Our nation is on fire.

In 1992, the city of Los Angeles was plunged into chaos following the acquittal of four white police officers of the use of excessive force for the beating of Rodney King--the beating had been recorded on videotape and seen by the public, and the acquittal of the officers was inexplicable and unconscionable. The jury that reached the not guilty verdicts (including one hung jury result) was comprised of ten white people, one Latino person, and one Asian person. 

There were no African-Americans on the jury. 

The city burned for five days, during which time there was over one billion dollars in damage, tens of thousands of arrests, thousands of injuries, and dozens of deaths. There were smaller disturbances in other parts of the country as a result of the verdict: San Francisco, Las Vegas, Seattle, Atlanta, and New York City. 

In 2020, Los Angeles again erupted into disorder following the videotaped death of George Floyd of Minneapolis, Minnesota, after he had been choked by a white police officer while his three other officers watched or assisted. Mr. Floyd was choked by the officer for over eight minutes--the last three of which Mr. Floyd was unconscious or otherwise non-responsive. Minneapolis police took four days to charge the officer of a crime, and of this writing, the other three officers have not been charged at all.

The main uprising occurred in Minneapolis following the murder, but other cities soon followed suit. I am writing this while the uprisings are still happening, almost a week after the murder. Some of the major cities experiencing uprisings include Minneapolis, New York City, Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, Salt Lake City, Cleveland, Raleigh, Louisville, Atlanta, Dallas, and the nation’s capital in Washington, D.C.

Today, the entire county of Los Angeles was placed under 6:00 p.m. curfew, which includes Santa Clarita, where I live with my family. My wife and I watch the news and are transported back to ‘92: twenty-eight years ago, we were newlyweds, living in Los Angeles and just starting our lives together. We’d both just started our careers as educators, and we saw our city burning. 

And now, I have to ask...what has changed? I know many of you out there are saying, “violence isn’t the answer” or words to that effect. I know what you mean, and I understand the sentiment. You can’t ask for an end to violence but use violence as your method to get there. An eye for an eye and the world goes blind. Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. I’ve heard all the homilies. The answer is to vote, they say. 

Donald Trump won the presidency despite millions more people voting for his opponent. The Russian government intervened in our election to assist him. Voter suppression tactics were used by the Republican party to tip the scales in their favor. So why would a person think that voting works? I don’t mean a person thinking “my one vote won’t matter,” but instead thinking “my vote won’t count.”

Colin Kaepernick decided to kneel during the National Anthem during the 2016 NFL season, when he was a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers. He did so to protest police brutality. He has been denounced by many on the right for his protest, including by President Donald Trump, who called him a “son of a bitch” and said he should be fired. So what is the message being sent to those who wish to protest police brutality? Protest peacefully, but not that way? This is but one example of people of color protesting peacefully and being told that their methods are wrong. 

What methods, then, remain?

Langston Hughes once asked, “What happens to a dream deferred?” He had many poetic possibilities in mind, including that it might “dry up/Like a raisin in the sun” which inspired Lorraine Hansbury to write her masterpiece play, A Raisin in the Sun. But his poem, “Harlem,” ended with a prophetic warning, an ominous question about the result of deferring a people’s dream: “Or does it explode?”

I don’t condone the violence that these protests have wrought. I could go on and on about how much of it, if not almost all of it, is the product of fringe groups using the protests as cover for their own unrelated ends: anarchists and white supremacists and all kinds of other groups who see a chance to inflict harm upon society for no reason other than to do so. But let’s not get into that argument. Let’s just simply acknowledge that along with these protests, there has been violence. I don’t like that. I don’t support it.

But to those who look and wonder, who say, “I don’t understand why these people are being so violent,” let me ask you…

What else is left?

If you can answer that, then you are wiser than I. I don’t know what the method should be to effect change--change that is long, long overdue and which has been deferred for centuries. I can’t say what avenue a protester ought to pursue to achieve his or her ends. And since I can’t answer the question “how,” then I will just watch my nation burn, and hope that this time, this time, from its ashes will rise a better society.

​Be seeing you!

I've been around football in one way or another for most of my life. I've filled almost every role there is regarding the game: I've been a player, a coach, a spectator, a television  and radio commentator, and a public address announcer. These experiences have shown me nearly every facet of the sport, including the dark side of the fan base. 

To be sure, many--if not most--of the parents who watch their children play high school football do so with an understanding of the proper place for the sport. They cheer on their own offspring without denigrating others, they recognize that the sport is a metaphor and not important in and of itself, and have a healthy respect for the rules of the game and for those who arbitrate those rules. These parents are not the focus of this essay.

There is a not insignificant assembly of parents who do not understand. From my place in the press box during football games these past years, and from my place as head coach of a high school program, I've seen parent behaviors that are as confounding as they are dangerous. Nothing, however, puzzles me more than denial.

Parents deny much about their own children. Their own DNA courses through the systems of their child's body, so I suppose it is natural for a parent to see his or her child as an extension of their own life--at least, to a small degree. But parents who cannot see what is plainly and clearly evident, who invent convoluted theories and alternate realities to explain away deficiencies or undesired outcomes, who see plots against their children in every decision that doesn't match with their own wants--I've seen these parents all too often.

There are significant numbers of parents who truly seem to believe that every foul called against their child's team is an unprecedented affront to justice: part of a conspiracy against their kin and kith heretofore never seen on Earth. The vitriol and indignation these parents hurl onto referees is nothing short of deranged. Some of the time, the parents' overreaction to a questionable call is what's noteworthy, but when a blatant foul occurs--one which even I can see from my place atop the bleachers--and parents become apoplectic at the temerity of an official to penalize such behavior, that's when I question the sanity of those around me. To use the vernacular, parents go apeshit when a ref throws a flag against their team. 

Similarly, when a coach makes a decision (a play call, a personnel change, what have you) that is at odds with a parent's wishes, its not chalked up to a difference of opinion. It's part of either a pattern of incompetence or conspiracy against a player and his family that demands retribution. Anonymous letters delivered in secret. Messages to the press. Appeals to higher authorities. In many cases, these methods work, and coaches find themselves hauled before addle-pated superiors who demand to know Just What Is Going On with the coach. 

So, in summary, many parents are convinced that a vast conspiracy is at work against their child athlete. Referees have all met in secret to work against their child's team (that's not an exaggeration--I've heard all manner of conspiracy theories expressed about officials); coaches are prejudiced, racist, on the take, or otherwise disinclined to treat their child fairly; college recruiters who do not offer a full athletic scholarship are likewise part of a grand plot, and so on. 

I can't recall the last time I was at a game where my team lost and those parents said, "The other team was better than we were," or "they played stronger than we did" or other acknowledgements that their child simply lost. With this kind of parent, it's always "the refs were terrible" or "Coach should have put you in more" or "They should have given you the ball more" or any number of excuses to deny what happened. 

I often wonder with these parents--is this behavior confined to sports, or does what I see there represent that adult's worldview in general? Is their life an endless stream of grievances, perceived slights, imagined conspiracies? Do they look at their own divorce (amazing how many of these parents are divorced) and declare "that bitch was crazy" instead of looking inward to see the mote in their eye? Do they mumble about favoritism at work when they were passed over for promotion? Do they rant about police corruption when they get a speeding ticked? In short, do they see the mess of their lives as someone else's fault?

Confronting adversity is not easy. We'd rather not admit the truth that our kid just got outplayed today, or that we're not in a loving relationship because we might not be as worthy of love as we think at that moment, or that we have the career that we do because that's as far as we can go for the time being.

Part of effective leadership is getting those around us to accept that we are all imperfect, and that we must strive to do better. Or that we are in a bad situation which demands action. Or even harder--that we've made decisions that turned out to be wrong, and we must change. Bad leadership plays to our followers' demons of conspiracy, flatters our sense of self-importance, denies the ugly truth in exchange for a beautiful lie. 

We'd rather not believe something awful about ourselves. And many of us will go to dangerous lengths to avoid facing the truth. We deny an unpleasant truth with such force as to create new false realities that are more pleasant to live in--my son didn't catch the winning touchdown not because his skills were simply not up to the task that day, but because the ref made a bad call, or that someone else cheated, or that the pass was wobbly, or even that he DID catch the pass but no one saw it. 

Let me tell you a story that virtually all teachers have. Sometimes, a student receives a grade less than an "A." It's not uncommon for a parent to tell us, "Well, my child has never gotten a grade lower than an 'A' before, so I'm wondering what's happening in your class." We hear this, or some variation on it, rather commonly. The story is interesting for two reasons. First, what is that evidence of? That because they have done well in the past, they will continue to do well in perpetuity, even as material becomes more rigorous? Would one go into one's doctor and say, "I've never had gallstones before, so I'm wondering what's going on with your lab tests?" But more interesting is that on many occasions, we check the student's past grades and find that they HAVE received grades other than "A" in the past. So even if one accepted that somehow this assertion meant something, it wasn't even true in the first place, and can be easily debunked. 

My teacher friends and I wonder at this tactic. What is it meant to say? Does the parent truly believe what he or she is saying? Invariably, when confronted with the reality that no, your child has NOT always gotten "A's," the parent simply shifts to a new line of attack. No mention of the falsehood or mistake. Simply move on to a separate tactic. 

We're in the middle of a pandemic now. We have made mistakes--serious ones--regarding treatment and tracking of the pandemic, and we're now paying the price. That's a difficult admission, but it's plainly true. Our leadership refuses to admit the truth, and is leading too many Americans astray. Trump has denied the problem exists, then blamed others for the problem, then blamed others for reporting on the problem, and I fear will now return to where he started: he'll declare the problem doesn't exist.

I predict that soon, you will see our president and his allies (some in his administration, some in the press) simply deny the truth. I don't mean "express an opinion not supported by facts," like saying "we've done a great job with this pandemic." That's an opinion, albeit an insane one. No, I mean we will start to hear challenges to the statistics themselves. We will hear news outlets and the President himself declare that the number of disease cases and deaths is not as high as reported. "There is a conspiracy against our Leader!" will be the cry, "and these numbers aren't true! Almost no one is dying!" 

It's the crazy parent yelling about the refs. Or the stat sheet. Or the coach. Or doing ANYTHING except accept the reality of their child's current ability. Instead of exhorting their child to work harder and get better, the parent rants about the conspiracy. 

The depressing difference is--this isn't simply a crazy parent, and this isn't a sport. This is the President, and this is real life.

Be seeing you!