Tsunami

I flunked college geology. I did well on my exams, but on my practicals, I just could not see differences between igneous and metamorphic rocks to save my life.
Even some sedimentary just looked metamorphic to me because they didn't look igneous and I wasn't sure they were sedimentary. In that class, if you could not get a
passing lab grade, you flunked. Period. When I elected it, I thought, 'the lab will be easier than any other lab I've had'. Oh well. So to comfort myself after grades
came out, I just re-read the book cover to cover. Of course, as another disclaimer
for my geologic opinions, that was in the 70s - and I haven't kept up much.
All that being said, however, I did read a lot of the material my eldest daughter
bought in the 90s for a University of Michigan class called 'Oceans'.
At that time I was amazed to learn that whatever mountain ranges, rivers, lakes, streams, eruptions etc. we have on the earth's surface - there are larger, faster moving, more vast, more volatile counterparts on the ocean floor!
Whatever happens on the surface of the earth, happens in spades on the ocean floor.
So I just have to believe that since climate change has somehow caused more frequent
and larger sink-holes on earth's surface, we may have larger and more frequent
sink-holes on our oceans' flooring. Where they would be in proximity to a tsunami, I would have no idea. How they would be related to earthquake, I could not say.
What I can say, however, is that the polar ice caps are melting at an alarming rate
according to Al Gore and most scientists. And I know water is very, very heavy. It
is going somewhere. It is moving quickly if gravity is real. It is causing severe
weather patterns. And obviously that is happening both on land, and at sea. I
think we need a LOT more geography and geology majors in our colleges. I'm just sayin'.

Sargent Shriver

Early this year Sargent Shriver passed away. From then until now I have considered
nearly every day what a profound effect he had on me, on my city, on my family,
through his policy of trusting people to employ their government to grow.
When President Johnson asked Sargent Shriver to head Great Cities, I thought "O wow, another government program. It won't be administerd to benefit anyone I know." I was too wrong! My mother followed the guidelines to apply for funds for the children in her surrounding neighborhood. I was married with a child by then, but my mother told me she was serious about needing me to get involved. Since I was trying to complete an undergrad degree, I initially thought I was too busy to make a committment to a project which would never come to fruition.
In the end, though, I saw the proposal I helped her write actually did get funded. So one day I went down to the church building, which was mainly a donated space to help with the program for children I felt were going to amount to an unruly chore group. Again I was so wrong. The children were young, from around eight years of age to maybe, twelve. Mom had named the program E.A.R.N. and Learn. The kids I met were engaged and engaging. My mother had hired a young art student from a nearby university to give the children art lessons twice per week. Initially, I thought even that was sort of an erudite idea. I visited the program one day, though - during an art lesson.
I felt such amazement at how quiet, how orderly, how eagerly the children soaked up the lesson on color and shading, and perspective. That lesson proved to be the first real art lesson I had ever received myself! The young people were respectful when they asked questions, but were not actually eerily quiet. They were truly working hard on their assigned projects. The teacher was very generous to let me sit in because she at first thought I would be a distraction, or an estimator of some sort for my mother. In the end I had a great deal of fun helping pass out the lunches that day, and helping preserve art for parents to see. I tried to visit the program to help out each day after that.
E.A.R.N. and Learn children did chores for elderly residents in their neighborhood. They swept up lawns, got a few groceries, swept porches, went to the mailbox, little things which could be supervised by the adults in the program. Every week they got paid. Every day they got a lunch. Every week they got a little evaluation by their seniors. Every week a tiny amount was put into individual accounts for them, a savings for program's end.
I just couldn't believe how motivated the very young very blonde teacher was each and every class period, how precisely my dad kept each and every receipt and expenditure in its proper place. The adults were so productive. The children were so industrious. Those getting services were so proud. The parents were so proud. Not from that day until this have I seen such positive governing at work. There was no waste. There was no fraud. There ws no putting children at risk. There were no parental complaints except that a few of them wanted to be more involved. There were no elder complaints.
In the end, Chrysler took the name of the program in a desperate move to garner some government attention at some point. We waved that away, as Great Cities had come to an end anyway by then. I'm not aware of what the name was used for at Chrysler.
Mom died in 1998, but a representative from the city came to her funeral to speak of her loveley achievement during the seventies, and to say there would always be a plaque to commemorate that achievement hanging in a place of honor in the City Hall.
I have seen first hand that children love to be the focus of meaningful education on any subject. I have seen first hand that every teacher is different from every other teacher. I have seen that a tiny church a few blocks east of Mack and Van Dyke on a street corner in Detroit can be a place of immense joy and community.
Forever and ever, I will thank Sargent Shriver for the depth and breadth of his conscience, of his wisdom, and of the gift those both were to us in America's great cities. Thank you Sargent Shriver.

The Edmund Pettus Bridge

Thank you to Congressman John Lewis. Please lead lectures on your view of the movement which details the events you experienced, and all those you
interacted with to make so very much American history. I wish all living civil rights leaders took turns teaching classes at least once a month. I wish a lot of those classes could be taught at the NAACP. I wish we could have a John Lewis Day at least in the black community. Then we would always be reminded how we got "Letter From A Birmingham Jail". The civil rights leadership in the U.S. - both living and departed, both black and white, are a national monument. I wish our children had proper access to them.

Partial Body

What in the world is the proclivity of American sculptors to portray black men as partial persons?
The artistic vision escapes me. In Detroit Joe Louis is sculpted as a giant fist. It should be hilarious, but it is just so awful. Mr. Louis was a complex person,
always disappointed he hadn't gotten an education.
Now we have the statue of Dr.Martin Luther King Jr. as a man with no obvious feet.
Isn't he the proverbial "inventor" of the peaceful MARCH?! Doesn't a march need feet?
Again, I want to laugh - but it is so terrible! Could we maybe vote on the
final depiction of these statues? It couldn't cost all that much to get it on the ballots. Hey, we need a sculpture somewhere in America of an entire black man,
and I need to see it myself.

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Dr. King is a revered public figure in this world. He has a lot of family in this
world; both public and private family. He has an enduring world legacy. For
me, though, he holds a special, private, quiet place at the heart of the formative
years of my social consciousness. Until I learned who he was, I had no idea such
things as I had begun to hear about could happen. Between 1961, and 1965,
I learned most of what I admired most about Dr. King from Ebony and Jet magazines. I turned eighteen in 1965.
I felt a great deal of disappointment none of my teachers at school
had breathed a word about it. I guess to them the movement was militant.
Our school was tiny. Our graduating class was one of the largest the school had
had in years. There were 100 of us! I found out people who were the fabric of
my very existence were suffering, likely dying, for the sin of wanting equal
justice under the law - equal treatment by law.
I wanted to hear Dr. King speak in Detroit. For all my anticipatory pride
and identification with the event, all I got was news in the hometown paper
that Dr. King was breaking the law to come to our arena because our mayor
hadn't issued the permit for the public gathering. Reading that gave me a
first commitment to the promise I intended to make to myself the day of the
speech; a promise of civil disobedience. I prepared myself for a big fight at home,
a big fight at school, a big ballooning struggle with police and courts.
I didn't need to be that prepared. Everyone and anyone came downtown to
hear that speech. I mean, except anyone from school. My parents had quickly
informed me early on they wouldn't miss it for 'all the tea in China'.
Everyone in the world knows that speech now. But by the time I heard it, I
was thinking Dr. King was just too kind, too accepting, too forgiving. I had
learned about Emitt Till. I knew he had gone unavenged. I had learned about
SNCC and CORE. Those were bitter legacies. I found myself arriving late at the
table of the SCLC. I harbored still, an immense respect and hero-worship for
the man who risked his life and limb every day, so that his people could be
'free at last'. When I got back to school the following Monday, I wasn't angry
no one seemed to have gone. This wasn't their fight. It couldn't be until we
had made it a lasting enigma. I don't even remember if the other black students
went. People at my school didn't seem to want to be known so much as black
but rather as 'black but just like everybody else'. I never did relish that idea.
I found early in life I loved being black. Not everyone agreed I knew what it
meant to be black. But I felt it deep down inside whenever I was home or
around extended family. At school, I felt...other. I didn't mind. But when I
got back to school after that speech, I knew it was up to me to spread the
word, and contribute to the work. Dr. King gave my the gift of turning me into
an activist-mini. I couldn't do much - but I did appeal to my classmates to
be the Catholics we had been reading about. We got reluctant permission
from the principal (probably because the captain and co-captain of the football
team were on my side) to organize canned food drives for the marchers
in the south who couldn't stop along their routes for a bite to eat. She let us
organize for a week or so. I thought the effort should have been ongoing; but
I had learned from Dr. King. I took what was authorized, yet I collected beyond
the end date she gave me until she began to intimidate the givers.
I will always be grateful to my mother for helping me provide collection
tools and containers. I will always be grateful to my dad for 'getting me to
the churches' and other collection centers 'on time'. (He was later to beg me to
do the same 'on time' bit with him for my wedding!)
So at seventeen, I found I did have it in me to stand for something. That
self knowledge it turned out, got me through a million later tribulations.
But Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. took my mini- committment, and kept giving
as we know past the day he died.
I went back to class. Dr. King went back to the marches. Southerners turned
dogs on him. Southerners turned water hoses on him and the other
marchers. Southerners jailed him. Constantly. Finally Dr. King had to
marshall his inner strengths for fighting the war in Vietnam. Young black
men were coming back from the war with no cheeks left to turn. Dr. King
had begun talking with Macolm X. And people like me just loved Huey Newton.
Dr. King in America had become Nelson Mandela in the old South Africa.
Our society began to see they were going to choose from among Milton Henry,
Dr. King, Malcom X, Huey Newton. After 1967, and 1968, we naturally chose
Dr. King to lionize. He was the only one associated with peaceful coexistence
in a nation of many cultures. Huey didn't have the humanity to match his devotion. He was hero of returning warriors who mocked the "para-military".
Later, in South Africa, the apartheid government was to choose from among
Nelson Mandela, beloved the world over, Winnie Mandela's "boys", (a majority
of black youth in South Africa were teenagers at the time) and the Zulu Nation.
They surely didn't want either of the latter two.
We as black people did not get jobs or any equal access or any EEOC attention
until after our civil insurrections in '67 and '68. Laws on the books had no
teeth we could see in the cities. Of course I call them civil insurrections.
Our journalists and officials called them 'riots'. Young people don't hear or read
the real history of '67 and '68. They don't hear the truth of how Dr. King was
treated when he was alive. They don't even know the history of Thaddeus
Stevens. The true history of slavery is obscurred and obfuscated in countless
high school texts. Even at the height of black pride we skipped over our
slave ancestors to be proud of our ancestors who were kings and queens in
Africa. Our children, however, don't study African history. The true history of the
Mau Mau is nearly impossible to study in America. I hope one day
the history of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords will be honestly told.
For though she is not a traditional civil rights hero, she voted for Congressman John Lewis for this Congress's Minority Leader, even knowing her girl Nancy Pelosi would win. Hey, we love Nancy too. But Giffords honored the venerable one. And whereas '67 and '68 , a more violent part of the struggle,
are glossed over in the U.S. - Osama Bin Laden obviously
studied it intently. And whereas Congresswoman Giffords has suffered
terribly, possibly for being so honest, possibly for being so forthright, you can
bet your bottom dollar that if the Reverned Jesse Jackson, or the Reverned
Al Sharpton had put rifle cross-hairs on a map of certain congressional districts
the resultant conversations wouldn't be so "kinder , gentler".
If we really love Dr. King we will study the history of his work more closely.
We will conclude the truths about the meaning of his work in modern
culture more precisely. We will know more assuredly the work left still to
be done. And we will note, for instance, more of the little noticed affects of
his legacy. For instance, the Liberal Arts and Sciences, literature, and
western civilization studies before Dr. King, and after Dr. King, are like
night and day. If you are a black person - teach you children. If you are
not a black person, you should teach your children. Run and tell that, all
of you.