In 1991 Jack Lalanne was a guest on an afternoon television talk show. Known as the “Godfather of Fitness,” he was credited with making exercise fashionable and acceptable. He opened the first health club in 1936, and he had a television show for 32 years in which he appeared in a black sleeveless jump suit and performed a variety of calisthenics his audience did along with him. Although it wasn’t named for him as many people believe, he did popularize the “Jumping Jack” exercise.

The talk show host questioned him about his workouts and the feats of strength he performed on his birthdays, and after hearing about the length and intensity of his activities asked him how old he was.

Jack replied, “Age is just a number.”

He was sitting in a chair with wooden arms, and suddenly he pressed his hands down on them and lifted himself into the air, assuming a pike position with his legs straight out before him. He held that position for about 15 seconds, supporting his entire body weight with his arms, then calmly eased back into the chair.

“I’m 77.” Jack said.

It was obvious he was showing off and wanted everyone to know how old he was, but that was how he marketed himself and the various products he sold. As he got older he’d often say, “I can’t die. It would be bad for my image.” He’d give advice about eating. “The best part of a donut,” he’d say, “is the hole.”

Lalanne was a bodybuilder known for his prodigious feats of strength. Arnold Schwarzenegger once exclaimed, “That Jack LaLanne’s an animal!” after a 54-year-old LaLanne beat then 21-year-old Schwarzenegger “badly” in an informal contest.

He still worked out two hours a day when he was in his 90’s, lifting weights and doing cardio. By that time you may have seen him selling juicers on Saturday morning infomercials. He was very personable and witty, and he had a fine sense of humor. Do you know the first name of his wife of 51 years? Elaine. That’s right, Elaine Lalanne. You can’t make this up.

Jack died in 2011 at the age of 96. He did a full workout the day before he died. He’d had pneumonia for a week, but he refused to see a doctor. He thought he could workout his way out of what he thought was a minor illness. He was wrong. What are you gonna do?

But he was certainly a great role model for Americans of all ages, a walking advertisement for health and fitness.

It must be understood that there is a chronological age and a physical age. More often than not the two numbers don’t coincide. One can be old physically at a young chronological age or young physically at an advanced age.

Let’s take four hypothetical examples:

1. A 70-year-old man who’s a fitness fanatic and is in superb physical condition

2. A 50-year-old man who is 50 pounds overweight and susceptible to high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, and a host of other ailments

3. A 30-year-old man with a serious drinking problem and a cirrhotic liver

4. A 20-year-old man who’s addicted to drugs and in deteriorating health due to substance abuse

The odds are even that numbers 2,3, and 4 will never collect a Social Security check, and it won’t be due to the system running out of money.

Which of the four is truly the youngest?

What is your physical age, and how does it compare to your chronological age? If you answer this honestly, you may be in for a rude awakening.

Jack Lalanne was absolutely right. Age is just a number.

In January of 2001 my wife and I bought a winter home in Southern Mississippi.

We lived in a town outside the city of Brookhaven, population 9500. My wife’s parents had grown up in the nearby town of Monticello until they were out of their teens. Life in the Jim Crow era prompted them to head north.

Although they both came from large families, they were the only ones who left. Most people never leave that state. That’s what I liked about it as opposed to Florida. Nobody in Florida is from Florida. Everybody in Mississippi is from Mississippi. It’s not as warm as Florida in the winter, but there’s no snow or ice. Spring arrives on February 1.

Mississippi is a large state with just under three million inhabitants. By contrast relatively tiny Massachusetts has six million residents. A town in the Bay State is a city in the Magnolia State.

Mississippians are extremely friendly, so much so that when you go there for the first time you’re taken aback. Strangers smile at you and say, “Good morning. How y’all doin’?” Out on the road drivers passing in the opposite direction wave a greeting, as do people standing on their front lawns. Everyone is polite, unhurried, and laid back. That’s the way it is in the Deep South. It’s their culture.

It’s no different between the races. The Black folks wave to the white folks and the white folks wave to the Black folks. If a Black person is broken down on the side of the road a white person will stop to assist him—and vice versa.

When the Civil Rights Bill was passed and segregation ended, white people had no choice but to deal with the situation. Four out of ten people in Mississippi are Black. Whites and Blacks can’t avoid each other.

Coincidentally, our first winter in Mississippi was the time when the state held a referendum on the Confederate flag. It is a part of the state flag, and they held a controversial vote about whether to eliminate it or retain it.

After months of debate, of editorials defending both opinions, of meetings and heated discussions, the voters went to the polls in April.

The racial breakdown of the state was 62% White and 38% Black. The vote coincided almost exactly with those numbers. The White majority prevailed by a margin of 62-38, and the Confederate symbol was retained.

My opinion is that White Southerners just don’t want to be told what to do or what they should change. They were told by us Yankees they couldn’t own slaves. We told them they couldn’t practice segregation. They despise us for our interference. In 2001 they were being told by the people we helped to become free and integrated that their flag had to go.

They accepted that they had to send their kids to school with Black kids, and that they had to work side by side with Black adults. But this was going too far.

Now it looks as if the Confederate flag is doomed in all the Southern states, Mississippi included. All it took was the massacre of Black folks in a church during Bible study to make this happen.

It’s comparable to the controversy over religious symbols at Christmas. In a public setting they should be forbidden. In a private setting people can knock themselves out. The Confederate flag has no place flying over government buildings, but anyone who wants to can fly it on private property. They can have Confederate flag bedsheets, pillow cases, or toilet paper.

It’s such a waste of time to get all worked up over symbols. The baby Jesus in the town square, burning an American flag, cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, what difference, at this point, does it make? Keep them private, eliminate them in public. What’s so difficult?

I wrote a letter to the editor last month about a Jewish woman in a diversity training I facilitated whose consciousness was raised. She insisted the Christmas decorations be taken down in her public school.

A Jewish lawyer wrote a rebuttal letter stating that this was bad because it would contribute to more anti-Semitism.

To be consistent he would have to be in favor of allowing the Confederate flag to continue to wave over the capitals of our Southern states and in their public colleges and universities. Taking those flags down, by his logic, would result in more racism.

This is where someone should jump in and declare, “It’s not the same thing.” You know when people say that it’s always exactly the same thing.

What are you gonna do?

A quote in Monday’s New York Times about Dylan Roof, the young white man who killed nine Black people in a Charleston, South Carolina, church read as follows:

“…according to CNN, “a friend recalled a drunken Roof ranting one night about his unspecified six-month plan ‘to do something crazy’ in order ‘to start a race war.’ Roof confessed his intention to cause a race war to investigators.”

In the summer of 2008 I was working as a commissioned salesperson in an art gallery in the resort town of Newport, RI.

I loved that job because I met people from all over the country and all over the world. Newport was on the national and international tourist map, and sooner or later travelers from America or foreign countries found themselves walking down Thames Street, the town’s main shopping area.

I enjoyed talking to my customers. I asked a lot of questions and learned about what was going on where they lived. It was a job where you could make money and get educated at the same time.

That summer Senator Barack Obama, a Black man, was running for president against Senator John McCain, a white man. It was fun to talk politics with the people who came into my gallery because they were far from home, uninhibited, and had no need to be politically correct.

A retired white man from Arkansas said, “Y’all can call me racist if you want, but ah ain’t never gonna vote for no Black man for president.”

An older-than-dirt retired lawyer from Mississippi, a graduate of Ole Miss, proudly proclaimed he had graduated from that university before James Meredith got there in 1961 and that “he had never in his life gone to school with someone Black.”

Four enthusiastic female Obama supporters from Iowa said Hillary Clinton had made a big mistake by ignoring the Iowa caucuses and that it had ultimately cost her the nomination.

Three young women from Germany were absolutely in love with Barack Obama. They adored him, even though they couldn’t vote for him.

But the tourist who stood out was a thirty-something white man from Ohio, a swing state. When asked about the upcoming election he said, “I’m not gonna vote for someone who’ll start a race war.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“You elect Obama,” he said, “someone is gonna shoot him and then Black people will burn down their cities and we’ll have a race war.”

I thought this guy was crazy at the time, but seven years later I’m not so sure. Barack Obama has received considerably more death threats than any other president in history.

I agree with all the Republican conservatives who say that race relations have gotten worse since Obama was elected. It’s all Obama’s fault, and here’s why.

He had the temerity, the audacity, and the unmitigated gall to run for president—and WIN—TWICE. The second victory came after four years of commitment by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and his associates to make Obama a one-term president. It came after four years of looking for a Kenyan birth certificate while trying to convince the country he was either a Muslim or the Anti-Christ—or both.

Obama’s victory didn’t silence racists. It emboldened them.

They could hide behind the election of a Black president and claim that America is a “post-racial” society. After all, he couldn’t have been elected without white people voting for him.

But THEY weren’t the white people who voted for him. They voted against him in both elections, and indeed, in 2012 Willard Romney won the white vote. He just got trounced by voters who were non-white.

It’s very interesting that white America has no problem accepting Black superiority in athletics and music. What it can’t tolerate is a Black man in charge of things. It doesn’t even like Black quarterbacks (Thank god for Tom Brady and Peyton Manning).

It can’t tolerate a Black man who’s smarter and more articulate than they are. Obama seems to act like he’s above them and above the divisive ranting that constitutes our political system. He’s cool, witty, and professorial, and his demeanor enrages many on the right, and even some on the left who want to be stroked and invited for cocktails.

Dylan Roof could have started a race war. If a Black man went into a white church the day after the Charleston massacre and killed nine white people, there would be white retaliation—then more Black retaliation—and the war would be on.

There are white people in this country who would love for this to happen. And somehow, some way, Barack Obama would be blamed.

What are you gonna do?

Conservatives like to use the term “playing the race card” to attack liberal observations regarding social inequalities and discrimination. Anyone who points out racial discrimination is playing the “race card.” Criticism of Israel’s policy toward Palestine and its influence on American politics results in the “anti-Semite card.” Opposition to police brutality and aggressive policing earns the “cop-hater,” “anti-police agenda card.”

Then there’s the “patriotism card,” which is played when one rejects the idea of more boots on the ground in unwinnable wars, the “anti-Christian card” when one objects to the religious right’s attempts to pass legislation based on their mythological beliefs, and so on.

All these cards refer to made up grievances in the redneck Republican mindset.

Now there’s a new card that’s been introduced, and it’s called the “interracial marriage card.” That card was dealt after my June 9 column, “Janice Harvey and Magic Johnson, where it was suggested that North High principal Lisa Dyer, who married a Black man and raised two biracial sons to adulthood, was a wee bit more qualified to make judgments on racial issues than Janice Harvey, a white school teacher/ Worcester Magazine columnist.

It simply stands to reason if a white person marries a person of another race he or she will have more contact with people from that group. There will be a greater understanding of what they face on a daily basis and what trials and tribulations they have to endure to survive in this society.

It’s not just Black and white, either. It could be Black-Latino, Latino-Asian, white- Arab (Arabs consider themselves non-white) white-Indian (they’re from India) Black Native-American (they’re from here), or a host of other combinations.

When you marry someone or live with someone from another race you learn about them. You fear them less, they seem less exotic, and the stereotypes you had about them often vanish.

In my father’s generation people didn’t marry out of their ethnicity. Italians married Italians, Irish married Irish, Poles married Poles. An inter-ethnic marriage was frowned upon, forget about interracial. Marrying someone from another race was unthinkable.

It worked the same way with religion, and in most cases, it still does. Catholics marry Catholics, Protestants marry Protestants, Jews marry Jews, Muslims marry Muslims, and so on.

We put ourselves in little boxes and we’re tribal. As my female Italian-American colleague once told me, “People should stay with their own kind.”

It’s basic and logical to believe that close association with someone different promotes acceptance. Dick Cheney, our real 43rd president and the most repulsive man in America, is a right-wing warmonger who had empathy for gay people. This fact came out in the 2004 election campaign. Why? Because his daughter is a lesbian. Ohio Senator Rob Portman is another rare Republican. He came out in support of gay marriage. Why? Because his son came out as gay.

Some history on interracial marriage: in 1958, 96% of the country was against marriage between the races; in 1967, when the Supreme Court rescinded laws against it with the Loving v. Virginia decision, 70% were against it; when the “Gipper” got elected president in 1980, 50% of those polled weren’t in favor, and in 2015 there are still 16% opposed to the practice.

If you do the math, that’s approximately one in six Americans who have a negative view of marriage between races—and they’re not all Republican conservatives, sad to say.

Is it possible for a white person married to a Black person to be racist, or for a Christian married to a Jew to be anti-Semitic? Yes, anything’s possible. But instances like these would be highly improbable. That’s the difference.

There are enough cards to play, and we don’t need another one. Just accept the simple logic that ensues from the observation that interracial marriage is a positive action for many reasons, and let it go at that.

A 21-year-old white man walked into a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina. It was Wednesday night, and Bible study and a prayer service were featured. He sat there for an hour, and then he got up, pulled out a gun, and began firing.

He reloaded five different times, and at one point a survivor heard him say, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.” He killed nine people, six women and three men, including the church’s pastor who was also a well-known state senator.

The shooter got away but was identified from security cameras.

His name is Dylann Roof, and he appears on his Facebook page wearing a jacket with two flags, one from South Africa when it ruled under apartheid, the other from Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) when it was under white rule. These flags are very popular with modern white supremacists.

Anyone with a modicum of intelligence would easily view this as an act of terrorism and a racially-motivated hate crime.

But here’s a headline regarding the “fair and balanced network:

FOX NEWS: CHARLESTON SHOOTING IS AN ATTACK ON FAITH, NOT RACE—CALLS FOR PASTORS TO ARM

That’s right, the morons at Fox News are spinning this attack that took place in a church that just happened to be completely filled with Black people as an attack on Christianity. They’re denying that racism has anything to do with it. And they’re strongly suggesting that Christian clergy bring guns to church.

Repulsive Republican Rick Santorum, the holiest of the holier-than-thou GOP presidential candidates, had this to say:

“It’s obviously a crime of hate. Again, we don’t know the rationale, but what other rationale could there be? You talk about the importance of prayer in this time and we’re now seeing assaults on our religious liberty we’ve never seen before. It’s a time for deeper reflection beyond this horrible situation.”

According to Rick it’s a hate crime, but not against Blacks. It’s against religious liberty.

Some people say things that make you want to holler. Santorum makes you want to vomit.

What are you gonna do?

In his letter to the editor last Sunday regarding the third installment of Worcester’s “Dialogues on Race” held on June 8 at Belmont AME Zion Church, Holy Cross Professor David Schaefer wrote the following:

“During one breakout session, amid a discussion of alleged police insensitivity to “minority” concerns, when one participant pointed out that black-on-black crime is a far more widespread threat to black lives than police misbehavior, she was told that that issue could not be considered.” http://www.telegram.com/article/20150614/OPINION/150619607/101414

You’ll notice the good professor put the word minority in quotes (“minority”). This speaks volumes about his decades-long disdain for people of color. He also neglected to identify the participant who insisted on talking about black-on-black crime as former Worcester Regional Research Bureau Director Roberta Schaefer.

She was incensed when the moderator from the Attorney General’s office told her the topic of black-on-black crime was for another time and not relevant to that night’s conversation.

This session was supposed to deal with the WPD’s interactions with people of color and their complaints about profiling, racial slurs, police brutality, and other law enforcement issues.

Mr. Schaeffer had the audacity to write of “alleged” police insensitivity. Alleged? The city has lost over a million dollars in police brutality settlements over the years, paying off victims in exchange for not admitting responsibility for their misdeeds. The day after this dialogue the T&G reported a $53,000 settlement paid to a man who suffered a broken jaw when being arrested. People are waiting for the District Attorney to release the video of the white Worcester cop caught on video using a racial slur and kicking a handcuffed Black prisoner on the floor of a cell.

A pathetic Republican conservative trick is to change the subject and divert attention from the group they are trying to protect. An intended goal is to blame the victim. How does crime in the Black neighborhood or “the absence of fathers,” another irrelevant statement from the letter, justify police brutality, racial profiling, disparities in sentencing, exorbitant and unfair bails, and a host of other issues?

The Catholic Church should hire this couple to defend its child sex abuse cases and pedophile priests. You can imagine their defense:

“What kind of homes did these young boys come from? Where were their parents? Why can’t we talk about the good things the Church does? Was there an absentee father? Are these “alleged victims” simply looking for money? What about all the incestuous relationships in families not connected to priests? How many of these boys were already gay—isn’t it possible they seduced the priests?”

As ridiculous as that sounds, it’s exactly the same thing the Schaefers are trying to accomplish with their diversionary tactics that shouldn’t fool anybody.

Some history:

In 1995 Roberta Schaeffer was on the board of directors at Worcester State College. She made a diva-like resignation from that board that would have put Madonna and Diana Ross to shame because Kaylan Ghosh, WSC president, refused to rescind a speaking invitation to Wellesley College Professor Tony Martin. Professor Martin, who is Black, was smeared as an anti-Semite because one of six books he used in a class was “The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews,” which indicated that Jews were involved in the slave trade. He was attacked nationally by prominent Jewish organizations and individuals, prompting him to write a book titled “The Jewish Onslaught; Despatches from the Wellesley Battlefront.” http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1995/09/slavery-and-the-jews/376462/

On February 6, 2003, Telegram & Gazette reporter Emilie Astell wrote an article titled “Petitioners Say Speaker is Anti-Muslim.”

“WORCESTER– Some area Muslims are upset about a speaker scheduled to give a lecture tonight at the College of the Holy Cross, saying he spreads messages laced with anti-Muslim and anti-Islamic remarks.

The speaker is Daniel Pipes, director of the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum…Holy Cross senior Awais Ahsan…said Pipes has written some very derogatory depictions of Muslims, including references to what he calls their strange-smelling foods and sense of hygiene…”He’s for a war against Iraq,” Mr. Ahsan said.”

Here’s the key section of the article:

“The impetus to bring Mr. Pipes to campus began with Holy Cross political science professor David L. Schaefer, who earlier was instrumental in stopping the Rev. Michael Prior, a London professor, from speaking because of the educator’s alleged anti-Semitic leanings.”

The bottom line is that the Schaefers have been encouraging censorship for years against speakers who say what they don’t want to hear, but they encourage those who spout their right-wing hatred.

You couldn’t find two worse people to be involved in a conversation about race than this dynamic duo.

They’re members of a minority group who seem to have no empathy for any minority group other than their own.

There are a lot of people like that. It’s one of the great mysteries.

Discussions about police stops of Black drivers, aka Driving While Black, go way back in time to when young white guys wore their hair very, very long. Some guys had Jesus hair styles, dropping down to their shoulders. Their way of denying the existence of DWB was to complain about how they got stopped every time they drove through Holden. They knew about unjust traffic stops because their long hair made them suspicious to cops who assumed they were involved with drugs.

But I have a Black friend who owned, not rented, a condo in Holden and was stopped by the police regularly during the 15 years he made the mistake of living in that town.

All the white guys had to do was cut their hair. The Black guy couldn’t cut his skin. Do you get the difference?

There’s a fairly well-known white male in Worcester who thinks he’s qualified to lead a city-wide discussion on race because he claims to have experienced bullying and oppression. When he was young he was picked on and beaten up because he wore funny clothes.

All he had to do was change his garments. A Black man can’t change the color of his skin—well, maybe he can if he has as much money and determination as Michael Jackson. Do you get the difference?

A prominent gay man stated that he understood discrimination because of the homophobia that is rampant in this country. That’s true, but an extraordinarily high percentage of gays and lesbians don’t fit society’s stereotypes and are not easily identified. Limp-wristed and effeminate gay men are about 10% of that population, but the vast majority looks just like everybody else. There are gay people who openly acknowledge their sexual orientation while others are half-in and half-out of the closet. Not that many years ago everyone was in the closet because the penalties were too great for being out.

Black people can’t be in the closet. Their skin color and physical characteristics made them readily identifiable. Do you get the difference?

In his June 9 article about the Justice Department’s third Worcester discussion on race held at Belmont AME Zion Church, Telegram & Gazette reporter Steven Foskett interviewed a Black man who indicated he was dismayed by people who were uncomfortable with him because the color of his skin.

“…just recently he was walking out of a Whole Foods when “a woman behind me gives me ‘the look.’ ” That slight look of surprise when he approaches is something he’s gotten used to, and he said over the years he developed workarounds to try to avoid “the look.” He said he will sing a song, perhaps, or jingle his keys in his pocket. Something to alert people to his presence.”

This quote provoked a response from one of the few surviving right-wing Telegram & Gazette commentators:

“ Sorry Sir but this is a manufactured lie about race. “The Look” is something that you’ve adopted to feed your warped desire to be oppressed. I’m 6′ 2″ tall, weigh 240 pounds, am often clad in leather while motorcycling. I sport several tattoos, a beard and a moustache. Oftentimes I get “The Look.” That doesn’t make me oppressed in society. I don’t instantly stand up and shout that I’ve been violated. I choose to rather offer a quick smile and a handshake. That’s diversity. It’s almost comical how these groups gather to preach diversity yet they seem to relish in being the “victims.”

Oh…my…god…is this guy for real? Let’s write him a prescription:

Take off the leather. Sell the Easy Rider bike and buy a Toyota. Shave the beard and moustache. Cover up the tats, unless you’re like Mike Tyson and you’ve got one on your face. Voila! Now you’re just another overweight white dude, and nobody will give you “The Look,” or even a second look.

If the Black guy offers a quick smile and a handshake to an old white lady she’ll scream for the cops and before you know it a dozen of them will show up and started clubbing and tasing him—if they don’t shoot him first.

And the Black guy can’t take off, shave, or cover up the color of his skin. It’s not almost comical—it’s hilariously comical—that white people delude themselves into believing the discrimination they experience is the same as racial bigotry.

That refusal to recognize the difference is a result of ignorance or hatred—or both.

What are you gonna do?

Forget about the four changes in ownership the Telegram & Gazette has gone through in recent times. The most earth-shattering move the paper has made was to require people who want to make comments on articles to identify themselves via Facebook.

I had an inkling this was going to happen, and my prediction was that the right-wing, foaming-at-the-mouth conservatives would opt out. From the safety of hiding behind their screen names they were brave and bold, but while their political party insists on voter ID’s, they can’t handle commentator ID’s.

Way back in time Pete Seeger wrote a song called “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” It was covered by Peter, Paul, and Mary.

“Where have all the flowers gone
Long time passing
Where have all the flowers gone
Long time ago”

Where have all the commentators gone? It seems as if a long time has passed since we heard from them, but it’s only been a month and a half.

Where are Tomass, Honiahaka, Susan 77, 17 gray, strata 1969, Traveller, Hum, the two Finns (Finn 11 and Finn McCool), Publius, Alan44, Beantown Buck, MC1, Sassy, Carrie Bradshaw, Chan, Bombero, American veteran, more guns less liberals, and Colleen, to name a few?

As they say in Mississippi, “Where you at?”

It’s amazing. Articles and opinion columns that would formerly have had 50 comments by 10 AM now have one or two by nightfall—if there are any at all.

We’re talking about commentators who posted as many as 150-200 comments per week, whose voices are now silenced. Could we apply Hillary Clinton’s statement, “What difference, at this point, does it make?”

Perhaps, but my keen observation is that the loss of thousands of weekly rants by Worcester’s Republican conservatives will make it extremely difficult for them to “take back their city” in this November’s election. Those comments are desperately needed to “rally the base.”

Despite delusional claims to the contrary, other media outlets have no chance of taking up the slack and replacing the Telegram & Gazette. If you believe they can, you can believe that Rick Perry or Mike Huckabee will be the next president of the United States.

Like it or not, the T&G is the only game in town. It’s the sole legitimate news source. It has the highest standards and ethics. It’s the singular publication that people pay to read.

The other media publications, both online and print, can be more accurately described as “supplements.” Sorry to burst their bubble, but that’s the way it is.

The scores of commentators who left were embarrassed to put their names and faces on the comments they posted, and they showed some degree of sense in their decision to slip slide away (That’s a Paul Simon allusion).

But wouldn’t you know that the few commentators who remain, who should be embarrassed at what they write but aren’t, are just as right-wing and fanatical as their predecessors? They have an open field, and when you see two or three comments on an article they’re written by the same small group of survivors.

What’s great about Facebook is that under the old system the commentator’s name was at the end of the comment. Now it’s at the beginning, so it’s easy to ignore what you know will be a waste of time to read. It will either make no sense, or it will be an insult. The format has changed, but the right-wingers remain the same.

What’s also hilarious is that when you click on the Facebook commentator’s picture you discover he looks EXACTLY the way you imagined—a perfect stereotype. All that’s missing is a Confederate flag.

I could be wrong, but the best hope the folks in Worcester have of taking their city back is a very low voter turnout. Maybe they could pray for an early November blizzard.

POSTSCRIPT: After some participants at the second conference on race at Quinsigamond Community College objected to being videotaped, conservatives asked what it was they were afraid of and what they had to hide.

Let’s turn the question around—what are the commentators who’ve disappeared afraid of, and why do they have to hide behind anonymous screen names in order to voice their opinions?

The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind…The answer is blowin’ in the wind.

That’s a Bob Dylan allusion.

You’re probably wondering what these two names have in common. As I’ve told my readers time and time again, you have to be able to make connections. The mark of a true intellectual, regardless of whether or not he or she possesses an advanced degree, is this ability to bring disparate ideas together.

Janice Harvey is/was an English teacher at North High. She was involved in a controversy in which she used her Worcester Magazine column to criticize Black activists who protested the overly zealous reaction to incidents of violence at that school (coincidentally, A Keen Observer taught there from 1982-2000).

Her column used the words “color blind,” which are as outdated as the word “Negro,” and the principal of North, Lisa Dyer, who was a colleague of mine in the English department back in the 90’s, took umbrage and suggested it was a borderline racist term. Lisa, who married a Black man and has two biracial sons she successfully raised to adulthood, might know a wee bit more about racism than Ms. Harvey.

The attacks on Lisa Dyer were combined with attacks on the Black school superintendent, Melinda Boone, who appointed Dyer to her position and defended her performance at the school.

But in spite of all the animosity directed at Ms. Dyer from different quarters, she received a contract extension, and Janice Harvey was “reassigned.” She was not “fired.” Her paychecks will continue uninterrupted. She’s simply going to teach at another school.

Magic Johnson would be an NBA basketball allusion.

From the Sarasota Journal, November 20, 1981:

WHAT MAGIC WANTS, MAGIC GETS

“Los Angeles Lakers owner Jerry Buss…fired Coach Paul Westhead Thursday within hours of Magic Johnson’s threat to leave the club unless the coach was let go.”

If we substitute Dyer the principal as the coach, and Harvey the teacher as the player, the reverse happened. The player was let go and the coach remained.

Of course, Magic was so good the Lakers gave him a 25-year contract, and the team won the NBA championship in his rookie year. Even though the team had Kareem, it couldn’t win until Magic worked his magic.

I knew Magic Johnson. Janice Harvey is no Magic Johnson. That’s a Dan Quayle allusion.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, I find this whole thing amusing because I can empathize. It happened to me. I taught at North and in 1998 won a high-profile, front-page grievance against a principal and school department that tried to stop me from showing 20 minutes of the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan’s speech at the Million-Man March. Ron Madnick and the ACLU rode to my rescue.

That was in the spring. It crossed my mind that the principal would have me transferred to another school. It’s in the contract that an administrator can do that to a teacher.

Instead, when I returned in September after the summer recess, they took my Honors classes away and assigned me the absolute worst class in the school—twenty-five 9th grade repeaters—for a double period at the end of the day, the worst time to teach a recalcitrant class. One kid was 19 years old and had flunked freshman English four times. He was 6’4” tall.

This was supposed to be my punishment, but with my Tony Soprano personality it took two days before you could hear a pin drop in the classroom.

Every time I showed the Farrakhan speech the principal sat in the back of the room taking notes on a yellow legal pad. I told her she reminded me of Marcia Clark. That’s an OJ Simpson allusion.

So you see, Ms. Harvey’s punishment could have been a lot worse. In fact, she might be going to a much better gig. She could declare victory.

Why did she get reassigned and I didn’t? Perhaps the school department was afraid there would be a hundred scary Black guys from the Nation of Islam’s Roxbury mosque wearing suits, white shirts, and bow ties picketing City Hall in protest.

That would have made national—maybe even international—news. Can you picture it?
(insert smiley face here).

Miles Wilson, an English police officer my wife and I met two years ago on a trip to Scotland, sent me this e-mail the other day:

“Stat for you: US cops have shot and killed more people in May 2015 than British cops did in the entire 20th century.”

As I’ve mentioned before, Miles is a police officer in the Southampton-Bournemouth section of England, and over a million people live there. Police officers do not carry guns. They carry telescoping billy clubs. When a situation arises that calls for firearms, a call is put out to a small number of officers who are experts in their use and who have the mental stability and maturity that should be universally required for anyone entrusted with a deadly weapon.

Here’s another e-mail Miles sent me in April that I posted in an earlier column. It illustrates the point in the last paragraph:

“Remember the ISIS wannabe who tried to behead the soldier in London? First on the scene was a white female firearms officer. She was faced with two black guys with machetes. She took both down with single, non-fatal leg shots. What would have happened on your side of the Atlantic?”

Miles and his police colleagues view American policing with a mixture of awe, bemusement, and disbelief. Tanks in the streets of Ferguson after the Michael Brown shooting made them shake their heads in wonder. When policemen in other parts of the world are critical of hyper-aggressive police conduct in this country, perhaps it’s time to pay attention to what’s going on here.

The story about the white female firearms officer? This past week in the Roslindale section of Boston, police confronted a potential terrorist they’d had under surveillance 24/7 for several weeks. They confronted him near a bus stop at 7 AM, and he brandished a military knife and advanced toward them. The suspect was surrounded by FIVE cops, one of whom was an FBI agent. They fired their guns and he was hit three times, resulting in his death.

How is it that one female cop in England can take down two machete-wielding terrorists with non-lethal leg shots, but five American cops, including an FBI member, had to shoot one suspect in the chest and abdomen, killing him?

Had the suspect pointed a gun at the officers, it’s understandable they’d use their training and shoot toward the largest part of his body. But he had a knife. And in this country, cops shoot and kill unarmed adults, teenagers, even an occasional pre-teen. It’s just a coincidence that 99% of them happen to be Black, which is probably why somebody coined the term “Black Lives Matter.”

Because it’s quite apparent that to some people, both civilians and members of the police force, that Black lives do not matter.

Recently there has been an increase in violent crimes in our nation’s cities, and one theory put out by conservative police apologists is that protests over police brutality, which they refer to as “police bashing,” is responsible.

You can’t make this up. Police are engaged in “slow downs,” refusing to do ordinary police duties because of protests directed at their unconstitutional “stop and frisk” procedures and their penchant to beat, tase, and shoot people for no reason other than they’re bullies and can get away with it.

What would the conservative reaction be if school teachers, angry about criticism of their work, decided to stand in front of classrooms and not teach, allowing students to run wild? They’d vociferously demand they be fired, but when it comes to police slow downs they cheer them on.

It’s as if the police have decided, “if you don’t let us beat the crap out of people, if you don’t let us kill unarmed citizens with impunity, we’re not going to do anything but look on and collect our paychecks.”

In Baltimore police get out of their vehicles and 50 Black people are pointing cell phone cameras at them. The police are being profiled, and they don’t like it. For years they’ve been profiling Black men, pulling them over and physically abusing and humiliating them, and now they’re whining they can’t do their jobs because of this intense public scrutiny.

You can’t make this up, either.

Any criticism of police practices is met with this redneck Republican conservative attack: COP HATER—ANTI-POLICE AGENDA!!!

Demanding that police behave in a rational, polite, and fair manner toward ALL people, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation does not constitute cop-hating or police bashing.

It’s asking for things to be the way they’re supposed to be. If members of the police force can’t do this, they need to find another line of work.

Tomorrow night the third Justice Department conference on racial issues will deal with public safety issues. It will be held at Worcester’s largest Black church, Belmont AME Zion.

If you attend, leave the cop-bashing, cop-hater, anti-police agenda rhetoric at home. Try instead to listen. Try to have an open mind. It will be difficult, but try, anyway.