The Golem who Punches Nazis for Us

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You're probably a much better person than I am. When the video of Richard Spencer, the white supremacist, being punched was released, you probably knew that was wrong and unacceptable. I was genuinely torn about it. It is wrong. But it looked soooooo right. I decided to write a story to wrestle with my conflicted feelings on the matter, and if folks share those conflicted feelings and would like more of the story of Josef the Golem, let me know below and I'll tell you the rest of his story. 

The Golem who Punches Nazis for Us

 

Sometimes you want to punch someone in the face.

Then, hopefully, you remember that you are human. Human beings should not go around punching one another in the face. Getting punched hurts. Hurting people does not solve problems. In fact, most of the people you want to hurt are behaving terribly precisely because they are hurting, and compounding their pain may channel their general horribleness in some other direction, but it won’t really solve the underlying problem.

You remember this because you are human. So you don’t punch them. Even though it might make you feel better.

Josef had complicated feelings about punching people, too. But they were different feelings.

Because Josef wasn’t human.

*      *      *

Frank was 94 years old, and he had been married to Ellen for most of that time. Couples find a rhythm, and often there are little syncopated lies that form the downbeats. One of their little twin lies went like this: Frank pretended he never, ever drank alcohol of any kind. This, he claimed, was because of the abuse he’d suffered at the hands of his alcoholic father in Switzerland as a child, an abuse that had motivated him to leave the small, alpine town of his childhood and move across the world to settle in Long Island and make a nice life for himself and his wife working as an auto mechanic until his retirement. Ellen had her own little lie. She pretended she didn’t know Frank drank beer each night after she went to sleep. It was just one beer. What could a little deception possibly matter at their ages?

Ellen protected Frank from a direct confrontation with this lie each evening. This was how they’d learned to live. “Okay, Dear,” she said on that particular night, “I’m feeling a bit tired. I’m going to go to sleep.”

Frank, already dozing on the couch, was awakened just enough to respond. “Can I help you out of your chair?”

“No, no. I’m fine.” And Ellen did pull herself up, though it took some doing. She was a spry 92 year old, so she didn’t want to burden Frank, but her hip really was giving her an awful pain that evening. She knew he had his date with the secret case of beer their son brought over and hid behind some canned soup in the garage, and she didn’t want to get in the way of that with her aches and pains. She loved Frank dearly, and this was her way of showing it.

“I’ll just finish my program and come to bed, too,” Frank said. He took comfort in the fact that this was mostly true. He would open the can of beer in the garage, but he would put it in a cozy just in case Ellen woke up for some reason, and then he would drink it in the livingroom while watching Sportscenter on ESPN, a show that doesn’t feel like it ever begins or ends. When he’d finished his beer, he’d remove the can from the cozy and hide it in a bag behind the old freezer full of Ellen’s strawberry jam. No one one ever touched Ellen’s jam, but it would take on magical significance when they passed away and be doled out to the children and grandchildren to be eaten on vanilla ice cream as a way of remembering.

Frank tried to convince himself that this little bit of cloak and dagger was keeping him young. He left the TV on CNN which they watched together. He’d switch the channel once he had his beer in hand. He pulled himself up from his spot on the couch with more vigour than he’d shown all day, excited to participate in this bit of mischief. He did not like thinking about the reason he was compelled to keep the ritual, the vigil he was holding, the thing alcohol used to make him forget, back before he’d cleaned himself up and met Ellen in 1963. He wanted to forget the years between the war and going cold turkey, when he’d spent his days working his way up at over at Gary’s Automotive, and his nights drinking himself into unconsciousness while sneaking peeks out the window of his little apartment, his Ruger in his sweaty hand. Those had been bad years, the worst years, but they were long behind him now. Now the beer was just a holdover, a ceremony divorced from significance, a tradition. That’s what he told himself.

Frank quietly opened the door to the garage, stepped down to the cement slab as surreptitiously as a 94 year old can, and gently closed the door behind him. Then he shuffled across the middle of the garage, past his extensive tool collection to the shelving covered in canned food. He reached behind one of the rows of cans of tomato soup stacked two high and found one of the cans of beer. He found he was salivating slightly and licked his lips to make sure he wasn’t drooling. That was becoming more and more of a concern as he got older.

When Frank turned around and saw the thing standing in the garage behind him, he dropped the beer and froze. The can split, foam spraying in a thin geyser and propelling the can along the floor toward the washing machine, but Frank didn’t look away from the hulking shape even when beer splattered on his face and made a neat line down one side of his shirt.

Frank and the thing stood there opposite one another, positioned as though they were looking at one another. But they weren’t, technically. Frank wasn’t really looking at the creature in front of him because he was seeing a moment from seventy two years earlier.

And the creature wasn’t really looking at Frank because the creature had no eyes.

“I thought you would come earlier,” Frank said.

The creature did not reply.

“I suppose it was a long journey.” Though Frank’s accent was close enough that people outside of New York might mistake him for a Long Island native, he hit the “o” in “suppose” and the “s” in “was” just a bit harder than any of his immediate neighbors. His cover story had been close enough. Even the locals believed he was Swiss. Even Ellen did.

“Is there any way I can talk you out of this?” Frank asked.

The creature had no mouth or eyes or external ears, but it must have heard and understood him. It slowly shook its head.

Frank pressed forward anyway. He couldn’t help it. “It was a long, long time ago. When I chased that man into that attic, I was only 22 years old. Almost a child. The city was in chaos. Our lieutenant was obviously frightened. There were reports that the Soviets would arrive at any second. You can’t imagine how frightened we were…”

The golem tilted its head slightly.

“No, no, you’re right. I’m sorry. I’m sure you can understand that fear. You’ve seen it.” Frank caught himself, raising his hands, palms out, as though he felt he needed to interrupt the mouth-less monster. “Worse. You’ve seen worse. But I’m just saying we were very afraid, too. So when we were told to … but I shouldn’t tell you that I was just following orders, should I?”

The golem puffed up at the phrase “just following orders” as though it had inhaled, though that was impossible, and it leaned forward, even more menacing.

“No, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I was there at all. In that cursed city. In that synagogue. In that attic. I know I should have died right there. And I knew that you would come for me. I couldn’t understand what the old man said in his language. Was that Yiddish?”

The golem shook his head.

“Hebrew?”

The golem nodded.

Frank looked down at the ground, but he wasn’t contrite exactly. Instead, he was temporarily displaced. He was finding his way back into the gloom of that attic atop the Old New Synagogue in Prague, 72 years earlier. “Yes, I couldn’t understand it, and I thought he was looking at me and pointing at me because … you know, because I was coming through the attic to finish the job. But then you stood up and I knew he’d been talking about me.” Suddenly his head snapped up, and he was back in his own garage, looking into the featureless face of the thing before him. “And I ran from you even though I knew it didn’t matter. Isn’t that strange, how the mind works with the body most of the time, but sometimes they stop communicating? I knew I would be caught. I knew I would be killed. But I ran anyway. You probably don’t know this, but I didn’t return to my company and retreat with them even though they left the city the very next day. I left right away. Did you know that?”

The golem nodded again.

“I ran and ran. By horse and buggy in France once, but I was still running. By boat with refugees to New Foundland. Then a job on a fishing boat, but still running. Then the drinking, but that was still running, really. Then the job here. And this life. This life.” He was catching up to the present, and it reminded him of his speech. “I have done many good things with my life. I was on the local school board. I was in Rotary and raised money to send school children around the world. I got involved in my church, even though I wasn’t a Catholic as a child. We were Lutherans, but I pretended when I got here. I even confessed that to the priest once and I think he was amused that I felt so guilty about that particular lie. I did not tell him about Prague, though. Or the other places before that. I certainly never told anyone about you. But you’ve motivated me to do a lot of good things with this new life. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

To Frank’s surprise, the golem nodded.

“It does? So you’ll forgive me?”

The golem shook his head.

Frank’s shoulders slumped. “It means something. But not enough. I agree. But if it means anything, will you please do one thing for me? One favor?”

The golem did not move at all.

“Will you let Ellen live? She doesn’t know anything about my time in the Wehrmacht. She doesn’t know that my real name was Franz. She only knows the man I’ve tried to become, not the man I was. If I do not cry out, she’ll sleep right through it. Will you leave her alone?”

The golem said nothing.

In the silence that followed, Frank transformed. He stood a little straighter. His face became flushed. He was Franz. He began to mutter curses at the golem in German. He cursed the rabbi he’d killed. He cursed all the Jews for ruining his life, for ruining Germany. His voice grew louder. He cursed the Soviets, with their inferior Cossack blood, for betraying the Reich, and the British, with their pure blood, for betraying their Germanic ancestry, and the Americans, with their inferior blood mixed with the blood of Africans, for siding with the British. And when he’d really worked himself into a lather, he pointed his right arm out and upwards, so that his fingertip almost touched the golem’s left shoulder, and he said, “Heil Hitler!”

The golem punched him.

Because of the creature’s height, Franz’ neck snapped almost as soon as the bones of his skull were smashed and shoved down his own throat. His body didn’t even know quite which injury to die from first, so everything went limp at once and he slumped to the floor.

There was very little blood. Some of the clay from the monster’s hand remained in the cavity that had been Franz’ face, absorbing it and forming a giant clot. But Franz’ heart had stopped so fast, the blood wasn’t pumped through the new opening. The little blood that stuck to the golem’s hand was absorbed into the clay. The body needed moisture. It did not care about the purity of the blood, the lineage, the human inventions of race and tribes. It preserved the body because the body was necessary to the task. Josef looked down at the broken old man and felt for some movement of its spirit. Perhaps it would hear the voice of God, it thought, or maybe a whisper from its first master, Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, telling it what to do now that this work was finished. It felt nothing and knew with complete confidence that the silence was the answer. The task was not finished.

Josef stepped over the crumpled body and made its way toward the house. It did not need to open the door. This light from the television told it that there was more than enough space to fit underneath. It slowly turned into a mass shaped like an amoeba, but surrounded by a fuzzy cloud of loose dust. As it extended a pseudopod under the door, some of the dust fell on the floor of the garage, on the back of the door, into the weave of the carpet on the other side. No one investigating Frank’s murder would ever be able to explain this dust in any satisfactory way.

Inside the house, Josef rose up until it stood in its humanoid shape. It felt for Ellen in much the same way a human hears, only its whole body was a single tympanic membrane, feeling the vibrations in the world around it, and also a single nerve sensitive to a spiritual dimension rather than a physical one. So Josef felt Ellen’s presence as a spirit in that plane and also heard her breathing in the darkness, slow and regular. She had slept through her husband’s death the sound of his last angry tirade masked by the noise coming from the television.

Josef listened to that sound now. He could not see the images on the screen; light bouncing off of molecules in the air did not disturb his universe enough to make him aware of the changes. But the television’s small speakers pushed and pulled the world around him in a way he had come to understand, and the language, though not his first or second or third or fourth, was not unknown to him.

A man’s rich baritone shifted from one story to another. “The racism and anti-Semitism of the alt-right movement were on display Saturday in Washington when its members gathered to celebrate Donald Trump's victory.

“The president of the alt-right National Policy Institute Richard Spencer's remarks were posted Sunday on YouTube by ‘Red Ice Radio,’ which describes itself as ‘covering politics and social issues from a pro-European perspective.’ The Atlantic magazine, which is recording footage of Spencer for a documentary they're working on, also published a video of the same event showing audience members apparently giving the Nazi salute.”

Now Josef heard a different voice, magnified, along with a chorus of male voices cheering. "Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!" the voice shouted.

The voice of the announcer came back. “His remarks were filled with racist imagery -- including references to ‘the black political machines’ and Latino housekeepers -- as he bashed Hillary Clinton's minority supporters.

Josef listened closely as the shouting voice returned. "Her coalition was made up of mutually hostile tribes only united out of a hatred of ‘whitey' -- that is to say, out of a hatred of us." More cheers of approval. Then Spencer’s voice again. "There are no two parts of this coalition who could ever be in the same room together for any length of time. America was, until this last generation, a white country, designed for ourselves and our posterity. It is our creation and our inheritance, and it belongs to us," Spencer said.

The announcer came back and spoke again, “The event was held at the Ronald Reagan Building on Saturday-” ...but Josef had heard enough. It lashed out at the television with the same quick ferocity it had displayed in the garage. The television sparked as it snapped in half, the pieces sliding down behind the old, wooden entertainment center.

“Frank?” Ellen called from her bed. “What was that? Are you okay?”

Josef had not made any promise regarding Ellen’s safety, but that was only because it didn’t owe Franz any mercy. It had no interest in harming Ellen more than it already had by killing Franz and destroying her television, two actions it found roughly morally equal. It took two long steps back towards the garage, slipped into its amoeba shape, slid underneath the door, then slid across the garage and around that door, out into the night. In the driveway, it could hear Ellen continuing to call for her husband by the wrong name, then her shrieking that name when she found his body. Josef recognized this expression of pain all too well, but in this case it was hardened against sympathy. It was already thinking about the next part of his task.

It did not know where he would find this Richard Spencer or the other people he’d heard applauding. It was not sure where it would find this National Policy Institute. But it was sure it would find it eventually. As Franz had suspected and then had known, if only briefly, Josef could be patient, and it was very good at finding Nazis.

It would be a long walk, but not its longest.

 

Want to read more of Josef's story? Enter your email below and, if enough folks want more, I'll send you an update when the next chapter is available!

My Pledge To Republicans and Democrats

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I want to make a public pledge and encourage others to do the same:

If a Democrat is ever in the White House and there is reasonable suspicion that she/he is colluding with a foreign government who has committed acts of theft, espionage, or cyber warfare on the United States in order to influence our elections, or

...if a Democrat is in the White House and owns businesses that are regularly receiving payments from foreign governments in violation of the Constitutional prohibition against taking foreign bribes,

...and then my elected representatives in the House and Senate even appear to be dragging their feet, let alone blocking a full, independent investigation into the matter,

...I pledge to you that I will never vote for those representatives again, regardless of their party affiliation.

Ever.

I might have a hard time voting for someone who didn't share my values from across the aisle, but I would never be able to trust someone from my own party who placed party loyalty above protecting our democracy.

What we are witnessing is not normal. We cannot let it become normal, or politicians from both parties may start looking for foreign assistance in manipulating our elections or soliciting bribes once they reach high office. The response to our current situation should not be partisan. I promise I would place the security of fair and democratic elections, and the reputation of the Presidency as an office free of suspicion of bribery, above party affiliation. Furthermore, I challenge all Republican voters to take the same pledge in order to put pressure on their elected representatives. Our democracy is more important than either political party.

If love of country trumps party loyalty for you, take this pledge and share it widely to let our elected representatives know these situations require independent investigations immediately.

To make this same pledge, share this or copy-and-paste to social media to maximize the reach.

-Benjamin Gorman

Just an American voter

White People Can't Say "Trust Us" to People of Color

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White people can't say, "Trust us," to People of Color.

I mean, sure we have a right to say whatever we want, but this is one of those statements that, while permitted, isn't meaningful or legitimate or helpful. In fact, it's detrimental because it shows such ignorance of history that it magnifies the lack of trust.  

I was just talking with a friend yesterday about how people where I work are very sensitive about being told, "Trust us," by people who burned them in the past, and we agreed that trust cannot be demanded; it must be earned over time. And that was just about small-scale workplace politics, not matters of life and death. Imagine if the betrayals had gone on for 400 years! We, as white people, have a long, long way to go to earn the trust of PoC, and we don't get to decide when we've earned it. That's not up to us. We need to be allies until we're told we're trusted, and we have no place to say, "It wasn't me personally so that's unfair." That kind of defensiveness just shows how little of the history of this country most white people know. I know I still have a lot to learn. Here's a powerful example I was unaware of (Thanks to Son of Baldwin*):

They were airing this documentary about the 1989 murder of a pregnant white woman in Boston named Carol Stuart. Her husband Charles claimed that they were robbed in their car by a scary black man, and that scary black man shot Carol in the head, and shot Charles in the back.

Carol died. The couple's baby, named Christopher, was born brain dead and died after Charles requested he be taken off life support.

All of Boston was in mourning because this couple was presented as though they were Boston's own version of Camelot/Prince Charles/Princess Diana.

In response to the absolutely heinous crime, the Boston Police Department went on an unchecked rampage in black communities all over Boston. They stopped and frisked over 150 black people a day for months. They broke into black people's homes. They took black people down to the station. The beat up and harassed and stalked and frightened and brutalized every black person they could find, all while the world watched and co-signed. They violated every right black people had during the span of their investigation into this crime. The media was complicit by amping up the anti-black sentiment that was already at a fever pitch.

Boston citizen were no better. They called into police stations by the hundreds with tips about how they saw the black man who did it, how they were witnesses to the murder, how they think it was the black person in their schools, jobs, neighborhoods who did it. Police acted on a bunch of these leads, disrupting and disrespecting the lives of countless black people.

Without a shred of physical evidence, but having a teen brag that he heard his uncle say he killed Carol, and Charles IDing him as the shooter, the police took a black man, Willie Bennett, in and charged him with the murder and the shooting. Politicians and citizens alike wanted to bring back the death penalty in order to kill the suspect. And he would have likely been convicted too.

But then someone had a conscience.

Charles' younger brother Matthew confessed to police that Charles was lying. That Charles had planned the entire thing and murdered his Carol for insurance money. As it turns it, Charles didn't want to be with Carol anymore, didn't want a child with her, wanted to be with someone else, decided to kill Carol and their baby instead of asking for a divorce, and knew that all he had to say was that a black man did it and no one would question him or his motives and that white supremacy would ensure that Boston would turn itself upside down to find a black person to blame no matter how innocent they were.

Once Charles knew the jig was up, he committed suicide to avoid facing the consequences of his actions.

Boston has never apologized to the thousands of black people it violated on the word of a lying murderer. The city and all of its white supremacists remain arrogantly unrepentant.

Matthew was ostracized by his family and white communities for being honest and betraying white supremacy. He sunk into a deep depression, became despondent and addicted to drugs, and, a few years ago, died from a drug overdose.

Though I am very familiar with the many cases in which white people blame black people for crimes that the white people committed themselves, I had never heard of this case. And I was astounded by the degree to which the racism/white supremacy involved played out for a national audience. It was so open and blatant and proud.

As Willie Bennett said:

"The police falsely pinned a crime on me once and they can do it again…I have no faith in the law enforcement and I don’t like cops. Nothing has changed. You still have those same racist cops on the police force."

I don't care what color or gender or sexuality they are, I do not trust police.

This is why black people have a right to be suspect of any police narrative about black suspects.

Here is a brief history and shortlist of white people falsely accusing black people of crimes.


*@SonofBaldwin is a must-follow on twitter and Facebook.

I Shouldn't Have to Say This: Supporters of Fascism Are Not Good People

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Someone in my community who I used to respect is still loudly voicing her support for Donald Trump. She earned that respect through her volunteerism, her commitment to our community, and her concern for our community's children. But consider: If someone's legacy is that she started great programs for kids, but she also supports a regime that destroys the schools where she's volunteered, deports the parents of some of the children she's served, annuls the marriages of the parents of others, and ultimately gets a few of those students killed either in wars or in gulags at home, will all her good work mean much? We are fast approaching the point where the compliments read a lot like, "She always made such a nice lasagna for the church potluck. Too bad she supported Mussolini."  I'm sure some people will think any reference to fascism is hyperbolic. After all, we don't have secret police or executed journalists or people on cattle cars. But we're ten days in, and we do have ICE holding legal residents without trial or access to lawyers, journalists being hand picked for press conferences, an order to take healthcare away from tens of millions of people, and legislation moving through the pipeline to turn our national parks over to corporations and to enshrine the right to discriminate against the LGBTQ into law. It's been 10 days. How many days will it take until "hyperbole" becomes "unavoidable," becomes "entrenched," becomes "history"?

There is a poster for sale in the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC that identifies the following "Early Warning Signs of Fascism":

*Powerful and continuing nationalism
*Disdain for human rights
*Identification of enemies as a unifying cause
*Supremacy of the military
*Rampant sexism
*Controlled mass media
*Obsession with national security
*Religion and government intertwined
*Corporate power protected
*Labor power suppressed
*Disdain for intellectuals & the arts
*Obsession with crime & punishment
*Rampant cronyism & corruption
*Fraudulent elections

Please note: This is not for sale in the "What Makes America Great Museum" or the "American Exceptionalism Museum" or even the "Make America Great Again Museum" where you have to wear those special rose tinted glasses they give you and squint your eyes just right to see the exhibits. No, this poster is for sale in the Holocaust Museum.

If you are still supporting Trump after the last two weeks, either you haven't been paying attention or you are taking the side of fascism. I'm sure you were once a kind and caring person who has simply forgotten how to care about the people Trump or right-wing media tell you not to care about. You can choose to remember, to care enough to investigate for yourself, to push through the misinformation meant to deceive and the disinformation meant to confuse and sow doubt. You can still choose that. But right now, if you are supporting Trump, whether through apathy or ignorance or self-protection or spite toward liberals, you are not a kind or loving or good person. Not right now, anyway. I know that might be hard to hear, and I'm sure you'll hate me a bit for writing it. And many if my liberal friends who want us all to hold hands and get along won't like me writing it, either. But read that list again. This is fascism we're dealing with. Not fake news. Not alternative facts. Not normal partisanship or ideological differences that people can discuss politely over a beer. Fascism.

This is the moment when we decide how the museums of the future will remember us.

On White Bitterness and Black Despair

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After a brief, desperate attempt to try to explain white privilege to one of my white, male, cis, straight students, then watching President Obama's wonderful, inspiring farewell address and reading some vitriolic comments by his detractors, then reflecting on August Wilson's play Fences, and then reading about an angry white man who reveled in the repeal of Obamacare because he didn't realize his ACA provided health insurance is Obamacare, I've had a bit of a revelation: Most white people will never be able to fully empathize with the feeling Wilson is trying to express through Troy, the anti-hero of Fences, a character emotionally hobbled by the persistent recognition that he is a Black man who was exceptional and simply had the misfortune to be born before our advancements in civil rights would have provided him the opportunities to capitalize on his dreams. But most people of color will not be able to fully empathize with the inverse, the source of the bitterness of so many Trump supporters who are, at their core, normal, unexceptional white folks who do not want to admit that, had they been born ealier, their whiteness would have conferred upon them some measure of status which they could have parleyed into greater economic opportunity and potentially exceptional success. The exceptional person of color must know he's been born too early. The mediocre white man must constantly deny the fact that he's been born too late.

Life Hack: The Greatest To-Do List Software You Already Own

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Remember that guy in college in the mid-nineties who was ridiculously bad at remembering appointments? He had a paper-and-pencil planner, and he'd even write down everything in it, but then he'd forget to check it, so he had to get one of those original monochrome Palm Pilots? That way there would be something that would beep at him to tell him where he needed to be and what he needed to do? That guy? What? You didn't know anyone like that? Well, you do now. I was that guy. Still am.

Now that we live in the future, many of us have multiple devices that can beep at us and tell us where we need to be. Since college, I've acquired a cell phone, a smart watch, and an even smarter child, and all of them make noises when I'm not where I belong. (My wife does not do this. She says it would make her feel naggy and I'm a grown-ass man who should be able to keep track of his own schedule. And she's a grown-ass woman, so I can't tell her what to do. Noah, on the other hand, is twelve, so he can still be tasked to remind me when I need to do things, especially when those things relate to getting him to swimming lessons.) But how do we put all this information together? And how do we remember where we wrote down that thing we were worried we'd forget? Not only am I getting older, but Google has officially made me stupid (I had to use Google to remember where I read about that). I've exported most of my memory to the cloud. When the big solar flare hits and wipes out all computers, I will be a gibbering moron. Until that happens, here's a trick you can try, too!

I am a huge fan of my Google Calendars (yep, I have three), and those do a very good job of keeping track of specific appointments, meetings, my wedding anniversary, and birthdays (including my own). I've tried to use the calendars for tracking projects I need to complete, and the software is good for telling me to do things at specific times, but what about those projects that need to get done but don't have specific due dates? So much of my life as an author and publisher is composed of projects that all need to be done yesterday but which don't have specific due dates. How does one keep track of those?

This one has figured out a solution that works for him. If you don't have a Gmail account, get one. There are lots of imitators, but it's still the best interface out there. Then, write out the list of the things you need to do and send it to yourself. 

It seems too simple to be a good idea, right? Ah, but it gets better and more complicated! A few times a day, I go back to the list and reply to myself. I can copy and paste the items I haven't completed and move them to the top of the list, or I can reply inline and put check marks next to the things I've finished. Here's what's fun about it: No one else sees my list (except the corporate overlords at Google and the spooks and the NSA) so I can write notes to myself in the to-do emails berating myself for failing to complete things as quickly as I'd hoped or congratulating myself for finishing them early. I can even make fun of myself for sending myself emails. It makes to-do lists fun! And because Gmail keeps all the entries into a single conversation organized into a single line in the list of emails, it doesn't take up lost of space and prevent me from seeing other emails, but it does keep the to-do list near the top, reminding me that I have things to do which are more important than reading a lot of the emails below. And because it's in the cloud, this with me wherever I go, reminding me about what I need to do, whether I'm trying to procrastinate on my computer or my phone.

"Get your butt to work, Ben," it says.

"Fine," Ben replies, "and thank you for not swearing at me this time."

"Well, it's a family-friendly blog post. We both know what I mean," Ben says.

And he's right. We do.

But wait! It gets better! I have three Gmail accounts I use frequently, one for personal use, one for the publishing company, and one for my job as a teacher. This allows me to send the to-do list to the email address where the tasks need to be completed If the tasks at the top are projects I need to complete for work, I send the whole list there. Then, when all those things are done, I send it back to home or the publishing company so I can focus on those tasks. Once I knock out a whole list, I let that conversation slip down the email. It's fine to keep it. If I ever need it, it will be discovered by searching my email. But I start a new one with a subject line like "Wednesday's To-Dos." If I'm still working on that one on Thursday, that's fine. If I'm still working on it on Saturday, time to add some nasty narration about how I'm a slacker who needs to get his act together. 

This year I've joined a goal-setting and accountability group at the invitation of Jason Brick (keep an eye out for his novel Wrestling Demons which will come out this spring/summer), and I'm hoping this strategy will be helpful to the rest of the folks there. I encourage you to give it a whirl. At worst, berating yourself on paper is more amusing than carrying around a constant sense of dread about things you think you may have forgotten to do. At best, it adds a therapeutic element to your to-do list!

Are you a to-do list maker? What works for you?

A Winter for Activists

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I am completely done with requests that I stop speaking out about present injustice or future dangers to American civil society. No one is obligated to pay any attention to what I write, but I agree with Garrison Keillor who said, "I think the most un-American thing you can say is, 'You can't say that.'" Today we had a bit of weather here in Independence, so I wrote a little sonnet for my fellow activists who are also tired of being told to shut up. 

 

A Winter for Activists

 

The snow began to fall in midday sun,

And sent the townsfolk scurrying inside.

The canceled school day freed the kids for fun.

The widest turns made each car slip and slide.

As flake by flake the inches grew and grew,

And just as trees hold snow until they bend.

Acquaintances online build ice walls, too.

They call for talk of politics to end.

They envy snow, the way that it piles on.

At snowball’s sting, the child’s cry it will eat.

Just so, this talk of justice they want gone,

But calls for silence won’t achieve that feat.

These shouted orders snow will not obey.

An avalanche is loud and wins the day.