Judgement down the Centuries

She was, by all accounts, a pretty tough woman, this woman born in 1881 on the border of Illinois and Wisconsin to a 58-year old man and 35-year old woman, both immigrants from Norway.
 

She was my father’s mother; her name was Sarah Gustava Tillotson, though her father was Ole Trondson Tillorson. Had the name been changed in Ellis Island? Or was Ellis Island even operating at that time? Because the family came in the first or second wave of immigrants: her father’s first child, Henry, was born in New York in July of 1846.

I barely knew her, though I distinctly recall having to eat beet greens that had been boiled from about the beginning of time. And I remember that her hair was falling out, probably due to the chemotherapy she was taking at the time; she died of cancer when I was ten.

“She was a fine woman,” said my mother, with real respect in her voice. And the feeling must have been mutual; apparently my grandmother had remarked, when told that my mother couldn’t come to a family gathering, “but how will we have any fun?”

So I don’t know the woman, and I may not even know the stories. Because I seem to recall that she heard that the ladies in church were scoffing that she was too poor to buy a car. So what did she do? Went out, bought a Cadillac, drove it to church, and then drove it back. Then she parked it on cinder blocks in the front yard.

True? Cousin Ruthie says no, and she should know, being slightly older than I, and having known the woman.

OK—so what about the story about my father, who wanted a quarter to go to the movies? “Move the woodpile to the side of the house,” said his mother, “then come back for instructions.” Jack appeared half an hour later.

“Now move it back,” she said.

She was a religious woman, this lady who endowed a wing in a Chicago children’s hospital, and who bestowed an annuity from the Moody Bible Institute on my mother. The annuity was for twenty-five dollars or so; notwithstanding, the institute was in the habit of sending a man out every year to make sure that Franny was still living. Invariably, he arrived in January; just as invariably, he got stuck in a snow bank on the long road to my mother’s house.

“Would you like to join me in prayer,” the man would ask.

“No,” my mother would reply. But pleasantly….

“She was tall, and ramrod straight, and pretty unapproachable,” said John, my brother, who remembers her, apparently, just as vaguely.

What is it about old pictures? Did she believe, when this was taken, that this would be one of the few photos of her that would be taken, photography being—relatively—in its infancy? She looks out at us, as if challenging us. Have we measured up? Are we slackers? Giving in to vice?

I do my best, or so I think. I have my collection of people to whom I give money—one of whom invariably asks for more. I try not to cheat or steal or bear false witness.

Why do I think that’s not enough?

Bad Policy

It was a day when nothing much got done. Yes, I wrote a longish post in the morning, and then it was time to go, time to take the train to 42d street, examine the map, and decide that the A train to Far Rockaway was the ticket out of the city. Time to leave, time to go home.

And what had I seen in New York? Oddly, everything was as normal, except that there seemed to be a new breed of poverty and homelessness. There had always been street people, but they had seemed different—maybe drunks, maybe drugs, maybe just crazy. The point was that they couldn’t fit in—that’s why they were on the streets.

There was the woman sitting halfway down the stairs to the 42nd Street subway. She was sitting on cardboard on the landing; the air was a mix of the 40 degrees outside and the 60 degrees inside. Still, it was cold enough that she was bundled up and yet still shivering. And her sign was clever: Donate What You Can to Polish Your Karma.

Nor was she the only one—there were many more people like her. “One in five of our neighbors can’t put food on their tables,” stated the public service ad on the subway. Is it true? What would a Google search reveal?

Well, as usual, the picture isn’t clear. Yes, the rate of poverty in New York City inched up to 21.2%; it had been 20.9 the year before. But Bloomberg came out blazing—he stated that of the 20 largest cities in the country, New York was the only one whose level of poverty had not risen since 2000. It was 21.2% then, it’s 21.2% now. In other words, it’s gotten worse for every other city except New York.

It’s also true that I was in Manhattan all of the time I was there, unless you count passing through Brooklyn to get to the airport. And The New York Times has this to say about Manhattan:

Manhattan retained the dubious distinction of having the biggest income gap of any big county in the country. The mean income of the lowest fifth was $9,635, compared with $389,007 for the top fifth and $799,969 for the top 5 percent — more than an eightyfold difference between bottom and top.

All of this is based on new data from the Census Bureau, which leads me to wonder—how do you count homeless people? And in fact, looking it up, it appears that the Census Bureau itself has come out and said that its count of the homeless for 2010 was off by three million. Not surprising, really, since many state and city ordinances prohibit sleeping, loitering, or camping in public. So there are a lot of people who go uncounted.

The train to the airport had the usual buskers—in this case a really bad mariachi duo (a singer and an accordion) and a good trio singing songs from the 40s. But nobody except for the out-of-towners—maybe Minnesota nice?—seemed to be giving anything. Oh, and there were the people selling candy for a dollar—often their signs proclaimed them homeless or out of work.

It was a study in contrasts. The city has unimaginable wealth, both now and in the past. And I had been staying with my brother and sister in law, who live on Riverside Drive. Their apartment is hardly palatial, neither is it small; but that’s not the point.

And that is? John and Jeanne are living a bit better than their parents did. They had had good public school educations, they had gone to graduate programs, they were now taking vacations and spending in ways that their parents wouldn’t have dreamed of. And that’s good—that’s the way it should be. The American Dream, right?

Assuming a level playing field, yes. But I sat next to a young black woman and her daughter; mother had clearly picked up the five-year old from school. And her first action, on entering the train? Take out and power up a small tablet and hand it to the girl.

Two days earlier, I had been in a bus in Manhattan watching a white mother talking to her son of roughly the same age. No tablet, instead it was questions to the child—what had he learned at school, was his teacher happy with the class, was everybody there? By the end of ten blocks, the mother had gotten the boy to remember the material presented in school, had reinforced it, and had added to it.

Nor is it a white / black thing. There were black guys in very good three-piece suits who were getting on and off the subway in midtown New York. But I would wager any money that their parents had done the same thing that the woman on the bus in Manhattan was doing.

“I am a girl, and I am beautiful just the way I am,” the child with the tablet on the subway began to recite. She was reading a poster on the train. And as kids at that age will do, she started to repeat it endlessly.

I know what the lady on the bus would have done. She would have agreed, she would have probed—what were the best things about you, she would have asked. What things are most important to you? What kind of person do you like and what kind of person do you want to be?

The mother on the train shushed her child up.

Which was a shame, really, because the child was obviously very intelligent. There’s something about the eyes, you know, and the quickness of response to stimuli—you could tell this kid could go places.

“It was my librarian,” said Jeanne, when I asked who had made the difference in her life. Her parents had never read, never even completed high school—but the librarian had hooked Jeanne on books, and gave her the message: you’re sharp, you’ll go far.

Will there be anyone there for the little girl, who is beautiful just the way she is? Or will our cuts in education, arts programs, and Head Start mean that only the rich have a shot at a better life? I wish we could see that neglecting people, and especially kids, has another dimension than morality or equality.

It’s also disastrous economic policy.

When Sugar Bought Art

There’s something melancholic about it—the news that the Two Trees Management Company wants to develop the shuttered American Sugar Refining Company. And why, you ask? Well, for one thing, the name American Sugar Refining Company may mean nothing to you, but its finished product? Domino Sugar.

Well, if you’re like me, you can still see the bag in your mother’s kitchen—or kitchens, since I could locate the sugar immediately in my childhood home, were the sugar still there. Sugar tends to figure pretty strongly in the culinary life of kids.

Then there’s the fact that the sugar came from a site across the East River from Manhattan. In fact, the factory had operated from the site since the mid-nineteenth century at least—the ships had come in laden with a sugar cane slurry from the Caribbean or the Philippines or wherever, and the sugar was refined right there in Brooklyn.

Nor was it, as the Times article describes it, “refined” in anything but name. Temperatures could get up to 140 degrees. Here’s what the Times had to say about the process:

In the earliest days, much of the sugar arriving at the Havemeyer family’s refinery on the Williamsburg waterfront had been harvested by slaves. It was mixed into a dirty slurry, boiled in enormous vats and filtered through charred animal bones.

Then it was “whipped, beaten, flayed, hurled into ‘grain,'” The Illustrated American magazine reported in 1894. “The process is very wild and terrible, like a caged cyclone.” Life in the refinery was so infernal that The New York Tribune declared in 1894 that a worker had only one hope of escaping “perpetual torture.”

“Not infrequently,” the newspaper said, “death comes quickly to his relief.”  

Henry Osborne Havemeyer inherited some sugar interests, and then went on to found his company in 1868, when he was just 22. The current building, built after a fire destroyed the original building, was built in 1882, and is the only factory site named as a New York City Landmark. Havemeyer went on to become an extremely rich man, know as the Sugar King, and the company was one of the original 12 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

What happened? Well, the company stumbled on, and sources for sugar shifted from cane to beet sugar to the nefarious high fructose corn syrup. And why the shift? In part, according to Wikipedia, because of tinkering with the marketplace:

A system of sugar tariffs and sugar quotas imposed in 1977 in the United States significantly increased the cost of imported sugar and U.S. producers sought cheaper sources. High-fructose corn syrup, derived from corn, is more economical because the domestic U.S. and Canadian prices of sugar are twice the global price[29] and the price of corn is kept low through government subsidies paid to growers.[30][31] High-fructose corn syrup became an attractive substitute, and is preferred over cane sugar among the vast majority of American food and beverage manufacturers. Soft drink makers such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi use sugar in other nations, but switched to high-fructose corn syrup in the United States in 1984.

Hey wait—the cost of sugar in the US is twice as much as in the rest of the world? So the government is protecting the corn farmers by paying them to grow this stuff—or at least the raw material for it—and also imposing tariffs and quotas on sugar, which may be far healthier?

In fact, a recent study at the University of Guelph in Canada has this to say:

Canadian researchers have found that high-fructose corn syrup can cause behavioral reactions in rats 'similar to those produced by drugs of abuse, such as cocaine'.

Professor Francesco Leri of the University of Guelph, who carried out the research, said it suggested there was an addictive quality to foods that contain high levels of high-fructose corn syrup which could explain, at least partly, the current global obesity epidemic.

Oh, and the same article says this:

Research from Princeton University in 2010 found that rats fed on a sugary diet became nervous and anxious when the sugar was removed. They were thrown into a state of anxiety similar to the kind of stress that people feel during withdrawal from drugs like nicotine and even morphine.

So at some point the Havemeyer family sold out, and in 2003, the refining part of the operation closed down, after a bitter, twenty-month strike, one of the longest in New York history. And then, in 2004, the whole operation closed down.

I tell you it’s bittersweet; here’s why. First, we used to produce stuff, rather than import it. Second, it’s an outrage that we are subsidizing high fructose corn syrup, which has been linked to something called metabolic syndrome: high blood sugar, diabetes, obesity, heart disease, etc.

Lastly, anyone who has been in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City will know the Havemeyer name; both Henry Osborne Havemeyer and his wife collected art like crazy, and their three children carried on as well. Here’s Wikipedia on the subject:

Although each of the children collected in their own right, Electra Havemeyer Webb collected on the grand scale of her parents and went on to found a museum to showcase her deep and diverse collections. Louisine identified some 142 works as a bequest to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and empowered her children to give the Met's curators free rein. By the time they had finished an inventory of the Havemeyer's three-story Fifth Avenue manse 1,967 works would be assimilated into the Met's holdings.

And here’s the Met itself on the collection:

A legendary assemblage, the Havemeyer collection is famous for its unparalleled groupings of works by Corot, Courbet, and Manet, its great Monets and Cézannes, and its many paintings, pastels, drawings, and bronzes by Degas. But the real depth and the encyclopedic range of this legacy are not well known, because part of it is dispersed throughout the Metropolitan and part dispersed throughout the world. Few know, for example, that the collection encompassed Rembrandts and El Grecos as well as works by other old masters. The Havemeyers were not only the premier American patrons of late nineteenth-century French painting—Mrs. Havemeyer was perhaps the first American to buy a Monet—but also pathbreaking collectors in such uncharted fields as Spanish painting, for which they created a demand and established a taste among their contemporaries.

Will our current crop of magnates do as well?

Portrait of a Cardinal, Probably Cardinal Don Fernando Niño de Guevara (1541–1609)  El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos) (Greek, Iráklion (Candia) 1540/41–1614 Toledo)

Finding and Losing Freddy

I seem to be running a war on my life. It’s two PM, and what have I done?

Well, I spent the morning wondering about 10AM, which was when the alleged plumber was supposed to show up. Instead—no need to sit down for this news—he arrived telephonically at noon. I went downstairs to let him in….

Nobody….

Right, checked the shoe store, above which I live.

Nobody….

Call the number that had just called me—nice you can do that with cell phones—and got the company, not the plumber. The plumber, it turned out, was on the next street up, and so the guy at the company patched in the plumber, who said he would come down one street. What did he do? Of course, he walked up one street.

I have wanted this plumber more than I ever wanted my first sexual experience or my first—and only—husband. And now, like so many things including my childhood and my faith in the essential goodness of people…where is my plumber going?

The company guy is busy explaining to Freddy, the plumber, that he is going the wrong way. Freddy, instead, is describing absolutely everything he sees—some of which are phenomenological. “There’s a woman parking her car,” reports Freddy.

Freddy, dear?

“Two cats are mating,” he says.

This I ponder for a moment—have I ever seen two cats mating on the street? It occurs to me: no. So why Freddy and not me? I do live here after all….

“Do you see any businesses on your street?” I ask.

“No,” he says.

“Freddy,” I beg, “go back to where you were. Stand absolutely still—describe every store you see. I’ll come find you, Freddy, BUT DON’T LEAVE ME!”

Oh—and I forgot to mention that all this is occurring in a construction—more accurately destruction—site, and that’s important to know, because their reaction—those big burly guys—to a desperate middle-aged guy professing his love and need for Freddy?

“No me dejes, Freddy!”

“Te quiero, Freddy!”

Bésame mucho, sings one. Kiss me a lot….

Freddy, in the meantime, has retraced his steps and is in front of the Bombonera, a long and now defunct tradition. I race to get him—talking nonsense on the way. We return, only to be greeted with cheers, whistles and catcalls. Oh, and scattered applause.

I grab Freddy’s hand—he’s the ebony on the keyboard, I’m the ivory—and raise it above our heads. We both bow.

“Freddy is the plumber,” I tell the guys. They give me a special smile.

Freddy, amazingly, is completely unfazed by this ridiculous situation, and gets right down to work—in this case pulling the handle off the faucet with such force that it crashes and breaks. Oh, and he will later inform me that it would be silly to buy a replacement because they’re ridiculously expensive. Who would want such things?

Well, it turns out that Freddy, of course, doesn’t have the parts and will have to go Bayamón to get them. I instantly object.

“You’ll never come back, Freddy,” I tell him. “People disappear in Bayamón—lost in traffic jams, or aimlessly drifting around in Plaza del Sol, or who knows what. Don’t, DON’T go to Bayamón!”

Before Freddy, I was a baritone—now I’m a mezzo-soprano in a very bad opera. Is this the moment to sink to my knees, and gaze upon him beseechingly?

He leaves, as so many men do, paying absolutely no mind….

I sit down at my computer. What to write about, today? I could tell you the improbable story that the redoubtable—love that word, by the way—New York Times served up this morning. It seems that the FBI arrested two rabbis in the New York area. And what for? Blackjack in the synagogue? Cocaine in hollowed-out Torahs?

Nope, the rabbis were employing a hit man to work over husbands who were unwilling to give their wives a divorce. Here’s the Times on the subject:

In some Orthodox Jewish communities, a divorce is granted only once a husband provides his wife with a document known as a get. And stories of the frustrations and obstacles that women face in their quest to obtain a get are commonplace. While a woman can sue in rabbinical court to try to secure a get, some husbands do not comply with the court’s edict.   

Right—be warned, any Orthodox Jewish readers of the blog, the little lady wants out? Give it to her—otherwise you’ll get kidnapped and worked over, and by the way, these guys are professional. They don’t leave marks, so when you go to the cops, they’ll just think it’s some weird Jewish thing, and shrug it off.

I ponder this for some time. Can I write about this? Is there enough here for a post? Can I combine it with some other story?

It’s no use. Freddy has come into my life, Freddy has left me. I am desolate. How is it in French? Je suis désolé. Better, I think.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing to write about today, and guess what? There is also no going to the bathroom because Freddy has dismantled both faucets and turned off the water. Fortunately in reverse order. But if I turn the water back on? It’ll be like the fountains at Versailles, though horizontal.

It took me back a bit to the 70’s, in those pre-AIDS days that we all very much enjoyed. Guys came into your life, and then they left. So long, baby-cakes!

Well, it’s 2:41, and page three, and exactly 904 words.

And Freddy?

And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain

For unremembered lads that not again

Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.

(From Sonnet XLIII, Edna St. Vincent Millay)

OK—Flunked That Test….

Yeah?

That seems to be my reaction to everything, today, since the news, guys, is anything but great. True—no category five hurricanes are barreling down on us, and the murder rate is actually down in the little town of Loíza, traditionally a very hot-in-every-sense place. Internationally, the news from Syria is good. Oh, and in Florida, this hovel got sold….

Yes, I bring you this in the spirit of compare and contrast, which was dear to the hearts of all of my high school teachers. So here it is:

1. Compare and contrast the lives of the 1% versus the 99%

(‘Shit, I hate these questions—hey, can I use the Internet? There’s gotta be something there….)

To start, the top 1% in terms of wealth own one third of the net worth of the United States. And that’s why, dear Reader, somebody was able to shell out 41.1 million greenbacks to live in the current mansion of the former Gianni Versace in Miami.

In the meantime, we have this:

Meet Deirdre Cunningham, who, according to today’s The New York Times, is working two jobs and living in a homeless shelter. Nor is that unusual—apparently over 20% of people in New York’s homeless population—estimated at 50,000—are working. An apartment costs at least 1,000 bucks in New York, and Cunningham doesn’t have a good credit rating: she was evicted.

Consider this curious sentence, from the Times:

The average monthly cost for the government to shelter a family is more than $3,000; the cost for a single person is more than $2,300.

Ummm—is anybody seeing what I’m seeing? Such as if there are apartments for $1,000, why aren’t we renting them and putting homeless people in them and saving 1,300 or 2,000 bucks monthly?

This idea, apparently, would be anathema to New York’s mayor Michael R. Bloomberg—who if he’s not part of the 1%, by the way, we’re really fucked—since he feels that the homeless like to be homeless and like to live in shelters. Or something like that—that’s how I interpret this sentence from the Times:

To make the shelter system less inviting, the city also stopped giving homeless families priority for public housing, and made it harder for those who left the system to return.

Pretty clear, hunh? A few details from Cunningham’s life:

1. she gets four hours of sleep from 7AM to 11AM
2. She can’t keep sharp objects of razor blades with her
3. She has to take her laundry to a laundromat, since the washing machines at the shelter are either broken or being used
4. Oh—there’s a curfew, so even if she had the money to go out, she couldn’t

I’ll come clean—that wasn’t all Deidre: it was a composite of three women mentioned in the article.

But there is something perversely wrong about American culture today. Do we really think anybody would want to live in a shelter? Listen to another sentence:

But in an interview, Ms. Gibbs reiterated the Bloomberg administration’s long-held position that more benefits only attract more people to shelters. “That drives more demand,” she said. “It’s a Catch-22.”

Guys—we’re talking about people here, not widgets. People whose alternative is the streets at 3AM. People who have daughters—Deirdre’s is eight, and wants to take ballet.

I remember when my family went to New York, for my brother’s wedding. We saw a man pawing through the trash can.

“What’s he doing,” asked my father.

“Looking for food,” said Jeanne.

“In AMERICA?” cried my father.

What have we become?

The Beatitudes Banned?

Every day, the same guy hits me up for food, and I have to confess. I’m annoyed with him.

Annoyed because he hits me up twice or three times in a day—shouldn’t once be enough? Annoyed because I give him three dollars—enough for bread, ham and orange juice, and he wants five dollars for “a hamburger at Burger King.” Annoyed because he now has taken to coming into the café where I “work” and asking for money while I’m busy writing. In short, he isn’t acting like a properly grateful beggar—I have become his bank. And so? I am not a cheerful giver, which I should be.

Right—so why don’t I tell him to go to hell?

Because he’s hungry, dammit.

How do I know? Well, he’s rail thin. And I see him “selling” parking spaces on the street, as well as pushing shopping carts with food for customers at the grocery store. In short, he’s struggling, and he’s just getting by.

I write this because Susan has sent a link to a church website in Raleigh, North Carolina, which has apparently banned churches from giving out food to the homeless. The church, Love Wins, had for 6 years given coffee and sandwiches to anybody who came by on Saturday and Sunday mornings. They were recently told this is illegal.

Second confession—I have not been able to access the link, and I suspect that everybody else in the country is having the same problem. I did read, however, news of the affair in The Daily Kos, and here’s the link.

In chasing down this improbable but seemingly true story, I came upon the interesting news that many major American cities have done the same. In Philadelphia, Mayor Nutter has prohibited groups from distributing food in city parks, saying the practice is unsanitary and lacking in dignity. (Hey—just the facts; that’s what he said…)

And it goes on and on—New York City, Orlando, Dallas, Las Vegas and Houston have all restricted feeding the poor in some ways. Here’s what one blogger wrote:

New York City has banned all food donations to government-run homeless shelters because the bureaucrats there are concerned that the donated food will not be "nutritious" enough.

Yes, this is really true.

The following is from a recent Fox News article....

The Bloomberg administration is now taking the term “food police” to new depths, blocking food donations to all government-run facilities that serve the city’s homeless.

In conjunction with a mayoral task force and the Health Department, the Department of Homeless Services recently started enforcing new nutritional rules for food served at city shelters. Since DHS can’t assess the nutritional content of donated food, shelters have to turn away good Samaritans.

You know, I’ve often believed that the internal combustion engine was the ruination of America. Why? Because too many of us wake up, leave our houses, drive to work, come home, eat, and go to sleep. Maybe it would be better to take the bus, as I do. Then people would see, as I once did, a whole family in a parked car at five in the morning. They were all asleep, all except the father, sitting in the driver’s seat. Nor will I forget his eyes, which plainly told me—“this is all we have, all we can do.”

Or people would see—as I do—the guy who routinely goes into the dumpster up the street, fishing out scraps of food. Oh, and the guy in Houston who did so in March of this year? Here’s what the Houston Chronicle said:

James Kelly was hungry and looking for something to eat. He tried to find it in a trash bin near Houston City Hall.

For that, the man, who said he spent about nine years in the Navy but fell on hard times, was ticketed by a Houston police officer.

According to his copy of the citation, Kelly, 44, was charged on Thursday with "disturbing the contents of a garbage can in (the) downtown business district."

"I was just basically looking for something to eat," Kelly said Monday night. "I wasn't in a real good mood."

Houston, by the way, passed an ordinance in 2012 requiring organizations to get a permit to distribute food, and socking any organization in violation with a $500 fine.

You know, there are days when I think the Victorians did it better. However bad the workhouse was, it provided shelter and food. I give it to you, which would you prefer, the streets or this?

Workhouse in Ripon, England

Those Disrespectful Nails...

It was disrespectful, Yelena Isinbayeva said, to the country, to the host what Emma Green-Tregaro did.

What did Emma Green-Tregaro do, and why did it upset Isinbayeva?

Take a look….

This is, apparently, unacceptable in Russia, where both athletes are competing, and where president Vladimir Putin makes it illegal to distribute “homosexual propaganda," as defined below.

…information that can harm the spiritual or physical health of a minor, including forming the erroneous impression of the social equality of traditional and non-traditional marital relations.

Read closely; this doesn’t mean distributing “homosexual propaganda” to minors, it means—look, can I just call it HP? It’s Saturday afternoon, I’m lazy, and besides, writing out this “homosexual propaganda” nonsense makes my stomach churn.

So—distributing any HP to anyone would be illegal, even to an adult. And what happens if you do? You can be fined up to $30,000.

Right, and what else can’t you do in Russia, or in this case, Moscow?

Have a gay pride march for the next one hundred years. The clip below quite clearly shows what happens when you do.

Of course, that’s better than what happened in St. Petersburg—be warned, the blood is flowing in this one….



The situation for gay people is deteriorating in Russia; here’s what one writer, Masha Gessen, has to say:

Two things happened to me the same month: I was beaten up in front of parliament for the first time and I realized that in all my interactions, including professional ones, I no longer felt I was perceived as a journalist first: I am now a person with a pink triangle.

My family is moving to New York. We have the money and documents needed to do that with relative ease – unlike thousands of other LGBT families and individuals in Russia.

Gessen is a fighter, not a quitter. But she consulted a lawyer—could they go after her adopted son, since another law makes it illegal for gay people to adopt? The lawyer’s answer, “your answer is at the airport.”

Nor is that all. According to the Mother Jones magazine, a fake web site has been set up to lure gay men on “dates.” Here’s Mother Jones on the subject:

Led by notorious Russian neo-Nazi Maksim "Tesak" ("the Hatchet") Martsinkevich, the group has been using social media, primarily VKontakte (Russia's Facebook spinoff), to place fake dating ads to lure gay men. Once face-to-face with the men, group members interrogate and torture them, and a video of the encounter is put on YouTube. Here's one such video from late July. (Warning: The content of the video is disturbing.)

Disturbing? My word would be gut-wrenching.

Nor is it just in Russia—hate crimes are on the rise in New York City, where gangs are attacking gay people in broad daylight in places such as Madison Square Garden. Check out the video below.

What’s the worst thing?

Let me tell you a little secret. When I worked at Wal-Mart, there were two people who spent an hour or two reading the newspapers and listening to morning radio. It was called “corporate communications,” and the idea was simple—monitor the buzz and hit back when necessary.

If that was little Puerto Rico, do you think the international sponsors of this 50 billion dollar event being held in Sochi, Russia next year were unaware of this controversy? Here’s what one writer has to say:

"This piece of legislation worked its way up through the legislative system," Minky Worden, HRW's Director of Global Initiatives, told me in an interview (listen to the full interview below). "The International Olympic Committee, the United States Olympic Committee, the so-called top corporate sponsors -- Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Procter & Gamble -- these companies all, as [HRW] did, tracked the progress of this law."

"And because it is so clearly in complete violation of the Olympic Charter," she continued, "it's also clear to us at Human Rights Watch that if any of the major Olympic stakeholders who have a hotline to the Kremlin -- because the Olympics are very important to Putin personally, he has a deputy prime minister, [Dmitry] Kozak, who is tasked with making them come off perfectly -- that if any of the Olympic stakeholders, the sponsors who are literally paying for the Games, or the International Olympic Committee, the U.S. Olympic Committee or the other Olympic committees, if they weighed in on this, I don't think this law would have been signed by Putin or passed by the Duma. If they had leaned on [Russia] before the law was signed, it would not have been signed. That is absolutely true." 

Let’s head back up to the top. A Swedish athlete is dissing all of Mother Russia by displaying her rainbow fingernails?

Screw that—move the damn games to Vancouver, and I’ll start eating Big Macs again….

Royalty on Several Levels

OK—two guys. One grows up in a very poor town in Venezuela, gets introduced to the violin as a child, and goes into an amazing program, El sistema. He goes on to do well, becoming the director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which recently extended his contract. But he doesn’t forget his roots: he’s also the director of the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra.

If you know classical music, you know Gustavo Dudamel; if you don’t, you won’t. But the other guy in the clips below you will know: Prince Henry of Wales. Now, as you can see below, given a baseball jersey / t-shirt and crowned Prince Harry of Harlem.

Well, the world needs heroes, and it may be that we need them more than ever. So Harry, along with his brother and sister-in-law, decided to create something called Coach Core, just before the Olympics in London last year. The three turned to an organization called Greenhouse, which works in London’s poorest communities, and which runs programs…well, wait. It’s easier just to copy / paste what they say about themselves…..

Greenhouse puts inspirational coaches into schools and community clubs to work with 8 to 18 year-olds across 10 areas; Football, basketball, table tennis, volleyball, judo, swimming, drama, multi-sports for young people with special educational needs, tennis and athletics.

Great idea, hunh? So now, the Coach Core program has its first  group of coaches: 23 college age kids who are working with Greenhouse Master Coaches to learn the arts and skills of coaching, as well as the fundamentals of child development and how to instill core values. Oh, and also something else—fundraising.

Well, that’s a tremendous story. But watching the clip below, I noticed the banner behind the speakers’ rostrum—Harlem RBI, it said. Right—time to check that out.

And what a find! It all started in 1991, when some volunteers got together and created two baseball diamonds in an abandoned lot. The next year, there was a year-round youth mentoring program for kids at risk, a newsletter, and a summer literacy program.

Important, because kids of middle class or upper class families do all right during the long summer vacations. They either progress academically or at least maintain what they’ve got. But kids in Harlem have nothing to do, and when they hit the classroom in September, they’re one or two reading levels behind. So here’s the deal: the 700 kids in the program read during the morning, and play baseball during the afternoon, for 6 weeks during the summer. It’s first come, first served—and importantly, it’s free.

But it’s not just about the summer program—the organization established a charter public school in 2008, and its kids are doing great. Here are the results:

•   Our fourth graders increased their proficiency in Math by 91%

•   Our fourth graders increased their proficiency in English Language Arts (ELA) by 154%

•   Our fourth graders made the second biggest jump (out of 90 NYC charter schools) in improvement in ELA, and sixth biggest jump in improvement in Math. That's big progress!

•   Our third graders made an incredible showing in their first year of testing, outperforming last year's third grade cohort by double digits.

In both English and Math, DREAM fourth graders outperformed the school district average and the New York City average.

Because the summer program is old enough, the first graduates are coming back and telling the kids: “I was where you were. I buckled down and studied and graduated from high school and now I’m in college and nobody has ever done that before. Not in my family, at least….”

Oh, and how are they doing? Well, as you can hear in the clip below, 100% of the kids in the program graduate from high school, and 97% go on to college. That’s in a community where 50% of kids drop out of high school.

It makes a difference, you know, to see a guy from the ‘hood come back and tell his story. And yes, it’s cool when a British prince comes through the neighborhood, but it might be totally cool when Mark Teixeira comes onto the field. Look, the guy signed a $180 million dollar contract with the New York Yankees, and he’s got a World Series ring (don’t know what that is, but I assume it’s important).

Well, for a lot of kids, it’s baseball that teaches you team building, discipline, getting back up to the plate after you’ve struck out. For me, it was the cello, the Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestra, and several inspiring men and women—all important.

Something similar happened to Gustavo Dudamel. Here’s his story, taken directly from his website:

Named one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2009, Gustavo Dudamel hails from humble beginnings in the small town of Barquisimeto, Venezuela. Born in 1981, he began violin lessons as a child with José Luis Jiménez at the Jacinto Lara Conservatory. He continued his violin studies with José Francisco del Castillo at the Latin American Academy of Violin. His conducting studies began in 1996 with Rodolfo Saglimbeni and, the same year, he was given his first conducting position, Music Director of the Amadeus Chamber Orchestra.  In 1999, he was appointed Music Director of the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra and began conducting studies with the orchestra’s founder, Dr. Abreu; a few years later in 2004, Dudamel was brought to international attention by winning the inaugural Bamberger Symphoniker Gustav Mahler Competition. These early musical and mentoring experiences molded his commitment to music as an engine for social change – a lifelong passion.

You know, guys like Dudamel and Teixeira are my heroes, much more than a prince. Oh, but sorry—I’ve forgotten the real heroes, those two teachers in the clip below, who walk into a classroom every day, take attendance, call Billy out for screwing around, give permission for Ginny to go to the bathroom, and then start teaching.

Nobody else in our society is more important.