active opposition to cruel bigotry, compulsive violence, and the sadistic persecution which has characterised the philosophy and practice of fascism.
I feel obliged to say that the emotional universes we inhabit are so distinct, and in deepest ways opposed, that nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge from association between us.
I should like you to understand the intensity of this conviction on my part. It is not out of any attempt to be rude that I say this but because of all that I value in human experience and human achievement.
I’ve been getting more and more comfortable with Photoshop’s many editing tools, chief among them layers, cloning, blending, and various level adjustments.
I find politics, especially the clowns in the Trump administration, wonderful subjects for my efforts. For instance, recently the Attorney General, William Barr, responded to a question about whether or not he was worried about his legacy with the following:
“I am at the end of my career. Everyone dies and I am not, you know, I don’t believe in the Homeric idea that you know, immortality comes by, you know, having odes sung about you over the centuries, you know?”
Aside from his use of the filler “you know” four times in one sentence, I was stuck with the thought, “is he being stoic or nihilistic?” I’m still not sure, but the statement reminded me of a song by George Harrison. I found a pic of the album cover, researched then downloaded the proper font, and tweaked the cover like so:
I think he looks appropriately unconcerned, don’t you?
For a few moments, Aleida Ramos, wearing her rose-colored tiara, coral dress with the scalloped bell skirt and cowgirl boots, floated above family and friends, uplifted by tradition, community and family.
Systems Savvy 