The Newell Post

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.

Number 10

Number 9

Number 8

Number 7

Number 6

Number 5

Number 4

Number 3

Number 2

And the number one reason I love President Trump.

Number 1

Growing up in a pre AC era I often recall days like today when the mercury reached 100+ and wonder how did we survive without air conditioning? I actually remember the day we got our first fan. It happened to be my 6th birthday; it was a Cool Home fan. That wasn’t my birthday gift but it could have been, even a fan was a welcomed addition.

Then a few years later we got a second fan. On Leland Avenue, we were hi rollers. As a kid we never really stayed in the apartment during the day so I guess the heat never seemed to bother us. We would play on the shady side of the street and take a break when there was no shady side of the street.

But the worst was yet to come. When I turned 18 and got a job in the mailroom at Lorillard Corp and had to take the IRT 6 train to Grand Central, and a new level of torture by heat presented itself.

Now, you were hot from the moment you stepped out on to Leland Avenue and made your way over to the Parkchester station. But then getting on the 6 was like entering a sauna. In fact, we used to joke and say, “It’s like a sauna in here,”

Ok, so we weren’t funny, but it was freakin hot. The sweat dripped right off your head onto your NY Times, which you had to fold in a very special way, the art of which has been lost unfortunately, but where was I? Yeah, it was freakin hot. But it got better.

We got to 125th and changed for the downtown express. The train was right across the platform and it was already jammed with people. However, if you positioned yourself, as I always did, right by the door so that you could scoot over and just squeeze yourself into the little bit of the free space available, you were able to make the train.

I was not the only one, though, who wanted to make the train and it was not unusual for me to have barely squeezed in to suddenly find myself on the opposite side of the car, having been crammed through like the chopped meat at Lenny’s butcher shop. This, of course, only made it freakin hotter.

This tender memory of days gone by does absolutely nothing to help me deal with today’s heat. It is unfortunate that I am no longer 18 as I think that would have enabled me to cope better. Not having to commute on the Long Island Rail Road in this summer of hell does take the sting out of the weather.

I do take comfort that there is no snow to shovel or ice to chip and I will try to focus on taking a dip in the pool that while I try to remember those halcyon days or extracting my shoe out of the melting surfaces of the city streets

I Say…You Say…Or My Night With A Knight

Late one night, a night that would soon change to early one morning, in the middle of November, 1963, I heard a song on my Dick Tracy transistor radio (a story for another time) that would change my life for ever. I heard it once around midnight and I couldn’t go to sleep until I heard it again. The song was I Want To Hold Your Hand by a group from England of all places.

Well, I wasn’t the only one who heard that song as the Beatles came roaring into our lives. You might say they saved our lives. I always thought that their first hit, my all time favorite song that I heard back on that November night in 1963 was exactly what the country needed just a few weeks after I first heard it.

In the Dark Days that followed when we were sucker punched by Lee Harvey Oswald we needed someone to hold our collective hands and the Beatles showed up just in the nick of time. The trouble was not everyone got the Beatles. Some ridiculed their look; others denied their harmony and musical talent. This was when I was introduced to the world that would become the 60’s and while it took a few years for it all to sink in, my worldview was altered forever.

All these emotions presented themselves to me last night as I sat in the upper deck of Yankee Stadium with my family. It was Eileen’s coming out party, as she liked to describe it (she was one year removed from breast cancer and surgery). There I was, in the Bronx, where 48 years ago I heard I Want To Hold Your Hand back in my bed at 1261 Leland Avenue, waiting for Paul McCartney to take the stage. When he finally did I was overwhelmed. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Fortunately I did neither but I must have had a quizzical look on my face because Eileen kept asking me if I was alright.

So Paul or as I like to refer to him Sir Paul, just started singing around 8:30 and didn’t leave till around 11:20. Hello Goodbye; Eleanor Rigby; Jet; and perhaps the shocker of them all, A Day In A Life. I tried to take snippets of all the songs but every time he went to the piano I just knew he was going to sing Hey Jude. But, as luck would have it, that did not come till the end of the show and as I started my video that sick little twirling spiral indicating that my iPhone was shutting down appeared on my screen. Oh well, I’ll get it tonight at my second night with a Knight.

An Anglophile’s Delight

This has been some weekend. It began, as the best weekends often do, on Thursday night. Bryan and I went to see Deathly Hallows Part 2 and it was spectacular. It may not have included all of the back-stories we would have liked but it was terrific all the same. We certainly will be going back for another viewing.

I guess this desire for redundant experiences in English culture was again exhibited the following two nights as we set off to Yankee Stadium, not to see Derek Jeter add to his 3000 hits, but to hear the hits of another icon of Brit lit, Sir Paul, He’s still a Beatle, McCartney. Now some of you may not recognize the producer of self proclaimed silly love songs as nothing more than a rock icon. But Billy Shakespeare himself would have chucked his sonnets for the opportunity to hear Sir Paul sing A Day In A Life and Give Peace A Chance. Nor would you ever hear a Yankee Stadium crowd serenade the Bard as we did Sir Paul, recognizing him in the traditional Yankee Stadium Bleacher Creature Roll Call.

The show Friday evening was so spectacular and was matched by an equally spectacular show on Saturday that it will take several weeks for me to stop thinking about being 13 and listening to the Beatles on our Hi Fi back on Leland Avenue. Of course facing myself in the mirror while shaving should put an end to those time travels but only for a moment.