Midlife Meditation

                           They came to St. Louis hoping to win hearts and minds as liberals always do: through love, prayer, empathy, compassion, witness, dialogue, building relationships, scriptural principles, appealing to the better angels of humanity. And as is almost always the case, they lost to cold-hearted power mongering. Liberals wave the banner of hope; conservatives count votes and bargain away principles to consolidate and preserve power. It's how Donald Trump was elected president, how Mitch McConnell is stacking the Supreme Court, how Benjamin Netanyahu is staying in office, how Brexit passed and is still the law of the land, and on and on. Time and again, conservatives have demonstrated through their actions that principles are a commodity. That's how it was in St. Louis, as United Methodists from around the world gathered to decide, once and for all, if one of the world's...

Is it just me, or do you see the similarity, too? Bing Crosby in blackface. I rubbed my eyes, tried to wish it away, but there it was: midway through Holiday Inn , the classic musical that introduced "White Christmas" to the world, there was a blackface number. It wasn't just Bing doing the bit, either: there was a whole chorus of white people, all done up the same way, gathering around as he sang a ballad of "Abraham" (Lincoln, that is) who had "set the darkie free." The year was 1983, and I had begun a decades-long quest to see every classic musical I could. This one happened to be on TV a few hours before I boarded a train from Champaign, Illinois that would take me home for Christmas break. I was charmed by the high concept of the film--a hotel open only on holidays--and the chance to see Crosby paired with Fred Astaire (and yes, that's him, not Der Bingle, in the picture). But then came the Lincoln's Birthday number, and...

I have no idea what this kid is thinking--and neither do you. Cards on the table: I'm frequently uncomfortable around teenagers. As an educator, this has been a hard thing for me to accept about myself. My initial training was to be a band director, more specifically, a high school (and hopefully, eventually, college) band director. I didn't really get to do that until 2011, when, coming out of the recession, I was hired back to Banks as a half-time middle and high school band and choir director. There I found many kids I liked and enjoyed working with, some who were difficult, and a few who scared me. More cards on the table: boy energy agitates me, sometimes to the point of shutting down. As boys get bigger, they also get louder, their impulses more dangerous. I've seen boys in the fifth grade (the oldest kids I work with, now that I'm an elementary music teacher, band together into disruptive proto-gangs. I've seen them play at, and sometimes a...

It's not that I haven't been paying attention. I wish it were otherwise. I wish I could just check out, ignore what's going on around me, focus on what gives me joy, celebrate the wonders in my life. Unfortunately, that's not who I am, not how my brain works, not how it's ever worked. And so today, I'm going to begin writing about myself in a way I haven't before ( though I did briefly reflect on this topic in the early days of this blog, more than five years ago ), even as this blog--the way I write it, the amount I share, the carelessness around boundaries, the sheer logorrheic excess of its word count--is, itself, solid evidence that I am, in fact, in possession of an autism spectrum disorder. To be clear, I have not been identified as autistic by any professionally-administered psychiatric assessment, because I have yet to be assessed. I am, however, for the first time in my life, actively pursuing such an assessment. I want an answer. I want t...

Quick, where's the Kleenex box? It was a hard week. It began, as so many hard weeks have in this chaotic era, with a news story: a white nationalist, the kind who are the most rabid believers in the Trump agenda, only this one was even more extreme than they are, took his Trump-empowered bigotry and part of his NRA-empowered gun collection into a synagogue in Pittsburgh and killed eleven people. I saw that in my news feed Friday after school, and coupled with the other horrible things that no-longer fringy conservative white men had done that week (pipe bombs, shooting elderly African-American grocery shoppers when a prayer meeting proved inaccessible), I started the weekend in a bad place. All these crimes hit close to home one way or another: the bombs being sent to people of any prominence at all who'd been critical of Trump (making me thankful my blog reaches dozens, rather than thousands, of people); the attempted assault on a church much like the one where I pl...

Not nearly as scary as Trump wants you to think. It's been yet another time-dilated week, a week crammed with presidential verbal bullying, dehumanizing policy proposals, racist fear-mongering, and on top of all that, pipe bombs sent to prominent critics of the Trump regime, an arrest revealing the bomber to be a rabid Trump believer, and finally a synagogue massacre. That last atrocity was committed by a right-winger who believes Trump colludes with the Jews he mowed down with an assault rifle, but it's still of a piece with every other horror that has issued from the putrid mouth and thumbs of our monstrous accidental president. In an effort to escape the horror of the news cycle, Amy and I took advantage of a break in the weather to walk through a new development near our home. The neighborhood was still going up, and we passed several houses under construction. The carpenters' work was lent an air of festivity by the music they had playing: mariachi-style Mex...

No, it doesn't make me believe him--but maybe I'm weird. Once or twice a school day, one of the two hundred children I see makes a bad choice that results in another child being in tears. Classmates are quick to finger the perp, who initially will point at innocent bystanders as the true culprits. When that fails to impress me, the child will say something along the lines of "It was an accident" or "I didn't mean to." My response is consistent: whether or not you meant to hurt someone else, you did, and now you need to apologize. In some cases, the denials take on an angry edge, with raised voices and furious eyes accompanying the insistence of innocence. Sometimes this works, to an extent: I'll investigate further, wanting to be absolutely sure who was responsible for the incident. As often as not, though, the stridency of the protest correlates with the guilt of the protestor. The louder they deny, they guiltier they are. For much of my ...