Op-Ed

Two dogs walking. One of them says to the other: “I bark and I bark, but I never feel like I effect real change.”

This is the caption of a New Yorker cartoon by Christopher Weyant from several years ago. It keeps popping up in my head — I mean, every day. Like everyone else, I want what I do to matter, to “effect real change.” What I do is write. Specifically, I swim in the infinity of possibility. Humanity can kill itself or it can learn to survive. Most people (I believe) prefer the latter, which is all about discovering how we are connected to one another and to the rest of the universe. This is what I try to write about.

Then Congress passes another military budget. And once again, there’s the New Yorker cartoon.

Damn those Marxists!

You know their game, right? They want to spew truth and real history at our kids. No doubt they’re also in favor of dropping charges against Julian Assange, who (as all real Americans know) deserves 175 years in prison for exposing — with the help of the New York Times, The Guardian. Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El País — embarrassing realities about U.S. foreign policy.

How do I know the Marxists are behind this? The Heritage Foundation tells me so. In their dismantling of good old Critical Race Theory, they explain that it’s “an academic discipline founded by law professors who used Marxist analysis to conclude that racial dominance by whites created ‘systemic racism.’”

A dark cloud will threaten the future of Pacifica until it re-establishes good faith and trust with its listener-supporters, and with the public at large.

Along with the staff of KPFA, KPFK and KPFT, a strong majority—more than 6800 voters—approved a change of by-laws in July, 2021.

That clear majority voted in the well-founded belief that the previous by-laws had failed, and that the structure of Pacifica’s management needed to be reformed if the Network were to survive.

In denying that rightfully approved change of by-laws, and then denying the rightful election of a number of candidates to the KPFK board, Pacifica broke its good faith and trust with its listener-supporters, and with the public.

The results have been painfully obvious.

As Myla Reson has pointed out,  Pacifica INITIATED the lawsuit against New Day---and a number of individuals--- in direct opposition to the wishes of the majority of listener-supporters.

Money donated by those listener-supporters was somehow paid to the legal team to deny those very listener-supporters their own clearly stated mandate for new by-laws.

Can a poem transcend fury — fury combined with helplessness? Can individual property owners join NATO?

Having no other options than simply to continue seething, let me tear myself psychologically open for a moment here and see what happens. Yeah, this is personal. And yeah, I live in Chicago — part of what would, I presume, be called the “inner city,” which is where trouble happens, right? A lot of people avoid the inner city. Watch out, it’s dangerous.

But it’s been my home for the last 45 years and I love it for many reasons — but, essentially, for its complex, evolving diversity. Back when I was a reporter with a neighborhood beat in this city, I had an astounding realization: The whole world passes through Chicago! Thus, though my beat was a few square miles of teeming neighborhood, I was, in effect, covering the whole world — not from the top down but from the bottom up. It was a world of struggle and squabble, crime and empathy. It was the melting pot of peace.

Or whatever.

America’s beloved, desperately needed Pacifica Radio is at the brink of avoidable death.  It needs a miraculous but do-able progressive uprising to overcome the toxic, outmoded structure that’s killing the Network.  

In July, 2021, the Pacifica Voting Membership voted 6820-5471 to revise the Network’s failed old by-laws (FOB).  

But their legal team refused arbitration and pre-emptively sued, at financial costs they refuse to reveal…while demanding still more!!!  Individual “New Day” reformers have been threatened with personal liability.  

The result has been a horrific year of abject failure.  Rightfully elected board members, irreplaceable staff and many of the Network’s most popular hosts have been purged.  Basic operations have deteriorated into failed state chaos.  Phone lines have crashed, utility bills are unpaid, and Pacifica’s listenership has crashed along with its finances. 

My friends Scott and Betsey gave me a drum a few weeks ago. I played it as I sat with them . . . and I certainly mean the word “play” as childishly as you can imagine. I’m no more a musician than I am a nuclear physicist, but I played along with them and, well, this is what happens to me: I notice big things emerge in incredibly small moments.

10/30/22
City of Ft. Lauderdale seeks to privatize the drinking water of the Central Broward Region to a foreign corporation. The city owns and operates the Fiveash Treatment Plant, serving Ft. Lauderdale, Oakland Park, WIlton Manors, Lauderdale-By-The-Sea, Sea Ranch Lakes, Port Everglades, and portions of Davie and Tamarac. The reason for the proposed public-private partnership (P3) is to build a new treatment plant at the Prospect Wellfield, just west of the Executive Airport, in the flight path at the end of the runway. This will involve replacing a two-mile drain well currently in use at the Prospect site, installing miles of pipes to connect the new location to present infrastructure, plus multiple studies, approvals, and permits required for building a water treatment plant so close to an airport.

I’ve been haunted by a phrase for almost a month now: “morality police.”

The news has been global. A 22-year-old woman, Mahsa Amini, was arrested as she was leaving a subway station in Tehran on September 13 by an Iranian police unit known as the Islamic guidance patrol, a.k.a., the morality police, because she was an inappropriately dressed female. Maybe her hair was showing. Who knows?

There they were again. The dangling irony of memorial Nikes . . .

I was walking home from my neighbor’s house. They’d just had a piano recital and I was still full of music when I saw the pair of tennis shoes flung over the telephone wire that crosses my street – instantly redefining, at least for me, this moment, this piece of earth and sky. Oh my God. I don’t believe it.

Here?

In front of my house?

Every now and then I see a pair of tennis shoes flung over a telephone wire – that wire stretching through a nearby McDonald’s parking lot, for instance– and every time I do, I think about a 12-year-old boy named Jose, who shoved a bit of reality in my face twenty or so years ago. He did so as a student of mine.

I was a volunteer writing teacher at the time. This was part of my decade-long struggle with the Chicago Public Schools, which my daughter attended. One day, when she was in third grade – this is when the school system begins the farce known as standardized testing, and “education” started to mean teaching to the test – she came home angrily and declared: “Dad, I hate writing!”

Michael suggested the name Bob’s Rhubarb Lounge.

I couldn’t stop laughing, at least on the inside. I imagined commissioning someone to make a neon sign with those words, maybe ten feet high. I’d place it in front of my house, of course.

Why not? The point of the lounge would be to serve as a place where people can explore the meaning of life, just as I once explored the meaning of rhubarb. The imagination has no limits! At the same time, it has all sorts of limits, some of which are deeply painful.

All this emerged from an event at the house last week. My daughter, Alison — the Stained Glass Poet — who came to Chicago from Paris, is the one who organized it. “We should do a reading, Dad.”