If you see racist behavior or hear racist dialog, it’s racism. Why is there debate about that?

I was asked recently if I am a racist. I was also asked how I would know if someone else is one. I have answers to both of those questions.

First, am I a racist? No, I’m not, but don’t take my word for it. Ask around.

Second, how do I know if someone else is a racist? Let me count the ways.

* Three men walk into a Fairmont bar. Two are white and one is black. The bartender refuses to serve the black man but tells the white men they can stay. What would you call that? Is that racism? Yes, it is. Did that really happen? Yes, it did. I was one of the white guys.

* A man comes to my house to do some work and tells a racist joke. What would you call that? Is the man a racist? Yes, he is. Did this really happen? Yes, it did. He told the joke to me.

* Another man comes to my house to do some work. He looks in a window and sees an Obama/Biden poster from 2008. He said, “Oooh, you like him?” I reply, “Don’t go there.” What would you call that? Is the man a racist? Yes, he probably is. Did that really happen? Yes, it did. He was talking to me.

* A man is sitting at a basketball game waiting for a friend when a stranger slides over to him on the bleacher. He strikes up a conversation about the mostly all-white visiting team and how their players are “so intelligent,” compared with the mostly all-black home team. What would you call that? Is the man a racist? Yes, he most likely is. Did this really happen? Yes, it did. He was talking to me.

All of these events took place in Fairmont, West Virginia, where I was born, went to public schools and college and have otherwise lived for a large part of my life, including now. When I commented on a Facebook thread that racism has always existed in Fairmont and still does, a person I don't know suggested that maybe I was the racist and not the people who displayed open or dog-whistle racist tendencies.

Again, I suggest you ask around. There are plenty of people who know me. See what any of them think, then judge for yourself.

Just for the record, racism is certainly not limited to Fairmont, West Virginia. I could testify in court about other incidents that took place in other West Virginia cities. Like the time an interracial couple was denied entry to a Charleston establishment, or the time a Jewish friend was refused entry to a Parkersburg club. What would you call that? Are those examples of racism? Yes, they are. Did those events really happen? Yes, they did. I was there.

So back to the original question: How do I know if someone is a racist? It’s pretty simple, really. If I see racist behavior or hear racist dialog, it’s racism. If someone endorses, supports, condones, accepts or tolerates racism, that makes them a racist in my book. I don't know why there is even debate about that. If someone shows up at my door wearing a white Klan hood and holding a burning cross, I’m guessing he’s a racist…but at least he’s honest about it, as opposed to the people who are racists and don’t know it, or the ones who try to deny their racism by saying, “I can’t be a racist. I have a black friend,” or my favorite, “There’s a black guy in my office.”

I contend that the closet racists are the most dangerous because they blend in with the rest of us, pretend to be broad-minded and then let their racism slip out a little at a time so that they think it becomes normalized. Then, when someone calls them on it, they project it back on the other person. When I posted my comment on Facebook, I only mentioned that racism exists in Fairmont, but I never mentioned anybody’s name or accused any person of being a racist. The post elicited a series of angry responses, the reply to which could have been, “If the shoe fits....” 

I could have said that, but I didn't. I wrote this essay instead.

Neither snow, nor rain nor gloom of night could stop my dad…but he never met Donald Trump

My father was a mailman. He worked for the Postal Service for 32 years, through snow, rain, heat and gloom of night. None of it could stay my dad from the swift completion of his appointed rounds.

He was a mailman before we had Zip Codes, before we had sorting machines and before the mailman drove around in little white Jeeps. My father sorted his own mail first thing every morning and delivered it on foot with a large, heavy, leather bag hung off his shoulder. On one of his routes, as I remember it, he told me he walked 11 miles a day, up and down the hills of Fairmont, West Virginia, and up and down thousands of steps to mailboxes on people’s porches.

On rainy days, he got soaking wet. On snowy days, he got freezing cold. On sunny days, he sweated through his clothes. I never heard him complain.

He treated everybody on his route like family. Old ladies would give him money to buy them stamps because they couldn’t get out to the Post Office themselves, and he’d deliver them the following day. At Christmas time, my father delivered thousands of cards and dozens of small packages, working long hours into the night, and he got paid very little overtime for his effort. He also got a lot of fruitcakes, Christmas cards and $5 bills from his customers.

Once every few months he delivered everybody a Sears and Roebuck catalog. Try to imagine what it was like carrying hundreds of those thousand-page books around for eight hours or more.     

He couldn’t carry all the mail at one time, so there were Army green “relay boxes” strategically placed along his route. A truck would drive around in the morning and fill them up, and when my dad came to one, he’d open the box with keys he carried on a long chain and take out a bunch of mail, deliver it, and do the same thing at the next relay stop until all the mail had been disbursed. The next day, he’d do it all again.

Wash, rinse, repeat.  

After so many years, when he had built up a lot of seniority, he was able to “bid into” certain mail routes if they became available. That way, he eventually got to be the mailman who came to our own house. It meant that in bad weather, he could come inside and put on dry clothes or extra socks or a rain slicker, or just spend 10 minutes talking to my mom and getting warm before getting back to work. He could do that because as far as I know, in 32 years on the job, he never took the time he was allowed to eat lunch.

Eventually, the Jeeps arrived and the sorting machines were installed and everybody was assigned a Zip Code and they started sorting Fairmont’s mail in Clarksburg. My dad kept working for a few years, finally retired in the early 1980s and died in 1985.

So why am I writing this essay now?

Because for better or worse, the Post Office has been a part of my life since I was just a little boy, and now the president of the United States is trying to dismantle it to restrict mail-in voting so he can steal the 2020 election…and that really pisses me off. You may have read that the Post Office is one of the largest employers of veterans in the country, and that’s true. My dad was a World War II veteran who got a job there after the war, and was even given credit for his years of military service.

Everybody in Fairmont knew my dad, who probably delivered mail to all of them at one time or another, and I grew up as the mailman’s son. Until recently, when I’d meet someone for the first time, I could say, “You might have known my dad. He was a mailman,” and people would reply with, “Oh, sure, I knew your dad.”

Sadly, the people who could say that now have mostly passed away.

The Post Office is also a very important institution in rural America where an aging population depends on the mail to deliver their bills, their Social Security and pension checks and even their medications. According to The New Yorker:

“In 2012, when the Postal Service planned on closing 3,830 branches, an analysis by Reuters showed that eighty per cent of those branches were in rural areas where the poverty rate topped the national average. You know who delivers the Amazon package the final mile to rural Americans? The U.S.P.S. You know how people get medicine, when the pharmacy is an hour’s drive away? In their mailbox. You know why many people can’t pay their bills electronically? Because too much of rural America has impossibly slow Internet, or none at all. These are the places where, during the pandemic, teachers and students all sit in cars in the school parking lot to Zoom with one another, because that’s the only spot with high-speed Wi-Fi.”

According to Jane Kleeb, chair of Nebraska’s Democratic Party, the mail “is a universal service that literally levels the playing field for all Americans. It is how we order goods, send gifts to our family and keep small businesses alive. In the era of the coronavirus, mail is now our lifeline to have our voices heard for our ballots in the election.”

So it breaks my heart to see what’s happening to the Postal Service. It’s disturbing that a man who has no regard for the history and tradition of this country can systematically strip away everything that’s good about America to feed his own ego and his narcissistic quest to stay in power, and even more disturbing that he is doing it in broad daylight while openly admitting in televised interviews that his motive is to suppress the vote.

More to the point, I want to know why Congress can go home in the midst of such a crisis when mailboxes are being removed and sorting machines are being dismantled and nobody is doing anything about it. I want to know why our leaders are allowing Donald Trump to flush America down the toilet while they sit back and pin their hopes on an election he intends to steal.

How to save America revisited

I was looking at the final election map one night and it just came to me, like an epiphany that was so simple I'm surprised I didn't think of it earlier..

IT’S TIME TO SAVE AMERICA BY BREAKING UP THE UNITED STATES.

We’ve already noted the differences between Hillary Clinton’s America and Donald Trump’s, so this is the perfect time to go one step further and make it official. Here’s the plan:

Step 1. We’ve known for some time that Texas wants to secede from the union, so I say we let them. They can become independent or go back to Mexico or become Greater Guatemala. I don’t really give a rat’s ass.

Step 2. People in California are already talking about having a Calexit, so I say we add in the contiguous blue states of Nevada, Washington and Oregon (plus Hawaii) and create West Coastlandia, with San Francisco as the capital and the government buildings located next to Ben and Jerry’s at the corner of Haight and Ashbury. (Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Jeff Sessions.)

Step 3. New England joins with NY, NJ, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia to create The Thirteen Colonies Minus a Few But Much Better Than the Original 2.0. We make Annapolis the capital so the Navy can defend it any against Trump supporters who might escape the Virginia boondocks. Of course, Trump will have to move out of New York because the president can’t live in a foreign country. Trump Tower will be demolished and a statue of President Obama holding his birth certificate will be erected in its place. It will be one foot taller than the Statue of Liberty.

Step 4. That leaves the blue states of Illinois, which has enough weapons to defend itself while standing alone; Minnesota, which we’ll give to Canada where it belongs; and the Colorado/New Mexico Rectangle, which we’ll name New Colomexiradoco. Say it with me: Col-o-mex-i-rad-o-co. It rolls off the tongue. This new country will be given back to the Native Americans we stole it from.

Step 5. We allow Trump to govern all of the remaining red states, which will be renamed Trump’s Golden Basket of Poorly Educated Low Information Deplorables. I’d put the capitol in Mississippi and make Trump and his ceramic family live there among the stupid, uninformed confederate flag-flying redneck racists who elected him president.

Step 6. Finally, Trump’s government will deport all of us red state liberals to the new blue country of our choosing, and we’ll all live happily ever after without ever having to hear his voice or see his tiny hands again.

That time when the president talked and talked and couldn’t tell the truth

I just finished watching Jonathan Swan’s complete Axios interview with Donald Trump, and I believe I can truthfully say that Trump told more lies in 38 minutes than I have told in my entire life. He lied about the coronavirus, he lied about the economy, he lied about Russia, he lied about Portland and he lied about African Americans and Black Lives Matter.

He probably lied about some other things that I don’t know much about, so I’ll give him a pass on them since I can’t prove otherwise, but I know he told eight lies in the first five minutes of the interview, and that’s got to be some kind of record. Trump likes to claim records for a lot of different things, so I will gladly give that one to him.

I’ve been watching and hearing this narcissistic cretin tell tens of thousands of lies in the five-plus years since he slithered down the golden escalator and announced he was running for president, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him talk for nearly 40 minutes without ever actually telling the truth. (Well, he did say “I don’t know” a couple of times, so there’s that. I’m sure some day people will write books about all the things he didn’t know, so I’m calling that statement the truth.)

It was a most remarkable interview considering the guy Swan was talking with is supposed to be the most powerful man on the planet. Trump claims to be a stable genius, but frankly, if this interview was an accurate record of his mental acuity, he could sit by himself in a school bus shelter and still not be the smartest person in the room.

I took notes all during the interview, which really has to be seen to be believed. If you’ve got 38 minutes to spare (and who doesn’t in the age of COVID), I encourage you to watch it for yourself. If you can’t or would rather not, I have compiled this convenient summary for your reading pleasure. The lies start at 1:55 and go all the way to the end, so buckle up, buttercup, it’s going to get bumpy at times.

Swan began the interview asking about Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic which has been universally criticized for its slow response, lack of planning and uncoordinated communications strategy.

1:55 – “I think we’ve done an incredible job,” Trump says. (Only if you mean incredibly bad.)

2:17 – By closing off travel from China and later Europe, “we have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.” (The virus was already in America and spreading before Trump took any action.)

3:03 – “Nobody knew what this thing was all about.” (Yes, a lot of scientists did, but Trump refused to believe them, or at least disregarded their warnings.)

3:18 – “There are 188 countries that are far worse off than we are.” (There are not.)

3:50 – When the virus hit “we were beating China on trade.” (No, we weren’t.)

4:04 – China “was paying billions of dollars” in tariffs. (China was simply adding the tariffs to the price of its exports and American consumers were paying the added cost.)

4:17 – When the virus hit, “I closed down the greatest economy ever in history.” (Only if you base economic success solely on the stock market.)

4:49 – “Those people who really understand it (the pandemic) say it’s incredible the job we’ve done.” (When Swan asked “what people,” he couldn’t name anyone.)

5:34 – Trump claimed that 12,000 people attended his Tulsa rally, which actually drew just 6,000 people. “You couldn’t get in. It was like an armed camp.” (It wasn’t. There was a lot of open space.)

5:50 – He claimed that the virus was “pretty much over” in Tulsa and Oklahoma at the time, when, in fact, both the city and the state were hot spots before the rally and a lot worse after it.

6:58 – He claimed that he canceled a subsequent rally in New Hampshire because of the virus, but at the time, his staff said it was canceled because of an impending storm.

7:23 – “Right now I think (the virus) is under control.” (One thousand Americans are dying every day.)

Are you starting to get the idea?

I have a lot more notes. There’s basically one lie, half-truth or questionable comment every minute throughout the rest of the interview, but I’ll spare you the gory details and just hit the highlights.

* COVID deaths – The U.S. has the lowest death rate in the world. (You can google this. It’s far from true.)

* On Russia paying bounties to the Taliban to kill American troops – “Many people said that was fake news,” and that specific intelligence “never reached my desk.”

* On his recent phone call with Russian president Vladimir Putin – He didn’t discuss the bounties but talked about nuclear proliferation, “which is a bigger problem than global warming.” Asked about Russia providing weapons to the Taliban, he first said, “We did that too” when Russia was fighting in Afghanistan, then said he has “heard people say” that was happening before backtracking to, again, “It never reached my desk.”

* On whether he reads his daily intelligence briefings – “I read a lot and comprehend extraordinarily well, probably better than anyone you have interviewed in a long time.”

* On voting by mail – “There is a new phenomenon called mail-in voting.” (Swan corrected him to point out that mail-in voting started during the Civil War.) Trump claimed that ballots would be sent automatically to dead people and even to people’s dogs. (There is no evidence that anything like this happens in 99.9999% of the cases.)

* On rioting in Portland – Videos of unidentified stormtroopers beating and gassing peaceful protesters were “fake news;” the problems were all caused by Antifa, anarchists and agitators; and that the violent protests “got better” after his troops arrived (in fact they got worse). He also said the troops wore no identifying patches or markings because “anarchists could read their names (on their uniforms), find out where they live and go scare the hell out of their families.”

* On African Americans – “I’m doing very well with the black community and we were becoming a unified country” before the virus hit. “I did more for the black community than anybody with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln, like it or not.” (I’m just going to leave that right there.)

* And finally, on the death of civil rights icon John Lewis – “I don’t know John Lewis. He chose not to come to my inauguration. He didn’t come to my State of the Union speeches. I think he made a big mistake.”