Tag: USA

America Collection/General interest
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Hope is the Thing With Heart

by Fran Johns

STRANGERS AT A DEMONSTRATION SHARE THEIR HOPEFULNESS

(Politics alert: Though I usually try to stay apolitical on this site, a Substack follower actually emailed that he, a Republican who also checks out this site from time to time, thought I should share it on WordPress. What can I say? An actual Reader Request. Thanks, Al, and enjoy, anyone else.)

“Not much,” said one young man when asked what gave him hope. “I mean, I don’t have much hope for today, or next week. But I have a lot of hope for the future. We just have to get things back on track.”

An indomitable group of strangers gathers regularly at the corner of Van Ness and Geary Blvd in San Francisco to hoist signs, wave at passing cars and cheer for democracy. It’s always a different group but with occasional familiar faces. At a recent “Trump Takedown” protest I asked a dozen or so of those gathered what gives them hope. They had a lot to say.

“People like you and me,” said one tall, grizzled Black man with whom I would appear to share little in common except, perhaps, old age. “We’re here, and not giving up.” 

A lovely woman named Nacha (“like Nachos”) answered my question with a smile as she rested her sign to reach for something in her pocket. It was a small plastic envelope containing her U.S. passport and a copy of the Constitution. “I’m an American by choice,” she said. “I came here years ago because I had to leave Peru; I love this country. But I carry my passport with me always now, just in case.”  I did not share with Nacha the brief feeling of hopelessness that spread through me on hearing this last sentence. Still, she smiled broadly and how could that not give everyone hope?

The demonstrators come partly just for the shared community fun. There’s a constant honking of horns, there are waves from passing cars and trucks, shouts of encouragement. One participant said to me, “I know this is San Francisco — but I also know these demonstrations are happening all over the country and won’t stop until we get our democracy back.” That gave me another shot of hope.

A young man named Tylor (“With an ‘O’ — nobody gets that right”) said he has a meditation practice that keeps him “hopeful, and on track.” Tylor also had a rainbow cape, an inclination to dance in the median strip and a Cheshire Cat smile. “Evolution,” he said while dancing (on the sidewalk,) “is a path. It may be bumpy, but the universe is taking us forward toward love and peace.” It is possible to pick up gems of philosophical wisdom at sidewalk protests.

A teenaged couple who are classmates at Washington High School gave my question serious thought before responding. “Trump’s approval ratings keep going down,” he said; “that gives me hope.” She gave a broader assessment: “When I see all sorts of people coming together with positive values . . .” she said, before turning away to smile at a white SUV with passengers waving from every window.

I came home with Tylor’s words in my head. “I’m really just paraphrasing Martin Luther King Jr here,” he said after going on for a while about the evolutionary path toward love. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” 

May hope continue to be the thing with feathers, and heart.

America Collection
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Long Live the Daily Newspaper

by Fran Johns

NEW YORK TIMES PRINT EDITION, THAT IS. A RECIPE FOR THE GOOD (LONG) LIFE

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

(A Medium publication I regularly write for — with the ungainly if apt name of “Crow’s Feet” — issued a writing-prompt challenge about doing things the old-fashioned way and my brain was starting this piece before I even turned the digital page. Enjoy.)

Impeccable digestive system. We’ll get this issue out of the way first.

Coffee, toast and the New York Times to start the day = longevity and the bloom of health. I’m staring at 93 next June, feeling just fine, thank you, and — more to the point here — thanks, NYT print edition. 

Before I entered upon what would be a joyful, 26-year late-life marriage there was one delicate issue to be settled. We both required the print edition (in 1992 you weren’t yet a weirdo if you read newspapers) of the New York Times with our morning coffee. As if an augury of that future bliss: he needed the sports section first; I begin with page one and go straight through every section as it comes. Deal.

You cannot digest breakfast while scrolling; it is against the natural order of the universe. (News on TV? God help you.)

There’s more to my read-the-news-the-old-fashioned-way fixation than maintenance of my digestive system, however. Or perhaps the two are related. It’s the angst factor. Watch the faces of two people getting today’s news. The one scrolling through will react with widening eyes and clenched teeth. It’s the way the body handles impending disaster. But the newsprint reader? She gets the disaster one slowly and carefully printed word at a time, just the way God intended. Emotionally digestible.

OK, it’s yesterday’s news by the time it gets to your doorstep. That’s the whole point. You’ve already heard the headlines blaring from everywhere in the world including all of your state-of-the-art devices. You’ve survived the headlines, now you sit down and read what actually happened.

Not to be blunt about it, furthermore, we print subscribers are quietly subsidizing your scrollings. We don’t mind, really. We try not to talk to you about it when your nose is glued to your screen all day. 

My obsession may have a tiny bit to do with having had a lifelong career as a freelance writer that spanned decades of working for old-fashioned newspapers. The newspaper world was, in the olden days, one of equal parts grit and glamour. It was also never-ending fun with dashes of enlightenment, watching the business of courthouses and penthouses, trying to communicate the truth of it all.

This ingrained obsession crept up on me slowly. When I was first beginning to read my sister Mimi and I would grab the morning paper and spread the comics on the floor before breakfast. My father, an educator to the bone, soon discovered a tool. “Girls,” he remarked, “if you’re going to read like that, at least start with the front page; then you can skip to the comics.” We actually cheated a lot, doing the comics first; but knowing we’d get a headline question with our orange juice we also spread the front page on the floor.

All these decades later, there may be a symbolism and a further lesson here: Perhaps we should all start the day reading the news on our knees.

Whatever. The like-clockwork digestive system, the mild-mannered demeanor, the frugality in every area of life except print media subscriptions — I credit it all to the foundational daily print newspaper.

Here’s to your health, New York Times print edition. May you live long and prosper. 

# # #

This essay also appears on my Substack, The Optimistic Eye (@franjohns,) where I post, once a week, something positive on the political front. It’s almost always possible to find something, I promise. Feel free to visit any time; subscriptions are free.

America Collection/General interest
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Historical Events & Life Changes

by Fran Johns

SOMETIMES A LOOK BACK CAN HELP WITH LOOKING FORWARD

Photo credit: NASA on Unsplash

A publication I write for featured a writing prompt recently asking what historical event is most significant in your memory and how it affected you. Interesting assignment. My life has gone on too long to choose, I think — and including recent years of the Women’s March (and other marches and tumults) quickly gets everything murky. But the prompt immediately prompted this response:

It was simply beyond belief. I think that’s why the Challenger tragedy stays so starkly in my mind. Surely there were plenty of notable others:

I was hitting tennis balls against the garage wall with my sister Mimi when our father called us in to hear FDR on the Philco radio, telling the nation that we were at war. It was December 7, 1941.

I remember Harry Truman on the train platform making a whistlestop speech after that war ended.

There were the appalling shocks of McCarthyism and the Vietnam War. There were assassinations and celebrations and tragedies. Men would walk on the moon.

When the plane struck the first World Trade Center tower, it was barely dawn in San Francisco. My CNN anchor son-in-law called from New York. My husband took the call in another room, came back to bed, and said to just go back to sleep. Later, as we made coffee and turned on the TV, he explained that decision. “I knew we’d be awake for a very long time,” he said, “and I figured you would need another hour or two.”

Each of the above events shifted the world a little on its axis for the creatures who live upon it. Any of them, and countless others we’ve lived through, have shifted our perspective to some degree. Or if not, we weren’t paying attention. Paying attention is never a bad idea.

On the morning of January 28, 1986, I was driving home along the main highway of Daytona Beach, FL, having dropped my step-daughter off at her high school. En route, the Space Shuttle Challenger launched into the brilliant blue skies directly ahead and above.

Living in Daytona, as I briefly did during the 1980s, included many memorable times at Cape Canaveral. Often when there was a night launch we’d take the fishing boat down the Halifax River, drop anchor, and watch the beauty of a flight roaring into the black sky. Daytime launches were possibly less dramatic but equally beautiful.

This one I was idly watching as I drove. Suddenly, the looping white contrails seemed to disintegrate into a large puff. Smaller contrails began to appear in the sky as they fell earthward on separate paths.

It was as if the world stopped.

Like almost every other car on the road, I pulled onto the shoulder and cut the engine. We simply stared. I remember saying out loud, “No. Nooooo.”

I don’t remember how long I sat there. I remember tears beginning to pour down my face. I remember thinking I could not go home to an empty house, and driving instead to a coffee shop next door to the church I then attended. There was already a small group gathered around a portable TV someone had placed on the counter. There were more tears of disbelief and quiet questions without answers. The coffee was free.

Here’s what we were saying, and what I learned: Life is precious. Hug someone. Try to be kind.

Because no one knows when the contrail ends and splits, or where its spirals go.

America Collection/General interest
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Two Lessons from One Good Dad

by Fran Johns

DO GOOD. LOVE THY NEIGHBOR. MANTRAS FOR YESTERDAY AND TODAY

His four daughters at Earl Moreland statue (on R-MC campus) dedication, 2002. (L to r, Oldest sister Jane, yours truly, closest sister & bff Mimi, second oldest Helen.

“Do good, and love thy neighbor,” my father would say. “That just about sums it up.”

Not that he didn’t have plenty of other lessons and admonitions. My father, J. Earl Moreland 1897–1987, was a fierce believer in books & education (the more the better,) in interfaith relations, music and the arts, justice and equality, God and country. But when pressed for something like the secret to long life or prosperity he was prone to rely on that two-pronged moral motto: Do good and love thy neighbor.

My father didn’t set out to raise four daughters. The second of five sons himself, he grew up poor but proud — at least, that was how he told it — in a sturdy, God-fearing home. Left in charge at age 10 when his mother died, his tale was all about rough and rugged Texas, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, that sort of thing.

But stuff, and daughters, happened.

My dad left Texas, but kept his Texas soul. After SMU, Class of 1917, he set out for Brazil where, as an educational missionary for the Methodist Church he helped start a college that’s still there and happily met my mother. Then came the daughters. Not long after we came back to the U.S. for good in 1935 he wound up heading another college this one in Virginia.

Aboard ship to Brazil, c 1925 (He was back & forth a half-dozen times in twelve years)

For the record, keeping a family & a college afloat through the Great Depression and World War II was a full time job — (twice that for my mother) — so my father worked 18-hour days and spent a lot of them on the road. But there were always hand-written daily cards and letters, and paternal wisdom wasm freely dispensed.

The only moment of deep disappointment I recall creating was the night my date and I won a jitterbugging contest at a dance chaperoned by my parents. Their love of music and dance did not extend to be-bop and jitterbugging. But episodes of that sort magically disappeared by morning, as if they’d never happened.

My father was, by design and necessity, a feminist ahead of his time. He firmly believed and regularly proclaimed (sometimes to our extreme embarrassment) that his daughters could do anything, be anything, accomplish or inspire anything — as long as it was within the parameters of doing good and loving neighbors. The same applied to his flawless granddaughters — he had 10 of those, though he did finally acquire two flawless grandsons.

In the haphazard one-room schools of his upbringing my father memorized countless speeches and parables — I think the way those 19th century teachers kept order was by setting their charges to memorize entire books of wisdom. One poem that stuck with him forever, and was forever repeated, bore the wisdom of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

Each morning sees some task begun, each evening sees it close; Something attempted, something done, has earned a night’s repose.

Wasting time was not an option, though creative daydreaming, especially if you had a book in your hand, was respected and that was my usual excuse.

Because he loved the country chosen by his immigrant grandparents, loved justice and democracy and his fellow humans, my father would be appalled at the U.S. today. I am sincerely grateful that he and my genteel mother never had to hear the words, especially the lies (Thou shalt not) and vulgarities that spew from our narcissist in chief. But while his three-piece-suit persona didn’t lend itself to protest marches I am absolutely certain he’d be cheering on this daughter, along with her pro-democracy rantings and KAKISTOCRACY sign. He’d also be writing letters and making speeches and admonishing ordinary citizens and government leaders alike:

DO GOOD. LOVE THY NEIGHBOR.

America Collection/General interest
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Children, Try to Get Along, OK?

by Fran Johns

SECOND GRADE TEACHER TO DONNIE AND LITTLE ELON: IF YOU CAN’T BE KIND, BE QUIET. AND A FEW OTHER APPROPRIATE ADMONITIONS

Photo by Austin Pacheco on Unsplash

No offense to Mrs. Trump and Mrs. Musk, but some things just didn’t get through to your little boys.

Having raised three children who survived into adulthood without causing bodily harm to one another, or humankind in general, I know what’s possible. One of mine is actually retired now, and he still hasn’t shouted obscenities at former friends (or caused the deaths of thousands of poor children for that matter.)

In the interest of world peace, I’d like to remind Little Donnie and Little Elon about a few things that surely their mamas tried to teach them.

Such as: You never look good trying to make someone else look bad. We grown-ups are getting really tired of you trying to out-badmouth each other. Most of us had second grade teachers — didn’t you? — who taught us that insults are only used by small people.

My second grade teacher Miss Fretwell (I’m not making this up, that was her name) had a list of adages always at the ready. One offense and you’d be copying the appropriate sentence fifty times. So, Donald and Elon, if you didn’t get these messages from your moms, I would like to pass along a few lines from Miss Fretwell:

People with dirty hands point fingers.

A narrow mind usually goes along with a wide mouth.

None are so empty as those full of themselves.

And emphatically:

It’s okay to be angry; it’s never okay to be cruel.

Finally, to get back to that name-calling and finger-pointing, National No-Name-Calling Week was celebrated the third week of January; maybe you weren’t paying attention. Miss Fretwell would have loved No-Name-Calling Week.

Miss Fretwell would have had Donald and Elon at the blackboard, writing a few of the above. Or perhaps, Be Kind. Or even yet,

If you can’t be kind, be quiet.

On a personal note, as if this entire ramble weren’t personal notes, my birthday is June 8, which a friend just texted is National Loving Day this year. Actually, he was a few days off, but I’ll take it. (Bob Liner says he has moved the celebration four days over from the 12th.) It’s also Pentecost, the day we Christians celebrate the descent of the Holy Spirit, which has seemed in short supply lately. Let’s take love and the spirit of peace wherever they can be found.

Be kind

This essay also appears on my Substack, The Optimistic Eye, where I regularly post observations on the political scene (which I try to limit here on dear old WordPress. C’mon over any time; it’s free.

General interest
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“Play Ball!” and the World Plays With You

by Fran Johns

A HAPHAZARD GEEZER FAN GETS A REMINDER ABOUUT BASEBALL MAGIC

Next generation Giants fan (Authorized photo by Fran Johns)

The crowds! The organ music! The peanuts! The chants, the cheers! The excitement!

Oh, and the ballgame!

It’s all in an afternoon — or evening — for millions of American sports fans, so I don’t pretend to be saying anything new. But plunging into it after a decade’s absence amounted to a sight for new eyes — and what a view.

In an earlier life I was drenched in ballgames. My late beloved husband, Bud Johns, covered sports for the Flint (MI) Journal when he was still in high school, worked his way through college officiating games of all sorts (when he wasn’t playing one) and throughout his life covered and/or followed every sport known to TV. I once came home to find a curling match on. I draw the line at curling.

Baseball, though, was number one. Beginning with several 1940s Negro League players who became lifelong friends, he kept a mental file of players, games, batting averages and obscure trivia that boggled more sports-oriented minds than my own. For decades I was a San Francisco Giants fan with the ultimate personal game guide.

Then life intervened.

A combination of Bud’s decline and death, the pandemic and a few other of life’s little surprises sent the remembrance of our national pastime back to the level of my undistinguished third baseman career with the Ashland (VA) High School girls’ softball team.

Until now.

Gifted with four great seats for a recent game between the Giants and the Texas Rangers I rounded up three geezer friends, happily including one confirmed fan who knows stuff, a key bonus. It all came back in a rush, you could say nine innings’ worth of rush.

AND! Bottom of the 9th: Heliot Ramos sends a blooper softball into no-man’s land, the Rangers make a couple of throwing errors and Ramos steals his way clear around the bases and into a walk-off dive across home plate. It doesn’t get any better than that.

San Francisco Chronicle story the following day (Author photo)

Here’s my comprehensive report on the day:

Arrive early. Of the 41,000+ people who showed up at Oracle Park for our game, some 20,000 were simultaneously funneling into the same entrance chosen by my three companions and me. (This will be the only quasi-negative element of this report. I apologize for it.) Deference, to little old ladies or anyone else, is not shown by baseball fans intent upon reaching their seats before the opening pitch and picking up garlic fries en route. Of the fast-moving sea of 20,000 in which we swam, all but four of us knew exactly where they were going. We four were saved by the guidance of our one stadium-familiar fan. We arrived unscathed.

The scent of the game: deep fry. Nowhere but in a ballpark can recirculating hot oil smell good. Sensibly limited or outright banned in most home kitchens, it miraculously morphs into attar of ballgame. Irresistably aromatic. You may have just finished Sunday dinner, but suddenly you absolutely have to have that corndog.

Fans are wired to be friends. Despite the jostling to get seated before game time, about 40,000 of those 41,000+ (our game was sold out, I’m not making this up) seemed to be my new best friends. Folks approaching our seats after we were comfortably settled politely explained we were in the right seats but the wrong section, and guided us one section (with way better view) over. Folks behind expertly leaned over to take our picture when they saw we didn’t know how to take a foursome selfie. The mom of one of countless adorable toddlers in game-day couture (he was high among the most adorable) obligingly said, Sure! I could post his photo online. And scattered everywhere else were smiling fans happy to give directions, make running commentaries on the play, offer opinions or sing along.

Ballgame music is the All-American heartsong. From the three-note thrum to get the home crowd going to the intermittent rousing organ notes (why did somebody have to tell me it’s all just digital?) to the seventh inning ‘God Bless America,’ music in the ballgame air is bound to the joy. Even mangled renditions of the Star Spangled Banner can be goosebump-inducing. (To the extent that our less-than-melodic anthem can induce goosebumps.)

News of the day? Forget it. There is no world outside the stadium once the ballgame starts.

There is also just no need to hurry. A few innings in, though I had successfully bypassed the corndogs and garlic fries, I was in desperate need of a latte. Thanks to my confirmed inner coffee snob I did not think any of the umpteen dozen fast-food kiosks could serve drinkable coffee. So I set out for the Peet’s place behind the scoreboard, hardly a few hundred yards as the crow flies. On foot, though, Peet’s is a good quarter mile or so. Speed-walking is out; at one point the crowd simply, mysteriously stopped for a while. Going for coffee, as it turns out, is a two-inning endeavor. But never mind — everyone’s friendly, the music is good and there are ever-changing views of the action along the way.

And one more note about the music: Observing the sights and sounds of the ‘God Bless America’ episode was a monumental nostalgia moment. I was, at that moment, behind the scoreboard in the outer, outer outfield surrounded by a sizable portion of the 41,000 — I never did figure out who was actually in the seats, since they all seemed to be swimming in the sea of kiosk-shoppers. But then, as one, the shuffling crowd — which seemed to include every size, shape, race and tattoo preference — shuffled to a stop. Hats came off, hands went to hearts (this being national anthem junior, I guess,) and every other fan seemed to be singing along.

For a brief interlude there was world peace. And God, whoever and wherever She is, surely blessed America’s pastime.

🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸

This essay appeared earlier on my Substack page, The Optimistic Eye. C’mon over any time, it’s free.

General interest
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KAKISTOCRACY: Government By the Worst

by Fran Johns

THE OLD WORD IS A DESCRIPTIVE TERM WHOSE TIME HAS COME

At a recent San Francisco People’s March (Author photo)

(This is an exception to my policy of avoiding politics on this website, posted here just because this good Webster’s Dictionary word deserves our attention at the very least. Regularly my political observations are on Substack, weekly, @ The Optimistic Eye. C’mon over any time; it’s free.)

If anyone was worried about people being worn out after the National Day of Action that drew huge crowds all across the country on April 5, those apprehensions were put to rest the following week. We’re still working to prevent the mean-spirited and unfit people “running” the country from totally wrecking it. Hands Off!

Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez drew a crowd of 36,000 in Los Angeles on the 12th. Follow-up rallies brought out enthusiastic supporters of democracy in city after city, small towns and village squares over the weekend.

My personal favorite — possibly because I was there — was The People’s March / Fight Fascism for Democracy event in San Francisco April 12. Billed as a rally in support of “everyone under attack by the current government administration” the event featured representatives of faith communities, teachers, artists and an assortment of groups that have been targeted by Trump 2.0. Soft breezes drifted inland from the Bay, the sun shone on young progressives and gray-haired activists and the talks were a mixture of enthusiastic protest and be-good-to-yourself encouragement.

The signs, as protest signs go, outdid themselves.

I snapped a picture of one homemade proclamation carefully inked on cardboard (above) and held timidly aloft by a gentle participant. Be Kind, it urged. It’s going to take a lot of kindness to counteract the cruelty of policies that seem to get more stringent and oppressive by the day. Because the crowd was constantly moving and shifting I had hardly noticed the sign just a few feet from the kindness advocate.

KAKISTOCRACY it proclaimed. Who knew? In my undistinguished two years of college Greek and subsequent decades of political activism I don’t recall encountering the term. Its time has come! Government by the worst, the least qualified or most unscrupulous. Hello? Trump 2.0 has been identified.

Thank you, unidentified sign-creator.

If ever we have lived in a kakistocracy it is now. All talk about growing autocracy (true,) oligarchy (true) and fascism (scarily possible) aside, Trump 2.0 is the definition of a kakistocracy. From the multi-bankrupted businessman turned reality TV star turned puppet president to his cabinet choices of the excruciatingly unfit, not even Socrates could have come up with a better example of kakistocratic perfection.

Recently, for example, we saw Secretary of Education Linda McMahon blithely talking of young students getting A1 education; presumably she never heard about Artificial Intelligence. Then there was Health Secretary (God help us) Robert Kennedy, unaware that his department’s $11 billion “DEI” cuts actually had eliminated critical projects and key, highly qualified people. Well never mind, Mr. Kennedy’s going to unveil a shiny-object proof that vaccines cause autism, a pet project he’s still busy working on while Americans are dying of measles and whooping cough. 

Stupidities such as the above and cruelties such as mass deportations with no due process continue — showing how much damage a kakistocracy can do, especially when it’s headed by an aging, mentally challenged and supremely kakistocratic man.

All is not lost. We the people are getting some help from the courts. For example, just when ignorance (or disregard) of the constitutional right to a free press seemed to be vanishing, a judge blocked the White House’s AP ban. The ACLU, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Freedoms, the State Democracy Defenders Fund and a growing list of nonprofits and public figures are working with the courts — and in whatever other ways possible against the wrecking ball. They are all sustained by the support of ordinary people.

This is what living under and fighting against a kakistocracy looks like. At the very least, I think we should be calling it what it is. Meanwhile, since the Egotist in Chief delights in being first, we can award him this distinction:

Donald J. Trump, first American president to create a certified kakistocracy.

America Collection/General interest
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Naps, today, are mandatory

by Fran Johns
Man sleeping on sidewalk with sign "Back in 2 minutes"

WHEREVER YOU ARE, YOU NEED DEFENSE AGAINST THE CARES OF THE WORLD

(Author photo)

Naps are good. Ask my friend outside the California Street Trader Joe’s, whose paintings I often buy though admittedly do not hang.

I understand his position. Though I don’t work as hard as he does, I do follow the news, and to follow the news is to exhaust oneself. Relief is hard to come by.

After taking this photo on a Saturday, I attended church on Sunday. It’s a church denounced, in recent public commentary, as being Woke. This we accept (as a badge of honor;) we have a rainbow flag, and signs like “Immigrants Welcome” and “Black Lives Matter” out front, those sorts of blasphemies.

Reporting on our Woke rating from the pulpit, the pastor opened with a recommendation for naps. This followed just 24 hours after the above message from my street friend. What can I say?

God’s answer to today’s burdens? Nap.

# # #

If you want to read more about the cares of the world you’re invited to visit my Substack site, The Optimistic Eye (you can subscribe for free) on which I post, once a week, some optimistic word on political goings-on or one or two things we can do besides take naps.

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