Profiles in courage: The men and women who fought for civil rights

"Did you say that President Trump wrote a book?"

The questions came from a middle-aged African-American staffer in the Martin Luther King, Jr., room at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta. I had just turned away from the replica of MLK's library that lines the wall to the gallery. My collegian nephew Morgan, pushing me in a wheelchair, had spotted a book by Nixon on the library shelves. "Nixon wrote a book?" he asked.

I told him that all presidential candidates write books. They're campaign tools, a chance to outline their philosophy and goals should they rise to the highest office in the land. I pointed out a paperback copy of JFK's 1956 "Profiles in Courage." I had devoured that book in the months leading up to President Kennedy's election. I was a voracious reader at 9.

"Trump wrote a book," I replied to the question from the museum staffer."They don't always write them. Some use  ghost writers." It was an attempt to explain the inexplicable.

She seemed bemused by the concept. I was too. Trump's book, "Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again," was published in November of 2015, a year before the election that changed America for the worse. A glowering Trump adorns the cover, reflecting the ugliness that waits inside. He looks like your angry old neighbor, the same kind of person who flocks to Trump's white-power rallies.

"They just threw 200,000 people off the food stamp rolls," the staffer said as Morgan, my sister Mary and I exited.

"Can we be any more cruel?" I replied.

The answer, of course, is yes they can be more cruel. Trumpists demonstrate this every day.

We were in a museum that remembered some of the cruelest chapters in American history. The South's Jim Crow laws, lynchings, murders, sundowner ordinances, miscegenation statutes, segregation.

The exhibits remembered those outrages. And also celebrated the response of outraged Americans involved in the Civil Rights struggle. You know some of the names. Those mostly unknown faces look out from the exhibits. Freedom Riders, college students who came from all over to register black voters, priests, ministers, and rabbis who left their flocks to administer to the dispossessed and disenfranchised in the rural South. There are the murdered and the martyred. Four little girls killed when the KKK bombed a black Birmingham church. Emmett Till, tortured and killed in 1955 by redneck vigilantes for allegedly whistling at a white woman. Medgar Evers, the World War II veteran who challenged segregation at the University of Mississippi and was shot down in 1963 by a member of the White Citizens' Council.

Millions now know the names and faces of these brave people who challenged the  status quo.

The most frightening exhibit recreates the sit-ins at the Greensboro, N.C., Woolworth's. You sit on a lunch counter stool, place earphones over your head, and hands flat on the counter. For the next few minutes, you experience what those black college students went through in the name of equality. Name-calling, threats, slaps upside the head. The lunch counter stool vibrates with the kicks from racists in their jackboots. I was shaken when I stepped down. I've heard the same invective coming from 21st century racists.

On the way to the gift shop, we passed a large mural by Paula Scher that features protest posters from around the world. I really liked it so bought a few items in the shop that celebrates that work of art. Christmas is coming, after all. And I want to always remember this place. I also urge everyone I know to visit it.

Cohort replacement is the only cure for Trumpism

It's an "age" thing.

In September 2016, just weeks before Trump's election, writer Chris Ladd in Forbes foretold the future. The article, "The Last Jim Crow Generation," spells out the roots of white anger that led us to this earthly paradise called Trumplandia. If you were a 70-year-old white man at the time of the election, you had led a mostly white life in the U.S. Here's a sample:

Like Donald Trump, white voters turning 70 this year had already reached adulthood in 1964, the year that the first Civil Rights Act was passed. They started kindergarten in schools that were almost universally white. Most were in third grade when the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education. A good number of them would complete their public education in formally segregated schools. 

Read the rest here.

Is it just me, or some of the best articles on Trumpism have been in Forbes and the Wall Street Journal.? This liberal baby boomer must be getting soft in his old age.

I am in this same cohort, those of us born in the first five years after World War II. I was born in December 1950. All of us boomers born in December of 1950 share one thing -- we were born in the same month and year. We do share some touchstones of our journey from birth to 18. Depending on who you were and where you lived, you had at least a passing knowledge of the Civil Rights struggle and Vietnam. You may have been involved in them, or blissfully ignorant. "Turbulent," they call the sixties. That term came up more than once last night in the first two segments of CNN's "1968."

Children and teens, as a rule, are focused more in school and sports and dating than they are in social justice movements. In my senior year of high school, my attention was on getting my basketball team to the state tournament, finding a date for the prom, and deciding on which college I could (or couldn't) afford. I was a good student, but not great, and a pretty good surfer. I had a car that ran most of the time. My parents were good people, but imperfect, which describes most of us humans trying to do our best. At 18, I complained about my parents to my friends. At home, I was respectful as any tormented teen.

My school was integrated, sort of. An all-white Catholic school recruited black athletes. My class of 69 had three African-Americans, two of whom were my teammates. Some of the football players were recruited from our town's all-black high school. Integration was still a few years in the future. My class also had an Iranian place-kicker and first-generation Cuban immigrant who looked more Irish than me. That was the extent of our ethnic diversity.

Ladd's Forbes article  talked about a workplace, unions, schools, churches, military -- all dominated by white males. That was our experience in our formative years. So, is it any wonder that men from the early baby boomer cohort look around, see a changing America, and freak out. And that is the cohort that turns out to vote, this time for Trump.

I am 67. I did not freak out in 2016. I am freaking out now. Racism and jingoism have returned with a vengeance. I was susceptible to these influences when I was 18. I am susceptible to them now. I choose a different path. The question remains: How did I get here?

How did we get here?

Republicans are aghast that anger rages in America

Republicans are aghast that someone would be so angry as to take a shot at Congressional reps practicing for a baseball game in Alexandria, Virginia.

I am aghast that they would be aghast at this turn of events.

Republicans and their Fox News mouthpiece have been stoking American anger for decades.  This led to the simmering stew of hatred that begat Trump.

A Republican rep says that America is "fraying around the edges" earlier this week on CBS This Morning. And who is responsible for that turn of events? A Bernie Sanders fan who was a little frayed around the edges, frayed enough to go shoot up a baseball field? He was angry. Many are angry. And they have guns.

What do these Republicans expect? They stoked grassroots anger for eight years during the Obama administration. And the recipients of this barrage of hate were not all Republicans. A fair number of Democrats and Independents watch Fox, listen to Rush Limbaugh, and voted for Trump.

So who's to blame? All of us. For inciting hatred and letting it slide -- or stoking it with snark. For not countering hatred with love and tolerance. For not doing something to make the world a better place.

I am as guilty as you are. I have been poking fun at conservatives online since 2005. For eight years, I assumed that we were a civilized nation with a minority of ignorant, regressive haters. I was smug. I made fun of those Obama haters who carried misspelled signs to Tea Party rallies. I even invented a character called Tea Party Slim, whom I imbued with the many TP utterings I heard at rallies and on the Internet.

All of that only stoked more hatred and resentment. Our leader, Barack Obama, provided an example for us to look up to. Meanwhile, he did little or nothing to stem the tide of resentment. Obama didn't fight hard enough for the America we wanted. Neither did I.

It's game on now. The enemy is obvious. Our government is trying to kill us and our planet. For the second time in my 66 years, I know who to fight. During Vietnam, my government wanted to kill all of its young men in pursuit of a rotten Cold War policy in Vietnam. Our government would rather kill its sons than admit it was wrong. That's why the trauma of Vietnam will never end. Let's hope Ken Burns informs us of the real reasons behind Vietnam this fall on PBS. I am not optimistic.

Now our government wants to maximize riches and marginalize the rest of us. We are on our way to be serfs, a return to the Dark Ages of Europe. Ironically, Europe is experiencing a golden age.

Response is to #Resist with the tools we have. We have wit and grit. #Resist on your own and with like-minded people. Marginalize those who urge violence. Many of those people are not our friends and may be insurgents in our midst. Now that an apparent anti-Trump person shot up a baseball field and some Republican reps, look for law enforcement to plant operatives in #Resist groups. It may have happened already. This sounds paranoid. Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean someone isn't following you. Read some of the first-hand account of the antiwar and Civil Rights movements. They often were the targets of COINTELPRO units of the FBI. They were provocateurs who knew that to turn a protest violent invited a violent response from the police. No better way to discredit dirty hippies than to show them getting beat up by the police. The 1968 Police Riot in Chicago was caused by those dirty hippies (and Yippies) that were getting bloodied by Mayor Daley's Finest. At least that's how Middle America saw it and turned to Tricky Dick and Kissinger for a solution for Vietnam.

You saw how that worked out.

Angry Americans have now turned to a spoiled rich boy who gets his way because the Republicans in Congress have fallen into lockstep behind him. Shame on them. Shame on us for letting it happen.

#Resist

Read it all -- you might be a winner on Jeopardy

The history teacher from Texas won the $100,000 Teachers' Challenge on Jeopardy last week. He clinched the championship because he knew that New Orleans was the U.S. city that dropped off the top-50 cities list but reappeared 10 years later. He permanently moved into first place the day before because he because he knew the author of a very famous book. This very famous book, written in 1936, is 1,037 pages long and the only novel published by the author in her lifetime. You won't find it on any literary lists, mainly because it is basically a southern romance. Not only that. If it doesn't exactly glorify the southern cause in The Civil War, it does portray members of the KKK as brave protectors of southern womanhood.

You know the answer: "Gone with the Wind" by Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta. A big potboiler of a book that was transformed into a big potboiler of a movie in 1939. The book sold well in its time, but it really took off when the star-studded movie came out. The movie is considered a classic. The book, not so much. That's probably why the two English teachers in the Jeopardy semifinals did not know the answer. They guessed Edith Wharton and Jane Austen. Very smart modern women who knew two members of the American Literary Canon. But didn't know a best-selling author who died too young when run over by a car in downtown Atlanta in 1949.

These two English teachers didn't know GWTW because schoolkids don't read it. I know why (see reasons above) but still, they are all missing out on something good. Have you ever read a big, fat, bloated novel? Of course you have. James Michener excelled at these. In "Hawaii," it takes the reader a 100 pages to get to the spot where human beings actually appear on ancient Hawaii. In "Centennial," set in my part of the country, the author takes his time reaching the arrival of Native Americans to pre-state Colorado and Wyoming. Neither of these books are part of the canon, although you might find both in history classes or, worse, in multicultural studies classes that exhibit books of "cultural appropriation."

Political correctness rears its ugly head.

My liberal self knows that the whole anti-PC movement is an excuse by racists to be racists, misogynists to be misogynists, Trump to be Trump, etc. Still, we are caught up in a ridiculous fight over who has the right to speak for who. Is it valid for a white writer such as myself to speak in the voice of a black woman or a Native American? Yes, because writers have the freedom to write from any POV, including non-human and intergalactic ones. What's that Harlan Ellison story told from the POV of a planet-exploring dog? Fantasy and sci-fi are filled with mythical characters who come alive in the hands of skilled writers. We live in an era of fantastic beasts and superheroes. Not enough of these writers are women or people of color. But that is changing, albeit slowly. The push is on for a balanced perspective, pushed by the country's changing demographics and tastes

But back to "Gone with the Wind." My grandfather Shay boasted that he read GWTW once a year. He was not  a Southerner but an Iowa farm boy who served in the Great War and came home to be a Denver insurance salesman for 60 years. My father was a GWTW fan, which is probably how I came upon the book, sitting forlornly in Dad's library after he and my mother finished with it. I was thrilled by the war narrative but rushed through the mushy stuff, hoping to find sex scenes, but in vain. Meanwhile, I was trying to get my hands on Terry Southern's "Candy." A copy was circulating through Sister Theresa's eighth grade class at Our Lady of Perpetual Chastity Grade School. The girls bogarted the book, which led to the ringleaders being discovered and forbidden from graduating with the class. Some of the boys read it too, although only the girls were punished. Catholic school was instructive in so many ways.

I knew that GWTW was the answer to the Jeopardy question.

"The English teachers will know that," said Chris.

"No they won't."

She seemed shocked when I was right. I told her about the status of GWTW on college campuses and in high school classrooms. At the same time, Mayor Mitch Landrieu had crews dismantling Confederate symbols around New Orleans. A week ago, alt-right demonstrators carrying torches (really guys, torches?) showed up to protect a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia. Some guy drives around Cheyenne in a white pick-up flying a large confederate flag.

"The past is never dead. It's not even past."

So wrote William Faulkner in "Requiem for a Nun."

In the South -- and in some parts of Wyoming -- the past is present.

So public school teachers in California don't read and don't teach GWTW. So, the Cali school teacher on Jeopardy was an also-ran in the big Teachers' Challenge prize.

While all of the Cali population was not alive in 1865, about half of the state's population is now non-white. GWTW would hurt their feelings. But they will always miss out on a compelling story. They might know the movie but not Mitchell's language and style, which is a damn shame, my dear. They may be an English major at UW or Stanford. They will get to know Austen and Wharton, Toni Morrison and and Jame Baldwin, Sandra Cisneros and Flannery O'Connor.

I've read Michener and Michael Crichton and tons of thrillers and detective novels. I've read treacly romances and predictable Zane Grey westerns.

Read it all.

Don't limit your world. That's how we got into this mess.

We need more than sound and fury to defeat the GOP's cruel policies

Chris and I wore tutus to a local bar last Friday night.

Nobody beat us up. 

Our tutus were homemade from strips of tulle and, well, left a little bit to be desired. They were blue and black. We wore them over our jeans. Not as noticeable or as flamboyant as the pink tutus worn by others at Accomplice Brewing Company at the old train station. 

People all over Wyoming wore tutus to work and school and bars on Friday. It was in response to Sen. Mike Enzi's April 20 comments.  

This from the #LiveAndLetTutu Facebook page:

During a recent event at Greybull High School in Greybull, a sophomore courageously stood up to ask Senator Mike Enzi a question -- what he was doing to support LGBT youth in Wyoming? To which Senator Enzi responded, "I know a guy who wears a tutu and goes to bars on Friday night and is always surprised that he gets in fights. Well, he kind of asks for it." This message delivered directly to the youth of Wyoming sends the message that if you're bullied in high school things are NOT going to get better. His comments say that to find happiness you must leave Wyoming.

Patrick and Brian Harrington came up with the #LiveAndLetTutu theme and hashtag. They are creative people in Laramie, You may have seen Brian's excellent photos all over the place. On April 22, he took great shots of Laramie's March for Science. The two brothers are from Greybull. They know some of the stigma attached to people who are a bit different in any small town. That's why Enzi's remarks rankled me. It was if he was proclaiming that there was a correct way to be a Wyomingite and an incorrect one. Many incorrect ones. If you follow any of these paths, you will get your ass beat. Or worse. Remember Matthew Shepard.

This is an era when our differences define us more than our similarities. Too bad, since we have so many things in common. For 25 years, I traveled Wyoming promoting the arts. I met all kinds of people. We talked art and not politics. The two are intertwined, but most people in Wyoming what's best for their families. The arts and arts education mean a lot. I once saw a performance of "Annie Get Your Gun" at Greybull High School, the same one when Sen. Enzi made his comments. The whole town, it seemed, turned out that night. It was a high school performance so not all of the voices were stellar and a few lines were dropped. "Annie Get Your Gun" is a bit dated, what with its portrayal of Native Americans and women and the West. Still, any attempt at high school theatre must be applauded. Most schools in Wyoming still have art teachers but theatre teachers are in short supply. Plays are usually supervised by a local with theatre background or a faculty member who (as I did) played The Second Dead Man in a minimalist version of "Our Town."

An event such as #LiveAndLetTutu" features elements of protest and theatre. Protest is always partly theatre. Clever signs and outrageous costumes play a part. So do music and poetry, as in the recent March for Science in D.C., and our own homegrown one in Laramie.

Is protest as theatre effective? It helps us get our ya-yas out. It does nurture community. But it didn't stop the House GOP from passing the so-called American Health Care Act. The better name is Trumpcare. Or Ryancare. Or Tryancare. More creative challenges for us wordsmiths. The GOP has effectively taken over enough state houses to gerrymander the hell out of many states. Their voter suppression efforts have paid off -- for them, anyway. Margins can be thin when half the electorate stays home because you've made it too hard for them to vote. Or their brains have been turned to mush from too much Fox.

Trump & Company only understand one thing -- raw power. We shut them down by voting them out and changing the laws that feed the oligarchy. This won't be easy as we've grown complacent. The theatre of protest will have some effect. But without serious involvement, I am but

a poor player/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/And then is heard no more: it is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/Signifying nothing.

Sound and Fury. We need more than that. Much more.

"No Human is Illegal" the theme of Cheyenne May Day march

Front page of this morning's Wyoming Tribune-Eagle

The WTE second-page jump header quoted Rev. Rodger McDaniel over a photo of me. This struggle is biblical in many ways. Love thy neighbor as oneself. Stuff like that. 

Artwork and protest signs complement each other at the May Day March in the Depot. The multimedia piece in the foreground is CylieAnn Erickson's "Executive Order 13769."

I was one of a hundred-plus souls who came out on a rainy Monday for the May Day March to Keep Families Together in Cheyenne.

Organized by Juntos, the march protested Trump & Company's cruel attempts to demonize people from Mexico or anywhere south of the border. Put it together with Trump's attempted Muslim ban and you have a set of racist policies that deserve protesting.

Juntos enlisted the arts as part of its rally. One of the organizers, Gonz Serrano, read his poetry to the crowd as it sought shelter post-march in the Cheyenne Depot. A high school mariachi band played. Laramie artist Adrienne Vetter worked with Juntos organizers to stage an art show. The arts both personalize and magnify the cause.

Before the poetry and music came the march. The goal was to carry a letter, signed by organizers, to Gov. Matt Mead. His HQ resides at the other end of  Capitol Ave., the route  followed by most marches in Cheyenne. Rally at the Depot Plaza and walk eight blocks to the capitol, usually with a police escort. The capitol complex will be under construction for three years. So we visited the governor at his temp HQ at the old Schraeder Funeral Home quarters on the corner of 24th and Carey.

A delegation, led by Juntos Director Antonio Serrano, left the march and walked inside to deliver the letter to the Gov. They returned a few minutes later with the news that the Gov was in meetings all day and couldn't meet with them. The crowd was not pleased. Since the goal was peaceful protest and not civil disobedience, we turned around and walked back to the Depot.

A sound system had been set up on the Depot stage. But rain and a bit of hail forced us inside. I pondered the largest artwork in the exhibit. CylieAnn Erickson's multi-media piece, "Executive Order 13769," featured a human-sized Statue of Liberty behind a chain-link fence. The artist had included cutouts of newspaper headlines on the subject. It included a snake-like lamp jutting from the panel far enough that I almost bonked my head on it. It appeared that the lamp worked and was meant to illuminate the assemblage.

Writers attempt to comprehend the deeper meanings behind an event, and not always successfully. Marches like this were held all over on this May Day. L.A. had a huge crowd with reps from more than 100 organizations and unions, including the Screen Actors Guild, which may go on strike soon. Why should I care about a Hollywood screenwriter making a lot more money than I ever did as a writer? Because they are fellow humans trying to make a living in an economic system that does not care if you live or die. You must fight for it. Just as these immigrants are doing. ICE agents bust into their homes and haul away family members. Schoolkids taunt Hispanic peers. Cruelty abounds. Trump and his minions lead the charge.

The headline on the news clip above speaks of the universal nature of this issue.

Biblical? Shakespearean? Historic? You could describe our current situation with any of those. Or find your own term. We need witnesses. In print. In art. In music.

Message to Sen. Mike Enzi: You are no help on the Senate HELP Committee

Received this letter from my U.S. Senator Mike Enzi today. It was a response to my postcard appeal back in March to Sen. Enzi, a member of the Senate Arts Caucus, to save funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, which Trump has targeted in his draft budget. Every time I receive a Congressional response, I frame it with  drawings of the human body in the excellent big-format book, "Wall Chart of Human Anatomy," 24 charts of "3D anatomy based on the National Library of Medicine's Visible Human Project." It's a very sciencey book which is appropriate due to  the hundreds of marches for science we had last weekend. Republicans have yet to show that they have human circulatory systems. 

I received a nice note from Sen. Enzi today. It was short, but I understand, as Sen. Enzi had an action-packed week advising Wyomingites the proper attire to wear (or not to wear) to a Wyoming bar. He was specific about the attire -- a tutu -- but not specific on which bar. It could be the railroaders bar in Bill or the cowboy bar in Cheyenne or the brewpub in a barn in Ten Sleep. He told high school students in Greybull that anyone who wears a tutu into a bar in Wyoming gets what he deserves. We know he was talking about Wyoming's Larry "Sissy" Goodwin, a heterosexual Wyoming man who wears women's clothes and has been beat up several times by drunks who don't think that Wyoming men should be walking around in tutus. Sissy and I have spoken at Democratic Party and union meetings. Sissy is quite a dresser.

So Sen. Enzi has been busy apologizing and, in turn, not apologizing.

So I will forgive the abruptness of his response. But I do want to deconstruct it as it includes some strange statements. Some non-explaining explanations, if you will. Maybe even some alternative facts.

Sen. Enzi points out that he is a member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee. As such,

"I believe that the arts and humanities are an important part of a quality education for our children."

Who can argue with that? Children need the arts just like they need to breathe. But it's not just the children -- all of us need the arts. Republicans know that they can get into the least amount of trouble by saying they are for the children and education. If they said, "I love the arts for art's sake" at the local bar, they would be beat to a pulp. Or if they said they supported the rights of artists to artistic expression -- the same result. They might be spared if they said they supported their local arts councils which sponsor much-needed artistic performances in some of the smallest communities in the state. But then if they told the mugs at the bar that the money for these activities came from taxpayer dollars, they might object. Tax money shouldn't support the arts and artists. That's something they might say. Or this: The arts should be self-supporting. This is funny coming from a Wyoming taxpayer, who annually receives more in federal funding than they contribute.

Does anyone find it odd that the Senate has a committee called HELP? There might have been a time when Congress looked out for people's health care, public education, the rights of labor unions and the ability of seniors to support themselves after a lifetime of working. Those days are gone. If you need any proof, just take a look at the Repubs' latest healthcare legislation. None of us will get any HELP from this bill. Keep your eyes on Sen. Enzi's vote when it comes to the Senate. Let's see how much HELP he offers to his constituents. He was a foe of Obamacare and will probably gush over the latest cruel version of Trumpcare.

Here's another statement from Enzi's letter:

"In Washington, I am working to encourage people across the country to get more actively involved in the arts."

As James Baldwin once said, "I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do." This is a notable writer saying that "actions speak louder than words."

The statement that really got me riled was this one:

"As we celebrate the arts, culture, and humanities that are native to our land, we encourage our young people to learn about the past and develop their own artistic abilities."

What exactly are the "the arts, culture and humanities that are are native to our land?" You have to admit that the native artists who etched the petroglyphs were talented. Native artists to our land created beautiful baskets and pottery and jewelry. They built Mesa Verde in Colorado and the mounds in Indiana. The medicine wheel on the crest of the Big Horns.

Not sure that's what Sen. Enzi means. The man reads books and he attends arts events around the state. As a mayor, he energized the arts in Gillette. But his statement smacks of the Nativist mentality that got Trump elected. When they say native, they mean white men. White Protestants founded this nation, by God, and we are the native race. All those other cultures don't count. Witness the Arizona law that forbids schools to teach Latino culture. Are African-American art forms such as jazz and blues and hip-hop counted among the arts native to this land? Salsa dancing? Non-representational art created by New Yorkers and Coloradans and Wyomingites who may find their influences in art from Puerto Rico, Mexico, Zimbabwe, Japan, Iraq, or Ukraine?

The U.S., surprisingly enough, did not invent the arts and humanities. We come from many cultures, many lands, many religions. We all deserve to be heard and seen.

Sen. Enzi wraps up his letter with a cautionary note that "the president's budget is always just a starting point." OK, so get started and do something to ensure that arts and humanities thrive in these United States. Make a stand and say that you will no longer follow the voting patterns of the Republican right-wing kook caucus. Tell your constituents you will no longer follow Trump as he marches us off of a cliff.

HELP us!

And I leave you with this artistic image, which I thought was hilarious.

This from Wyoming Equality: LGBTQ friends and straight allies put a tutu on, we're going out!
Find a #ToLiveAndLetTutu party near you: https://goo.gl/IqdZQ6

Gary Snyder: "I pledge allegiance to the soil of Turtle Island"

Jane Hirshfield has teamed up with the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University to form #poetsforscience which will commemorate this weekend's March for Science and Earth Day. Hirshfield will read her poem "On the Fifth Day" on Saturday's march in Washington, D.C. This poster is part of a series celebrating poetry and science and the environment. Gary Snyder's "Turtle Island" was my favorite poetry book in the 1970s and I took it with me on backpacking trips in the Rockies: "Ah to be alive/on a mid-September morn/fording a stream/barefoot, pants rolled up/holding boots, pack on,/sunshine, ice in the shallows,/northern rockies."

Trump Chicken asks: Where are Trump's missing tax returns?

The Trump Chump Chicken was the centerpiece of the Tax March rally today in Cheyenne. The building in the right background is IRS HQ. Some 150 rally attendees in Cheyenne, plus tens of thousands all over the country, request that Trump release his tax returns because we suspect shady dealings with Russia and almost any other entity on the planet. As one sign said, "No tax reform without tax returns." Creative people, creative signs. Next Saturday, April 22: March for Science in Laramie. Will you be there?

Tax Day Protest set for April 15 in Cheyenne

On Saturday, April 15, concerned citizens will gather in Cheyenne to protest Trump's refusal to release his tax returns. It's Tax Day, the day usually devoted to the wailing and gnashing of teeth over tax filing deadlines. This year, however, Tax Day is officially April 18 due to the weekend and Easter and. presumably, the traditional Easter Egg Roll at the White House, which Trump will emcee this year. Imagine that. If it doesn't go well, if the eggs are not rolled to his liking, expect another Tomahawk launch on Syria.

Why is it important for Trump to release his taxes? Because we need accountability and transparency from this man who has shown so little during his 70 years. Release your tax returns, now, Donald. Or remain the nefarious robber baron that we suspect you are. More info on the protest at https://www.facebook.com/events/1256681387753289/ The Cheyenne protest was highlighted in an April 4 article on CNN Money.

I will make a sign and march on April 15. Will it accomplish anything? If you mean: will Trump finally release his tax returns? No, he will not. We will announce our opposition to his crooked ways, experience camaraderie along the way. At the Women's March in January, I had fun and met the nicest people. New people, mainly, although I saw some old friends. These sorts of gatherings help hold us together as Trump and his minions try to divide us.

See you April 15 at 10 a.m. at IRS HQ, 5353 Yellowstone Rd,, Cheyenne. Bring a sign. If you don't have a sign, and would like to make one in the company of good people, come to the Unitarian Universalist Church, 3005 Thomes Ave, at 6 p.m. on April 14.

And those of you interested in protest and body art, the Wyoming Women March on Equality group also is hosting a "Nevertheless, She Persisted" tattoo party from noon to whenever on April 15 at T.R.I.B.E. Zoo, 1901 Central Ave. in downtown Cheyenne. T.R.I.B.E. artists will charge $75 for a "Nevertheless, She Persisted" tattoo, with $50 going to Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains. The offer is good through May 15.

MIA: Barrasso, Cheney, Enzi

Newspaper ad organized by local activists at Indivisible Cheyenne and paid for by just people.

April 2017 brings flowers, poetry and demonstrations -- snow, too

It's snowing. April comes in like a lion...

Those cruel bastards that make up the Republican Party will get more wake-up calls in April with demos by concerned Americans who've had it up to here with the likes of these people.

First up in April, though, is National Poetry Month. In the past, it has been an occasion for cordial celebratory readings of poetry, past and present. This year, poetry takes on new meaning and a new urgency. Words matter. Expression matters. Heart and soul matter.

To get things off on the right note, here is a spring poem I like. It's Noma Dumezweni reading Wordsworth's "Daffodils" on BBC Radio 4. Go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radio

William Wordsworth seemed to me a stuffy old Brit before I took an undergrad English course at the University of Florida on "The Early Romantic Poets." Wordsworth, Coleridge and Blake were early, calendar-wise. The late Romantics, which I took the following semester, covered Keats, Shelley and Byron. An amazing group of poets. From The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to Ozymandias. Wordsworth noting the beauty of spring daffodils in the lake country to Byron dying for Green independence at a young age. Blake's mysticism and otherworldly drawings.

Think poetry as you attend any of these other activities celebrating free expression.

Wyoming is the site for three March for Science events on April 22. The largest one will be in Laramie. There also is Pinedale and Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park. To RSVP to your local March for Science, go to https://www.marchforscience.com/rsvp.

Why March for Science? If you were paying attention the past three months, Trump and the Republicans have marched out one anti-science bill after another. It's a horror show. So we march.

Many of us in Cheyenne will carpool to Laramie. Marchers meet outside of the UW Classroom Building (the lawn on 9th and Ivinson) at noon and from there march downtown for an Earth Day rally with music, info booths and speakers. Probably food and beverages. If you are interested in being part of a Laramie citywide clean-up, meet at Coal Creek Coffee at 10 a.m.

But before the March for Science comes the Tax March on Saturday, April 15, 10 a.m., at the Cheyenne IRS HQ, 5353 Yellowstone Rd. We will be making clever signs on Friday evening. These sign-making sessions have been dubbed Wines and Signs or, you prefer, Whine and Signs. Keep posted on the Tax March Facebook page.at https://www.facebook.com/events/1256681387753289/.

And time to plan ahead for Monday, May 1. The May Day March to Keep Families Together is sponsored by Juntos Wyoming and convenes at Cheyenne Depot Plaza from 2-5 p.m. While at the march, check out the art exhibit in the Depot Building. FMI: https://www.facebook.com/events/223220958143613/

And for those who like meetings (and who doesn't?) the Laramie County Democrats monthly meeting takes place at the IBEW HQ in Cheyenne, 6:30 p/m/-whenever. Lots of newbies been showing up as they are upset with all things Trump and we don't blame them.

If you like to drink and complain about the Trump regime, please come to Laramie County Drinking Liberally on 6 p.m. on Thursday, April 20, at the Albany Bar downtown.

And don't forget the Laramie County Town Hall Meeting with Rep. Jim Byrd at 6 p.m., April 4, in the Laramie County Public Library's Cottonwood Room.

More events are planned. Check out the Prairie Progressives calendar at http://prairieprogressives.com/calendar/

Lots of activities for liberal activists this week in Cheyenne

Sixty people attended last night's Laramie County Democratic Party's monthly meeting in Cheyenne.

That may not seem like a lot to you, dear readers in more populous places. But here, that's a good crowd.

Why so many people, and newcomers, at that?

Donald Trump -- he's making our Dem meetings great again.

New Faces. New energy. Groups represented that didn't exist this time last year, groups such as Indivisible Cheyenne. Juntos has been around for awhile but their mission helping immigrants has gone from necessary to critical. "People are in danger of losing everything," said Juntos leader A.J. What he means, of course, are the people who are being rounded up in ICE raids. They can be snatched, Gestapo-like, in the middle of the night and spirited away to camps and then back to their countries of origin. These raids are a byproduct of Trump's immigrant ban, announced a few weeks ago in a fever and promptly shut down by the courts. Trump doesn't have his multi-billion-dollar wall yet, so the ICE raids will have to do for now. Juntos needs volunteers. If you can help, go to the Juntos Facebook page. Juntos hasn't had a chance to work with local faith communities interested in becoming sanctuary churches. Kathleen Petersen announced at the meeting that the Unitarian Universalist Church has taken steps along this path. The congregation held a "community conversation of becoming a sanctuary church" on Feb. 5. Other churches will follow. UUCC is always a leader in social justice issues.

Attendees elected ten new precinct committeemen and women. Anyone signed up by the close of last night's meeting now can vote for county party officers at the March 20 meeting. Many of these precinct people were newbies and one was a Republicans this time last year. The precinct is the trenches of the political wars, one we haven't fought very well. We know that grassroots organizing is the way to get people elected. But it's hard work and you have to actually talk to people, engage them on a one-to-one basis. People -- you know how annoying they are! But without them, well, look what happens. Take a look at our current legislative session. More extremist legislation this year as a result of the Republican juggernaut. Mary Throne was House minority leader from Laramie County but was beat by a clodhopper on Nov. 8. She spoke about the horrors of this session. As is the case with many of us, her kids are out (or almost out) of the local K-12 system. "If I had kids in the K-12 system now, I'd be really worried," she said, noting that we are looking at the "potential destruction" of our education system, recently ranked as one of the top ten in the country. A scary thought. But that's the Republican plan nationally, now that we have the anti-education Education Secretary Betsy DeVos at the helm. The Wyoming Republicans have their marching orders -- scorched earth for public education.

Wyoming Republican senators spend their days bashing educators when they are not busy waging war on women, gays, wolves, Mother Earth, wind power, etc.

Mary Throne summed it up this way: “No family is going to want to move here, no business will want to move here, without a great education system.”

So much for diversifying the state's economy.

This sums up the attitude of Republicans in Wyoming: “Let’s make Wyoming worse than it is now.” Some wags have called Trump’s ascendancy “the Alabamafication of America.” You know those polls that always show Alabama dead last in education, children’s health, income levels and almost everything else? Well, the folks who gave you Alabama now give you America which includes Wyoming last time I looked.

The Dems argued a bit last night, as is their wont. We should be arguing after our piss-poor showing in November. There is energy in the discontent. That must be turned into action.

Wonder what you can do?

Attend the Laramie County Democratic legislative reception on Thursday, Feb. 23, 6-10 p.m., at The Suite Bistro, 1901 Central Ave., in downtown Cheyenne. Admission is $15, which includes a free drink and cool jazz by the Jane Robinette Trio. Also schmoozing with Dem legislators and other local liberals. A chance to get acquainted.

If coffee or tea is your bag, attend the letter-writing party on Wednesday, Feb. 22, 5:30-7:30 p..m., at the Paramount Café, 1607 Capitol Ave. Materials and letter-writing experts will be available to help with ways to write the most convincing dispatch to your legislator. Helpful hint: no cussing.

If you were part of the Trump post-inauguration Women’s & Allies March in Cheyenne, and you’d like to participate in upcoming marches, including the March for Science and The Tax Day Rally, come to the Laramie County Public Library, 2200 Pioneer Ave., at 2 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 26. This energetic group gathered more than 1,000 people on a cold day in January to register our disgust with Trump and Trumpism. Fed them all, too.

I am at our local library right now using the public wi-fi because my home wi-fi is not working correctly. If you are looking for a place to blog surrounded by books that our president doesn’t read, this is the place. Support your local library in any way you can!

Indivisible Cheyenne also is planning events. You can find a link to its site on the right sidebar.

Just how do we get this alien life force off of our starship?

Sitting in my blogging chair since 2005....

I am not a member of the press. I do not represent the mainstream media in any way.

I am a blogger. A progressive blogger, prog-blogger to those who still use the term. An attendee of Netroots Nation. A sometimes blogger on Daily Kos. An embedded blogger (courtesy of the Dean brothers) to the 2008 Dem convention when we thought we entered a new and glorious era of truth, justice and the American way.

I am a Liberal in almost every way.

When it comes to telling the truth, I am s staunch conservative. Truth must be proven. It must be based on facts.

How do I talk about the post-truth Trump administration? A very good question. Fortunately, I do not have to experience press gatherings in Washington, D.C. How would I discern Trump's very strange press conference this past week? It's easy to call him an idiot, a fool, a madman. None of that seems to put a dent in Trump. He just keeps babbling on, no matter what sort of verbal ammunition you use on him.

Trump seems to be an alien life form who feeds on the fear and confusion of his enemies. Remember that Star Trek episode when a shimmering alien life force pits humans against Klingons? The force stokes the fears of both sides and then feeds off of that fear. The only way to get the alien force off the Enterprise is to declare peace and laugh it off. Go see "The Day of the Dove," season three, episode 11.

Scorn and satire doesn't work with Trump. He feeds off of the name-calling. He doesn't get the satire. You have to have a knowledge base to get it upended by satire and irony. Trump doesn't read books. He makes deals. He's using fear and anger against us. And he doesn't get any of our jokes.

Just how in the heck do we get this alien off of our ship?

No easy answer, especially to those of us who pride ourselves in being decent artistic types who pride ourselves in not ranting and raving at the drop off a hat. Will that be our downfall?

Nothing stopped Hitler except brute force. He cheated and lied and schemed to take over his country and then tried to take over the world. No wonder we can't let go of World War II. It was a titanic struggle. The forces of good triumphed over evil. The forces of good used horribly violent means to do so. We never quite got over the rush. Some say that Trump's U.S. looks like like Nazi Germany with the swastika, imperial Rome with to the togas, and Il Duce without the pouting Mussolini. We have the pouting Trump. America First!

Sabrina Tavernise writes today in the New York Times, Are Liberals Helping Trump? In it, Ms. Tavernise posits that the wise-ass and snarky and condescending attitudes of the liberals are driving away moderate Republicans. Where else do they have to go?

She wants to compare the current strife to the late 60s and early 70s, when every public discourse erupted into a fight about Vietnam, civil rights, or how long you could wear your hair. But her prime example goes all the way back to the Civil War years. That's scary.

Liberals are angry at themselves, too, that we didn't prevent this. We just took for granted that the intelligent liberal candidate would win. We didn't treat seriously those big rallies of Trump's. Yes, some of those people were unhinged but many more were just angry at the state of the nation. They turned out to vote on Nov. 8. I helped Dem voters get to the polling stations, visited many around Cheyenne, and long lines were the rule rather than the exception. They were Trump voters. Even worse, they were people who usually didn't vote but by God were going to vote for Trump this time. They were former Bill Clinton and Barack Obama voters who couldn't stomach a liberal woman lawyer in the White House after watching Fox News blather against Obama for eight years. Fuck you, they said to liberals. And now we're returning the fuck yous.

That's as far as my political punditry goes. The Republicans are going to dismantle everything that I care about: Corporation for Public Broadcasting, NPR, NEA, NEH, ACA, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, public transportation, clean air, clean water, public lands -- the list goes on and on. There's nothing to hinder this process but a few judges and possible outrage from the citizenry. But a lot of the citizenry love Trump's attacks on liberals and media. And we only have the satisfaction of our witty social media posts,

We will all be stuck in the coming Dark Ages together. Maybe then we can find common ground.

Is corporate America really our enemy?

I watched the entire Super Bowl, from its hope-filled opening to its bitter end. I saw an hour of the pre-game show but didn't watch the post-mortem, when Trump's boy, Tom Brady, celebrated in style. Or I assume that he did.

Funny how this football game became a forum to challenge #45. Big corporations paid big money to air their inclusive views on race, immigration, history. Budweiser told the story of its German immigrant founder, including a scene at the docks where nativist Know Nothings harass him and other "foreigners." 84 Lumber aired the story of a Latin American mother and her young daughter and their trek to the U.S., to reunite with the father. Unfortunately, the imagined Trump wall almost got in their way. Air B&B addressed intolerance by exhibiting the many faces of our neighbors. All of the ads featured Americans of varying colors and creeds and statuses. The America that exists now, not the fear-plagued, hateful nation summoned by Trump. Creative people imagined these ads, wrote them, shot them, acted in them, edited them. Creativity is one of our greatest strengths. It can reveal, in creative ways, the xenophobic ways of the fascist, who hates creativity and humor and the First Amendment.

At the end of last night's game, I wondered: Will it be the corporations that save us from Trump? You must be a huge entity to afford Super Bowl ads. To be a huge entity, you need to appeal to the largest possible audience. For years, Coke and Bud and McD's have featured a rainbow of talent in their commercials. Look at ads from your childhood in the 50s-70s. White people. Look at commercial TV now and you see America as it actually exists. We have African-Americans and Latinos, Somalis and Salvadorans. We have hearing-impaired people signing a language that it as foreign to most of us as Urdu. We have people in wheelchairs.

This apparently irritates Trump supporters, who tend to be rural and white. They look around their small town and see people like them. They watch cable TV and see a changed America, one that is foreign and scary. It's mainly urban and young. They go to Denver and Salt Lake City and Albuquerque and see this America in living color. It's intimidating. Almost like a foreign country.

Many of my city friends laugh when I say that I'm a city boy. I say I live in a capital city, the largest one in my state, one of only two Metropolitan Statistical Areas. If asked, I say that the population is 68,000, the size of some suburbs in their state. They think I'm funny.

Back to corporations. Many liberals see them as the enemy. They are trying to take over the world, make everybody live in a cookie-cutter world. They are the enemies of craft brewers and locavores and indie bands.

But corporations employ smart people and see what's going on. Corporate brewers buy up craft brewers and try to duplicate their appeal. Fast-food giants try to be like the mom-and-pop neighborhood bistro, offering artisan this and handmade that. They know things are changing. But we sneer at them, superior beings that we are. Meanwhile, they hire people of color who are dependable and smart. These companies understand that Trump's prejudices will kill their businesses.

Look around you. See who works at your favorite restaurant and coffee shop. Investigate their politics. See who they are connected to in public. You can hate Starbuck's if you want, but it is an open-minded company, one that challenges the Trumpsters. Buy a coffee there and one at your locally-owned coffee shop. Thing is, your local shop may be owned by rabid Republicans just following a proven business model. Maybe Starbuck's is more attuned to your beliefs.

Some wingnuts are calling for a Budweiser boycott. Last summer, Bud changed its flagship beer's name to "America." I didn't drink any America. I thought it was silly, and that only bikers and cowboys would fall for it. But now I will drink a Bud for every Fat Tire or 90 Shilling I drink. Not sure if my heart can take too many fast-food meals, but there must be something I can eat at Wendy's. It's important to support those companies who dared to challenge a despot on the biggest sporting event of the year

Wyoming Women's March and Potluck draws big crowd to downtown Cheyenne

Me: We had 5 million people in Cheyenne yesterday for the Wyoming Women's March.
Other person: No you you didn't.
Me: Yes we did.
Other person: Impossible. Only 65,000 people live in Cheyenne. The crowds would have stretched all the way to Chugwater. We have photos to prove you wrong.
Me: Photos, schmotos. If I say we had 5 million, we had 5 million. That's all you need to know in Trump's America.

OK, some 1,200 people attended Saturday's Women and Allies March on Wyoming. How do I know? I don't. I am relying on guesstimates from the Cheyenne Police Department and the U.S. Marshals Office. That number was repeated in this morning's Wyoming Tribune-Eagle which featured the march on the front page. At one point, I ventured that several thousand had attended. My proof? My own bias and buoyant enthusiasm at seeing such a large group of enthusiastic people gathered to protest Trumpism. So, I am as much a reliable source as Trump is reliable with estimates of attendance at his Jan. 20 inauguration.

No matter. The crowd exceeded expectations, and may have been the biggest ever to protest anything in The Magic City of the Plains. It was organized by a coalition of liberals that included the Laramie County Democrats, the Laramie County Democrats Grassroots Coalition and Wyoming Equality. Organizers were Sara Burlingame and Lori Brand. Speakers included Cathy Connolly, the first openly LGBT state rep, Rev. Rodger McDaniel, and a host of others from faith communities and activist organizations. Many, many people volunteered as parade marshals, cooks, servers and for anything else that needed doing.

I'm a member of the Grassroots org's fund-raising committee. As such, I was tasked with making chili and baking brownies. In my Crockpot was a big serving of Mike's NASty Man/Woman Beef and Bean Chili. The N-A-S in NASty is the abbreviation for No Added Salt, a battle cry of mine since salt helped bring down my heart a few years ago. Actually, I helped bring down my heart. Modern medicine, science, a refugee cardiologist, great nursing care, and my own hard work aided in the return of my heart. My mission, as a home gardener and a cook, is to make low sodium foods from scratch. It is almost impossible to find low sodium canned chili, one of my favorite remedies for Wyoming's long winters. So I make my own without salt and expect people to eat it.

They did. It was gone by the time I went through the serving line. 30 other Crockpots awaited my attention. Organizers don't know that so many hot dishes would show show up at Cheyenne's Historic Depot. We put out the word on social media and e-mails and even phone calls. The people responded with chilis, stews and soups. I would have liked to sample them all, the vegetarian minestrone. the white chicken chili. the vegetable soup. I sampled Sherryl's beef and sausage chili which featured salt but was oh so good (I had a small bowl). I ate my post-march meal with some friends from Fort Collins and some strangers from Laramie and Centennial.  A congenial group, impressed by the hospitality. I was impressed too, even though I was part of it. The warmth of the crowd had all the markings of a church social or grange hall potluck. You don't see many pussy hats or artistic uteruses at the grange hall. But you get my meaning. A group of like-minded people gather for an event, chat, eat well and then go on our way.

All the Crockpots and soup pots plugged into a limited number of outlets caused a short circuit. Latecomers to the food line had a limited selection of lukewarm dishes. But I heard no complaints. There was, after all, plenty of cookies and brownies. The homemade cupcakes were gone, as were Ray's Famous Chocolate Chip Cookies. You have to get there early for those.

What about the march itself? Were the speeches good? What else did you see? Were there any riots?

Short answers. I couldn't hear most of the speeches due to defective sound system. I ran into my one-time work colleague Katie and her four-month old baby and her handcrafted uterus sign. I also like the big banner unfurled by women from Laramie: "Wild Wombs of the West." No riots, although I did have to serve as bathroom monitor at the depot when the women staged an uprising at the long women's restroom line and marched over to the men's room looking for equal time. We graciously took turns.

Read today's WTE's story on the march here. Google "women's march" to get scads of stories about protests all over the globe, even in Park City, Utah, and Antarctica. And four other Wyoming locales: Casper, Lander, Pinedale and Cody.

See you next time.

Afterburn, a post-march transition meeting, will be held at 3 p.m on Sunday, Jan. 29, at the Laramie County Public Library in Cheyenne. More info at https://www.facebook.com/events/1630509583917589/

P.S.: If you came here looking for part two of "Learning to Breathe," I will post it tomorrow.

Writers, welcome to The Resistance

Denver's East Colfax Avenue has no "Cowboy Crossing" signs.

But I stopped anyway to let two cowboys cross in the middle of the street. It was growing dark, snow spat from the Colorado sky. As the two cowboys in black hats sprinted across the street, one limped along and one waved his thanks.

I returned the wave and motored to my destination. It's Stock Show time in Denver. Cowboys from Hugo in Colorado and Greybull in Wyoming swarmed the town. By day, they rodeoed and exhibited prize bulls and spectated. At night, they hunted down good eats on Colfax.

Cowboy: Where can I find a good restaurant?
Denver person: Try Colfax. But beware of the hipsters.
Cowboy: What's a hipster?
Denver person: You'll see.

I saw a few hipsters at the Writers Resist reading at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop just off of Colfax on Race Street. No cowboys, though, at least none wearing cowboy hats. As one of the readers pointed out, it was good to see all of us introverts out and about on a winter Sunday night.

Some in the 100-plus crowd in the basement grotto were writers. Some were not. We attended because we objected to what was happening in our country during the third week on January 2017. A demagogue was getting sworn in an president. We never dreamed we would see this day. Maybe that was part of the problem. We never dreamed, as Martin Luther King, Jr., did. We complained. We wrote. We blogged. Many of us, but not all, voted. Somehow we didn't work hard enough to keep a guy like Trump from being president.

Writers Resist was formed after the election by writer Erin Belieu who teaches in the M.F.A. program at Florida State University. I am a product of an M.F.A. writing program (Colorado State University) and have a weakness for MFAers, especially when they are social activists. Writers tend to be liberals. So do Liberal Arts academics. Maybe that's why the wingnuts hate us so much and want to send us all to re-education camps. We are products of a liberal education system, in my case, a series of community colleges and land-grant universities most of which feature football teams subsidized by citrus barons (my Florida Gators) or by robber barons such as the Koch Brothers. If you look at a list of alumni of any land-grant university, and you see names of military leaders and corporate CEOs and Republican politicians, you might be tempted to wonder why universities aren't hotbeds of rabid wingnuts instead of breeding grounds for social activists. As it turns out, most campuses include righties and lefties and people who don't give a shit. College students voted for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and anyone else who managed to get on the ballot. You can just as easily blame Trump on the Sigma Nu at CU as you can the laid-off factory worker in Wisconsin.

I digress. Writers Resist in Denver was one of more than 100 similar events happening all over the world. I was in Denver because I was taking my daughter Annie to some medical appointments. I'm retired so I have the time and inclination to do these things. I drag my kids to these events, just as the young Hispanic couple who sat in front of us did last night. Two young parents, two well-behaved children. An all-American family.

The writers were a diverse bunch. Teow Lim Goh read from her first book of poems, Islanders, from Conundrum Press. I listened to her poems and they spoke to me. Not because I am Chinese but because I also come from immigrants. They also had to go through an island -- Ellis Island -- to be admitted to this country. In the case of the Chinese, it was Angel Island in San Francisco Bay. Chinese immigrants faced additional barriers that my Irish forebears did not -- color and language (some Irish spoke Gaelic). The writer addresses this issue in the poem "Daydreams." In it, a white bureaucrat walks to work every day "past a sea of yellow faces,/their worries creased into their brows." At work, he looks at immigrant files, "the tales inside just words to him." Yet, as he looks at the photograph of a potential Chinese immigrant, this happens:

In her eyes he sees his mother
fleeing a homeland plagued by famine,
huddled on Ellis Island.

That hurts. Irish-Americans worked hard to assimilate. The first generation born in the U.S., such as my own mother, spoke English like a native and, with her all-American good looks, rarely ever was called a dirty Mick or a redneck Catholic, all terms Denver Nativists flung at Irish-Catholics. Even though my family name was changed from O'Shea to Shay either at Ellis Island or in my great-great-grandfather's attempt to fit in, we Shays eventually blended in and could become suburban Republicans who look on people of color as "the other," people to be feared and possibly banished.

Why I love poetry, good writing of all kinds. It makes me think and feel. I can become the other. If that is true, can I imagine myself as the other, that guy driving the big black pick-up with the Trump bumper sticker I followed today down the snowy interstate? I hope I can. Our future as a nation may depend on that.

Meanwhile, the writers stood up and read at Writers Resist. David J. Daniels wrote about growing up gay. His book, Clean, is published by Four Way Books. Emily Perez read a long poem, "My Father Quotes Jaime Escalante," from her book Backyard Migration Route. Khadijah Queen read June Jordan's "Poem About My Rights." and a poem about sexual harassment from her new book, I'm So Fine: A List of Famous Men &and What I Had On. Army combat veteran Seth Brady Tucker read a selection from Claudia Rankine's Citizen and a short piece about his struggle, as a soldier, to take a college course that meant he could become the "educated other" in his unit. Alejandra Garza wrapped up the night with a presentation about her organization, the Colorado ACLU, and why it is important for these times.

Annie and I each bought a book and had it signed by the authors. We drove home on the lookout for cowboys, but saw none crossing the road in the dark city night.

To contribute or volunteer for the Colorado ACLU, go to http://aclu-co.org
To contribute or volunteer for the Wyoming ACLU, go to https://www.aclu-wy.org

Past and present meet in my old Aurora neighborhood

Last week, I stood on the disappeared foundation of my old house in Aurora's Hoffman Heights. I thought about the past but gazed out upon the future.

First, the past. I was a pre-schooler when my father bought his first house in 1954 for $8,000 with no money down and a low interest rate. Like thousands of other World War II vets, he received benefits from his grateful government. He was a college grad, thanks to the G.I. Bill. My dad had a job as Denver's businesses boomed, thanks to an influx of GIs who trained in Colorado and had discovered its possibilities.

Hoffman Heights was one of Denver's first suburbs. First called Hoffman Town, after developer Sam Hoffman, it consisted of 1,700 houses on 44 acres between Colfax and Sixth avenues. Many Baby Boomers were born in the neighborhood, flooding into new schools such as Vaughn Elementary, which is still there and looking much as it did when I started kindergarten in 1956. In September 1955, residents were excited because the President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, recuperated from a major heart attack at Fitzsimons Army Hospital across Colfax from the neighborhood. You could walk out on your front lawn, if grass seed had sprouted during your first summer, and see the lights of Room 8002. The president was in the house! The supreme allied commander who had led us to victory over the Nazis and now was whipping up on the commies. You had a job, a house, a car, and a growing family. Your neighbors were white like you with similar backgrounds. There were exceptions. The guy next door was kind of a redneck. He kept rabbits in a backyard hutch and slaughtered them while children watched in horror. We shared a fence with the mother of Jane Russell, the Hollywood star. My mother's hospital co-worker, Jeep from Alabama (I swear that was her name) didn't come over any more because my mother insisted on being civil to the black nurse who recently joined the staff. There was a "funny" kid in the neighborhood, an older kid who our parents didn't want us to play with. He insisted on hanging with us little kids, which made him more creepy than funny.

Memory is an odd thing. Only some parts of this may be true/. My memory center is aging and isn't what it used to be. My parents are both gone. My brother Dan is gone. My sister Molly doesn't remember much, as she was a baby during most of the years we lived on Worchester. The Internet helps me look up old stories about the neighborhood. But there is no section in Cyberspace called "Mike's Memories." I'm on my own.

What can I say about growing up the 1950s suburbs in Middle America? I felt safe and loved. I walked to school with a zillion other kids. I walked the neighborhood with the same kids on Halloween. We collected candy and the parents collected cocktails and were pretty looped by the time we all got home. Nobody thought of taking X-rays of the collected candy. Christmas brought coonskin caps and hula hoops. Summer brought games of tag and kick the can.

Memories are similar for millions of American Baby Boomers. I am retired, alas, and many conversations I have with fellow Boomers at the YMCA or the coffee shop, harken back to those halcyon days. They are mostly white, too, as Wyoming is overwhelmingly Caucasian and conservative. Many of them voted for Donald Trump in an attempt to "Make America Great Again."  What they wish for is a return to the reality that exists only in their flawed memories.

Cut to the present in Aurora. Some of the houses, including mine, and old strip malls have been leveled for hotels, such as the Hyatt Regency Conference Center and Springhill Suites at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.. The latter is the one we stay in when visiting our daughter, who lives in an adjacent neighborhood. Across six-lane Colfax is the medical campus, which employs 21,000 people. It is home to one of the country's premier children's hospitals, the CU Medical Center, and a number of research facilities. Located in their midst is the old Fitzsimons Army Hospital, now the complex's administration building. At night, you can look to the east and see the lights of a new RTD light rail stop that spans Colfax and is adjacent to I-225. Also to the east, on the fringe of the old neighborhood, rises the skeleton of a brand new condo complex that features an interior parking garage. Nearby brick apartment complexes, other relics from the 50s and 60s, now bill themselves as "apartment homes" and advertise "move-in specials." Houses in the old neighborhood are again selling, a relief to the old-timers who thought that they never would sell their houses in this now-seedy enclave. The city of Aurora even offers grants for fix-up and clean-up projects in the neighborhood, getting it ready for future resident who may even be hospital residents or physicians or nurses or researchers. They come from all over the world, so the new neighborhood will also be a mix of Kenyans, and Syrians and Chinese and Brazilians. The multi-ethnic mix that makes up any American city.

Aurora is not Denver, where only 18 percent of residents voted for Trump. Aurora is more suburban and conservative, but still part of the Denver metroplex, which is blue, and Colorado, also blue. As a state, it will be an outpost for resistance to Trump's extremist agenda. It will be a battle in a state known for its legal marijuana and craft beers but also for its Sagebrush Rebellion and long-time distrust of big government.

Wyoming is what Colorado was. Some Denverites have had enough and are moving to Laramie and Cheyenne. Or even north along the I-25 corridor to Loveland, Greeley and Fort Collins. Cheyenne is growing. Many Wyomingites refer to it as "north Denver," consider it way too liberal for The Cowboy State. Our county will soon be home to 1000,000 people, about one in every six Wyoming residents. The legislature meets annually in Cheyenne. Legislators are here now, crafting regressive bills that embarrasses us progressives and makes our fellow Dems in Denver shake their heads.

A rural Republican from Baggs, Sen. Larry Hicks, offers SJR 4 which would roll back equal protections for people based on "their race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin." You could call this resolution "Make Wyoming White Again" which, of course, it already is. But just across the border in Colorado, swarthy liberals wait to snatch your state job or your entrance slot to the University of Wyoming Law School. This effectively closes the border to all of those well-educated ethnic minorities who energize Colorado's economy. Hicks and his Know Nothings' co-sponsors also want (in SF 71) to "penalize electricity providers if they continue to sell power to consumers that is generated by wind or solar energy in Wyoming," according to a staff editorial in this morning's Wyoming Tribune Eagle. It goes on: "To suggest charging utilities...a penalty for using renewable energy where the sun shines more than 300 days a year and the wind blows constantly is just insane." Yes it is. My subtitle for this bill: "Make Coal Great Again."

Monday, of course, is Martin Luther King, Jr., Day. It is a national holiday. Wyoming must not be part of the nation as the legislature insists on working this day while it recesses for Presidents Day on Feb. 20. This not surprising in an august body that turned down Sen. Liz Byrd's bill to recognize the MLK holiday eight time before finally caving in, but only if "Wyoming Equality Day" was added to the title. Even then, our rural legislators were concerned about hordes of ethnic minorities streaming across the border and claiming seats in the Capitol that properly belonged to white folks.

Other rural Repubs are offering bills to allow people to carry guns everywhere, even into college classrooms and sporting events. It would allow guns into all government meetings including those of the legislature. Rep. Biteman of Ranchester is point man on these efforts. I suppose he will be the first one to carry a sidearm into a legislative committee meeting next year, as these people never seem to be voted out of office.

I am used to reporting on the nutty things that Republicans do in our one-party state. You can read some of my earlier columns by going here and here. Now I have to keep up with happenings on the national scene with the dawn of Trumplandia. This story is from the New York Daily News:

A conservative Arizona lawmaker, Rep. Bob Thorpe, is proposing a far-reaching law in Arizona, House Bill 2120, banning virtually every college event, activity or course which discusses social justice, skin privilege, or racial equality. Violating the law would allow the state of Arizona to levy multimillion-dollar fines and penalties against universities. 

A few years ago, Arizona enacted a law that eliminated ethnic studies courses. I blogged about that here. And now this

Just the beginning, folks.

Readers can still find an epiphany in this post-truth world

Remember the impact of The Matrix when it debuted in 1999? The "Matrix" was the false reality created by machines. Humans lived in this manufactured reality. The scary truth is that humans lived in pods where their bodily fluids and brain waves were farmed as power sources by the machines. Neo (Keanu Reeves) suspects there is something wrong in this world. He gets the lowdown when he joins with Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) and other rebels to upset the status quo.

The film boasted a cool cast and neat-o special effects. But its core was an old theme: Things are not what they seem. People are not whom they seem to be. In Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train  Shadow of a Doubt , Charlie is not the kindly uncle that his niece Charley thinks he is. In Chinatown, detective Jake Gittes finds out once again that things are not what they seem in Chinatown or San Pedro or anywhere else.

A well-worn theme. As in our recent presidential election, things are not what they seem. This liberal voter thought that his country of birth was a rational place that would elect the experienced person. As I told my sister Molly, who works in Italy, there was no way that Trump would be elected. Molly was telling me that Italians thought that Trump was a buffoon, an idiot, a flim-flam man. He was -- and is. But somehow, enough voters bought the act to make him president. They bought the fact that Trump was Professor Harold Hill and not, well, Donald Trump. Does that make them stupid, gullible or hopeful?

I have read many columns explaining the 2016 elections. The best are thoughtful examinations of the national psyche. They come from reputable sources such as the New York Times, The Atlantic, Los Angeles Times, Salon. The gap between Republicans and Democrats is unbridgeable. It was a battle between urban liberals and rural conservatives and the latter won. The working classes hate privileged liberals such as Obama and Clinton, even when they come from (as Obama did) modest roots. Sen. Bernie Sanders contends that the Democrats sold out to the moneyed elites and forgot the middle class, even though many middle class voters in Rust Belt states voted for a member of New York City's moneyed elite. Go figure.

Although our new president doesn't read, I do. I guess I will keep reading until this all makes sense. Or not. I am a bit tired of reading critiques of the election. Most of my reading from this point on will be in fiction and poetry. Today is the feast of Epiphany, or as we called it in Catholic school, that day we get off after Christmas vacation. I learned in religion class that epiphany means "revelation." This according to the Fish Eaters blog:

As described on the page on Twelfthnight, this Feast -- also known as the . "Theophany" or "Three Kings Day" -- recalls Christ revealing Himself as Divine in three different ways: to the Magi, at His Baptism, and with His miracle at the wedding feast at Cana.

I learned today on Writer's Almanac that Epiphany also figures heavily in a James Joyce story:

James Joyce’s famous short story “The Dead” is set at a party for the Feast of the Epiphany. The story ends: “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” Joyce also gave us a secular meaning of “epiphany,” using the word to mean the “revelation of the whatness of a thing,” the moment when “the soul of the commonest object [...] seems to us radiant."

I just finished Colson Whitehead's radiant novel The Underground Railroad. An incredible book. Does it help me understand the state of the U.S. in 2017? Our country's history is complicated, much more complicated than Lynne Cheney or Bill O'Reilly would have us believe. U.S. history is messy. Brutish and transcendent. The Underground Railroad pulls no punches when it comes to slavery's realities. But Whitehead adds some magical-realism elements that makes it much more than an anti-slavery screed. I can't give away the ending. That wouldn't be fair to millions of people who have yet to discover the book. Here is one tiny clue. The author is also interested in Manifest Destiny. Important to all Americans but especially to those who live in the Rocky Mountain West. Manifest Destiny leads us right to Wounded Knee and Little Bighorn and broken treaties and North Dakota's Standing Rock protests. Current events. And the timeliness of great fiction.

And poetry? More about that in my next post.

Which side are you on, boys?

I admired Len Edgerly's column Tuesday on Medium: "Dalton Trumbo: 'It will do you no good to search for heroes and villains.' " It's notable in its restraint, a parable for our times. It's about screenwriter Dalton Trumbo and the 2015 film that portrays his run-in with the Hollywood Blacklist of the 1950s. Len is a fine writer and someone I worked with in the arts for many years in Wyoming. His post includes excerpts from a speech Trumbo delivered in 1970 that looked back upon the blacklist era. It's notable that he delivered this speech during another time when young men were once again trying to sort heroes from villains.

The blacklist was a time of evil. And no one who survived it came through untouched by evil. Caught in a situation that had passed beyond control of mere individuals, each person reacted as his nature, his needs, his convictions, and his particular circumstances compelled him to. 

It was a time of fear. And no one was exempt. Scores of people lost their homes. Their families disintegrated. They lost — and in some, some even lost their lives. 

But when you look back upon that dark time, as I think you should every now and then, it will do you no good to search for heroes or villains. There weren’t any. There were only victims. Victims, because each of us felt compelled to say or do things that we otherwise would not, to deliver or receive wounds which we truly did not wish to exchange. 

I look out to my family sitting there, and I realize what I’ve put them through. And it’s unfair. My wife, who somehow kept it all together, amazes me. And so what I say here tonight is not intended to be hurtful to anyone. It is intended to heal the hurt, to repair the wounds which for years have been inflicted upon each other and most egregiously upon ourselves.

I know a few things about Trumbo. He was born in Montrose, Colorado, grew up in Grand Junction, and went to school for two years at CU-Boulder where the "free speech fountain" is named after him. That namesake fountain sometimes inflames the passions of CU conservatives and, yes, conservatives are allowed into Boulder just as liberals are allowed to dwell in Cheyenne. For now, anyway.

Trumbo was a commie or at least a fellow traveler. Those terms were used to brand liberals or progressives during the Cold War. Baby Boomers know the sting of those labels. Most people didn't lose careers after being publicly branded a communist, as did Trumbo. He resurrected his career by using aliases, even earned two Academy Awards, one using a fake name and one using a "front." When he openly won scriptwriting Oscars for Spartacus and Exodus in 1960, the blacklist was officially over.

But he paid a price. Was he a hero? Maybe not. Hero, of course, is used indiscriminately these days and has lost its meaning. Ditto for villains. I volunteer for Cheyenne's Old-Fashioned Summer Melodrama. The plot is a fiction wherein the hero rides to the rescue and rescues the damsel in distress who has been tied to the railroad tracks by the mustachioed villain in the black cape. We cheer for the hero and boo the villain.

Were it only that simple.

Len and I and many others were college freshman in 1969 trying to sort friend from foe. My U.S. Navy ROTC commandant at the University of South Carolina was a Marine colonel whose son had been killed in Vietnam. He told me that the Viet Cong were the bad guys which was why us -- the good guys -- had to fight and possibly die in the jungles of Southeast Asia. President Nixon, my future commander-in-chief, said the same thing. So did the members of the "best and brightest" brain trust who designed the foolproof Vietnam War strategy. Many of them were Harvard grads.

The SDS, at Harvard and on my campus, said that the U.S. was waging an immoral and unjust war and soldiers were baby killers. Some young women on campus thought that we midshipmen looked dashing in our uniforms. Others would not give us the time of day. Some campus longhairs spurned us buzzcut guys. Others were happy to share a joint with us, even friendship.

Most of us felt we had to choose sides. That was difficult if you planned a military career. Your military leader said do this and you did it. Our civilian leaders said do this and you should do it but was it the right thing? Our fathers were all World War II veterans, guys that had saved us from the Nazis. These guys were our heroes. Wasn't it our turn next?

"Which side are you on?" That's a famous union organizing song by Florence Reece, wife of union organizer Sam Reece. The chorus asks a key question, one that many of us have been asked over the years. We may be asked again, here in 2017:

"Which side are you on boys?
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on, boys?
Which side are you on?"

If you were organizing for the union in 1931 in Harlan County, Kentucky, whose side would you be in? When mine owners sent the sheriff to arrest Sam Reece, he fled to the hills. Union organizers sometimes ended up dead in mysterious circumstances. Who were the good guys then? Many musicians have sung "Which Side Are You On?", including Pete Seeger and Billy Bragg. This rousing song urged audience to take a side, whether it was during a union battle, the civil rights struggle or the Vietnam War. Or now.

In his column, Len writes that his father sat him down and told him that he would cease to pay for college if his son became one of those campus protesters. My father, formerly a Democrat, had become a "Southern Strategy" Nixon man in 1968. That year, my father sat me down and informed me that he had lots of kids to feed (nine including me) and that I would have to figure out my own way to get to college. He urged me to go to Annapolis or get an ROTC scholarship to the university of my choice. Become an officer, said this former Army dogface, sail the ocean blue and stay far away from Vietnam.

I was only an alternate for the U.S. Naval Academy but my book smarts helped me land an ROTC scholarship. In January of 1971, the government took away my scholarship for some bad choices I had made. I could say I was the victim but that's not true. Several cultural waves broke over me and I got swept up in the currents. As a surfer, I should have known the dangers. Losing my scholarship would have forced me to drop out and instantly be eligible for the draft. My father, who'd just lost his job, borrowed a semester's worth of tuition from his parents. "No son of mine is going to Vietnam," he said.

I chose a side. My father chose a side. We all do. Even not choosing a side is making a choice.

Many years from now, someone might ask this grizzled old guy: Who were the good guys and bad guys during the chaos created by a Donald Trump presidency? My answer may be this: "It will do you no good to search for heroes and villains."

The questioner might persist: Which side were you on? Did you choose?

I chose.