A wisdom

"Like Columbus in the olden days,
We must gather all our courage.
Sail our ships out on the open sea,
Cast away our fears..."

Seals and Crofts, "We May Never Pass This Way Again"

Don Lemon's inconvenient truths

I have been reading for the last week conversations on Facebook and various black-oriented websites about CNN anchor Don Lemon's commentary last Saturday. Lemon had the audacity to agree with some critical remarks by Fox News' Bill O'Reilly about the upbringing of black youth and then to add some criticisms of his own for good measure. And for that, Lemon has been raked over the coals by a host of black people and some whites. Indeed, some of the insults hurled at Lemon had a frantic, almost manic quality, as if he had wandered off the reservation and has to be brought back at all costs. It was as if someone had given an order: "Get that Negro back in line!"

How sad! How pathetic!

The man offered five pieces of advice that ought to be unexceptionable, and yet they are treated as if they are an attack on "the black community." I would bet a week's pay that none of Lemon's critics raise their own children the way they suggest is just fine for others in "the black community."

Lemon's critics strike me as being in deep, deep denial. Far from criticizing him, we should be lauding him for raising these inconvenient truths that we desperately need to face.

A wisdom

"The truth of the matter is that, except for the occasional shark landed on a fishing boat or jostled by a depth charge, sharks are practically indestructible. Always moving, always hunting, like evil they assure the randomness and uncontrollability of life itself."

--John Bart Gerald, "Conventional Wisdoms," Harper's magazine, July 1971

My 'Bourne' addiction

Why am I unable to resist watching any of the Matt Damon "Bourne" movies? I'm sure I've seen each of them at least a dozen times. But whenever I go scrolling through the cable channel guide and see one of them listed, I find myself tuning it in.

I love the exotic locales--I can never see too much Paris. I love the fight sequences--has there ever been one better than that between Bourne and Desh in the third film? And I love the individual-vs.-the system theme.

Long live Bourne!

Apologies in advance: "In my day..."

Even though I'm now officially a senior citizen--I'm 66, full Social Security age--I try to avoid being one of those old farts who talks incessantly about how much better things were "in my day." However, two things happened today that force me to do so.

I just returned from the supermarket--a Meijer's, a major Midwestern chain not unlike Walmart. My wife had asked me to pick up several things, including a watermelon. I went to the produce section and there found a big cardboard bin topped with a sign: "Watermelon. $4.99." In smaller letters was the word "seedless." I looked into the box and there they were: a couple of dozen striped melons, all of about the same circumference and all, I have learned from experience, of the same passably sweet taste and with those little white would-be seeds that you can eat right along with the meat.

What ever happened to--dare I say it--real watermelons? I mean the dark green ones that came in an assortment of sizes, with big black seeds that you had to spit out as you ate and that, if you picked the right one, could have a sweetness that would make you want to cry. Or the long, light-green ones that could taste just as good?

I think back to my youth, when my brothers and sisters and I used to spend summers with my grandparents on their farm in East Texas. Grandpa always planted watermelons, not just because he and we liked to eat them but also so we children could sell some and make a little spending money. Every few days we would harvest a batch of melons, load them onto his trailer, hook it up to his little orange Allis-Chalmers tractor and drive down the country roads, selling melons to folks taking the evening air on their front porches. There was no one-price-fits-all. Prices might range from 50 cents for one of the small ones (about the size of what I paid $4.99 for today) to $2 for a great big one, family size.

What I remember most vividly about those melons was the way a good one would pop--thunk!--when you first punctured it with a knife, and how thin was the rind as compared with the rich, red, juicy meat. Now those were good watermelons! Do they exist still anywhere?

The other noteworthy thing today involved our neighbors' dog. He was sitting on their front lawn as I returned from the grocery, and he had that forlorn look that never seems to leave him. You see, the neighbors have one of those electronic fences and the dog has gotten used to the fact that he is going to get some sort of painful shock if he tries to leave the yard.

His appearance brought to mind a line from a favorite essayist of mine: "A dog without a broken spirit is no dog at all." Our neighbors have an honest-to-God real dog. His spirit is broken.

My wife and I were driving somewhere recently and a thought hit me: When was the last time I saw a dog chase a car? I can't remember when it was. Can it be that all dogs reside now behind electronic fences? Or has all the spunk been bred or trained out of them?

When I was a kid, you saw dogs chase cars all the time. We briefly had a dog that would bolt out of our front yard to chase vehicles on the highway that ran in front of our house. We had him briefly because he ran out one day and got himself run over by a truck.

There's a deep philosophical dilemma in this dog thing. Do you breed or train or shock all the spunk our of your dog, leaving him with a broken spirit, so that he'll live longer? Or do you leave him to live life free and unfettered, and risk that he'll meet the same end our old Spiegel did while chasing a truck? It's pretty clear which way the majority in our society have answered that question. When was the last time you saw a dog chase a car?

Roll away the "Stone"?

I don't get the protest over the use of Dzhokar Tsarnaev's picture on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. Presumably it calls attention to a story inside the magazine about him and his crimes. Hitler, bin Laden, Charlie Manson, the disgraced Richard Nixon and dozens of other bad guys have been on covers. What makes Tsarnaev different?

This is about journalism, people!

Opined elsewhere

My Chicago Tribune Op-Ed today on the George Zimmerman-Trayvon Martin case:

http://my.chicagotribune.com/#section/533/article/p2p-76678788/