Wisdom, Youth and Voting

04 Thursday Nov 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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26th Amendment, Activism, Civic Engagement, Corruption Perceptions Index, Election 2010, Howard Fineman, Low Voter Turnout, Political Corruption, Ted Halstead, The Atlantic Monthly, Transparency, Twenty-Sixth Amendment, Voters 18-24, Voters 18-29, Voters 18-39, Young People

Two Great Symbols of Sanity and Youth, Rally to Restore Sanity, Washington, DC, October 30, 2010. Donald Earl Collins

Back in the days when The Atlantic Monthly was really humming with cutting-edge articles, New America Foundation founder and former president Ted Halstead’s “A Politics for Generation X” appeared in the magazine’s August ’99 issue. In his piece, Halstead wrote, “Xers appear to have enshrined political apathy as a way of life….” and “are considerably less likely than previous generations of young Americans to call or write elected officials, attend candidates’ rallies, or work on political campaigns.” This was part of a much larger piece on the lack of Gen X political knowledge, participation and activism, and served as a bedrock article for the civic engagement community for most of the ’00s.

For many, Tuesday’s midterm elections and the utter lack of participation of eighteen to twenty-four year-olds (folks born between ’86 and ’92, roughly, anyway) reflects Halstead’s words of wisdom and sobriety. Only nine percent of eligible Gen Yers voted in Election ’10, fully half of the number who came out overwhelming for President Barack Obama in ’08. Gen Xers came out in larger numbers, but still didn’t touch their near three in five eligible voter participation from two years ago.

How terrible, the scholars and pundits have said. From Keith Olbermann and Howard Fineman to Donna Brazzile, Melissa Harris-Perry and so many others, the reasons varied. It was the anger and disgust over being saddled with student loans and graduating college with no jobs available. Or it was the demobilization of the millions of folks kept active by the Obama campaign machine in ’07 and ’08. Or it was because President Obama had used up all of his political capital on a year of healthcare reform, with unclear benefits or with benefits that wouldn’t kick in until ’14.

While I’m sure some of all of this is true, all of the commentary and analysis reflects a bit of disconnect

Rally to Restore Sanity Crowd, Washington, DC, October 30, 2010. Donald Earl Collins

and condescension. The folks invested in politics can’t truly understand why millions of adults under the ages of twenty-five, thirty, and even forty find traditional American civic engagement about as vital as the Spanish Inquisition. Condescending because those with any voice in the public arena and around politics act as if those who choose not to vote are the reason for the bad politics we have in our wonderful country.

Pulling out the old “people marched and died for your right to vote,” as true as that is, is about as effective in mobilizing these voters as Sarah Palin is at appearing as intelligent as my seven-year-old son. Saying that voters who don’t vote “get the government that they deserve” only serves to prove the point of the most jaded among us. None of this works, and it hasn’t worked for the nearly four decades since the Twenty-Sixth Amendment passed in ’71.

Here’s the real truism of generational inactivity at the polls and in the campaign offices. As a group, the voters under forty see American politics as opaque, out of touch, corrupt and heavily influenced by corporate and moneyed interests. More than eighteen years ago, a friend of mine at Carnegie Mellon got into a debate with me about campaign finance reform and how then Democratic presidential candidate Clinton needed to make this the centerpiece of his platform. That didn’t happen.

Halloween & The Two-Party System, Rally to Restore Sanity, Washington, DC, October 30, 2010. Donald Earl Collins

But he was correct. The process — despite the passage of McCain-Feingold in ’02 and because of the Supreme Court’s decision in favor of unfettered corporate contributions earlier this year — is more corrupt and secret than it has been before. Transparency International’s 2010 Corruption Perceptions Index ranks the US twenty-second in levels of corruption and transparency, putting us between Belgium and Uruguay. This isn’t a joke, but those of us under forty see our political process as one.

One thing for the expert class in American politics to think about — especially those of us who see ourselves as progressives or liberals — is a Biblical truism about being “doers of the words, and not hearers only.” What does this mean in the context of this post? Well, on Tuesday and Wednesday morning, I left before 7 am to vote one day and to pick up some groceries the next. I bumped into City Year workers — so-called young people — on those days, rising early to do their good works, to engage in meaningful work, to — dare I say it — change the world.

Voting for the younger adults in this country is hardly enough, because they don’t see it as making any more difference than dumping salt in the Atlantic. Volunteering for campaigns, for people who could get caught in a scandal at any moment? That’s a ridiculous idea. Working and doing good work to change peoples lives, however, is much more meaningful, and less fraught with scandal, corruption and hypocrisy than coming out to vote for candidates of two parties seemingly the puppets of K Street and corporate interests.

Until the poets, priests and politicians of our era get that, we will continue to see the politics of the foolhardy. For the people who aren’t voting may be acting out of a wisdom that the experts don’t understand.

This Thing Called Rap

30 Saturday Oct 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, music, race, Religion, Youth

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"I've Got The Power", "Rapper's Delight", Arrested Development, Grandmaster Flash, KRS-One, Lyrics, Manhood, Musical Tastes, Notorious B.I.G., PE, Public Enemy, Rap, Run-D.M.C., Snap, Sugar Hill Gang, Tupac

Snap - I've Got The Power Screenshot, October 30, 2010. Donald Earl Collins

At nearly forty-one, I ultimately don’t care what anyone thinks about my musical tastes. I haven’t cared for years. Heck, I make fun of some of the stuff I still listen to. Some of it’s deserved, but much of it’s a function of the music segregation that’s part of the cultural segregation that still exists in this country we call America.

Like most growing up in the ’70s and ’80s, I was introduced to rap in late-’79 by the Sugar Hill Gang “Rapper’s Delight,” rap lyrics with Chic’s “Good Times” — a disco hit the year before — as the background music. I got to see a rap venue once growing up, the following summer at Van Courtland Park in the Bronx. Back then, me and my Holmes Elementary School friends weren’t sure if rap was much more than a curiosity or fad, or would be here to last.

Who knows if the Hebrew-Israelite years or Humanities or just having parents who’d barely made it out of the ’60s music-wise had anything to do with it, but the years between ’81 and ’84 were lost ones as far as rap was concerned. I heard more classical than probably any other genre in middle school, thanks mostly to our wacko music teacher Mrs. Mallory. We didn’t have cable, and me listening to the radio at 616 wasn’t permitted unless it was religious programming. I caught pieces of music from videos on ABC on Saturdays sometimes, from my nearly daily runs to C-Town, and from my classmates and their conversations.

That was until I rebelled in the summer of ’84. Grandmaster Flash. Kurtis Blow. The whole Roxanne thing. That’s what I got to hear when I began to turn the radio dial to WBLS-FM and a couple of other stations in ’84 and ’85. Of course, Run-D.M.C. Doug E. Fresh, Kool Moe Dee, and early LL Cool J would all hit the scene in the two years that followed.

But unlike my other Black male classmates, I didn’t take a liking to most rap. And that made me wack. I was preoccupied with escaping 616, trying to find my true self, with succeeding and surviving Humanities and high school. Chasing skirts, trying to one-up and put down those around me, going to Mount Vernon Knight basketball games and hanging out on weekends? That wasn’t me, and the rap of those times didn’t have much of me in them. To think that a quarter-century ago, rap lyrics that referred to neighborhoods in the Bronx, Harlem or Brooklyn hardly ever commented on bling or blight — especially the blight — shows how far the genre had to grow in ’85.

PE, October 30, 2010. Source: http://www.melophobe.com

It took college and Public Enemy for me to fully appreciate rap and its power and popularity. It took PE and KRS-One and Arrested Development for rap to do something that all of the other music I listened to had done. They made me think. They touched my mind and my heart. The anger and rage of their rap other ’90s rap finally matched the early music of U2 and the romance of love balled R&B. I finally felt like the game had gotten serious, enough for me to pay attention.

Then the whole fake East Coast-West Coast crap of Tupac and B.I.G. came along to ruin rap for me again. What were they doing and thinking? Really, would Pearl Jam and Creed threaten to kill each other in order to promote their music? It was “a shame and a pitiful,” as my father would say. It took me a few years after Tupac’s death to come back to him, his contradictions and his poetry as rap.

Hate to say it, but only Eminem has picked up where Tupac left off since ’97 — and he’s just as contradictory. I’ve never really liked Jay-Z. Not because I don’t see the talent or can’t bump to the music.

Kanye West Album Art, October 30, 2010. Donald Earl Collins

But because until recently, his words never made me think, never gave me anything to feel at all. His music reminded me of why I didn’t like rap in the mid-’80s. It was cotton candy rap, the kind my superficially cool Black male classmates liked. Nas may be the most talented one of them all, but seems almost tormented between being a slut (this is a gender-neutral term for me) and being a soothsayer.

I find the music that is hip-hop and rap today wanting, with the same tired themes, with about as much originality as a ’60s radical patting themselves on their backs for striking a blow against “the man.” After three decades, the genre’s come full circle. I want to listen and learn. But I don’t think that the folks who step to the mike now are worth listening to or learning from.

My Mom, Birthday 63

27 Wednesday Oct 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Marriage, New York City, Religion, Youth

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Bradley Arkansas, Death, Finding Peace, Funeral Arrangements, Happy Birthday, Mother-Son Relationship, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Regrets

My Mother, Thanksgiving Day 2006. Donald Earl Collins

This has been a rough year for my family. But even with my financial difficulties and writing struggles, teaching, looking for additional work, my wife in grad school and Noah turning seven, nothing compares to what my mother’s gone through in the past few months. In July, my only sister Sarai passed away at twenty-seven after a lifelong struggle with sickle-cell anemia. Earlier this month, my grandmother — my mother’s mother — died after a battle with cancer and dementia at the age of eighty-three.

That’s difficult enough, to lose your only daughter and your mother three months apart. It became a hardship almost immediately. Neither my sister nor my mother made any preparations for Sarai’s death, funeral or burial. “It cost too much,” my mother said after I asked about next steps the morning Sarai passed. It took three days’ worth of work to get Sarai’s afterlife arrangements done. In the case of my mother’s-side grandmother, they were never close. My mother had been back to Bradley, Arkansas to visit her father and mother only two times since she left for the Bronx and Mount Vernon in ’66. Once in the summer of ’69, when she was pregnant with me. The other was in ’04.

Because my mother married and remarried at an early age, I’ve had a front-row seat for watching her in her twenties, thirties, forties and fifties. My mother has always avoided looking back in her life, reflecting on her mistakes or triumphs, or talking about anything that matters other than God. But one thing that was obvious to me when I went home to 616 and Mount Vernon to help with my late sister’s funeral and cremation arrangements was the sense of regret that I could feel coming out of her body. It wasn’t just grief, mourning, the rage that I’ve seen and felt when others dear to me have died. No, there was a sense of deep, repressed regret, about all the things that could’ve and should’ve happened, but never did.

I heard that same sense of missed opportunity in my mother’s voice a few weeks ago, after my mother called to let me know that my grandmother had passed. I’d only met my grandmother once, when I made arrangements during what I called “my Southern poverty tour” as part of my social justice fellowship job to visit Shreveport, Louisiana and Bradley, Arkansas. So while I didn’t feel much for the woman, I did feel for my mother.

I felt for her because unlike my mother, I’ve said everything that I could’ve left unsaid to her years ago. The family intervention (see “The Intervention,” January 21, 2008) I orchestrated nearly nine years ago. All of the arguments we had when I was growing up. My PhD graduation ceremony at Carnegie Mellon in ’97. My I love you’s to her now.

I may regret that our relationship isn’t closer, but at least I know why. I certainly regret how I’ve said some of the things I’ve said to my mother over the years, but not the meaning of my words. The only serious regret I have now is not being in a financial position to do more for my mother than I have over the past quarter-century, to make some aspects of her life easier. Still, all I can wish for her is a Happy Birthday, or at least, a day in which she can find peace. Hopefully, one birthday, she’ll have both.

An a-ha Moment

08 Friday Oct 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon High School, music, Youth

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"Take On Me", a-ha, Aiwa, Albany NY, Billboard Pop Chart, FDR, FDR Mansion, Friendship, High Falsetto, Hunting High And Low, Hyde Park, Music, Walkman

Today’s date marks a full twenty-five years — a whole quarter century — since me and my AP US History classmates rolled out from Mount Vernon High School at 6:30 am for a trip to Albany and Hyde Park. But nothing historical was especially eye-opening on this date. No, it was really more about the people, one in particular, that made this time an a-ha moment.

Our eccentric and late AP US History teacher, Harold Meltzer, used this trip to get us out of the classroom. to make history and government more real to us. We — meaning our AP class and folks from Meltzer’s Government class — went to Albany to meet our state representative and to learn a bit about the history of New York State’s governance. We also made a stop to visit the FDR mansion in Hyde Park. The trip to Albany was itself a three-and-a-half hour school bus ride.

Besides the standard exaggerated bouncing up and down we did whenever the bus hit a bump somewhere along I-87 North, there were a couple of things to note. It was my first time outside the New York metro area since ‘78, when Darren, my mother, my soon-to-be-stepfather and I went to Amish country in Pennsylvania. The Roosevelt’s master bedroom and “king-sized” bed was much smaller than I thought. FDR and Eleanor both looked pretty tall to me in their pictures and in those ’30s newsreels. And the Norwegian pop band a-ha had climbed to the top of the Top-40 pop charts with “Take on Me” a few days before.

A-ha? Well, “SD” had a brand-new $150 Aiwa Walkman (its normal retail value in ’85) with a state-of-the-art design and stereo system, including Dolby noise reduction and equalizer controls. The entire trip to Albany and Hyde Park and back she played a-ha’s Hunting High and Low album nonstop on the bus. After hearing the beginning of the song for what seemed like the 117th time, I chimed in, and SD sang briefly out loud with me: “Talking away, I don’t know what I’m to say….” I’d heard the lead singer’s “TAAAAAKKKKEEE!” without the need for an interpreter so many times already, since SD sat a row or two behind me. So me being me, during the return trip I attempted to hit the same high falsetto note to see if I could compete with a Norwegian pop star.

As soon as I hit the note for “TAAAAAKKKKEEE!” — badly, as it was in my balls-strangled version of high falsetto — the window in the row behind me on my right shattered and scattered all around D and A’s seats. D was closest to the window, and she was unhurt, but we had to stop for about ten minutes. Everyone was laughing this nervous, “this-is-funny-but . . . ” laugh, like audience members laughing at a Richard Pryor joke. Five of my classmates all but gave me a sarcastic standing ovation. After all, it turned out that no rocks or stones were found on the bus, and there wasn’t a sign of a sniper anywhere. All we could think was that I’d dialed up the correct frequency and shattered a glass window that may’ve been weak already from everyday wear and tear. I thought it was amazing to generate that kind of power with my voice. Even if it meant that I’d get flack for it.

But that’s not all I took from that day. I’d accidentally become more than an acquaintance with SD. Not only did I eventually go and buy a-ha’s Hunting High and Low. I appreciated all of her ’80s pop music. From Heart’s “What About Love” to Scandal’s “The Warrior” — it’s listed in our yearbook as SD’s favorite song. I picked up a writing habit that I use to this day, putting a dash through my 7’s and Z’s to make sure to distinguish them from 1’s and S’s.

It was a fun trip for me, even though most in my class would’ve likely preferred a trip to Grand Central over Albany and FDR’s mansion. It was fun because I had made a connection that would lead to friendship.

Half-Baked Z and Christian Zeal

27 Monday Sep 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Mount Vernon High School, New York City, Religion, Youth

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Arrogance, Baked Ziti, Christian Zeal, Kufi, Religion, Religious Zeal, Teaching and Learning, Wisdom

Baked Ziti. Source: http://culinariaitalia.files.wordpress.com/

Sometimes I’ve let my enthusiasm for good things in my life get the better of me. Perhaps that’s because there have been few periods in my life where nearly everything has gone the way I’d expect, especially in my Humanities years. One of those times had been in the months before, during and after my conversion to Christianity in ’84. After I outed myself at the beginning of tenth grade as a Christian and stood up (for once) to my idiot stepfather by refusing to wear my kufi ever again, things in my mind had improved. So much so that I was ready for my life to change, as if my conversion were a magic wand and I was Cinderella.

My conversion became a badge of honor, my Bible my new crutch in the first few months after becoming a Christian and the beginning of tenth grade. I read it every chance I had. At lunch, in my trips into New York with my father Jimme and my brother Darren, before I went to bed at night. Like a nine-year-old, I so wanted my life to change that I forgot that I still had work to do in order to change it. Prayer and fasting (deliberate, of course, and not the empty refrigerator kind) wouldn’t be enough. But I acted like it was.

Torture & the Spanish Inquisition (the direction of unchecked zeal).

It didn’t help that I had Z as a history teacher, one who almost automatically rubbed me the wrong way. She assumed that she was right about everything and looked like an older, worn-out, schoolmarmish version of Madonna to me, a woman whose best days were long past. She was about average height with blonde-gray hair, which looked like it had been freeze-dried. She dressed like a woman who didn’t realize we were in a public school and who didn’t see herself as a real person. Her voice was a slow-whine Brooklyn-accented version of Cyndi Lauper’s, the kind that made me think that she was talking down to us. It irritated the heck out of me when she’d call one of us “Peaches” or when she’d say, “When they’re slow they’re slow,” a reference to how long it would take us to answer one of her idiotic, non-history history questions. A personable person with emotions and empathy, the kind of person equipped to teach a diverse student body, Z was not.

After finishing one of Z’s bubble tests early, fifteen minutes early, as a matter of fact, I handed it in and pulled out my Bible. When she noticed what I was reading, she panicked. “Put that away! Put that away now!,” she yelled from her gray steel desk, exasperated. The exchange we had occurred while other classmates were finishing their exams.

“I’m just reading my Bible.”

“You can’t read that in school!”

“I know my rights! I have a First Amendment right to read the Bible in school, and you’re not teaching right now anyway!”

She threatened to send me to the principal’s office. I called her an “atheist” and put my Bible away. It was the start of a confrontational relationship between me and her.

We got into it quite a few times. One time was over what she was teaching in class, what exactly I don’t remember. What I did in response to it was to blurt out “Is this what you call history? All you talk about is art and music!” She banished me to the hallway outside of class for that one. I called her a “stupid atheist” on my way out.

We were both right and both wrong, both arrogant in our own way. Z was a teacher without an appreciation for student development and socialization. I was a new Christian on a high, believing that my spiritual status would by itself put me in right standing whatever I did. In the end, Z should’ve allow me to read my Bible, and I shouldn’t have confronted her based on her religious or non-religious beliefs. Our perspectives were half-baked, our stances too inflexible. I’m just glad that I’ve become a better person and Christian since those first days.

Anger Issues and Management, Inc

25 Saturday Sep 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, Mount Vernon High School, Religion, Youth

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7S, A.B. Davis Middle School, Anger, Anger Management, Christianity, Envy, Fights, Jealousy, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, MVHS, Patience, Pittsburgh, Race, Ridicule, Righteous Indignation, Scorn, University of Pittsburgh, Wisdom

Rage of the Incredible Hulk. Source:http://www.ramasscreen.com

Exposure to abuse, ridicule and scorn in fairly large dosages when you’re young will leave you with anger issues to manage. I should know. Don’t believe the impressions that my classmates from Humanities and MVHS and my friends from my first two years at Pitt have of me. I may have appeared to smile, to be happy-go-lucky, to be sober and monk-like. But mostly, I was angry, not in a raging, vengeful way, but in a depressed way, a constant, gnawing, sometimes envious, sometimes ironic and sarcastic way. My anger was the kind of anger that I chewed on and swallowed, simmered at low heat for a while in the pit of my belly, then I’d regurgitate it into my mouth, and then chewed on it and swallowed it again.

But, despite what some folks in certain religious circles may say, not all anger is bad, evil or sinful. In fact, sometimes anger is necessary, even if and when it’s dangerous as an emotion or a state of mind. Why, you may ask? Because without anger, you take what life gives to you, even when most of what good you get out of life comes in a miserly and begrudging way. Everything else that comes, if indeed bad or evil for you, isn’t taken in stride or taken with difficulty. You simply don’t take it at all. You become so emotionless that whatever happens doesn’t matter at all, as if your purpose for existing is merely to exist, not to succeed, not to do good works or make yourself a better person because of or despite your circumstances.

That, by the way, is what I’ve heard over the years when some of my former classmates from Mount Vernon — and a few people who knew me in my early days at the University of Pittsburgh — describe me. It was as if I was Porgy in Porgy and Bess, Louis Armstrong or Paul Robeson singing, “I’ve got plenty of nothin’, and nothin’s plenty for me.” That would and did piss me off, but I reminded myself that this was how I had to be to deal with the anger I had within. With emotion, I could’ve easily flown into a rage many

In Treatment Screen Shot. Source: http://sepinwall.blogspot.com

a day between ’81 and ’89.

At the same time, I had the wisdom to allow my anger to rise up, to channel it many more times than not into what I needed to have happen at a particular moment in time. It’s amazing how much you can get done with a sense of righteous anger and indignation, a feeling of got-to-get-it-done-or-else anger. It came at the right time, usually when I felt that my back was up against a concrete wall, with no way out except to fight my way out.

Like in February ’82, the middle of seventh grade, when I just got tired of my 7S classmates thinking that they could say and do anything to me without me getting angry, and tired of days on end at 616 without food to eat. After a fight in the boy’s locker room with one of my classmates — which I won, by the way — I channeled the energy unleashed by that rage and fight into two things. Improving my mediocre grades, and my infatuation over Crush #1. It was three months of relative bliss in the middle of the worst eighteen months of my life.

Richard Marx, 1987.

Or in January ’88, after recovering from the crash-and-burn of my first semester at Pitt. I was mad and disappointed with myself over allowing my obsession with Crush #2 hijack the final six weeks of my semester, not to mention my generally hopeful and creative imagination. After an incident with a couple of my more evil and drunken dorm mates — one in which I cracked a broom handle on the crowns of their heads (no injuries or investigation, luckily) — I summoned some discipline and theme music to get through that second semester. From Richard Marx’s “Should’ve Known Better” to Paul Carrick’s “Don’t Shed A Tear,” I spent fifteen weeks turning anger into A’s and jadedness into new friendships.

I’ve had other periods in my life — in ’93, ’98, and ’03 — where the circumstances dictated that anger, with some patience and understanding, was absolutely necessary in my overcoming of them. The lesson here is that anger — like fire, electricity and nuclear fusion — can be and is often dangerous. Yet it’s also necessary, a potential evil that can be an actual good, if channeled, allowed to dissipate, if tempered by wisdom and patience. At the least, anger allows those of us under stress to know that we are very much alive.

Hard Work and the Human Race

17 Friday Sep 2010

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Advantage, Boy @ The Window, Daydreams, Hard Work, Holmes Elementary School, Human Race, Individualism, Mount Vernon New York, New York City Marathon, Race, Social Class

Race card cartoon, no date, August 5, 2015. (Emanu!, http://pinterest.com).

When I was nine years old, my fourth grade teacher at Holmes, Mrs. Pierce — a grouch of an older White woman, really — talked about the human race and attempted to describe our species’ variations. She tried to do what we’d call a discussion of diversity now. It went over our heads, no doubt because she didn’t quite get the concept of diversity herself.

Holmes Elementary. Top left corner was Mrs. Pierce’s classroom in 1978-79 year.

Like the fourth-grader I was, I daydreamed about the term, human race. I thought of Whites, Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, young and old, male and female, from all over the world, all on a starting line. It was as if four billion people — that was the world population in ’79 — were lined up to run a race to the top of the world. In my daydream, some were faster than others, or at least appeared to be, while others hobbled along on crutches and in wheelchairs. Still others crawled along, falling farther and farther behind those who were in the lead, the ones that looked like runners in the New York City marathon. Before I could ponder the daydream further, Mrs. Pierce yelled, “Wake up, Donald!.” as if I’d really been asleep.

A high school friend recently gave me some much-needed feedback on my manuscript. Her feedback was helpful and insightful, and very much appreciated. But some of it reminded me of the realities of having someone who’s a character in a story actually read that story. Their perceptions will never fully match up with those of the writer, which is what is so groovy and fascinating about writing in the first place.

One of the things that struck me as a thread in her comments — not to mention in so many conversations I’ve had with my students about race and socioeconomics — was the theme of individual hard work trumping all obstacles and circumstances. As if words, slights, and mindsets in the world around us don’t matter. As if poverty is merely a mirage, and bigotry, race and racism merely words on a page. Sure, a story such as the one I have told in this blog for the past three years is about overcoming roadblocks, especially the ones that we set ourselves up for in life, forget about the ones external to our own fears and doubts.

2009 London Marathon. Source: http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk/

At the same time, I realized what my weird daydream from thirty-one years ago meant. Some people get a head start — or, in NASCAR terms, the pole — before the race even starts. That certainly doesn’t make what that individual accomplishes in life any less meaningful, but knowing that the person had an advantage that most others didn’t possess does provide perspective and illuminates how much distance the disadvantaged need to cover to make up ground. Those who limp and crawl and somehow are able to compete in this human race have also worked hard, likely at least as hard as those with a head start, and more than likely, harder than most human beings should ever have to work.

Plus, there are intangibles that go with race, class and other variables that determines how the human race unfolds. “Good luck is where hard work meets opportunity,” at least according to former Pittsburgh Penguins goaltender Tom Barrasso. Most human beings work hard, but all need opportunities that may provide a real sprint to catch up or take a lead in the human race. Family status, political influence, social and community networks, religious memberships, being in the right place at the right time, all matter and are connected to race and class, at least in the US.

The moral of this story is, hard work matters, individual accomplishment matters. Yet a panoramic view of the race in which humans are engaged matters more in putting our individual successes and the distance that remains in some reasonable perspective. Without that, we’re all just pretending that individual hard work is the only thing that matters, when that’s only half the battle, or half of half the battle.