The other day I posted something on Facebook asking how it was possible for people to claim they had voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 and then switched their vote in 2016 to Donald Trump.

It’s rather mind-boggling, and it doesn’t make sense, especially if you compare the two men politically, intellectually, verbally, physically, and morally. They couldn’t be more different.

My friend Tobe responded to my post by asking, “Ever considered why folks might do this?”

I wrote, “No, but I bet you’re gonna tell me.”

He said, “Maybe later. Right now it’s a beautiful warm day. Shorts weather.”

Tobe’s last comment triggered some fond memories and a couple of good stories.

Years ago when guys went to singles bars they’d ask a young lady to dance and she’d often say, “Not now. Maybe later.”

Women of that era were kind and considerate and used euphemistic language to gently let down some poor dude who’d gotten up the courage to walk across a dance floor and then was publicly humiliated.

They knew we had fragile egos and spines like jelly, and they didn’t want to see us reduced to a puddle on the floor. “Maybe later” wasn’t a complete rejection. There was a wee bit of hope in the phrase.

Women in 2018, especially Republican women, would respond differently. We could imagine someone like Ann Coulter or Laura Ingraham channeling their inner John Boehner and saying, “Are you kidding me?” Or they’d imitate Robert DeNiro in “Taxi Driver:” “Are you talking to me? Are YOU talking to ME?”

In the early 1970’s there was a club on Route 9 in Westboro called “The Meadows.” It was a big place that could hold a thousand people, and on Tuesday nights they had 25-cent beers and mixed drinks. For a buck you could get semi-drunk. They had an excellent band that played “Chicago” covers.

One night I went there with my friend Nicoletti. I had a good time, and at the end of the evening the band announced they were playing the last dance. As I was waiting for Nick I looked around and saw a young lady sitting by herself at a table, so I thought, what the hell, dance the last dance.

I tapped her on the shoulder and said, “Would you like to dance?” And she said, “Not now, maybe later.” Let me repeat, it was the last dance. There was no later.

Fast forward a couple of years. I was always a gay ally and had a number of gay friends. They were “in the closet” because at that time if you were outed you’d lose everything—your job, your family, and your status in the community. Nearly all of them were married with children as a cover.

They led double lives under stressful conditions, and in retrospect it’s amazing how they could still have such great senses of humor and display a joy of living under those conditions.

Friday night was “boys night out,” and these guys managed to get away from their wives and kids and head out of town. One night they asked me to accompany them to a gay bar in Boston.

I’m a congenial bloke so I agreed. On the way there they said it might be a good idea if I didn’t “make a big deal about being straight.”

In other words, shut up, play along, and don’t embarrass them. I said OK.

The place was as big as “The Meadows” with just as many people. It took me a couple of minutes to realize what was different. Then it hit me. Everybody in the place was male. Donald Trump would have hated it. No pussies to grab.

My friends introduced me to some of their friends. One of them noticed my wedding band and said, “Sneaking off on the wife tonight, right?” I smiled and nodded like a good co-conspirator.

Then it happened. The music started playing and a young man walked up to me and said, “Would you like to dance?”

When would I have another chance to give the inevitable response? I looked at him and in a sincerely apologetic voice said, “Not now—maybe later.”

Conscription, or the military draft, has been used in the Civil War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War.

In that last war, evading the draft was a controversial topic. As I wrote in a previous blog, many of today’s Republican political war hawks—Donald Trump, Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, Ted Nugent, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, and Rudy Giuliani all dodged the draft to avoid going to Vietnam. John Bolton and George W. Bush hid out in the National Guard and never left the country.

In the 1970’s a man’s draft status was a positive or negative badge of identity. The categories were:

I-A—available for military service

II-S—deferred as a college or graduate school student

II-A—deferred because of a civilian occupation

IV-F—Unqualified because of mental or physical disabilities

The draft was unfair and biased in favor of men who had class privilege and educational opportunities. Wealth helped a great deal, but even if you had made it out of the lower class your chances of a draft deferment were greatly enhanced.

My family was middle-class but only because my mother went out and got a lucrative job and made good money. I was able to get high enough SAT scores to get into Worcester State College, and that gave me II-S deferments.

Why should I have been able to avoid going to war just because I could write a good term paper and understand a Shakespearean play? Why should students at WPI, Clark, or Holy Cross have had the same benefit because they were good at science or math?

It was completely elitist, and even more so when college graduates got more deferments for advanced degree studies.

When asking a young man to risk his life on the battlefield, there should have been no II-S deferments.

The idea was to get deferred until age 26, when the draft no longer applied.

If you couldn’t get educational deferments, your next best bet was the II-A route, i.e., working at a job that the government deemed was more important than having you serve in the military.

I was deferred for teaching school. I think cops and firefighters were exempted, some medical personnel, some engineers engaged with making and improving weapons, and others who managed to dodge the draft with their occupations.

Almost all of these deferments should not have been allowed—but they were.

There was such a backlash against the war with violent protests and the burning of draft cards, as well as draftees leaving the country or staying and refusing induction, a drastic change occurred.

On Jan. 27, 1973, the U.S military draft ended, just as the Vietnam War was drawing to a close. The Selective Service announced there would be no more draft calls. President Richard Nixon thought ending the draft would be an effective political weapon against the growing anti-war movement.

Where do things stand today? All male U.S. citizens ages 18-25 are required to register with Selective Service, from 30 days before their 18th birthday to 30 days after.

Those who don’t register will be ineligible for federal student aid, federal job training, or a federal job. They may be prosecuted and face a heavy fine or time in prison. In 38 states a driver’s license will not be issued selective service registration is proven.

Selective service claims this will ensure a “fair and equitable draft.” That’s preposterous. The draft has never been fair or equitable, and it never will be.

If the draft is reinstated due to a war or national emergency, a lottery using birth dates will be implemented beginning with 20-year-olds. The first dates pulled will belong to the first soldiers conscripted.

That may sound fair, but rest assured that a select group will not be subjected to Selective Service.

The all-volunteer army has enabled the Pentagon to prosecute wars it might not have been able to if there had been a draft. If a few thousand men refused induction, the political battles incited by these protests would have made most of our unnecessary interventions impossible.

It is highly doubtful the Iraq War would have been fought had there been a draft.

The negative consequence of eliminating the draft is that in Vietnam a soldier had 13 months in combat and then came home. With the volunteer army soldiers serve a tour and then can be sent back for many additional tours.

To draft or not to draft is a fruitless debate, because if it’s ever reinstated we’ll all be in big trouble, anyway.

.

Among his multitude of daily tweets, President Trump posted this the other day.

From the New York Times:

“Sylvester Stallone called me with the story of heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson. His trials and tribulations were great, his life complex and controversial,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter. “Others have looked at this over the years, most thought it would be done, but yes, I am considering a Full Pardon!”
…other presidents did not act on requests to pardon Mr. Johnson, whose dominance as a boxing champion in the early 1900s elicited racial animosity. In 1910, after Mr. Johnson knocked out Jim Jeffries, a white boxer, riots broke out that led to mostly black deaths at the hands of white mobs.

Three years later, a jury convicted Mr. Johnson of transporting his white girlfriend across state lines. He served a year in prison and died in 1946.”

Are we supposed to believe that Mr. Trump is reaching out to Black America because he’s contemplating a pardon for a Black boxer who’s been dead for SEVENTY-TWO YEARS?

Trump ran the most racist campaign in American history. While other Republicans blew dog-whistle racism, he used a bullhorn. He achieved political prominence by insisting—for six years—that our first Black president, Barack Obama, was born in Kenya and was therefore illegitimate. When a Hawaiian birth certificate was produced, he declared it was a forgery.

One of his first presidential cabinet appointments was Attorney-General Jeff Sessions, a racist redneck from Alabama whose history of bigotry was condemned years ago by Coretta Scott King, the widow of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. She testified against him when he tried to obtain a federal judgeship. Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick also spoke against Sessions after dealing with him on issues.

Sessions is in favor of privatized prisons, reinstating mandatory minimums, and eliminating federal investigations into police brutality occurring in states.

Trump has appointed people who are engaged in suppressing the Black vote in our electoral process. He called for the firing of Black NFL players who took a knee during the playing of the national anthem to protest the murders of unarmed Black men by white cops.

Jack Johnson was the subject of a Broadway play called “The Great White Hope.” White America was looking for a white boxer who could beat him. What galled white folks the most was not only his superiority in the ring, but also his penchant for openly engaging in sexual relationships with white women.

Trump and Johnson had something in common, i.e., their preference for white women. In his 70-plus years, Trump has had one biracial girlfriend he said “reminded him of Derek Jeter.” You can’t make this guy up. (She ultimately married another billionaire).

He could instead pardon Mike Tyson, who’s still alive. They have something in common as well. Trump admitted on tape that he likes to grab women’s genitals, and since Iron Mike was convicted of rape, we can assume he did the same thing.

Trump could pardon OJ Simpson, who was convicted of stealing items that belonged to him. OJ and Donald are simpatico in that they love to play golf and they love blonde women, like Nicole Brown and Stormy Daniels.

Of course, pardoning Tyson or OJ is about as lame as pardoning a dead guy because they’ve already done their time.

Let’s put on our thinking caps—who would be a good Black guy to pardon?

COSBY!!!

That’s a mixed comparison. Even though they’re both “alleged” sexual harassers who deny any and all wrong-doing, Mr. Cosby didn’t pay prostitutes and porn stars to sleep with him, but Donald didn’t put a date-rape drug in their drinks and then have sex with them.

It doesn’t seem likely that Donald can curry favor with Black America by pardoning someone Black.

His best bet is to pardon his white lawyer, Michael Cohen, and his white campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, before they flip on him like a hamburger at Mc Donald’s.

Last week I wrote a column about poisoned gas in Syria. Included was a poem by the British anti-war poet Wilfred Owen which described a gas attack during World War I. Further on there was a mention of America’s use of Agent Orange and napalm in the Vietnam War.

A right-wing Republican commenter wrote, “Wasn’t the Vietnam War the one you didn’t/wouldn’t fight in?”

I couldn’t stop laughing. Here’s a dude posting under a phony screen name without the guts to identify himself, and he’s criticizing me. One thing I love about these mooks—they simply have no self-awareness. A metaphor would be the obese Donald Trump fat-shaming women.

I assume the commenter thought I should be ashamed and embarrassed because I avoided service in Vietnam, but nothing could be further from the truth.

To paraphrase the great James Brown, “Say it loud, I’m a draft-dodger and I’m proud.”

Let me go further and say this: “If I had gotten killed in Vietnam I would never have forgiven myself.”

Does that sound like a terrible thing to say?

Not if it’s compared to these two comments:

(1) “I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy. I considered the war in Vietnam already lost.”
(2)” “I had other priorities in the 1960’s than military service.”

Comment #1 comes from Republican John Bolton, Donald Trump’s newly-minted National Security Adviser and an avowed Fox News war hawk.
Comment #2 is attributed to Republican Vice-president Dick Cheney, the architect of the phony weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that prompted the Iraq War. Mr. Cheney received five draft deferments.

Republican President George W. Bush, who loved to parade around in his flight suit and who prematurely (by about 15 years) exclaimed “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq, hid out in the National Guard, as did Mr. Bolton.

Those who were around during the Vietnam era know that getting into the National Guard was a ticket to safety from the battlefield. You needed a connection to get into the Guard once President Lyndon Johnson doubled the draft in 1965.

Here’s a list of other prominent Republicans, all of whom are hawkish on war and despise diplomacy, that managed to avoid military service while pounding their chests with battle cries:

• Willard (Mitt) Romney, who did Mormon missionary work in France during the war
• Newt Gingrich, who got deferments for graduate school
• Bill O’Reilly, who used the same tactic Gingrich used
• Rush Limbaugh—are you ready for this—deferred for a pilonidal (anal) cyst
• Ted Nugent—took crystal meth and pooped his pants for a week before his physical exam. That got him his physical/psychological deferment.
• Rudy Giuliani—Donald Trump’s newest legal adviser got a half-dozen deferments. He even got a federal judge he was clerking for to write a letter creating a special exemption for him.
• John Wayne, who was deferred because he had four children, starred in over a dozen war movies but never served in WW II.
• Last, but not least, President Donald (Fire and fury, why can’t we use nukes?) Trump who got five deferments, four for college and one for bone spurs on his heels.

On the Democratic side, President Bill Clinton and VP Joe Biden managed to avoid service in Vietnam. A Keen Observer got his deferments for teaching school.

Here’s the YUGE difference between Democrats and Republicans who evaded the draft:

Democrats, with few exceptions, don’t go looking for war. Democratic voters and supporters don’t profit from war (think Cheney and Halliburton). Democrats don’t send other people’s sons and daughters into battle to be killed or maimed.

Can you imagine Don Trump Jr. or his brother Eric fighting in Syria, Iran, or North Korea? Not bloody likely.

Here’s something else you may not know. In 1968 the Vietnam Peace Talks were ready to be signed in Paris. Republican Richard Nixon was running for president, and he would have lost to Democrat Hubert Humphrey had the war ended. Nixon got Republican Henry Kissinger to stop the process. Nixon won, and the war went on for five more years. Out of a total of 58,000 military deaths in the war, 38,000 occurred during those five years.

Henry Kissinger received the Nobel Peace Prize for his working in negotiating peace with North Vietnam in 1973, the peace he had previously obstructed. You can’t make this up.

Republicans. You can’t make them up, either.

If avoiding an unwinnable war based on a flawed “domino theory,” (if we don’t stop communism 10,000 miles away we’ll be fighting communism at home) makes one “unpatriotic,” count me guilty.

But my sincere advice to Republican conservatives is before you open your mouths or move your fingers across a keyboard, do a reality check and develop some self-awareness.

I feed my dogs slices of raw carrot for their snacks. I toss them in the air for them to catch.

Zora, my black standard poodle, can catch anything. Poodles are extraordinarily agile and athletic. If Zora had been playing first base for the 1986 Red Sox instead of Bill Buckner they would have broken the “Curse of the Bambino” 18 years earlier.

Stokely, my black standard schnauzer, only catches about 50% of what goes up, but the other day I threw one too far and he made a magnificent, over-the-shoulder catch going away.

It reminded me of the catch New York/San Francisco Giants center fielder Willie Mays made at the Polo Grounds in the 1954 World Series, arguably one of the best fielding gems in the history of baseball.

Which brings us to a literary term called “acronym.”

ACRONYM: An abbreviation formed from the initial letters of other words which are then pronounced as a single word. Examples of acronyms are:

RADAR – Radio detecting and ranging
NATO – The North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
SCUBA – Self-contained underwater breathing apparatus.
WASP – White Anglo- Saxon Protestant.

Sports fans like to use the acronym “GOAT” to describe their favorite athletes. It stands for “Greatest of All Time.”

When we’re talking about the GOAT we’re talking about Willie Mays.

We’re talking about Muhammad Ali, Serena Williams, Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, Jim Brown, Pele, Roger Federer, or Bobby Orr.

When we’re talking about the GOAT, we’re NOT talking about the lead-footed quarterback for the New England Patriots.

I know—that’s blasphemy. It’s sacrilegious. It could be punishable by deportation from this six-state region.

But it’s an opinion, which everyone is entitled to express under the First Amendment to the Constitution.

Looking at the list, you could argue about every single name—except one. SERENA. No argument there.

The Willie Mays catch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dK6zPbkFn

The chemical weapons attack in Syria on April 7 and the subsequent response Friday night by America brought back memories of the War Poets, writers who had written of their own experiences on the battlefield as well as non-combatants who voiced their views on warfare.

It would be fair to characterize these poets as anti-war, and the most well-known wrote about World War I (1914-1918) in which poisoned gas was used with impunity. That led to the first international agreement, the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which banned asphyxiating, poisonous, or other gases and bacteriological methods of warfare.

One poem nearly always found in anthologies addressed the use of gas. It was written by the British poet Wilfred Owen. Ironically, he was killed in the war in 1918, one week before the Armistice.

The poem’s title is repeated in its entirety in the last line. It comes from the Latin phrase by the Roman poet Horace: “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” The imagery in the poem is unparalleled.
_________________________________________________________________
DULCE ET DECORUM EST

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________
Exactly 100 years after the poet’s death we see videos of adults and children foaming at the mouth from chemical gas attacks.

Over 600,000 people have been killed in Syria in the last five years, many of them innocent civilians. A very small percentage has died from chemical warfare.

Far greater numbers have been victimized by barrel bombs, described as flying IEDs (improvised explosive devices). A large barrel-shaped metal container, filled with high explosives, shrapnel, oil or chemicals is dropped from a helicopter or airplane.

A career military officer in the first Gulf War in 1991 reported that he and his company came upon a scene where 50 unmarked dead Iraqis were lying on the ground. American air forces had dropped a “thermobaric bomb” on them causing so much heat and pressure that the air was sucked from their bodies. This weapon is also known as a “fuel-air explosive” where the explosive cloud is provided by a volatile gas or liquid.

During the Vietnam War the United States used napalm against the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong. Napalm is a mixture of a gelling agent and gasoline. It was used as an incendiary device and an anti-personnel weapon because it sticks to skin and causes severe burns when on fire.

Here’s the famous picture of the Vietnamese “Napalm girl.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FrVpXE0kI&has_verified=1

From 1962-1971 our military sprayed Agent Orange, a potent defoliant, to destroy the Vietnamese jungle and the enemy’s hiding place. The unintended consequences are that 47 years later some of the nearly three million American servicemen who were exposed to it are contracting cancer and other illnesses, and tens of thousands of Vietnamese have worse problems, including horrific birth defects.

Why isn’t there as much concern over those who have been massacred by barrel bombs, thermobaric bombs, napalm, or Agent Orange as there is to those killed by poisoned gas?
‎
The answer is the social construct. Society decides what is good or bad, moral or immoral, tolerable or intolerable.

It decides where the red line is, and chlorine or sarin gas meet that standard.

It’s hard to fathom, it makes no sense, but what are you gonna do?

People on both sides of the political aisle often rationalize bad behavior by using the ubiquitous term, “What about?”

For example, a recent news article criticized Donald Trump and his trials and tribulations connected to alleged affairs with a porn star and a Playboy playmate.

The Republican conservative response was “What about Clinton and Lewinsky? What about JFK and Teddy Kennedy?

Add false equivalence to the “what about” defense. The Kennedys are dead. Clinton has been out of office for 18 years.

Sanctimonious “family values” Republicans would have you believe that because Clinton and the Kennedys cheated on their wives that means we can give Trump a pass.

If you’re stopped by a state trooper on the Mass Pike because you’ve been clocked at 80 mph, and while the ticket is being written another car comes rocketing by going at least 95 mph, can you tell the cop to tear up your ticket because another driver is getting away with driving faster than you?

That seems to be what Republicans are saying.

The Washington Post and their fact-checkers maintain that Mr. Trump tells five lies a day. He has told more than 2000 lies in his 15 months in office. He pulls numbers and “facts” out of the air that have no basis in reality.

Response: Obama said you can keep your health care plan.

Apparently one misstatement by Obama (the health care plans that couldn’t be kept were worthless, anyway) exonerates 2000+ lies by Trump. That’s classic false equivalence.

Trump is totally ignorant about almost everything, including geography. He stated that “Belgium is a beautiful city.” While in Israel he was filmed telling Benjamin Netanyahu that he had just returned from the Middle East. He didn’t know that Israel is in the Middle East. One of Netanyahu’s aides almost fell of his chair he was laughing so hard.

Republican response: Obama mentioned 57 states. He meant 57 primaries, but they want us to believe a constitutional law professor and editor of the Harvard Law Review didn’t know how many states are in the US.

Some people say there’s no difference between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.

Again, a stupendously false equivalence. Republicans are racist and bigoted and work to suppress the vote of black people. They’re against a woman’s right to choose, against equal rights for women, against equal pay for women, even against women’s access to birth control. They’re homophobic and want to overturn gay marriage, even though every time a politician gets caught soliciting gay sex in a men’s room by an undercover cop he happens to be a Republican. They’re Islamophobic and want to keep Muslims from entering the United States. They scapegoat dark-skinned immigrants and blame all this country’s problems on immigration. They pass legislation and tax cuts that give enormous benefits to the one-percent and to corporations while throwing crumbs to the middle class and the poor. They see nothing wrong with 45 million Americans being deprived of health care.

The Democratic Party has none of this ideology.

Some Democratic progressives still insist there is no difference between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. This is supposed to justify why they stayed home in November of 2016 or voted for a third-party candidate who couldn’t win.

To say there’s no difference between Clinton and Trump is absurd. All you need to do is make a list of the negative actions Trump has taken in the first 15 months of his presidency, the idiots he’s appointed in his cabinet, the chaos in the White House and the country, the real threat he’ll start a war, the insanity of his personal life, etc.

Do these progressives really believe Hillary would have people like Scott Pruitt, Betsy DeVos, Jeff Sessions, or Ben Carson in her cabinet, or that she’d have appointed a Supreme Court justice to the right of Antonin Scalia?

But the most bat-guano crazy example of “what about” and false equivalence is the statement by Trump supporters that there’s no difference between Fox News and MSNBC.

In the immortal words of former House Speaker John Boehner, “Are you kidding me?”

MSNBC certainly slants left, but they have a number of established conservative Republican commentators. Michael Steele, former head of the RNC, is a regular pundit, as are Steve Schmidt and Nicole Wallace, co-chairs of Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign.

Fox News is laughable propaganda and an extension of the Republican Party’s unending fear-mongering political campaign. All their commentators are graduates of the Baghdad Bob school of journalism.

Instead of banning Muslims, we need to ban the pathetic defenses called “what about” and false equivalence.

One of the happiest days for liberals was when Bill O’Reilly was fired from his nightly show on Fox News. He was a serial sexual harasser, and ten years before his demise he paid a substantial sum of money to hush a woman who worked for him. He got away with that, but accumulated charges from more women ultimately became too much for his employers and advertisers to excuse.

Just as a stopped clock is right twice a day, O’Reilly did say something that was profound. He said that if you want to succeed in a career, you must be willing to move to where the jobs and opportunities are available. He moved frequently from place to place as he climbed the ladder in his profession, and many men and women have had similar success based on their willingness to relocate.

I had a friend who moved from Worcester to Pennsylvania to Houston to Bakersfield, California, as he moved through the ranks of an oil company. He left his parents and four siblings, and he never came back except on yearly visits. Another friend relocated to St. Louis and then Santa Monica, and an acquaintance has lived in several states as a computer company executive. He goes where he gets the best financial offer.

People who move usually end up better off. But most people don’t want to do that, and for a variety of reasons.

One would be family obligations, the need to take care of ageing parents or troubled siblings. Another is the security of having close family and friends ready to lend a necessary helping hand. Fear of the unknown is a third, and the idea of starting all over again in a strange environment with different types of people can be overwhelming.

It’s much easier for a younger person to relocate than someone who is married with children and weighted down with obligations. One man I know saw his company taken over by a large conglomerate. He lived in Massachusetts, and the new outfit offered him the same job in Milwaukee. But his wife was a schoolteacher earning $60,000 a year. He couldn’t afford to lose her salary, so he had to find another job with lesser pay close to home.

Teenagers in a family don’t want to leave their school, their friends, their sports teams, and their access to the things that interest them to start all over in another locale.

Technology has caused great job loss, and relocation is a tricky solution. Telling people to move where the jobs are is not as easy as it sounds.

If you live in a economically-depressed area because jobs have vanished, how do you sell your house without taking a big loss? If you move to where jobs are available and the economy is good you’ll have to pay considerably more for a house or to rent an apartment.

It’s been my keen observation that when people buy their first home they do so with the caveat they won’t be there forever. They’ll trade up to a bigger, better house as soon as possible. What generally happens is they’re in that house for the rest of their lives. Inertia sets in, and even when they can financially afford to move, they don’t. They’ll build a small addition, knock down a wall and make one room larger, install a skylight, anything to rationalize why they’re staying put.

There are three reasons to buy a home: location, location, and location. Make sure your first choice is in an area you’ll be happy with forever, because the odds are more than even you’ll be carried out of that place in a box—unless you’re relocated to a nursing home beforehand.

I’ve lived in seven different houses or apartments, but they’ve only been in Worcester, Shrewsbury, or Sutton.

One of my Republican conservative baby boomer friends, an avowed right-winger, is a huge fan of Bill O’Reilly. I had a discussion with him about O’Reilly’s advice regarding relocation, and he loudly and enthusiastically agreed.

Guess how many places this guy has lived in during the course of his long life. TWO. The one he lived in with his parents, and the one he’s lived in with his wife for the last 40 years.

I just love talking to Republican conservatives. They are totally lacking in self-awareness.

What are you gonna do?

There’s a heated controversy going on in Boston over renaming the street Fenway Park sits on from Yawkey Way back to its original name, “Jersey Street.”

The change was instigated last August by Red Sox owner John Henry to send a message of inclusion to Red Sox fans.

In Mr. Henry’s opinion former owner Tom Yawkey, who died 42 years ago in 1976, was a racist. The controversy is similar to those in our southern states with regard to removing statues of Confederate generals from the Civil War.

There is much evidence to indict Mr. Yawkey as a racist. The Red Sox were the last major league baseball team to integrate. Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947 with the Brooklyn Dodgers, but the Bosox didn’t sign Pumpsie Green until 1959.

Yawkey’s worst baseball sin was rejecting a deal to sign Willie Mays, arguably the greatest baseball player of all time.

Willie Mays could hit for average, hit for power, steal bases, run like a deer, and was a fantastic outfielder. He’s the fourth leading home run hitter in history (660), behind Barry Bonds, Hank Aaron, and Babe Ruth.

Bonds holds the single season record (73) and the career record (762), but the right-handed hitting Mays would have hit 83 in a year and 900 in a career if he played at Fenway with its chummy left field wall. He would’ve hit moon shots over the “Green Monster.’ How many pennants and World Series would the Sox have won if Willie was on their team?

Yawkey also had a chance to sign Jackie Robinson, but his 1945 tryout was, in Robinson’s words, “a sham.” That’s the term he used when he spoke to Walter Carrington, who was in charge of the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination’s investigation of the Sox in 1959.

“It was not the “Curse of the Bambino” (trading Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1920) that kept the team from winning all those years,” said Carrington, “it was, instead, the curse of Tom Yawkey, who refused to hire the best players in the game because of their race.”

Mr. Yawkey does have his supporters, both black and white, who are fiercely advocating to keep the name in place. Jim Lonborg, who is white, and Reggie Smith, who is black, both played on the 1967 “Impossible Dream” team and want the name to stay. Ray Hammond, pastor of Bethel AME Zion church in Boston, and Cardinal Sean O’Malley, the highest-ranking Catholic prelate in the state, are in favor of retaining the name.

Both men lead organizations the have benefited from the Yawkey Foundation, a philanthropic group started by Yawkey’s widow, Jean.

Money can forgive a lot of sins.

Coincidentally on Facebook last week A Keen Observer raised the ire of some New England Patriots fanatics (“fan” is a shortened form of the word “fanatic”) because he wouldn’t sing the praises of Pats owner Bob Kraft. Mr. Kraft used the team’s jet plane to shuttle Parkland High students from Florida to Washington to take part in an anti-gun demonstration.

Nice move by a billionaire owner, but it doesn’t make up for his political and no doubt financial support of billionaire Donald Trump in his campaign for president.

Trump received $30 million from the NRA and is owned by the gun manufacturers’ lobby. He will do everything in his power to obstruct what those kids Kraft flew to Washington are trying to accomplish.

Color me unimpressed by a free plane ride.

A few good works don’t justify the actions of people like Yawkey and Kraft.

“Saying that the Yawkey Foundation’s good works absolve Tom Yawkey of racism,” said Walter Carrington, “is like saying the Ford Foundation’s good work absolves Henry Ford of his anti-Semitism.”

Tom Yawkey also supported an all-white school in South Carolina that was created after a court ordered schools there desegregated in 1971. He gave money for its start-up and kept it in his will for nearly four decades, donating a total of over $1 million. This demonstrates that he did not change his racial attitudes as he advanced in age.

Benito Mussolini was a dictator and a fascist in the WWII era, but he made the trains in Italy run on time. That’s something neither Boston Mayor Michael Walsh nor Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker have been able to accomplish. If only “Il Duce” could resurrect himself, we could put him in charge of the MBTA.

Three weeks ago I wrote about self-driving cars and how they would change the world in which we live for the better. They will be one of the major inventions in history, comparable to air-conditioning which made possible doubling the population in our southern states.

Over the last two years 80,000 Americans have died in car crashes. Self-driving cars would shrink those numbers by 95%, because 95% of all automobile accidents are caused by human error.

Last week a self-driving car owned by Uber struck and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona. The car was traveling at 40 mph in a 45 mph zone, and there was a human safety driver at the wheel who failed to see the pedestrian. Video taken from inside the car showed that the human was distracted and not looking at the road.

Immediately Uber stopped its use of self-driving cars, and as far away as Boston their use was suspended in the Seaport district.

Any fatality is tragic, but there seems to be a huge double standard when comparing the reactions to technological versus human error.

Here are a few human error anecdotes that have occurred right here in Central Massachusetts.

One afternoon several years ago in Millbury a woman driving a minivan dropped a cigarette between her legs. She reached down to retrieve it, and she lost control of her vehicle. It jumped the curb and killed a man who was standing on the sidewalk.

A young woman was a passenger in a car heading east on Route 20 in Charlton. Another vehicle heading west was driven by a man who had an epileptic episode because he had not taken his medication. He claimed he was made uncomfortable by its side effects. His car crashed head on into the young woman’s car, and she was killed instantly.

Many years later that young woman’s father was struck and killed on Route 169 in Charlton while getting his mail from a mailbox on the road. A woman driving an SUV who had worked a double shift at the mall momentarily fell asleep at the wheel, even though this happened in the afternoon.

On January 26 of this year a van heading west on Central Turnpike in Sutton tried to make a left turn onto Mendon Road when it collided head-on with a truck which was headed east. The man driving the van was killed in the accident. He was blinded by the sun and didn’t see the truck coming.

Four road fatalities in three bordering towns that could have been prevented by self-driving cars. Imagine the numbers of accidents like these that occur every day all across the country.

We take these in stride as if they’re nothing about which to be alarmed. Another day, another accident, and we shrug our shoulders as if to say “What are you gonna do?”

But one accident with a self-driving car is treated like a national disaster.

Even if self-driving cars cut traffic accidents in half rather than by more than 90%, it could be considered unethical, even immoral, not to mandate their use.

Not only would thousands of lives be saved, but also hundreds of thousands of injuries from non-fatal accidents and billions of dollars in property damage and medical costs.

As always, I report, you decide.