difficult conversations

     There is a reach in this post that may move us to not entirely comfortable places, though the place we land is better, I think.

          As a result of an impending surgery last week, I wrote
"The Letter." 
      "The Letter" is that document you leave your loved ones, in case.  It is your last words. You say what should be said, you offer valedictory thoughts, you include details to help their moving on, managing the business of life, and you say good bye. It is grim work. The finality of your own mortal life is front and center. It gets your full attention. 
       When it is complete, it is a good thing. It offers a peace of mind, but it also generates a clarity. There is much in living that keeps us from a clear view of life. This task leads you to the essence.
       Writing "The Letter" is something I suggest, for people of a certain age, even if there are no surgical or medical riddles on the horizon. It is either the best, or worse, kind of what if contingency. 
       I think it helps draw you closer to your own life and to understandings. 

         
         There is another difficult conversation, a dialogue, I think the nation should begin. 
          Some will find even this suggestion hard to abide, but I've come to think it is our only hope. We should begin a 25 year process of a moderated public conversation about reckoning and reparations.
       A quarter of a century is a long process, but we are talking about origin issues. It is time to come clean, to acknowledge an unvarnished history of this nation and to dial it back to the time of sovereign residents, before European exploration and colonization.
      I imagine a national commission of sorts to preside over a calibrated and measured process that would have an impact on every aspect of our national life. 
      Education, law, economy, cultural mores, and human understanding would reap the benefits and consequences of a society having a discussion with itself in a very deliberate and intentional way. 
       25 years would allow for every historical accounting, gripe, grievance, tradition, presumption, mis understanding, dishonesty, and all the other effluence of our hundreds of years of becoming who we are, to be heard, seen, examined and understood. 

     The first years would be the fact finding and the sharing, putting all things on the table. Detailed and exhaustive, building what amounts to an honest revelation of all that we have been, done, in unescapable clarity.
     It would be the national discussion and the world would watch. I can see public hearings in every major city and state. The mechanics can be worked out so everyone could have their say.
      It's a broad idea, but it emerges from a life being spent as an observer, watcher, journalistically reflecting who we are.
       Maybe it is just my time on the watch, but race has been at the core our national existence and drama since I started reporting.

      1965 put me on the trail of the Ku Klux Klan, which became the rabbit hole of race in America that occupied much of my reporting life.
       The late David Brinkley and Senator Barry Goldwater  were two of the judges who awarded me a National Emmy Award for an investigation of the Klan. Brinkley called it  "one of television's finest hours."
       For almost 50 years I've watched and wondered why don't we try to fix this, why don't we just get painfully honest. 

     A 25 year national conversation will allow the honesty and  time to create a full account of history. With that achieved in the early decade, generations can then begin to mediate what to do about it, how to adapt, how to make amends. 
    By adding the element of Reparations, it will force this nation to come to a time of adjudication, judgement, and seeking meaning through recompense. It becomes an act of contrition, a national seeking of redemption. It will not be easy, nor should it be. It will force knowledge to become common and it will challenge our sense of justice, and it will force us to proceed with honesty, vigilance, and a new sense of who we are and who we will become. It will change the balance of things.

     Living through a pandemic has given all of us time to think. Our initial "We've Got This" attitude got tired as disruption continued. Flattening curves worked, until we rushed too fully back to a sense of normal. No one has lived through a challenge of this magnitude and we have come to realize we are indeed vulnerable and without a cure.

      That realization can work on a human psyche.

  

    The eastern slope of the high Serra has become a favorite place. The power and beauty of nature is awesome. But I also find great renewal in the vestige of the frontier life, thinking about the spirit of those hardy souls who made their way against it all.

    
    I felt an extra measure of that when I visited ancestral Scotland the brave.  Surviving challenges has pushed our advance and toughened us to living on this planet in the face of hostility.

          

     As California summer brings the thirsty brown and tan, I've been watching a few fighters.

     The thistle is the flower of Scotland. Here in California it is the bane of ranchers and gardeners, but I delight in their persistence.

    And after cousin of the wild thistle, our prolific artichoke bed passes its zenith, it offers a final salute of resilience and beauty.  

       So there you have it; challenging notions, hard suggestions for difficult conversations. If we are to see this republic survive, if the best of our aspirations are a noble human endeavor, we need to get tough and we need to be fully honest.

       Stay safe. Take care of each other.

       See you down the trail.

...we will not look away...

   Bob Dylan's recent and rare interview with historian Douglas Brinkley covers sensitive history and sacred ground and does so at this time when the history we are creating shakes us to the core. 
    The rebellion against racism is global. The outcry about killer police and the culture of inadequate training and profiling is also world wide. It seems people of reason are fed up with the enabling of racist attitude. Non-Black people are the majority of this universal movement. This may be one of those "inflection points in the arc of history."

     "...If you can't speak out against this kind of thing, a crime that's so unjust,

      Your eyes are filled with dead men's dirt, your mind is filled with dust..."

      Dylan wrote the lyrics to the Death of Emmett Till in 1963, 8 years after the bright eyed 14 year old Chicago youth was savaged into a grotesque corpse in the Mississippi delta.

      "...For you let this human race fall down so God-awful low!"

     Years later a white woman admitted she lied about the incident that sent her husband and his half brother into a rage where they grabbed the youth from his uncle's home, beat and mutilated him, shot him in the head and put him in the Tallahatchie River. 

     An all white jury acquitted Roy Bryant and J.W. Millam. A year later the men admitted they killed Till.

    "...This song is just a reminder to remind your fellow man

  That this kind of thing still lives today in that ghost robbed Ku Klux Klan."

    Till's family wanted an open casket. The gruesome truth helped launch what we call the Civil Rights Movement.

    Dylan's song came in the midst of the push for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that outlawed segregation. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibited discrimination in elections. 

     

     We know those rights did not come without bloodshed, police violence, massive marches and demonstrations. 
     The extension of those freedoms were born of courage and faith.

      And, it seems, we are back to the start, though now everything is accelerated. The 21st century struggle against racism and repression is world wide. 

      People around the globe are demanding better training and less violence from their cops. 

       Too many men and women, black and white are killed by police without cause and for crimes that are minor, not serious and would never carry a death sentence. 

       Whites do not walk out of their homes with the daily fear that accompanies Blacks; will this be a day when a police encounter ends my life?  Being white in America offers a safety. Being Black in America brings jeopardy. Still, all these years later!

       Things must change and the momentum has filled our screens, dominated government attention, and provoked something new and powerful. 

     This has happened more rapidly than any political movement I've witnessed. But the grievances are centuries in the making.

      Something seems different. There is a kind of spiritual momentum. Justice and equality seem to be getting breath, bringing a multitude of races and ethnicities together and into the streets and halls of government with a common purpose.

   

     But racism does not die and it's congress of dunces do not go easily into the night, here or anywhere in the world.

     Ignorance is a powerful strain in humankind. While some refuse to see and understand, resisting all the while proclaiming they are not racist, others conspire to keep a knee on the neck of equality. We need only look at what Georgia did in their recent primary, suppressing black votes, as they did earlier in electing a racist governor denying hundreds of thousands of votes to a Black woman, the likely winner.
     The Republican strategy of voter suppression is in full overdrive, now trying to eliminate vote by mail, even in the midst of the pandemic. There continues a deliberate attempt to deprive people of the right, because of the color of their skin.

     It is dead wrong, but not surprising as the two most powerful racists in the US are the President and his partner Mitch McConnell.

    People of conscience should note, some of the harshest critics of the racist Trump and McConnell are Republicans, former Republicans now. They are a bit like the Germans who fled as the world watched the rise of a fascist regime.
Those who stay loyal to this President will be marked by history as ignominious fools.

        It is not unreasonable to see the murder of George Floyd as being a galvanizing moment, one death too many. In that way his murder by a dead eyed, trouble making cop captured on video is like the horrible casket photo of Emmett Till. We can not look away from that kind of evil. We can't deny the hatred, the racism, the stupidity, that still exists.
      Those of us who thought the legislative acts of the 1960's fixed the problem, were naive and racist in our way, because we refused to see the truth. 
     Racism is a human stain, it is ours to eliminate. It does not happen with one election, or a congressional action, or better testing of the psychological fitness of cops. 
     My dad used to say, equality cannot be legislated, but discrimination can be outlawed. Real equality is the work of the heart. 

       "...but if all of us folks that thinks alike, if we gave all that we could give,
        We could make this great land of ours a greater place to live.
           from The Death of Emmett Till-  Bob Dylan

beautiful diversion

Jacaranda trees are in bloom on the California central coast

     Take care, stay well.

      See you down the trail.

DREAMERS and SEEING HISTORY, HONESTLY

    The "Dreamers" are Americans.

    I heard a young would be nursing student talking about the 15 years he had spent in the US, becoming as "Americanized" as anyone else and now he and 800 thousand others are targeted. It is not only wrong, it is stupid!

     Donald Trump has lied again and while that is no surprise the scope of the reaction of Americans and certainly American business is. Almost everyone knows the idea of ending "the dream" is a repulsive violation of what we think and believe.

     Perhaps the opposition of business and industry and the law suits by states and others will help keep the dream alive.

GETTING PERSPECTIVE

Courtesy of Indiana Historical Society and Indiana University

(This is a repeat of a post first published September 15, 2014. The complaint and issue has again been raised)

     To quote Ed Murrow "this just might do nobody any good." To paraphrase his 1958 speech to the Radio TV News Directors Association (RTNDA), at the end of this a few people may misunderstand what I'm saying, but here I go.

      We need to find a balance point where those who wish to address and treat sins of the past do not also destroy history or use deconstructionism without restraint and/or the balance of intellectual buffers.

      A case in point-The Thomas Hart Benton mural.

Controversial when it was created in the 1930's it is said to make people uncomfortable now. Why?  The depiction of the KKK. An honest appraisal of Indiana history cannot ignore the Klan. 
       If you are disturbed by the Klan portrayal consider proportion and perspective. The hooded terrorists are counter weighted by a white nurse attending to an African American child. More visual counter punch is the left anchor of the Benton panel composed of the press, an editor/writer and reporter that challenged and broke the Klan's extraordinary control of Indiana politics and the 1920's Republican party.  

      The media's battle with the Klan is iconic. Pulitzer awards have been given. I was awarded a National Emmy for my investigative documentary of the modern Klan in America. I've been an enemy of discrimination and prejudice, including racism, sexism, ageism and other manifestations of bias. My body of work is deep in reporting on these issues.

      We should find a way to be aware of sensitivities without trying to edit the past. The mural is not, as some have said, a glorification of the Klan, rather it is a depiction of fact. Reality, regardless of pain or absurdity cannot or should not be retrospectively edited or worse, deleted. Knowledge dictates that we recognize historic truths.

     History appreciates with understanding and by sifting nuance and seeing things in context through an honest assessment.  Later we may come to advanced understandings, gain insight, change our minds, learn, discover information and evolve, but the ground from which we and knowledge derive is historic fact. What we see and call history must be understood not only in the context of our time-but in the framework of what people knew and did in their own time. 

     As a high school kid I spent time in the city room of the Indianapolis Times. A giant replica of the front page announcing the Times winning a Pulitzer for their investigation of the Klan adorned a wall. It made a huge impression. When I took the stage in New York to accept the national Emmy for my own investigation I stepped into a slip stream of iconic history. The Benton art tells part of that story. 
    Though you may think the behavior is offensive, the painting itself of klansmen and the burning cross should not be regarded as offensive in intent  but rather as part of that stream of history. In the painting the Klan is seen as small, yet the nurse doing good service and the press loom more significant and impressive.  And if you look carefully you will see the klansmen are dominated and overridden by circus performers. There was a time when most circus acts wintered in Indiana. I think Benton was expressing a bit of poetic contempt and mockery by that juxtaposition.  

     No the Benton mural is not offensive, and those who think it is are simply wrong. It is history and should be taught and respected as such. And as I study it again I am reminded there must always have been those who like to ignore or even forget as well as those who may be rightfully upset with our past, who would like to expunge it. We can not help but analyze by virtue of what we know, but we must keep in mind that we are only as effective as we are fully and historically informed. 
       We cannot change the past.

Protection

    See you down the trail

ACKNOWLEDGED GRATITUDE

THANKFUL

    It's a great idea isn't it? A day devoted to gratitude. Among the blessings I count this year is investigative reporting. Yea, a little out of the mainstream, but still appreciative enough to share a post.

     It started when a legendary radio newsman Fred Heckman hired me from a little station in Muncie Indiana to join his 50 thousand watt "Voice of News" market leader in Indianapolis.

     As a young reporter I "went back to high school," undercover, to document drug and gang problems. Later, the Black Panthers, New Mobilization Committee to End the War, Beaver 55 (draft  board vandals), SDS, Weather Underground and others were part of my assignment, so was fraud in public demolition projects, religious cults, corruption in the police department, doctors making mistakes and more. Thanks to Bruce Taylor for mentoring and editing my first investigative documentary.

     Thanks to Chris Duffy for hiring me to set up an investigative team at the NBC station and to my news boss Bob Campbell for giving us time and resources to do the job of investigating the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan and their paramilitary operations and recruitment of students, medical straight jacketing and neglect in state mental hospitals, fraud in public housing, the political use of Grand Juries, more police corruption in yet other communities, toxic waste dumping involving mobsters and a well known trucking union, illegal chemical recycling, the failures of busing to end segregation, drug smuggling, another round with a religious cult, criminal motor cycle gangs, Soviet and Chinese spying on defense contractors and in University research labs, lagging efforts at locating MIA's, Muslim "charitable" groups as cover for bringing "students" to the US and more. My trusted colleagues were Ben Strout and Steve Starnes. We had each other's back more times than I wish to recall.

     Thanks to John Hendricks founder of Discovery and TLC and program executive Steve Cheskin for buying and commissioning programs from my documentary company ranging from political assassins, training with Snipers, training with FBI Agents, to archaeological digs in the jungles of the Caribbean and work in Africa. Thanks to Mark Nisenbaum, Megan Fisher, Alan Bucksot, Brian Ho, Jung Park, Ted Coats and Eric Harvey.

     Thanks to Scott Blumenthal for hiring me into LIN Television and permitting me to set up a CBS affiliate investigative team where we pursued Department of Transportation practices and costs, laxity of security in airports, airlines and freight haulers, security weaknesses at federal installations including the world's largest nerve gas depot, security gaps and lack of oversight in the commercial food chain, and many more. It was in this posting I directed my last investigative effort that won a Peabody and alerted the world to military command decisions that resulted going for the cheap in the head gear worn by US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq where brain injuries and head trauma sky rocketed. Thanks to Doug Garrison a former FBI agent who I appointed to run the team that included Karen Hensel, Loni McKown, Rick Dawson, Pam Elliot with help from my Assistant News Director Kevin Finch and Executive Producer Stacy Conrad and editor Doug Moon.

       I'm on this memory lane because of the great film Lana and I watched with our youngest daughter. SPOTLIGHT tells the story of the Boston Globe's I-Team's breaking of the Catholic Priest pedophile epidemic and the role of the Church, and others in Boston, in covering it up. It is an extraordinary film and features brilliant performances by Liev Schreiber, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Stanley Tucci, John Slattery and Mark Ruffalo. I think Ruffalo and Keaton deserve Oscar nominations. 

       I hope tens of millions of people see it, not only to memorialize the valiant efforts of the Boston Globe team, but also to pay tribute to real journalism, which seems to be shrinking in the face of modern media penchant for hype hustle, personality, bombast and shill. 
       Like my colleagues those who engage in investigative reporting sacrifice a lot, endure unique pressures and put a lot on the line. Those executives who permitted time and resources could have made other choices that would have been easier, cheaper and not fraught with legal reviews. Instead they trusted. That is special.

      In this season of gratitude I wish to thank my wife Lana and daughters Kristin and Katherine for "sharing me" with years of reporting, pre-occupation, missed family time, stress, risk and immersion in the belief that trying to get at the truth and reporting facts makes a difference in the world.

      Investigative reporting is important. It is hard work, costly, risky and there is much less of it now than there used to be. That is a shame. I'm grateful for what there is of it and for my small role in having been about that kind of work.

   See you down the trail.

SAYING IT-IMPRINTING IT AND A BETTER WAY

NIGGERS, FLAGS AND RACISTS

    The words are still shocking, even more so from an 11 year old.

    "They ought to kill all the niggers or send them back to the slave houses. The stupid old niggers are the problem."

     The petulant girl was the daughter of the kleagle of a particularly active and virulent cell of the ku klux klan. Her words were pivotal in a documentary demonstrating how racism is passed through generations. 

      I covered the klan and extremist groups in the mid 60's and years later wrote and produced KLAN to portray how and why racism and racial hatred is so deeply woven into the American fabric. David Brinkley, one of the national Emmy judges, along with Senator Barry Goldwater, called KLAN "One of the most important hours in television." A national Emmy is an honor but little good that program or many other fine journalistic efforts have done to sear the disease of racism from society.

       A friend and Presbyterian pastor was active in the struggle that got the confederate flag removed from atop the Dome at the Statehouse in Columbia South Carolina. That it still flies anywhere is symptomatic of the disease. 

      Despite comments about heritage, legacy, history or any honey tongued justification, the flag is all about racism, white supremacy and slavery. Ta-Nehisi Coates in this Atlantic piece presents the very words of the confederacy and their political leaders. They are convicted by their own uttering. 

     The racist front continues in the existent celebration and heritage of the confederacy in the south; streets, highways, schools bearing the name of confederate leaders along with statues, monuments and cultural icons. We can not afford to forget facts and must seek to understand the pathology of the culture, but we should not elevate the symbols and names of those who sought to keep humans enslaved, denied of their rights, liberties and dignity and made war to do so. 

    The flag belongs in an historical museum, as a nazi swastika or heraldry is kept. It is an object of study. It is a token of a shamed and hateful ideology. The flag itself will not spur a supremacist to violence but its very flying near a seat of government is a nod and wink that condones a perpetuation of the hatred. 

    Whether on license plates, belt buckles, t-shirts, bumper stickers, in media or even tattoos, anything that celebrates slavery should be seen for what it is, evil and a discredited idea banished to the ash bin of history.

    Words carry emotional history. We debated and anguished over inclusion of the girl's words. I debated with myself in telling the story in this post. Such is testament to the sensitivity and respect that is due, but "to each his own," unless it inflicts pain, as does the confederate flag.

    A post script: Hoagland Jr. High School in Ft. Wayne was a mix of Black, Hispanic and Caucasians-almost an equal split with fewer Caucasians. Our basketball team was predominately Black with a few Latinos and a couple of us white guys.  In the final moment of a city tourney game our center, Roosevelt (Rosie) Dodds made an incredible hook shot giving us a win. As we triumphantly moved to the locker room several of my team mates deliriously gave Rosie high fives, cheering "way to go Nigguh."  I lined up behind a black mate and when I got to Rosie's locker I gave him a high five and said "way to go Nigguh."  Rosie smiled, picked up his tennis shoe and whacked me on the face. Still smiling, extending his hand to pick me up he said "but you ain't no Nigguh!" Rosie taught me a lesson, vivid today as it was years ago.

     BTW we aired a 10th Anniversary reprise of KLAN.

The sassy and hateful little girl had grown up. She was still at home but had been banished to a trailer on the families property. She apologized to our viewers saying she had changed her mind and learned real history. She was working with "African Americans" and considered one a good friend. 

A FATHER OF PEACE

      The man on the left is Elias Chacour, thrice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. I recalled the week I spent with Father Chacour as I read of recent Druze violence in the middle east.

       Chacour has done what no one else has. He's brought Druze, Muslim, Orthodox, Arab, Palestinian, Jew and Christian together.

  I shot this assemblage of every middle eastern faction imaginable-Israeli government, Palestinian, Druze, Muslim, Arab, Christian, Melkite Catholic, Orthodox. Chacour had convened them to dedicate a new building at his remarkable Peace school in Ibillin in the hills of Galilee.    

  Struggling against unimaginable odds, it seems no one wanted him to succeed, Chacour created a school where Jew, Muslim, Druze, Palestinian and Christian children studied together. I was there as a journalist and was overwhelmed his achievement. I was indelibly impressed by 

by the courage and extraordinary quality of the man. We had hours of conversation driving across Israel, in his garden, at dinners and in his home. We watched him work his efforts at reconciliation. Chacour was born in Galilee and considers himself a Palestinian-Arab-Christian citizen of Israel. He is truly a peace maker, perhaps the hardest job on the planet.

      Role models are important, as are images and symbols.
To what do we owe our attention?

SOMETHING NICE IN PARTING

  With appreciation to my daughter Katherine!

   See you down the trail.

     

"That's the way it was…" and Colorful Fungus Among US

THE LAST '15

     Fewer of us write checks or letters so there is less need to annotate the date. Artificial intelligence via phones and computers do it for us.  But there is always that hump of getting over the correct last digit. 

      As you slide into acceptance that we've reached the midway point of the second decade of the 21st century, consider our blue marble 100 years ago.

       World War I raged. The British ocean liner Lusitania was sunk by a German submarine. 1,195 died. Woodrow Wilson was President, the New York Yankees wore pinstripes for the first time, the Boston Red Sox won the world series, "Typhoid Mary" was finally arrested, Lassen Peak in California, seen here, exploded in a volcanic eruption with debris still evident, 

Ralph DePalma won the Indianapolis 500, fire destroyed most of Santa Catalina Island, the one millionth Ford came off the assembly line in Detroit, a court in Georgia accepted the official formation of the new Ku Klux Klan, City Hall in

San Francisco was dedicated, Cornell was the NCAA Football Champion with a 9-0-0 record, Wimbledon was cancelled due to WWI, Regret won the Kentucky Derby, William Jennings Bryan resigned as Secretary of State, a mob lynched a Jewish man in Georgia, unemployment was 8.5%, the Germans first used poison gas as a battle field weapon, DW Griffiths The Birth of a Nation was released and created the foundation of modern film making, Audrey Munson, portraying a model, became the first actress to appear nude on screen, the Nobel Prize for Literature went to Romain Rolland of France, the Vancouver Millionaires won the Stanley Cup, 600,000 to 1 Million Armenians were slaughtered by Turkish soldiers and the cost of a first class stamp was 2 cents. 

     Do you wonder what this new year will be remembered for 100 years from now?

SOME THINGS NEVER CHANGE

   Welcomed rain, warm days and more recently cool evenings have prompted the local variety of mushrooms, toad stools and fungus to arrive.

THE LESS COLORFUL COUSINS

AND THE WEE TINY LAD
These are growing out of a pine cone-notice the thumb?

   Wishing you well being, mindfulness, celebration of the moment, light, happy adventures, and good hours in the blogosphere in 2015.

2014 THROWBACK

"1-9-6-4-We're the class of '64" fifty years later.  Warren Central High School Class Reunion-Milano Inn, Indianapolis, June, 2014.   

    See you down the trail.