Reflecting, again, on Black history month

Daisy Bates – Civil rights leader, that I, until recently, had never heard of. Her story is so compelling. Please go check it out, and the documentary about her life.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot – and not just during this year’s month of February.

One of the challenges that white people sometimes face is their own ignorance of history. I guess all people face that, in one form or another, and at one time or another. And, for many of us, we just don’t have real connections outside of our mostly-white circles. We don’t host events in our house that include black people; we don’t get invited to black people’s homes; we’ve never been to a black church; we don’t work with black people; we don’t have black people in our families.

I am lucky. So, so lucky. I may have started life in one of the typically insulated situations described above, but I gradually eased out of it, further and further. And, in my adulthood, I have my wife to thank for some of this, but also so many others that have guided me. I have learned from you all, and want to honor you here.

This is an unexhaustive list. It is an incomplete list, and I hope it continues to grow over time. My life is SO much richer because of all of you, and I can say that I love you all. These are in no particular order, and I’m not listing full names out of respect for privacy.

Jamie P. : A true friend. We got in trouble together in elementary school, and found each other again in 7th grade. And immediately were sent to the principal’s office. Funny, positive, and clever.
Shirley: thank you for helping my mom keep the house, and allowing me to pull pranks on you from time to time. Your smile and care were infectious.
David C.: You are brilliant, and the world needs more of you. Your appearances on Comedy Central are hilarious – but you give so much more to the world, and if only more of us would follow your guidance.
Jeannette: Thank you for hosting me in Kigali – you and your team mates waited for my delayed plane, and took me places that changed my life. I’ll not forget your ‘heyyyyyy’!
Kim T: Not just a boss, but a thoughtful leader and supporter of my wild ideas. Thank you for your ongoing work in NYC – and I hope you and T. are laughing 🙂 P.S. heard one of your dad’s performances with Ellington on the jazz station this week.
Brandon: Yeah, I think of you like a son, and so appreciate your friendship with our son, your quiet, gentle ways, your introspective powers and your sense of humor. Plus, you brought Jane into our lives.
Alyce: With your beautiful Kenyan accent and sly smile, you anchored our team in so many ways – keeping us light, keeping us smart, bringing perspective and wisdom.
Badou: I’ll not forget our times together, at the Arbre a Palabre and down on the sandy beach. You introduced me to more African history, and spoke with such passion. I hope you are carrying on good work. You helped make the colonized history real for me.
Joe: You worked in the lab at Duke, and helped with dissections for my dad’s research. I’ll never forget your story about your son wanting a GTO. “If you want a GTO you better get a JOB!”
Nedra: Thank you for your trust and friendship, and for making our team so much fun. Your talents span widely, and you helped me see, again, what good mothering looks like. Your kids are absolute stars.
Jimmy P.: You beat me up on the bus, and that led me to a true reckoning. I met hate, anger, and edging violence in myself. Years later, I saw you again, and we connected. I forgave you. That was a huge gift.
Y and O: Next door neighbors, parents of 3 kids – you helped me laugh, and *made* our neighborhood integrated. I am grateful for that.
Michael F.: I’m so glad I had the opportunity to hire you – and to watch you develop into a successful media wizard. Attending your wedding was such a treat – and I can only imagine your life with kids now.. wow!
Phyllis and Frank: Leaders that I’m just getting to know – and such a lovely family you have. Thank you for your trust and support!
Myrion: Being stuck into our dorm room in 1981 was a blessing for me. You introduced me to some new media (Jet!), music, and showed me (indirectly, I’d say) that cleaning up for Sunday and having discipline in ones life is a good thing.
Cheryl: I asked you once “What should I, a white man, do?” – or more or less that question – when we had a conversation in the aftermath of one of the murders of Black men. You patiently tolerated my question. And then you simply and wisely offered – “speak up”.
Jimmy P: I have to thank you for pushing me into a hard life lesson about hating the circumstance, and not the person, and that forgiveness is a journey. I’m sorry for all that you went through as a child.
Dianne: Your smart wit and call-it-as-you-see-it were refreshing AND intimidating as I started out school teaching. And you made me laugh so… and still do!
And to the other teachers – Jeannette, Carla, Johnnie, Lawanda, Jackie and Karen – we know there is a reason why our school had better performance of minority kids. In large part, it was because of your example of strong and caring Black leaders and teachers.

I’m sure I’m forgetting some folks, and it is my deepest hope that, should they see this page and not their name, that they would take pity on me (lol) and send me some news.

Keeping things suspenseful

Some very significant progress on the Machino Bambino!

Have been working on the brake end points (brake lines, calipers) and have restored the calipers. I still need to check out the compensator at the rear of the car – this is some kind of contraption that I’ve never encountered – but essentially there is only one brake line exiting the master cylinder bound for the rear wheels and it obviously splits at some point (at the compensator and has a strange apparatus that is attached to the body and the axle.

Anyway, more on that weirdness later, but here are some restored calipers:

ALL the other time I’ve had has been devoted to the suspension. Let’s just say that some fire, penetrating oil, hammering, bending, pulling, clamping, more fire, more hammering – all of that needed to disassemble the upper and lower control arms, remove old ball joints, and remove old bushings.

Many thanks to the folks on the forum for guiding me through this.

I’ve finally managed to complete disassembly on the front, and have my shortlist of parts I need for replacement, and have cleaned and painted with POR-15 those parts that needed it.

There have been times when I needed to exercise patience – to walk away from a puzzle, or a discovery of some welded thing that shouldn’t have been done, or some aspect of disassembly that just wasn’t happening.

During one of those times, I went and cut new carpet for the interior, installed it, and installed the (repaired) driver’s seat.

Sometimes you just have to do something that is achievable and you know, looks kinda good.

Fascist Playbook: Undermine Voting

So…. one of the tropes that keeps coming around is that our voting system is broken, and that there is rampant fraud. Often this is stated in terms of supposed “illegal” people voting – and of course “stealing” our healthcare, blah blah blah.

Here are some facts about this – and I encourage readers to become #factivists as much as possible. Exercise your critical thinking! Question your sources of information! Be free!!

The Brennan Center for Justice’s 2024 review of so-called voter fraud. In their review and subsequent article entitled Debunking the Voter Fraud Myth, this quote really stands out:

The report reviewed elections that had been meticulously studied for voter fraud, and found incident rates between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent. Given this tiny incident rate for voter impersonation fraud, it is more likely, the report noted, that an American “will be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls.”

2. Non-legal residents are simply not allowed to vote in state and federal elections. This is not new. Repeating. THIS IS NOT NEW. When we vote we are challenged to present our credentials AND check a box that we can be pursued legally if we misrepresent any information about our voting status. Oh. And one more point on this. The undocumented people I am friends with WOULD NEVER TRY to vote. They know! They do not want to endanger their own livelihoods, households, kids in college, dreams of citizenship, by posing as legal voters.

3. More than SIXTY lawsuits that Trump and his followers launched following the 2020 election revealed NO substantive voting fraud issues – across numerous states. SIXTY. Many of those processes were overseen by REPUBLICAN-APPOINTED judges!

4. The Heritage Foundation’s own work (omg please. I hope I never quote them again). The Brookings Institute did a review of the Heritage Foundation’s tracking of supposed voter fraud in the U.S. The following tells the whole story – that they had to go back more than 30 (THIRTY) years looking at all state and federal elections to come up with a number that people are now using in their arguments.

My own state of North Carolina, over THIRTY EIGHT years, with more than 81 MILLION votes cast, reported a total of 58 instances of voter fraud. That’s it.

So.

When this bag-of-wind president and his boot-licking followers pound the podium for supposed ‘voting integrity’ take a step back and ask them and yourself what this is REALLY about. This is REALLY about imposing unnecessary roadblocks for folks to vote. That’s all.

When you can’t win by playing fairly by the agreed rules, you impose new and unnecessary rules that benefit your side.

On Beauty

The title of my blog is Fresh Eyes – and that title represents an inner transformation, one that I believe can happen to anyone, any time.

Somewhere in the early 2010’s I found myself pondering the state of things in the world, as I often do, and wondering why there is so much distrust and conflict. I settled on the ideas related to personal bias, limited exposure to other cultures, lack of curiosity, fear of the ‘other’, and how those factors are overtly or covertly reinforced by our selected or default context – where we live, our social circles, who influences us, what institutions we belong to, what work we do, what education we have, etc.

I was sitting in Heathrow. Waiting for a flight. I was surrounded by lights, sounds, people, and storefronts and their attendants attempting to lure us itinerants into buying something. Expensive somethings. Like the latest fashions, jewelry, limited editions of all sorts of things…

One storefront in front of me was a fashion house, and, in addition to the skeletal mannequins wearing things, there were large, vibrant video displays of very young and very thin models posing in various exotic locations. None of them were smiling. I don’t think smiling was preferred at the time.

In any case, I realized that I was meant to think of these models as ‘beautiful’. I was meant to want to look like them – hell, maybe even be them. Carefree, yet sullen-faced, rail thin and tan, lounging, emerging, twirling and posing on exotic beaches, in busy spaces, in workplaces.

I grew angry.

I’ve known quite a few people personally who have struggled with self-image, and some who have done harm to their own bodies because of this felt need to achieve such ridiculous physicalities in order to be accepted, loved, respected, included.

So. I whipped out my phone and posted to my favorite (at the time) social media platform, tagging the fashion house and asking them to please stop bombarding us with such unhealthy imagery, and I included a photo of the displays.

No. Nothing came of that, other than my own brief moment of agency.

However, I did start thinking, then, about revolutionizing my own mind around the concept of beauty. For, if it weren’t what I was objecting to in the airport concourse, what IS beauty? What is it for me? What could it be??

That was a bit of an epiphany for me. Sure, I’d always been consciously in the camp of broad acceptance of human bodies. But I don’t think I’d ever stopped to then define what beauty – human beauty specifically – was to me.

I would now invite the reader to think of your own experience with things and thoughts similar to the above. And to ask yourself – what is humanly beautiful, beyond the body?

So I started noticing. I walked differently. I thought differently. I was on a quiet quest. It was a daily quest, for quite some time! It felt good. Why?

Because: I suddenly started noticing the mundane but deeply human interactions in everyday life, and, in my mind, seeing them with fresh eyes – seeing them as beautiful.

The grocery store checkout person, smiling briefly and showing patience with a slow customer
A person held a door for someone else.
Someone cleaning the office took care around the photos on someone’s desk.
A man held a child’s hand.
Someone took great care with their hair, adding many many beads.
A server at a restaurant wiped the table – and dried it.

Sure, some of the examples are just regular, daily things that people might be expected to do. But that’s okay. In fact, that’s great. As I saw those gestures and small acts as ‘beautiful’, I saw those people differently. I saw them as beautiful.

There was beauty everywhere. I just had to see it.

The consequence of this was that I was happier. I felt more empathy, more connection to people. I felt less judgmental.

Today, I’m struggling to regain that perspective. I want to. I want to see people as beautiful. But the realities of what is happening in the US, in my state, and in my town make it so, so hard.

A tiny origami gift from a Japanese student many many years ago.

How many more?

Being a white person I have to recognize how further amped up I am about the MAGA fascists as a result of the murdering (assassinations, I think) of two folks in Minn – who happen to be white. I’m hoping more of the privileged demographic will become more and more uneasy with all this. More than uneasy – disgusted, frightened, angry, shocked.

Powerless, however, is the most damaging of the feelings I have though. I don’t like how cynical I have become about the United States. I have benefitted from travel and living abroad during my lifetime, and knew from I think 17 years of age that there would be and is benefit in seeing for oneself. And questioning everything. I am just so unsure of what to do now.

Yes, I volunteer moving water and supplies for those that are unhoused.

Yes, I volunteer with a mutual aid group that provides security and ice verification for targeted folks.

Yes, I participate in rallies and demonstrations.

Yes, I call or write the politicians who are supposed to be representing me.

Yes, I tell people, without request, about why I no longer am creating virtual reality immersions for human understanding. The MAGA fascist war on woke did my business in.

A long time friend and co-actor in good things texted me last night. She is an episcopalian minister outside of Seattle. She was just checking in. She has children of color (aka brown or whatever we need to say) who are grown and live in cities. She is terrified.

I feel like weeping but my anger and yet-unfocused resolve prevent it. Unfocused. What am I to do?

No, I can’t enjoy watching sports.

No, I won’t be buying things from those stores.

No, I won’t ‘give it up to the lord’

No, I can’t stand by and trust.

No ‘thoughts and prayers’, please.

Name them. (the following from Wikipedia)

Renee Nicole Good. Mother of 3. Married. On January 7, 2026, Renée Good, a 37-year-old American citizen, was fatally shot in Minneapolis, Minnesota, by United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross.

Alex Pretti. ICU Nurse for the Veterans Administration Hospital. On January 24, 2026, Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old American intensive care nurse, was shot and killed by United States Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

How many more will we need to list? And indeed, yes, indeed for all of us, especially my black brothers and sisters, NAME THEM.