The Newell Post

I am guessing that before anyone reads this entry of The Newell Post another high profile man will be accused of sexual assault/harassment.

There was a time, when I was not working in higher education, that I worked for a guy who used to love using a quote from another moron. He would proclaim proudly, “I live by the Golden Rule, I have the gold and I make the rules.”

I used to laugh to myself ( I needed the paycheck so I didn’t laugh out loud) every time he said it. The sad truth was that he lived his life in this belief. Evidently he is not the only man to do so.

That is what all these men accused of sex crimes share. They are under the mistaken belief that they operate on another plane, above all morality and decency, from the rest of us. In their world there are no rules that they obey unless they are of their making.

These deviants use their position and power and celebrity to coerce women and abuse women because they can. They see someone they want to dominate and maybe humiliate—-put them in their place so to speak—and they act accordingly.

There are of course, hundreds and hundreds of other shoes about to drop and it’s not only Hollywood and Washington that fear the fall. Anywhere there are men of power working with women in a male dominated environment there have been abuses of that power at the detriment of women.

It is hoped that these men who have hurt women are approaching their day of reckoning even if it hurts the organization in which they operate.

Roy Moore and Al Franken should teach us something we may have lost sight of. Neither represent the proclaimed values of the political party to which  they belong. Going after these men is indeed not a witch hunt. It is, however, an exorcism to cast out evil no matter where it exists.

This disease is not limited to any political party, religion, or event to the United States but it is time that it be eradicated here now.

Let’s hope we get this fixed and soon.

I was born on June 23, 1950. At those times when I want to feel older I consider that I must have been conceived sometime in September of 1949. Admittedly, at no time do I wish to feel older.

Nevertheless, we all have thoughts that we don’t want to have, and more importantly, thoughts we shouldn’t have.

A guy cuts you off on the highway and you feel snubbed and disrespected. A normal reaction you might say. But what good is it to brood about this apparent social faux pas and, is it worth speeding up in a frenzy of road rage?

A wise person would respond to such an affront by blowing kisses at the perpetrator.  A good friend of mine with whom I used to commute into the Bronx when I was teaching advised just that. I can’t say that I followed his advice all the time but I did try.

The lesson that my friend tried to convey was that we have control over our thoughts. We can control our response to any given situation.

We can opt for happiness in lieu of anger and frustration.

I have limited my activity on Facebook. This is one step for me to try to take control of my thoughts.

I loved the ability of catching up with friends and family who reside in distant parts of the U.S. Some across the sea. But during our most recent Presidential election I saw the meanness of Facebook emerge and I made an effort to visit on a less frequent basis.

Now, I have taken to write about Trump and I am sure I contributed to the same meanness that I describe but I didn’t resort to the vitriol that I  have witnessed.

I am sure some of it was begun by Russian trolls and somehow shared to my page. On one occasion there was a report that Hillary Clinton had four abortions before she gave birth to Chelsea. This was the straw as they say.

Such a despicable lie spread, not to win an election, but to inspire hatred for a woman drove me off the grid.

Back in the days when I was conceived and born you could disagree with your opponents. You didn’t have to be afraid of being hated by anyone who shared a different opinion.

Today’s political leaders lack imagination.

Neither Democrats nor Republicans ever have the fleeting thought that they may be wrong or that the other side may have a valid point.

You can’t compromise with someone you deem incapable of being right.

You can’t work with anybody you can’t meet halfway on an issue.

It can’t always be all or nothing, unless you’re happy with nothing.

The poor excuse we have for our national government is once again trying to fix the problems associated with Obamacare by destroying it at any cost. Well, not just any cost. The cost will be the lost benefits by our nations poorest.

That would be bad enough if Congress had the integrity to put forth their plan in the light of day and have it subjected to the scrutiny that a bill affecting one sixth of our economy deserves.

I am really surprised that Congress refuses to hold hearings and present evidence that will hold up to close inspection. I mean, look at what they did during that terrible epidemic affecting baseball.

These legislative loons were more concerned with exposing the use of steroids by baseball players than they seem to be interested in holding hearings on health insurance.

Wouldn’t you just love to hear some of the witnesses  confess that they didn’t want to talk about the Republican health plan just like some of the baseball players avoided talking about steroids? Back a few years ago Congress was more interested in “fixing” the problem of steroids than say, fixing the tax code or infrastructure.

Now, Congress wants to “fix” health care but doesn’t want anyone to know just how they plan to do it or how their plan will really work and who will be the winners and who will lose.

Look, I’ll accept that Obamacare needs fixing (but I would like to hear just exactly how, with evidence and proof, Obamacare is failing) and it might be a good idea to put forth a plan to do so but the Republicans are too interested in scrapping Obamacare just as they would love to scrap Social Security because both are Democrat inventions.

I think the first way to cut the cost of health care is to make the Secretary of Health pay for his own transportation.

I subscribe to the Republican notion that our federal government is too big. Unlike Republicans, however, I have the cure.

The next hypocrite, who happens to earn a paycheck, as well as a hefty health insurance package and argues for a reduction in big government, should resign and reduce the size of government by one.

Paul Ryan and Rand Paul should be the first to go. Then, the Donald. Mike Pence? Yeah, let him and Lindsay Graham fight to get out the door first. All these so called small government lovers should live up to their convictions and make government smaller.

Let them return to the market place on which they so confidently rely to take care of the poor and those lacking health insurance.

On another note, if Trump is so hot to get into a fight, how about he orders an invasion of   Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico?

Much of these states and Commonwealth are war zones in need of massive relief and rebuilding. How about we just wage war on the wastelands created by Harvey, Irma, and Maria rather than looking to inflict a man made wasteland on North Korea?

Just ask the survivors of Katrina and Sandy if our government is too big. I’m thinking they would have preferred an increase in government spending in order to recover the devastation they endured. With the three new states and Commonwealth in such dire straits, is it reasonable to cut the tax liability of those who can afford to help bail out these people?

No living person should be small enough to fail, too small to bail out regardless of how big a government is acceptable to you.

When your house is on fire you’re not going to quibble about tax rates.

Here I sit in Bradenton, Florida, the Gateway to Armageddon.

In about 24 hours a Category 17 hurricane will huff and puff and blow my house in.

I hope that’s hyperbole!

It’s gotten so that I have been watching our local weather broadcast more than MSNBC’s coverage of Trump and Russia. Somehow, approaching doom of any sort becomes addictive.

Eileen and I were next door putting up shutters for my neighbor/friend and we didn’t have our phones. We came back from shutter installation to find ten voice messages and an equal amount of texts. It’s getting too much to comfort our friends and family.

We say the right things to put them at ease but the reality is we are scared shit.

You’d be a moron if you weren’t.

Now, I think we’ll be safe and, hopefully, the only things we lose will be property. I don’t think we will have flooding as our area has not even been coded. We were told not to evacuate as, because we are above  the flood plain, we would not be eligible for a shelter.  Of course, these things can all be re-defined after a disaster like Irma seems to promise.

Other good news in our favor is that our home is built to the new Florida building code which requires concrete block construction as opposed to a wood frame. We should be safe from the severe winds of Irma. But, when you spend the last two days putting up metal shutters on all your windows, you begin to see the point of what we are hearing from our weather broadcasts.

Our plan is to hunker down and prepare a safe room. Stock it with food and water and hope we are over-prepared and over-reacting.

I truly believe this will not be the last entry in the Newell Post. But I’m not sure that is a comfort to you?

No it’s not what you think! And, by the way, that’s disgusting!

I just got my results from AncestryDNA and I have come to the conclusion that we should demand a DNA test for any candidate for public office. Much more revealing than a doctored tax return and the candidate might be enlightened by the process.

I was.

For the most part, my results were not unexpected.

My ethnicity estimate was as follows:

77% Ireland

21% Great Britain

2% Other Regions.

It’s this last category that I found the most fascinating.

Of the 2%, less than 2% represented Scandinavia. Considering the Vikings pillaged and settled in Ireland, I was not surprised at this result.

However, less than 1% (but it is there nonetheless), represents South Asia. AncestryDNA provides a map highlighting the relevant regions and South Asia includes Pakistan, India,   Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar. I never saw that coming.

Of course, it should not have surprised me as we all know where human life originated and, much as I hate to admit it, it didn’t all start on Leland Avenue in the Bronx.

This experience has given me a global outlook to life that I have to admit I had resisted. I mean, I’m having a hard enough time to deal with Floridians and now I have a whole new world of potential family members to learn about. It’s making me appreciate the Floridians as they, too, might be in my DNA soup.

And, of course, if we go back far enough, you and I are related.

Is that Melanie singing Beautiful People in the background?

This entry was written during Hurricane Irene back in 2011. Not much has changed.

Whether she was a hurricane or a tropical storm, Irene sapped our energy and left us in the 19th century. No lights, no TV, no internet. What’s a boy to do, blog on paper? Well, that’s what I am doing, a pre-Gutenberg blogger listening to my transistor radio as I pen this entry of the Newell Post.

We’re being told that it could be Friday before we see the light of night. I hope my batteries last. Ironically, the aftermath of Irene is the perfect metaphor for the American Citizen in the 21st Century.

For powerless is our condition after our political parties have ravaged us. We matter not one bit to our politicians. While the Democrats and Republicans fiddled about the debt ceiling, the American economy was left to burn. Unemployment continued to rise as our infrastructure continued to crumble. The Washington Monument isn’t the only thing cracked in Washington.

So, how do we get these people to pay attention to us? The Supreme Court is no help as they have sided with the rich by giving them more ‘free’ speech than we ever could afford. The average citizen can’t get the ear of a politician whose daily activity includes selling his/her soul to the highest contributor.

So what’s the answer?

I think we have to flood DC with emails and snail mail and demand an investigation as to where our government has gone? Say what you want about the NY and NJ governors and Mayor Bloomberg but they did act and respond to a major threat this weekend. Washington would still be debating whether it was a hurricane or a tropical storm.

Since they couldn’t tax it, bail it out, or provide a loophole, they had no plan to deal with it. While we do get taxed, the average citizen receives no bail out and cannot evade the wrath of the IRS through a loop hole because we have no juice. We remain as powerless as we were before Irene came ashore but at least now we can’t watch CSPAN.

I vowed a few years ago that I would stop watching TV news and talk shows. Well, the last eight months I have fallen off the wagon and succumbed, once again, to the dark side.

Never a fan of reality TV, I always opted to view good TV. Instead of Survivor, I watched West Wing. Instead of Jersey Shore, I watched NCIS. Instead of MSNBC, CNN, and FOX, I read the sports page. However, when Reality TV invaded and took hold of the White House, well, I just had to watch.

Trump has become the President you love to hate. Even as you attack hate groups for the terrible things they have done and want to do, you find yourself hating Donald Trump. Oddly enough, it was the same for President Obama as so many people seemed to hate him. The thing I used to love hearing the haters say about Obama was that he was a socialist.

Yeah, he was such a socialist that he let all the Wall Street perpetrators of the greatest economic catastrophe since the Great Depression get off scott free. Martha Stewart can go to jail for insider trading but let’s leave Wall Street alone.

And please I don’t want to hear from the Wall Street Defense League.

But, aside from getting yourself worked up, whether you are Pro Trump or Anti Trump, Whadya Crabbin About?

Has your life been impacted by  the election?

Do you still love your partner?

Do you still have your health? (OK so you may be losing your health insurance.)

Can you pay your bills?

Start to think of all the things you have and don’t let a politician take your joy away.

Fight hatred with love.

Fight hatred with forgiveness.

I don’t go on Facebook too often. I used to be logged in all day. Now, I check in to see what my family is up to. I find myself eliminating more posts than sharing them. I am sure many have deleted my posts and maybe deleted me. That’s ok with me as I have tried to  stay out of the fray.

I am trying to focus on positive things and I admit that this is a challenge. Sometimes I find myself getting angry and I have to stop myself and re-focus my attention to my better angels.

I have no reason to be angry.

I have no reason to be sad.

I absolutely have no reason to hate.

Forty years ago at this time I was preparing for my first year teaching at Saint Vito’s in Mamaroneck, New York.

I was nervous as you might expect but I was also filled with hope and faith and optimism. I was going to change lives. I was going to open the eyes of young people and encourage them to read and to be lifelong learners. It wasn’t always easy and it took a while to realize some of my goals.

I worked with great people. people I admired and I aspired to be like them. Teachers, nuns, priests,  were all so influential on my life as they were on the children who attended Saint Vito’s. Teaching there for four years was the defining moment of my life.

The students and the parents were extraordinary.

Despite leaving there in 1981, I did, as Father Peter suggested, “Take Saint Vito’s with you wherever you go.” I did that and I like to think that the places where I worked were all the better for it.

We all know great people like the ones I was blessed to know starting in 1977 on a hot September morning. We all know people who bring out our humility just thinking about their greatness. Hopefully, we are still able to earn the blessing of knowing such people.

My question is a simple one. Where were all the good people for the members of the hate groups?

I remember one day teaching history at Saint Vito’s. We were learning about World War II. I also had the class read Animal Farm and 1984. They may have read Brave New World as well. Anyway, I began the lesson talking about the Nazis. I started by saying, “Let’s remember that the Nazis were good men, believed in God, went to Church, and celebrated Christmas, and were good fathers to their children.”

The uproar that erupted was spectacular.

“But Mr. Newell, they were monsters. They killed millions of Jewish people.”

“Didn’t you see all the horror and hatred they produced?”

I let them go on for a few minutes and then I said, “That’s the whole point! Good people did monstrous things and allowed them to continue. Just because it happened over thirty years ago, don’t think it can’t happen again. When people hate they are capable of doing terrible things.”

Hatred consumed these people back in 1930’s and 1940’s Germany and it may well be consuming America in 2017.

Good people cannot allow this to continue.

I put a picture up on Facebook of a sticker on the window of a pick up down here in Florida, It read, “Rebel Lives Matter.”

I understand that people get upset by the notion of Black Lives Matter thinking that it’s an assertion that White lives don’t matter.

I think this failure to understand the viewpoint of Black Lives Matter is a result of a lack of empathy and a lack of understanding of our own history.

To think that we are still fighting the Civil War is amazing to me. It’s why the Second Amendment is so important to some. There are those who are afraid of losing  their right to wage war against America when things get out of hand. This is not about survivalists fearing Armageddon. This is about Supremacists getting ready for the Great Race War.

We need good people to stand their ground, not some knucklehead with an AK-47 and a confederate flag.

I know the original form of the statement reads “The sins of the father…” but today, on, what would have been the 110th birthday of my father, I prefer to think about the grace that was visited upon his sons.

I never knew my father to be sad. I never saw him cry until my mother died. He was always smiling and, despite having many life experiences that would have made other men bemoan their fate, my father chose to tell stories that made all who listened laugh.

I used to compare my father and my Uncle Al to Laurel and Hardy, my father playing Ollie to Uncle Al’s Stan.  Uncle Al was another man who had a hard life but you would never know it listening to him and my father talk.

The only character flaw my father had was that he couldn’t keep a secret. That’s not to say that he revealed sources to the Russians while entertaining them in the Oval Office. Rather, my father’s weakness pertained solely to Christmas. He rarely waited until Christmas to give me presents.

One afternoon in October my mother and father were waiting on Taylor Avenue as I was released from school. Walking out the gate by the Convent I saw them there in the car. As I got in the back seat my father had a sheepish grin and gave me the head nod encouraging me to look on the floor of the car. There was a box from Kleins and it had LIONEL emblazoned all over it.

My father bought me a set of trains and instead of tucking it away for Christmas, I was playing with them on Halloween.

Then, in December, I think it must have been the 23rd, he came bouncing up the stairs of 1261 Leland with a small box in his hand. It was two days before Christmas so why wait? He gave me the box as he led me into the front bedroom where our Lionel layout was stationed. He then opened the box and took out a beautiful Santa Fe diesel and placed it on the track.

He was always fond of taking my mother and I up to Ferry Point Park on a warm spring evening. They had lawn chairs and we always took a bat and ball and our mitts. I am guessing I was 10 and that would make my father 53.

He had just completed a hard day working in a Con Ed powerhouse but that did not stop him from fielding my fly balls. The unfortunate thing was that I was not a consistent hitter. When my father played left field, I hit the ball to right. Then he moved over to right and I hit the ball to left and so on and so on.

He never complained and was happy that I hit the ball no matter where it had landed.

I like to think he made me the father that I am.

I know he made my brothers Johnny and Michael the fathers they turned out to be.

I never had any chance of doing otherwise. Between the three of them, I always came in fourth but that’s still saying something.

The testament to my father is that anyone who knew him and is reading this is nodding his head and remembering much more than I have written.

I always liked to say that my father was a man of the twentieth century. Born in 1907, he witnessed the Great War, the Great Depression, Ruth, Gherig, and DiMaggio, WW II and all the rest of a most historic time. Yet, he taught me that true history recorded the lives of simple people enjoying a grand life.

And so, I wish my father Happy Birthday, knowing full well that no one would be singing louder than himself.

Happy Birthday Dad.