Archive for July, 2009

A response to Senator Voinovich

Jul 29

Posted by JayByrd in The South, rant | No Comments

Senator, you recently spoke disparagingly about southern Republican politicians, saying that “They get on TV and go ‘errrr, ‘errrrr.” You weren’t real clear on exactly what the problem with southern politicians is, but you seem to be questioning either their intelligence or their ability, because they are from the south. Or maybe you believe that the South has never contributed to American culture, so your constituents can’t possibly relate to folk from the South.

Now, I grew up in Georgia, I was educated here, and I intend to live my entire life in the South. All my life I have heard about how ignorant, racist, misogynistic, and generally backwards we are down here. So I have a deal for you and anyone else who believes these things about those of us from the South. We will take a step back and stay out of your way and form a southern conservative party or only vote for Blue Dog Democrats, but first there are a few things you need to do for us.

Don’t come down here and vacation on our beaches or play golf on our courses. Do not watch the Masters in April. Don’t shop at Home Depot or Lowe’s, and don’t drink Coke. While you’re at it, don’t listen to Jazz, Blues, Rock and Roll, or R N B. Don’t eat barbecue. The next time you give a speech, don’t qoute the Reverend Martin Luther King, and be sure not to give that speech at Duke, Emory, Vanderbilt, or Tulane. Don’t go to Mardi Gras, at least not in New Orleans. Dont read anything written by William Faulkner, Harper Lee, Tennessee Williams, or Mark Twain. Don’t watch any Nascar event from Charlotte, Daytona, Atlanta, or Taladega. Don’t watch the Sugar, Cotton, Orange, Gator, or Peach (Chick-Fil-A) Bowl. Don’t laugh at the jokes of Jeff Foxworthy, Larry the Cable Guy, or Ron White. The next time you travel, do not fly Delta Airlines and be sure not to have a connecting flight at Hartsfield-Jackson.

If you are not willing to accept this, then you should apologize to George Bush, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, Newt Gingrich, Sam Nunn, and posthumously to Dwight Eisenhower, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. Not all Republicans, but all southern.

If you are willing to accept these terms, then, in the immortal words of Lynyrd Skynyrd “a southern man don’t need him around anyhow”.

Fortunately you’re not running for re-election.

I’m not a tough guy

Jul 28

Posted by JayByrd in Society | No Comments

The other day I was on my ride sittin’ at a light and their was a gentleman in front of me driving  a moving truck. This gentleman was turning right on to the interstate. Between us were two cars driven by two less than gentlemen. The gentleman in the truck hesitated and the other two decided that the appropriate thing to do would be to lay on their horns. Did this do anything other than to irritate me. No – well it probably irritated the gentleman they were honking at.

Horns are safety devices. Drivers are to use them to warn others of impending danger. In some circumstances when one driver needs to get the attention of another, it is appropriate to lightly tap the horn. When a driver lays on their horn it is the same as yelling at someone while standing in line at the ATM. Most people would not yell at another for not moving quickly enough in line, but they don’t hesitate to lay on their horn at a traffic light. Why is this, because it’s easy to act tough when your wrapped in steel and glass.

Now, I’m not a tough guy. The last fight I was in was when I was fifteen, and I got my ass whipped. I can count the number of fights I’ve been in my whole life on my fingers. My father was a tough guy. No, he didn’t yell at people in line or honk at people in traffic. He was a Marine, and I remember what he told me when I was old enough to understand. He told me that he used to enjoy fighting until one day he woke up and realized that the only thing that he ever got from it was sore knuckles.

Since my father told me that, I’ve walked away from several fights. I was actually standing in line with my girlfriend, now my wife, and had a guy yell at me for stepping on his shoe. We were waiting in line for a concert, and were jammed like cattle in a car. Everyone was pushing toward the door and I stepped on the back of this fella’s shoe. He turned around and I apologized. A couple of minutes later the line surged forward and I stepped on his shoe again. This time he turns around yells at me  for stepping on his shoe again. Now I’m faced with a decision. I can either follow this guys lead and yell back or I can apologize again. One of these paths devolves in to violence and the other does not. I apologized and I had a good night. If I had taken the other path I guarantee both of us would have had a worse night.

Now, I’ve gone through this story to get to this. Society can not survive incivility. I would like to claim this idea as my own, but I can not. There are rules that exist in healthy socities that keep the peace. When I was younger I scoffed at these rules as ridiculous trappings of an out of date society, but as I moved out of adolesence I realized these rules serve a function. Simple things. Take your hat off when you’re inside. Hold the door for others. Say yes Ma’am and no Ma’am. These trappings of civilized society keep the peace and we would all do better to remember them. Gone are the days of the cotillion and it is to our great detriment.

Talking trash is seen as tough. Gone are the soft spoken, humble, gentlemen soldiers. Those men who defined themselves by how they treated other who were inferior to themselves. Men who could knock another man down if necessary, but wouldn’t hit him once he was down. Men who would extend that man a hand to lift him out of the dust.

We need to return to those days when you never kicked a man when he was down and you always tipped your hat when you passed a lady. So tomorrow, when you’re sitting in traffic or standing in line and you feel impatient, take a minute and think about how your actions affect others. Are the net results positive or negative, and remember you can’t beat sense in to a fool.

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Viva Honduras

Jul 23

Posted by JayByrd in Politics | 1 Comment

I will be writing my elected officials to voice my support for Honduras and actions they took to uphold their constitution and remove a nascent tyrant from office. I will also be urging them to reverse the stance of the State Department and to recognize the legitimate government of Honduras.

The Day Racism Died

Jul 23

Posted by JayByrd in Politics, rant | 3 Comments

On March 3, 1991 Rodney King led LAPD on a high speed chase. When he finally pulled over, he resisted arrest and was severely beaten.

On July 16, 2009 Robert Louis Gates Junior refused to cooperate with a Cambridge Police officer who was investigating a reported robbery. Mr Gates followed the Officer out of the house, berating the officer with charges of racism and threats of  “you don’t know who you’re messing with”.  When Mr. Gates did not desist, the police officer cuffed him, had another officer recuff him more comfortably, retrieved Mr. Gates cane, and had a maintenance worker secure Mr. Gates house. When asked about this incident President Obama responded that the Officer acted “stupidly”.

Mr. Gates is a Professor of English at Harvard, and a black man. President Obama is – well President of the United States, and a black man. James Crowley is a Cambridge police office, and a white man. Officer Crowley responded to a report of a burglary at Mr. Gates house. When Officer Crowley asked Mr. Gates to provide evidence that he was in fact the resident of the house he refused. The reason the incident was reported was that Mr’ Gates and his driver were trying to force the door open, because it had been damaged in a previous break in. Instead of showing the officer his ID and thanking him for doing his job Mr. Gates called him a racist. So who acted stupidly in this situation?

Is racism actually dead? No. But it is no longer institutionalized. We will never be free of bigotry, prejudice, racism, et al. Go into any high school in this country and you will find this behavior between cliues that have nothing to do with race. Some people are mean, some are stupid, and all of us can be mean or stupid under the right/wrong circumstances. In this incident Mr. Gates was both mean and stupid. Is he mean and stupid on a regular basis? I don’t know, and President Obama admitted that he didn’t know much about this incident, and yet he passed judgement on Officer Crowley. Sometimes it’s okay to say “I don’t know”, even when your President. Mr Obama did more harm to race relations in this country with that one statement than any incident any recent memory.

I learned at a very young age, and had it reinforced often through my teenage years, that when you are  questioned by a police officer you respond “Yes Sir”, “No Sir”, “Thank You Sir”. Even when you are innocent and powerful insulting a police officer is a bad idea. In this country no one is above the law. No one. If you are pleasant to police officers they are usually pleasant to you, even when you are guilty. Or, Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

My information regarding this incident came from the police report. If I find that this information is not accurate I will revise my opinion.

For those lost, those found, and those we never knew

Jul 18

Posted by JayByrd in Poetry, The Light of Day | No Comments

I hate politics. This isn’t a political post. The reason I hate politics is that politics piss me off. I just want to be left alone.

Anywho. Tonight a wrote a letter to my elected officials concerning the current healthcare legislation.  It left me irritated, disappointed, and a little sad. When I get in to this sort of dark state my mind is like adrowning man and it flounders around grabbing on to every thought , and doing to them what drowning men do to the folk who try to save them.

Well tonight I latched on to an occurrence from a few years ago. This poem is from my forth coming book it’s the only poem in the book, and it’s my favorite poem that I have written. Probably because it is personal and written about things that are important, not politics. I’ve never told anyone that this was actually written seperate from the book, which is weird, but I’ve found this blog to be a good way to clear my head. In life there is joy and sorrow and many times they overlap and in the resulting confusion we sometimes lose ourselves. Maybe this will help. It helped me.

 

Rejoice

You can spend your time sighing and waste your life crying

with grief for the dying and dead.

But open your eyes and dispense with the sighs

it’s the living with which you should tread

 

That path through the dark, that is so cold and so stark

is so only for those who have breath,

because the soul in death finds light and breath

on the road that for them is not dark.

 

So save your grief for sinner and thief

for they can benefit still,

and live your life through pain and strife

as the dead who were living would will.

 

For life is worth living and love is for giving,

so give as the living should give,

and rejoice, rejoice with resoundant voice

for those who are living still live.

Health Care

Jul 18

Posted by JayByrd in Politics | No Comments

I need to be serious for a few minutes and ask for your help. The Congress of the United States is currently considering legislation that will eventually destroy the healthcare system in this country, as well as bankrupting us in the process. Please write AND call AND email as many politicians as you can. Start with your Represenative and Senators and go from there. I’m posting my email below. Write your own, even if it’s just one line that says “Please vote against the healthcare bill.”

 

I am writing to urge you to vote against the healthcare bill that is currently being considered in Congress.

 I don’t even know how to begin to express my dismay that this legislation is even being considered. I find it appalling economically, morally, and legally. The government run healthcare that already exists in this country is broken; Medicare and Medicaid are rife with fraud and abuse, the VA system is difficult to use and the care is substandard, and the deplorable conditions at Walter Reed gave us a glimpse into what we can all expect from government healthcare.

 President Obama has said that this legislation will bring competition to the healthcare industry. It will not. Private insurance companies that have to make a profit to succeed can not compete with an entity that takes the money it needs by force and obscures its true costs through taxes. When there is competition there are winners and losers, some companies fail and others succeed. But politicians will never allow their insurance provider to fail. They will raise taxes, cut benefits and change the rules that private insurers are required to operate under in order to insure the Government’s “success”.          

 For the government to tax people at the rate at which the U.S already taxes its citizens amounts to usury, to increase it by the levels needed to pay for even the projected cost of this health care bill is shameful. People work for their money. Whether they are making minimum wage or millions of dollars a year should be of no concern to the Government. That money is the physical representation of the amount of time that person spent earning that money, and to confiscate is to lay claim to their life. To confiscate to give to another in goods or services is theft.

 This bill will do nothing other than add cost, complexity, and limit choice. Small business owners will bear the brunt of the burden in higher taxes and penalties. If you want to make positive changes to the way healthcare is provided in this country you should work to decrease mandatory minimum coverage laws, pursue tort reform to decrease the cost of malpractice insurance, and gradually reduce the tax breaks given to employers while increasing tax breaks or providing tax credits to individuals for the cost of health insurance. These things would reduce the cost to doctors and individuals while providing individuals with an incentive to shop for insurance and medical service based on price, thereby increasing competition and further reducing cost. All of this could be accomplished without increasing taxes or expanding government. The healthcare system in the United States is the best in the world and to reduce to the state of socialized medicine in Canada or Great Britain is a tragedy. Please I urge you to vote against this bill.

 

Sincerely,

James Byrd

“I don’t know”

Jul 14

Posted by JayByrd in Religion | No Comments

I’m an agnostic. I’m not proud of it. It’s a waffling, middle of the road, straddling the fence, indecisive thing to be,  but the fact is I don’t know if God exists. Now, before I go any further this is not an invitation for anyone to persuade me one way or the other; don’t do it. My best friend is a devout Catholic and one of his good friends, and the godfather of his first daughter, is a priest. Neither one of them tries to convert me, and I expect the same of others. In fact, please don’t try to convert people uninvited. It is a disservice to your religion or lack there of. Militant atheists irritate the hell out of me. So against my better judgement I’m going to leave this post open to comments. If you have something insightful, funny, or educational, please share your thoughts. If you want to proselytize go somewhere else.

Periodically, much to the chagrin of my wife, I get this tugging feeling. It’s an odd sensation in my head and chest that leads me to consider the question of God. I’m not being rhetorical, it is actually a physical sensation akin to anxiety. It usually starts and builds for few weeks comes to a head and then dies away. When it does come to a head I find my drawn to the works of C.S. Lewis. Today was one of those days. I woke up from a night filled with odd dreams feeling discontent. At lunch I usually head to the gym, but today I went to the book store looking to find a running magazine or maybe a book of poetry to read over a cup of coffee, but walked away with C.S Lewis’  The Abolition of Man. Last time it was Mere Christianity. Before that it was the Bible, although I didn’t finish it. I will.

Maybe it’s the fact that Lewis was a convert from atheism that draws me to his writing,  or that he was a professor of Medieval and Rennaissance English at Cambridge. But the fact of the matter is that C.S. Lewis wrote about good and evil, and right and wrong, not for literary effect. He wrote about them, because he believed in them. He believed that evil exists in the world and that good men can overcome it. There is a love of man that comes through in his writing, not in a new age everyone’s good at heart way. No, in a way that father loves his son. It’s an old school, hickory switch kind of love. Real love.  Not love debased by rationalizations, not cowardly love.

I only just started reading The Abolition of Man, but will post on it when I’m done. Until then I leave you with the wisdom of a child and my chagrin as a father.

When The Boy was about three years old he was asking me about religion. I don’t remember what exactly. It might have been about what happens when people die and if they go to Heaven. He asked me a two or three questions and each time I replied with an answer prefaced with “Well some people believe…”. He finally said “I’m asking what you believe.” Be blunt with your kids. I wasn’t and I ended up embarrassed. It’s okay to say “I don’t know”.

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Welcome to the South

Jul 10

Posted by JayByrd in Uncategorized | No Comments

Those of you from the South, the deep South, will find this amusing. The rest of you may be befuddled, or bored, but if you ever come down here keep this story in mind.

The Boy and I went camping this week to Vogel state park. Vogel is a beautiful state park located just inside of the Chattahoochee National Forest. You can paddle around the lake and watch the clouds  alternately reveal and obscure the peaks of the mountains that crowd together to form the park. There is trail access to the AT, Blood Mountain, Coosa Bald and Slaughter Gap. And in this 233 acre park there are more species of trees than there are in Yellowstone’s 2.2 million.

Now boy and I were in the Visitor’s center paying for our miniature golf when I hear this exchange from the other counter.

Visitor: “On the way in we saw these vines. They were covering the trees. Do you know what that is?”

Park attendant: “Probably kudzu.”

Visitor: “Why doesn’t somebody do something about it? Do you just not care? It looks like it’s going to kill the trees.”

At this point I ushered Boy out of the visitor’s center and stiffled my laughter.

Now those of you who grew up in the Deep South are laughing to yourselves, and the rest of you wondering why doesn’t someone do someting about it if its going to kill the trees. So in an attempt to edify, I am going to pass on some southern lore.

During the Great Depression the Federal Government of the United States paid workers through the Civilian Conservation Corps to plant kudzu to control erosion, it also subsidized the planting of kudzu by farmers. I suppose that if controlling erosion is thing you’re concerned with then the planting od kudzu was a success. However, in the south kudzu grows at an alarming rate, up to a foot a day, and is impossibly hard to kill. Herbicides have little effect, fire doesn’t kill it, it doesn’t freeze hard enough in the south to kill it, you can mow it but at a foot a day mowing is a full time job. So we do what we can, but we can’t get it all.

The moral of this story is: when you go somewhere new get to know the culture, before you get uppity with the locals. Oh, and it’s my understanding that they have the same problem with english ivy in the Pacific Northwest.

Off the grid

Jul 7

Posted by JayByrd in Technology | 1 Comment

Well sort of. Wimax is in Atlanta in the form of Clear. For those of you who don’t know Wimax is wireless broadband. I have seen it referred to as a MAN ( Metropolitan Area Network), and I am going resist using that particular acronym. Of course I vowed to fight the term Wifi as well.

Since we moved three years ago I have had the broadband blues. First Bellsouth told me that they couldn’t provide me with broadband even though the fiber post is in my yard. So I went with the local cable company who provides a very fast although unreliable, and very expensive solution. By the time I finally convinced Bellsouth that, yes broadband was available to me, I had started streaming lots of music and video, and the 1.5 Mbps provided by IFITL wasn’t an acceptable solution.

Then two or three weeks ago I was listening to Rough and Blue on Pandora and trying to look busy so that boss lady, not The Boss Lady, doesn’t put me to work, when an add for Clear in Atlanta comes on and I think to myself “I gotta get me some of that”. Well I am lazy and I procrastinate, so I looked at the site, but I didn’t follow through. Then Saturday I try to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Hulu and my connection starts to drop every couple of minutes. This pisses me off, because I need my Allyson Hannigan – Joss Whedon fix. So I call the aforementioned cable provider and the tech looks at my modem and “Yup, you’re modem’s dropping off intermittently. We can have a tech out on Thursday.” Thursday? Well that was actually better than the last time this happened, but it doesn’t matter now, because I have Clear.

So here’s the break down. I replaced my cable m0dem with a WiMax router. I have great signal strength. I’m getting a hair under 6Mbps down and 500Kbps up. All this for 20 bucks less a month. I have seen complaints online from clear users in other cities, but alot of those complaints were people trying to get out of contracts. I did not sign a contract, I’ve been down that road and it rarely ends well regardless of the company.

If this continues to work well, I will sign up for the laptop connection. So we can take Machine Politick on the road. We’ll have a mobile factory. We can pitch tents and have revivals. Signs and wonders. Stump speeches. Snake oil. Snake handling. Hallelujah.

If you are moved to remove yourself from the grid use referal code b42ef9. Help a brutha out.

Fifty stars and thirteen bars

Jul 4

Posted by JayByrd in Poetry | No Comments

I started this about four years ago and never finished it. Maybe I’ll revisit it, but until then have a happy Fourth of July.

 

Fifty stars and thirteen bars

And never a one shall run

‘Cause on this night

We stand and fight

The evil form afar.

 

Father, brother, son

With voice and pen and gun