Forgotten Posts

I was cleaning out drafts of posts that I never finished or published. I deleted most of them but here are a few old ones that I felt merited mentioning anyway.

The Katrina disaster was unlike anything I'd ever seen. Kanye West said that "George Bush doesn't care about black people." Well, I don't think George W. Bush cares about poor people or anyone who is struggling to take care of themselves. To me, this picture is the face of the hurricane's most fragile victims.

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The execution of Tookie Williams was covered the world throughout. Stanley Williams had the support of actors, scholars, clerics and rappers. But, from many discussions I had on the net during that saga, there were a lot of people - good, hardworking black people who lived in L.A. in the 70s - who wanted people to know that the legacy of the Crips had impacted them in a way that left them without much compassion for Tookie or his spawns. David over at ISOU had a poignant recollection of his experience with the Crips and their ilk.

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The title of this post was going to be "He Always Saved The Cake For Me."

I believe it was June 16 of last year that I tuned in to the Senate proceedings on C-Span2 (video streaming) just before Robert Byrd (D-WV) made his way to the mike. Though the topic at hand was Guantanamo and Senators were debating the treatment(or poor treatment) of the detainees, Robert Byrd seemed to ramble off on a tangent about fathers and sons. By the time he'd used up his allotted minutes he'd given one of the most touching soliloquies about his father (step father in fact) and some of the fond memories he had of him.

Bob Byrd got married the same year my mother was born and I believe he is the oldest man in the Senate. But his memories were vivid enough to touch and, certainly, enough to visualize. The high point was his recount of how his mother prepared lunch for his step-father everyday for his job in the mines. Each day she packed him a piece of cake. At the end of the day, when his step-father returned home, he would go into his lunch box and give the young Robert his piece of cake.

In the midst of an almost pointless debate about how well we treat/mistreat our "enemy combatants" he managed to soften the day's antics by presenting a tribute to fathers for the upcoming Fathers' Day. I sat at my computer in tears that, after all those years, an aging Robert Byrd still remembered the kindness of his step-father saving him that piece of cake. I always tell people that it is the littlest things that kids remember about their childhood and that story was a touching reminder.