Ode to Hansel the Rottweiler

I miss him when I think of him, but my brain keeps busy trying not to think of him.  And it does a very good job. 

So Thursday afternoon, as I sat at the picnic table, Fakedog the Doberman dredged up a long lost ball of Hansel’s and brought it to me hopefully, as if I might throw it for him.  I burst into tears.  Poor Fakedog.  Little did he know that with that ball, he dredged up memories as well. 

That ball, wherever it’s been lodged, has been missing for at least three years.  Hansel has been dead for two and a half years, but for at least six months before that, we had to quit playing ball. 

Hansel was good at ball playing.  I would get these very hard rubber balls, which bounced really high, and he would leap into the air to catch them and it was just magnificent to watch him leap into the air and catch the ball in his mouth before it hit the ground the second time. 

Of course, sometimes he would miss.  In which case, one of the other dogs would get the ball.  If they didn’t get the ball, they would lose interest, and Hansel would keep looking for it but would never be able to find it.  He had to have the worst sense of smell of any dog on the planet.  That’s why I had to keep buying more balls, and why you can find balls three years later. 

We had to quit playing ball because Hansel developed some major arthritis issues.  He could still do the leaping part, it was the crashing to earth part that was going to hurt him.  He would have done it anyway, I think. but it was up to me to make him give it up. 

What a dog he was! To his right in the picture that follows, you can see the Beast, who would never dare to try to take away the ball! 

Hansel with one of his balls

Racism Part 2

My last post about racism in Florida inspired two comments which seemed to be trying to tell me that black people can be racists too.  No way!  You gotta be kidding me!  Gosh, thank God I have people looking out for me, otherwise my intellect would go the way of the Dodo bird. 

Never mind that my post had to do with a white teacher saying in class that CHANGE stands for “Come Help A Nigger Get Elected”.

Let’s look at the definition of “racism”, shall we? 

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/racism

By this definition, black people in the U.S. only get to use the third meaning, not having been in a postion to legitimize those grandiose illusions of superiority.  I know all the arguments.  It wasn’t me who did it.  My family didn’t own slaves .  It was 150 years ago.  Get over yourselves already. 

Black people who are still mad are charged with an inability to get with the program; with unfairly targeting white people.  White people who have a whisper of a clue about what black people still have to endure are accused of suffering from “white guilt”.  Not me.  If my family had been any poorer, we would have been slaves ourselves.  Except we were white.  Somehow, the notion that you can believe in fairness and equality without tying it to your race has…gone the way of the Dodo bird. 

Let me recount a brief experience I had many years ago.  I went to Paris with a friend whose sister was attending the Sorbonne.  We stayed in the sister’s apartment along with her roommate.  One evening, the roommate came home trembling with fear.  She’d been returning home late, via the subway, and while standing on one of the moving sidewalks she found her way blocked at the end by a group of young male Algerians.  She started walking backwards.  Of course she couldn’t keep up and was inevitably heading into their hands.  They eventually laughed and dispersed.  When she got home she was still terrified, but was also wailing about how this could happen to her.  “I’m on their side!”, she said.  I said, unlike the way we like to look at it in the U.S., oppressed people don’t respond by saying “Thanks a lot for giving us more freedom”, now let us all sing Kumbayah.  Be wary, and take care of yourself. 

I understand her disappointment.  I’ve had some scary moments myself, though not since I left Memphis.  All races and religions have thugs.  That will not change me. 

But food for another post:  The worst thing that happened to black people in the U.S. is Affirmative Action.  It may also have been the best thing.  (“It was the worst of times, it was the best of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way.”)

Racism is dead in Florida…Oh, wait a second

Something about this presidential campaign has caused all those racists who went underground to claw themselves out of their graves and begin wandering the earth in hordes…oh wait, that’s Night of the Living Dead.  My point exactly.

For some time, it’s been very uncool to be openly racist.  In certain areas of life, it’s illegal, and in others, it’s hazardous to employment or both.  So the racists go into deep cover–well not so deep as they think.  My observation is that racists, while carefully watching what they do and say most of the time, will almost always let something “slip”.  This applies to sexists too, but we’ll save that topic for another day. 

I can recall when the Civil Rights Act took effect hearing people say, “You can’t legislate morality.”  That’s all too true, but who really gives a damn?  I don’t care how you feel “in your heart”.  I only care about your behavior.  This brings us to the occasion for this post.

Three weeks ago in Marianna, Florida (a small town to the west of Tallahassee) a middle-school social studies teacher wrote on a dry erase board that CHANGE (the Obama motto) stands for “Come Help A Nigger Get Elected”.  During class.  In front of his seventh-grade students.  No, I am not making this up. 

His punishment?  The school superintendent gave him a 10-day suspension without pay (value, about $2,500), a written reprimand, required him to write a letter of apology to students, forced him to give up his position as assistant football coach and to take sensitivity-diversity training.  The School Board upheld the superintendent’s decision.  I’m wondering what he would have had to do to get fired. 

Meanwhile, some parents and their attorney are appealing to Governor Charlie Crist to step in and remove this lowlife from a teaching position, and word is that the governor is “exploring his options”.  There is hope that Charlie will do the right thing, since as Attorney General–the position he held before becoming governor–he successfully prosecuted a hotel owner in a nearby but different town who refused to let black guests use the swimming pool, and a package-store/bar owner who refused to let black customers be seated in the same room as white customers.  In the same town, no less. 

So for everyone who thinks that racism is dead in Florida, or for that matter, in America, my advice is:  keep an eye on the cemetery.