Midlife Meditation

Charles H. King, Jr., in 1981. Changes in perception typically take time. The mind accumulates information through experiences, relationships, the media, and at some point, wakes up to a truth it has been stubbornly ignorant to. That's how it was for me with my understanding of homosexuality: I don't remember ever being taught that it was wrong, but my childhood was certainly steeped in the idea that it was a sinful choice some people made. I remember reading a couple of references to it in high school, and not really understanding them (one in an autobiographical essay by Tennessee Williams left me particularly confused). The first gay man I was aware of meeting was a theater major who lived in my dorm at Willamette University who struck me as outrageously flamboyant. Unbeknownst to me, one of my best friends in college was a closeted gay man who did not come out to me until our 25 year reunion. I also had no idea that a woman I was attracted to during my first semester...

Trump goes off script, insisting there was nothing wrong with his response to Charlottesville. I see it in every prepared word he speaks. He wants so very badly to hang onto their enthusiasm, their passion for his cause--which is to say, their passion for him. They are the truest of the true, the deep core, the believers who can never be shaken from their faith in him, their undying trust that he will continue to vouch for them, even when he must do it in coded language. It would be the easiest thing in the world for him to disavow him, and I'm sure that's what his advisors are asking him to do. Mind you, they can't tell  him to do anything. That's a recipe for unemployment. But asking, and doing it in an absolutely respectful way, carefully wording the request in terms that are as flattering as they can possibly be--yes, I'm sure they're doing a lot of that. "Just a though, Mr. President: the vagueness of the remarks you made is proving ...

Torch-bearing "Unite the Right" bigots showing their true colors. "How does legitimate white pride look?" Tony Peterson, one of the people I most respect, posted this question on Facebook twelve hours ago. It's generated a great deal of conversation in that forum, to which I contributed one short response:   "White pride" is for those who don't know or, worse, ignore history. White shame is where pale-skinned Americans like me need to start. I posted an essay yesterday about how integral racism has been to the history of the Americas, with a line traceable to the first European explorers and colonists to set foot in the New World. Today's essay draws on much more recent history: specifically, the direct line of racist policies that runs from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump. Modern racism begins in the 1960s with the passage of civil rights legislation during the Johnson Administration. That's when, for the first time since Rec...

The Goldendale, Washington, eclipse, as photographed by me, February 26, 1979. It took our school bus about four hours to reach Goldendale, Washington. Along the way, we stopped at the Bonneville Dam. This was a field trip for the physics class and the TAG program of Philomath High School. On our tour of the dam, we saw the fish ladders, visited the cavernous turbine room, and witnessed a barge moving through a ten-story tall lock. All of this was impressive, probably worthy of its own field trip, like the one we'd taken earlier in the year to the Trojan nuclear plant in Rainier, Oregon. But it was really just a prelude, a way of squeezing more learning out of the two minute event we had traveled hundreds of miles to see: a total eclipse of the sun. Geographically speaking, we could have traveled just to Portland, which would also be in the path of totality; but Mr. Gosser, our physics teacher, had lived in Oregon for most (probably not all--I remember him having a b...

Workers in New Orleans prepare to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee. Prejudice springs from two wells: ignorance and choice. Every person alive has some degree of ignorant prejudice. It comes from hard-wired framing mechanisms, ways in which we understand the world. Until we've had some experience of something, we've got no way to know what its characteristics are. Once we've had some experience, our minds make assumptions that then affect the way we view other examples of that object. If my first experience of a bar is that it's loud and smoky (as was the case of every one of the few bars I visited in early adulthood), my mind judges all bars to be like that--until I'm pleasantly surprised by a British pub, or an Oregonian brewpub, and then I can begin to realize that there's plenty of variety in the world of drinking establishments. It works the same way with people. Prior to my first experience of Catholic, Jewish, Asian, African-American, LGBTQ, ...

One of thousands of Trump Troll images I Googled. It took just over six months for President Trump to fulfill the destiny foretold for him by generations of necromancers, seers, and pundits: utterly ignoring his printed talking points (which were about opioid addiction), in total disregard for the criticisms he had levied against his predecessor for drawing lines in the sand and then not acting on them, Trump promised to exercise the literal nuclear option if North Korean dictator Kim Jung-Un makes any more threats of his own. Within hours, Kim called Trump's bluff, threatening to attack Guam, the American territory closest to North Korea's missile launchers. Thus begins the Trumpocalypse. All through the campaign, we joked about it. Slate Magazine summarized the speculations in its "Trump Apocalypse Watch," issuing a daily estimate on a scale of one to four horsemen of "how likely it is that Donald Trump will be elected president, thus triggering ...

It's true: he doesn't care what you think. He's not your President, either. It dates back at least to the debates, when candidate Trump referred to Barack Obama as " your (meaning Hillary Clinton's) President." Of course, that attitude toward the 44th President grew out of years of single-handedly keeping the "birther" movement alive, as Trump refused to accept even the documentary evidence of a birth certificate that Obama was born an American citizen. Many, including Trump, have criticized Clinton for engaging in identity politics: promoting the ways in which her policy goals would benefit women, persons of color, the LGBTQ community. In doing so, the critics forgot the essential truth, voiced by Tip O'Neill many decades ago, that "all politics is local." It's the job of government to address the needs not just of the whole populace, but of its fractions, even its individuals. The Constitution exists not to defend t...

The view this morning from Mt. Tabor, looking toward downtown Portland. The Mt. Tabor summit is usually an easy climb, especially from the parking lot by the amphitheater. I made it from there to the top in about fifteen minutes this morning without... Nope, can't say "breaking a sweat." Nor can I say "breathing hard." In fact, I did both, but not because I'm out of shape or the climb was tough. It's just too damned hot--upper 90s by the time I made the climb (close to noon), 104 as I write this (6 p.m.). It's also too damned hazy. With the heat came a plume of foreign smoke, carried by high winds all the way from wildfires in Banff National Park in Alberta, where we were a week ago and I took this picture: We in the Pacific Northwest are experiencing--well, I can't call it "unseasonal" heat, since if we're going to have high temperatures, summer is the time for it to happen. So instead, I'll just say ...