...Continued from yesterday:
So last week The Columbus Dispatch revealed a passle of mean racist, misogynistic, homophobic tweets posted by Gahanna mayoral candidate Joseph Gergley. Since then Columbus news station 10tv has uncovered more of the same posted by Gergley on Facebook. In 2009 Gergley posted: "Michael Jackson was white, Jamie Foxx you are a racist (gay slur that starts with "f")!!" In December of 2009: "Merry Christmas everyone. Everyone be careful. The Obama lovers are out looking to play Grinch and jack your stuff.” In February 2007: "Go Bears, beat the (gay slur that starts with "f") Colts." In 2007: "It might sound politically incorrect but it’s the truth, just like police who target blacks. Blacks commit a lot bigger percentage of crimes then (sic) whites even though they're (sic) population is a lot smaller." In a weak post-busted defense of himself which he posted on his Facebook page Gergley said: "...many of you know me and know these social media posts don’t at all represent who I am...." But of course these social media posts do indeed represent who Joseph Gergley is. That's what social media posts do. They represent who you are. They represent that Joseph Gergley, for example, is someone who's been thinking up demeaning things to say about women, gays, and minorities and passing them off as jokes, by his own account and by the account of the evidence, since back when he was in high school and college and through his mid-twenties. He's 26 now and has spent at least the past 8 years, the formative college and young adult years, embracing the kind of thinking exhibited in those Twitter and Facebook posts. Which makes one wonder if perhaps Mr. Gergley neglected to delete all those offensive posts because he thought it was all right to let the world know that this is the way he thinks. Maybe in the circle he lived and traveled in people found his nasty jokes and slurs funny and witty and rewarded him with the positive reinforcement of social acceptance and popularity. Maybe nobody ever called him out for those mean posts. But they are now. Maybe posting on social media is like social drinking. Done responsibly and considerately , it's a pleasant activity among friends that enhances our enjoyment of life. But media posting, like drinking, can bring out the worst in some people, bring out the side they'd rather people didn't know about but can't stop themselves from revealing while under it's influence. And, done recklessly and to excess, can wreak havoc on a person's life and plans. Maybe the new slogan should be friends don't let friends post irresponsibly. Maybe back when he was in college a real friend would have let Joe Gergley know that those tweets and Facebook posts weren't cool. Maybe a caring relative could have taken him aside and shown him the error of his thinking. Unless everyone whose voice he's ever heard agrees with or at least isn't offended by his thinking. I'd venture to say the mind-set Joseph Gergley revealed while under the influence of social media will sabotage him politically in a place like Gahanna, Ohio. We're small but we're a diverse community. I'd also venture to say that the brief perfunctory apology for his offensive posts that Mr. Gergley offered on his Facebook page hasn't changed his thinking about women, blacks, and gays even though it's a pretty good bet he'll stop posting what he thinks on social media. What Joseph Gergley really needs to do change his environment, move out of his parents' home and start having different life experiences or else if he lives to be 100 years old he'll still be living inside that twenty-something-year-old brain that produced the thinking he imprudently shared on social media.
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In response to last Saturday's post my friend Marianne commented: HUYA could be awarded closer to home. Too few Gahanna folks voted and of those, 1/3 voted for a 26 year old who has some pretty bigoted tweets. If his candidacy continues, our city will get a HUYA. Alas, my friend speaks true, and she is referring to the fact that for the past four days our town of Gahanna, Ohio, has been all a-twitter over a certain tweeter whose indiscreet tweets have thrown a ripe anchovy into the gears of Gahanna's upcoming mayoral election. Anyway, last Tuesday was Gahanna's mayoral primary election. Of the five candidates who ran, the top two vote-getters are now scheduled to run against each other in November. ...who ran on the platform that he would fight the failed liberal policies of the past. Now, for the past 30 years that I've lived in Gahanna all our mayors have been moderate to conservative Republicans, but never mind. Joseph Gergley promised to shake up the status quo, and sure enough, by the day after the election there was a whole lotta shaking going on when some anonymous source sent The Columbus Dispatch 1,100 tweets gleaned from Gergley’s campaign twitter account. The source of the problem this created for Gergley was two-pronged: 1. Instead of creating a new account for his campaign Gergley apparently just stacked his campaign account on top of his personal account, and 2. There were some right-down nasty tweets posted by Joseph Gergley lurking deep in his personal account. Here are some of Gergley’s tweets shared by The Dispatch and a local news station: From 2014: "The Easton Walmart might as well be Ferguson.” ( N.B.: Easton Walmart is the local Walmart for Gahanna folks). From 2012: "Why are Sesame Street characters all of a sudden speaking ebonics? Did I miss something?" From 2012: "The hungover girls on college campuses who go to Planned Parenthood are really just getting their breasts examined. Thank God for Komen!" From 2012: "If you support Obamacare, I urge you to go to a DMV or a courthouse and remember...These people will be in charge of your health care." From 2011: "Having drag queens play softball in a family park during pride weekend isn't the best way to get people to stop saying, 'that's so gay'." From 2011: "If I saw Kurt from ‘Glee’ in real life, I would bully him and tell him ‘It gets worse...’" (The character of Kurt is gay). So in the course of his tweet-fest mayoral candidate Gergley managed to offend blacks, women, gays, transgender people, people who work for the courts or the DMV, people who’ve been victims of bullying, me, and anyone I’d care to sit down and have lunch with. Quite an accomplishment for a 26-year-old on his maiden voyage into the roiling sea of politics. Of course, as was to be expected, Mr. Gergley excused his offensive tweets as flights of youthful indiscretion back when he was a green lad of five and twenty. He also stated in his defense that the tweets were taken out of context (what context, one wonders) and were "completely irrelevant to the dire issues facing Gahanna". Ah yes, the dire issues facing Gahanna. Last Thursday evening I went for walk around downtown Gahanna to seek out these dire issues. Alas, this was all I could see: Then the next morning Tom and I took another foray into the heart of Gahanna in search of the dire issues, I do know, though, from perusing Joseph Gergley’s campaign Facebook page that he is in fact direly concerned about the construction of apartment buildings presently going on in our town, Gergley promises that if elected mayor he will fight to stop the construction of apartment buildings in Gahanna. To which I respond, good luck with that, youngster. And that's what's going on in Gahanna as we speak, except for one more thing. My friend's dire warning for Gahanna has already come home to roost: Texas, hand it over: Gahanna, Ohio has just been named this week's recipient of the National HUYA Award. (See post from 5/9/15). Now, Gahanna did not win the HUYA Award because one-third of the few people who cared enough to vote in our mayoral primary cast their votes for The Indiscreet Tweeter. None of us knew about those tweets at the time (but the internet is finally good for something, right?), and even if we had known, well, it's everybody's right to vote for whomever they wish. No, Gahanna has earned the HUYA Award because, of the 24, 824 people in our town over the age of 18, only 3,746 of us bothered to vote. So only one-eighth of our fair city's population gives a tinker's hoot who our mayor is. Gahanna, that's HUYA lame. But we all get another chance in November to choose our mayor. So people, VOTE! And if this time Joseph Gergley gets the most votes, we'll, he'll be the mayor we deserve. Yesterday I called my almost 95-year-old mother, ...to wish her a happy Mother's Day. I apologized that her card didn't arrive on time - because I was tardy getting it to the post office - but my mom just blew it off, chuckling that she'd been late getting my Mother's Day card in the mail, too, then she ran off a litany of all the church work, social activities, shopping, housekeeping, and everything else that keep her "behind the 8-ball", one of my mother's stock expressions, meaning too busy to get everything done that needs to be done. And so I was off the hook for giving my 95-year-old mother nothing more for Mother's Day than a phone call and a late card. As I knew I would be. Because my mother's always been that way. Whatever strict standards of respect and behavior she might have held us to when we were young, those standards did not require us doing special things for her on special occasions. That sort of thing never seemed important to her. And this isn't because my mother is a hard or unfeeling person. Quite the contrary, she's always been the kindest soul with the softest heart. Of course, she could lay a guilt trip on her children with the best of them when it came to matters of our actions and morals. But never over undelivered tokens of our love and appreciation. Words were always plenty for her. "A kind and loving word is like water on a parched flower," she used to say. She practiced ego-free mothering. Inspired by own mother, I've come to the conclusion that every woman who has children ends up being two kinds of mother: the kind of mother she is when her children are young and the kind of mother she is when her children are adults with families, concerns, and obligations of their own. The kind of mother she was when I was young aside, when I reached adulthood my mother was the kind of mother who, when I got married, though she would have chosen otherwise, graciously gave into my wishes The first Christmas after I was married and had to deal with trying to figure out how to divide the holiday between two sets of relatives 500 miles apart, my mother gave me the priceless gift of telling Tom and I not to worry about getting out to be with her at Christmas. "I know how hard it can be over the holidays," she said, "So go where you have to go, be where you have to be, do whatever you have to do to make the Christmas easier on yourselves. Then come out and see me whenever you can."
My mother never played the Mother Card to claim wedding days, holidays, or any day, really, for herself. She was the mother who gave in. The mother who let it go. She's the mother I advise my friends to be when their adult children fail to accommodate their wishes or acknowledge their feelings. She's the mother I'm trying to be. Now I’m not saying that Texans as whole are any goofier than Ohioans or any other Americans as a whole. We all of us have our goofy moments.
But recently there has been a such a great public manifestation of goofiness in the state of Texas that for this week Texas is official recipient of the national HUYA Award. Which is what, you ask? Well, about 40-some years ago when I was a Department Of The Army civilian working on the American Army post in Babenhausen, Germany, every Friday evening after work the officers and often their wives would attend the happy hour at the post Officer’s and Civilians Club. For the officers of the 2nd Battalion, 5th Field Artillery, the unit to which I was connected logistically and socially, the Friday evening happy hour at The Club was pretty much mandatory. Of course for me, being a civilian, the happy hour wasn’t mandatory but I used to go anyway just for the fun. The fun (or at least I thought it was fun at the time; nowadays, having since then myself suffered manys the sling and arrow of outrageous fortune, I might find it less so), which was also the reason the happy hour was mandatory, was the weekly presentation of the HUYA Award. HUYA stood for Head Up Your…um…(you can figure it out, right?) and the award was a framed drawing of a figure performing the anatomical feat described by the award’s title. The HUYA Award was presented each week to the officer, usually some young lieutenant, who committed the biggest goof-up during the previous week. The battalion commander would announce who the award was going to and why, at which point the previous week’s HUYA winner would with much relief hand the award over to the coming week’s winner, who would be required to display the award in his office all week. Harsh treatment, perhaps, but it was all in good army-style fun (Lieutenant Tom Liszkay even received the HUYA once or twice in his career) and perhaps served a few more purposes as well: 1. To teach officers to be more careful about making dumb mistakes, 2. To toughen up young officers to criticism, and 3. To remind officers that they're not the only ones who sometimes make dumb moves. Anyway, with events transpiring as they've been lately, it was high time for the HUYA Award to be resurrected. And this week the HUYA had to go indubitably to Texas. Now, the Garland Texas Mohammed cartoon contest, ridiculous and mean-spirited as it was, ugly as it ended, would not have been sufficient to put the state in the running for the award; after all that was the work of a hand full of nasties and the two crazys who chomped on the bait offered by the nasties. And even the next Theater of the Absurd performance acted out in Texas a few days later wouldn't have been enough. I'm referring now to the paranoia-obsessed crowds of Texans who came out of the woodwork over the Army training exercise being conducted in parts of their state, crying out the alarm to every Lone Star State village and farm that the exercise is not an exercise but is in fact, "part of a secret plan to impose martial law, take away people’s guns, arrest political undesirables, launch an Obama-led hostile takeover of red-state Texas, or do some combination thereof" (1). HUYA-worthy goofiness indeed, but again, the goofiness of only a few who hardly can be said to speak for all the citizens of a whole state. No, what really snagged the award for the state was the behavior of Texas Governor Greg Abbott in response to the uproar over the exercises. Governor Abbott, after having given his approval for the use of his state for the exercises and having even been in on the planning of the exercises himself with the Pentagon, did an about face and gave legitimacy to the conspiracy-theorists and fear-mongers by deploying the Texas National Guard to watch over the exercises to make sure the U.S. Army doesn't try to take over Texas for Obama. (By the way, Governor Abbott, if you really don't want that huge military exercise going on in your state, how about if you tell the Pentagon to just send all those troops to Ohio. We have plenty of open land and our state could really use the income that will be generated by the presence of all those troops during the exercise). Anyway, Greg Abbot is the individual who was elected by Texans to be their governor, and as such when he speaks he speaks for all of Texas. And so congratulations, Texas, your governor has won you the HUYA award. At least for this week. (1). "Military Exercise Stirs Conspiracy Theory", Manny Fernandez, The New York Times, May 7, 2015. The other day at the Y on my way out of yoga class I met up with one of the members of the Panera Posse who takes the same class. I asked her what her plans for the day were and she said that first on her agenda was dusting the the leaves of the umbrella plant sitting in a corner of the the lobby of the Y. In truth I'd never paid any attention to that plant but my friend, a plant person at heart, did and she'd noticed that lately the plant had been looking a bit droopy. Upon closer inspection she saw that the plant's leaves were covered with a thick coat of dust. "Two years' worth," she said, showing me the plant's leaves which were, I had to admit, filthy. "Plants take in air through their leaves and this one can barely breath for all the dust." So my friend was intending to wet-wipe each of the plant's small leaves so that it would be able to breath again. "I'll wipe down the leaves and, you'll see, it'll perk right back up." I pointed out to my friend that there were hundreds of leaves on that plant and that cleaning each one would take her forever. But she was undaunted as she headed to the bathroom to get some wet paper towels for the job. "All right," I called after her, "get a couple of towels for me, too." So the two of us set to work wet-wiping down each dusty little leaf. After we'd been working for a few minutes an elderly gent on his way out of the Y stopped to see what we were doing. My friend explained how we were cleaning the plant's leaves to help it to breath. The man studied the leaves a moment then commented that the plant reminded him of the trees he'd seen on a trip to Hawaii. While he recounted the details of his happy vacation another older man stopped by to see what of interest was going on in this corner. "We're dusting the plant," I said. "What, is this an artificial plant?" The man asked. My friend explained about the dust and the plant's breathing. "You work here?" He asked. No, we told him, we just cared about the plant. Soon after he'd moved on a lady came by and asked what we were doing with the plant. "Plants take in air through their leaves and this one's leaves are so covered with dust that it can't breath," I, by now an expert on plant pulmonology, explained. "Oh dear," said the lady, "can I have one of those paper towels, too?" Now we were three. And a few minutes later, four. By now were were an item of major interest and almost everyone who passed by stopped to see what we were doing.
Many people learned that day that plants breath through their leaves and that a dust-covered plant is a plant in distress. Finally the desk receptionist came over. When we explained to her what we were doing a look of concern came to her face. "Oh dear, we've got two plants in the office that are just as dusty." But our work was done for then. We weren't able to rescue every plant in the Y that day. But we rescued that one. "Others of them were detestable hypocrites, making their pretenses to holiness a cloak for iniquity." From Matthew Henry's Concise Commentary on Matthew 3:7-12
It's true that the next presidential election is still a year-and-a-half away and new candidates are jumping into the race daily, but I've already decided who I'll vote for. Anyway, on that Sunday morning our Pastor, Kai Nilsen, was preaching on the Gospel story of the conversation about water between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4: 5-15). Pastor Kai explained how at the time of Jesus there was great ingrained animosity between Judeans and Samaritans that went back centuries, and in order to illustrate the earth-shaking significance of Jesus, a Judean, engaging in conversation with a Samaritan our pastor said, "It would be like Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton having lunch together." The congregation laughed, but in my mind I pictured Cruz and Clinton sitting across from each other in a nice restaurant, chatting pleasantly, chuckling over some little joke, sharing insights and ideas from their personal and professional experiences. And that's when the thought hit me like a bolt from the blue: If Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz would sit down and ate lunch together I'd vote for either of them! And I decided right then and there that I'm voting for the person who's first and foremost agenda will be not peace in the Middle East, immigration reform, or the economy, but getting Democrats and Republicans on the Hill to sit down and eat lunch with each other on a regular basis. I'll vote for the person who can make John Boehner sit down and eat with Nancy Peolosi, make Mitch McConnell sit down and eat with Harry Reid, and can make all their subordinates to do the same. And all these senators and representatives will be required to talk to each other over lunch. About any old thing. Because that's how it starts. Because people, whether they're the most powerful leaders on the planet or the likes of you and me, who start breaking bread together and sharing conversation can no longer distance and categorize each other (another lesson from a Pastor Kai sermon) and who knows, perhaps the members of the United States Congress, whose tactic now seems to be the garnering of power by attempting to debilitate each other and in the process end up debilitating our country, will discover that there's power to be had- and progress to be made - in cooperation. I don't want to hear any more empty promises from presidential candidates of "reaching across the aisles" - the aisles in the Capitol building are 'way too wide for any of their arms. So let our Democrat and Republican leaders, who are always trying to convince the rest of us that they're just like the rest of us, starting being like the rest of us. Let them start sitting across from each other and hashing around our country's and world's problems over a sandwich Then maybe our country and our world would see some progress.
And so the presidential candidate who promotes eating lunch together is the one who will get my vote. As long as they promise one more thing. What that thing is I'll share tomorrow. So New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and friends are in the news again. Though this time the spotlight is mostly on Chris Christie’s friends, or ex-friends, as he’s pretty much unfriended the lot of them, which he should have done before they committed the mean, nasty deed that cooked all their geese and singed Christie’s political feathers good in the process. These three were the powerful members of Christie’s inner circle who back in 2013 arranged for a monster traffic jam on the George Washington Bridge in Fort Lee, New Jersey on the first day of school. This they did to punish Fort Lee mayor Mark Sokolich for not endorsing Christie during his second run for governor.
Last Friday a federal investigation on the bridge lane closings culminated in criminal charges being brought against Bill Baroni and Bridget Ann Kelly, nine counts each, while David Wildstein, perhaps moved to contrition by the 15-year prison sentence he, too, could have faced for each count, pleaded guilty and cooperated with law enforcement officials in exchange for a lighter sentence. Thus David Wilderstein recounted to the criminal investigators in detail how he, Bill Baroni, and Bridget Ann Kelly gleefully planned having the bridge lanes closed in a way that would cause the longest wait and the most suffering for drivers and passengers, including the children who would be stuck on their school buses for hours on the first day of school. They’d give no advance warning to allow drivers to find an alternate route. They told the unwitting Port Authority workers that the lanes needed to be closed for a traffic study. They agreed that when Mayor Sokolich called for help he’d be ignored. Then, with all the carefully-coordinated details of their plan in place, they waited with anxious excitement for the first day of school to arrive. They couldn’t have hoped for a better result. On the first day of school the George Washington Bridge was a massive parking lot. Emergency vehicles couldn’t get through. Mr. Wildstein went to check on the state of the bridge and happily reported back to Bill Baroni and Bridget Ann Kelly that that the traffic in Fort Lee was a disaster. Meanwhile Mayor Sokolich’s urgent calls for help to Bill Baroni at the Port Authority were ignored. Baroni forwarded Sokolich’s text and email pleas to Wildstein and Baroni and the three had a good laugh, at one point joking about the things they’d done in the past and might do in the future to other mayors and community leaders who fell out of favor with Chris Christie. Sokolich begged Baroni for help, calling the situation on the bridge a “life/safety” issue. In fact one elderly woman in cardiac arrest died because the EMS was not able to get through the gridlock on the bridge. Finally Sokolich called the governor’s office. When one of Ms. Kelly’s staff members informed her of the horrible traffic problem in Fort Lee Ms. Kelly replied, “Good”. In response to an email from Bill Baroni that those children stuck on the bus for hours were probably Democrats’ children, Ms. Kelly texted back, “Is it wrong that I am smiling?" The lane closings went on for another day and a half until the director of the New York Port Authority heard about the gridlock on the bridge and, in defiance of Bill Baroni, sent in workers to re-open all the lanes on the bridge. Soon afterwards the George Washington Bridge lane closings blew up into a scandal and Baroni, Wildstein, and Kelly were fired and under criminal investigation. And Christ Christie was in the hot seat. And now that David Wildstein has spilled every bean on his partners in crime and a federal indictment has been handed down against them Christie is in the hot seat once again. He claims that he knew nothing about this plot cooked up by his hand-picked minions. He claims that the results of the federal investigation have exonerated him of any involvement in the Bridge scandal. But the case isn’t really closed yet. Because even though now Bill Baroni and Bridget Ann Kelly are screaming “liar, liar!” at their former friend David Wildsten and proclaiming their innocence, when the possibility of a long stretch of prison time starts staring them in the face, who knows, they might just decide to spill a few more beans of their own, some of which may roll in Chris Christie’s direction. But if even Chris Christie truly had no idea about the bridge lane-closing plot, his ignorance isn’t likely to do him much good politically at this point. Because even if he were innocent in this case, everyone knows he’s guilty of surrounding himself with people who behave more like Mafioso than dedicated public officials who care about the people whose welfare they’re supposed to be advocating for. As for me, though I may have once liked Chris Christie, now I wouldn’t vote for him for anything. But next time I’ll tell you who I would vote for. References 1. “U.S. Case details Bridge Jam Timed For School Start”, Kate Zernike, The New York Times, May 2, 2015. 2. “Two Indicted in New Jersey Bridge Scandal; ally of Christie Pleads Guilty”, Kate Zernnike and Mark Santora, The New York Times, May 2, 2015. 3. “Cloud Descends on Governor’s White House Hopes”, Michael Barbaro, The New York Times, May 2, 2015. Dear Future Cyber-Archivist who has come across this post in your internet search for the story of a society of human beings at a distant time and place in the past,
Today is Friday, May 30, 2015 in the United States of America and for the past week our country has once again been on fire. Figuratively, and in the city of Baltimore literally, as mobs of looters, vandals, arsonists and thugs have taken advantage of the city's civil unrest to run a rampage of theft and destruction. The fires of unrest, protest, and anger in Baltimore and across the rest of the country were sparked by the death of yet another unarmed black man or boy at the hands of the police. Since last August When 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot by a police officer in Ferguson Missouri, hardly a month goes by without another sickening news story of one more dead black man or boy, complete with video footage from the cell phone of some random witnessing passer-by. There was 12-year-old Tamir Rice, shot for having a BB gun at a playground; 42-year-old Eric Garner, choked to death for selling illegal cigarettes on a street corner; 50-year-old Walter Scott, shot while running away from a police officer during a traffic stop; 44-year-old Eric Harris, shot when he ran away from a police sting operation; and two weeks ago it was Freddy Gray, a 25-year-old man whose spinal cord was severed while he was in police custody for the crime of looking a police officer in the eye then running away. Nor is the likelihood of an unarmed fleeing black man being shot by police greater in one part of the country than another; it's happening everywhere: Missouri, Cleveland, New York, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Baltimore. Whether people are outraged by these deaths or whether they believe that police officers have been justified in their use of lethal violence seems to be be determined by one's race and/or political beliefs and, of course, personal experience with the police. But for me here's the questions: for all the lethal force being used by police in this country, why is there still so much crime? Do the people in the neighborhoods where the police have killed those men and boys feel safer now? Do these deaths make us all across the country feel safer now? Now when we hear the siren and see the flashing lights of a police cruiser will our first reaction be to breath a sigh of relief and gratitude or to pull out our cell phone? And, dear Future Archivist, has anything changed yet? |
"Tropical Depression"
by Patti Liszkay Buy it on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BTPN7NYY "Equal And Opposite Reactions"
by Patti Liszkay Buy it on Amazon: http://amzn.to/2xvcgRa or from The Book Loft of German Village, Columbus, Ohio Or check it out at the Columbus Metropolitan Library
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