Support Dr. King's Legacy

This month marks the 42nd anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In honor of Dr. King, the clergyman, civil rights leader, and peace activist, a National Memorial is being built in Washington, D.C.

The Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial is a scant 16 million dollars away from reaching its funding goal of 120 million dollars. This is a Memorial that will rightly take its place on the National Mall in honor of Dr. King and his ultimate sacrifice in the name of equality and civil rights. The tentative dedication of the Memorial is scheduled for the Fall of 2011.

There are a number of ways to support the Memorial, including direct bequests via the website and text messaging donations. Please visit the MLK website at www.mlkmemorialnews.org and help America honor Dr. King's legacy by making a donation today.

Back to Nature

With my children's Spring Break fast approaching, my wife preparing for a business trip, and my daughter getting her turn for the annual vacation with the grandparents, I found myself wondering what I could do with my son for the week. At fourteen, he is at the age where spending time away from his friends and his obsession with X-Box Live, all factor in on what he might consider a good time with his father. Due to other commitments, including a medical appointment later in the week, we were consigned to a two-day window to plan something enjoyable for both of us.

After ruling out a trip to Chicago (the Cubs were out of town) and some other inexpensive options, I decided to take Ethan on a trip to southern Indiana to hike the trails of Harrison-Crawford State Forest. Located on the Ohio River near the historic town of Corydon, Indiana, the state forest offered over forty miles of remote hiking trails and the prospect of very few hikers and campers this early in the season.

I had been to the area once as a small boy, accompanying my dad and one of his hunting buddies on a trip to scout deer hunting locations. It was a quick trip, spent mostly driving up and down dirt roads, but my recollection of the area was one of lush forests and towering hills, something totally foreign to me after growing up in the glacier-leveled plains of central and northern Indiana. Instead of meticulously planning every facet of the trip (something I am notorious for doing when planning family vacations), we decided to just pack up and go, even leaving open the possibility of camping under the stars.

Tuesday morning dawned unseasonably warm with temperatures near seventy degrees. After loading up the Rendevous with the bare essentials (including a compass, trail food, gloves and two rain ponchos), we hit the road. Unlike the typical family trip where the kids sit in the backseat and listen to their I-Pods or watch a DVD, Ethan sat up in front with me and we talked a great deal about school, sports, girls, and life in general. The conversation was refreshing. It was the sobering kind of interaction that reminds a parent that their child is two-thirds of the way to adulthood.

Not counting a quick pit stop south of Indianapolis, we made the three hundred mile drive in a little over five hours, arriving in Corydon around three o'clock. Since Ethan seemed less than thrilled about spending the night outdoors, we stopped at a local motel, checked-in, and got a quick bite to eat before heading to the state forest. With the temperature now at a balmy 84 degrees, we rolled down the windows and drove silently through the countryside. Turning off of State Road 62 to enter the state forest, we paused for a moment on a bridge over the Blue River, both of us entranced by the sight of two kayakers paddling down stream in the bluish-green water.

A few miles down the road we stopped at the entrance of O'Bannon Woods State Park. While Ethan waited patiently in the car, I spent five minutes talking to a cheerful park ranger who seemed very happy to see us. He asked about our plans, pointing out that it was not uncommon for people to get lost on the miles of trails, and stated rather mischievously that they had never lost a hiker for more than a day or two. After collecting a trail and topography map, we set out for a trail that followed a ridge line overlooking the Ohio River. Other than a lone hiker and two people on horseback, it appeared that we had the entire park to ourselves.

We were both excited as I parked the car near the trail head. Ethan laughed out loud while I struggled to put on a fanny pack filled with our supplies, especially when I put it on backwards the first time. The view from atop the bluff was surreal, almost as if we had stumbled back to the 1800's. No barges, boats or industry as far as the eye could see. The trail was well-maintained and clearly-marked. Two hawks circled overhead, effortlessly rising and falling with the wind as we walked silently, taking our time to enjoy the sweeping views from the ridge, and pausing at several spots to stand on the rocky outcroppings that perched over the river.

While I cautiously approached each overlook, Ethan negotiated the rocks with athletic ease, completely oblivious to the fact that one missed step could lead to a tragic end. Walking fifty paces in front of me, he shouted suddenly for me to join him on a large, flat rock that formed one half of a chute that led straight down to the forest between the river and the bluff.

"What is it?" I asked, surprised to hear the sheer excitement in his voice.

"I found a big black snake!" he replied. "Quick... Grab the camera out of your pack!"

By the time I had extracted the camera from my pack and joined him on the outcropping, the snake had vanished, undoubtedly annoyed at being interrupted during his late afternoon sunning session. We explored the rock for a few minutes, marveling at the dozens of cracks and crevices where snake could have sought refuge. I was actually somewhat relieved that it had been a black snake. Southern Indiana is Northern Copperhead territory, and one of their favorite places to den is in rocky crevices. Disappointed that he wouldn't have a picture to show his friends, Ethan finally agreed to give up his search and we continued on our way.

Fifteen minutes later we emerged from the trail at the bottom of the ridge. Instead of continuing on another trail that angled away from the river, we decided to walk back to the west between the bluff and the river. There were no trails leading up to the base of the cliffs, which presented us with the challenge of navigating the steep hillside filled with brambles and fallen trees.

While Ethan led the way, I carefully followed behind, choosing each step with the knowledge that a fall would probably result in a bruised backside. Sure enough, about fifty feet from the base of the cliff, my left foot slipped in the wet foliage and I tumbled first sideways and then downhill about eight feet. Pulling myself up with the help of a sapling, I was surprised to see that other than a few small cuts on my calf and a wet behind, I was none the worse for wear. Ethan, who was standing at the top of the incline, laughed for several minutes as I wearily made my way up the rest of the grade.

"Not very graceful, dad." he chuckled good-naturedly, extending his hand to mine for a final assist to join him at the top. "I'm surprised you didn't fall all the way down to the river!"

"It was the fanny pack's fault." I replied, before taking a paper towel out of the man purse and dabbing my bleeding calf. "It threw me off balance, probably because I packed those extra batteries in the left pocket."

All Ethan could do was smile as he scrambled up twenty feet to a rock ledge that appeared to run for several hundred feet beneath the outcroppings. Suddenly feeling my age and nursing my bruised pride, I declined Ethan's invitation to join him on the ledge, and instead followed beneath him, snapping pictures and watching every damn step I took. The rock ledges were both foreign and fascinating. Large and small crevices dotted the rocky formations, the product of millions of years of weather and erosion. Around a small bend, several hundred feet from our starting point, we came across an actual cave. The entrance was about ten feet wide and six feet tall. Ethan made a brief attempt to climb up to the cavern, but thought better of it when he realized the rock wall actually inverted outward.

Exhausted after about two hours of climbing and exploring, we both decided it was time to head back up to the car. Ethan had drained his water bottle in the first hour of our adventure and we were now sharing my half-drunk bottle. The point at which we chose to descend was fairly steep, and in a fearful moment of history repeating itself, I decided to tie a 25 foot line from a sturdy tree and rappel-stagger-slide down a particularly steep portion of the hill. I made it to the bottom of the incline without incident (although I wouldn't describe it as a graceful maneuver). Ethan was excited about the prospect of doing the same until I informed him that he couldn't because it was his job to untie the rope and throw it down to me. We couldn't leave it behind. Determined not to suffer the same fate as his father, Ethan did an excellent job shifting his weight to his down foot and slid down the incline without incident.

After some more good-natured ribbing back and forth, we made our way to the bottom of the hill and walked back to the base of the ridge. We stopped for a water break fifty yards from the river and during our break discovered two walking sticks that had carved, pointed ends. Tired, and hungry, we used the walking sticks to guide us back up the ridge. Watching my son navigate the long, upward stretch of trail with ease and grace, I couldn't help but feel a tinge of both sadness and joy knowing that my youth was gone, but Ethan's wonderful journey was just beginning.

At the trail head we stopped once again to admire the beauty of the river below us. The two hawks who had sailed overhead at the beginning of our trek were still floating effortlessly in the warm, humid air. We considered briefly taking the walking sticks with us for our next day's hike, but instead decided to set them next to the trail head marker for the next hikers who would follow in our footsteps.

As we trampled through a small meadow back to our car, I smiled and hummed an old Dan Fogleberg song. It had been a good day for both of us, father and son.

A Just Verdict in the Heartland

Today, Sedgwick County (Kansas) District Judge Warren Wilbert sentenced anti-abortion killer Scott Roeder to life in prison for the murder of Dr. George Tiller. Judge Wilbert could have given the convicted murderer a lesser sentence, opening up the possibility of parole in 25 years, but in a remarkable example of responsible jurisprudence, he recognized that Mr. Roeder is not only a murderer, but an evil miscreant who believes he can kill people in the name of his god.

Spurred on by organizations like Operation Rescue, former Republican Congressman Bob Dornan, and thuggish talking heads like Bill O’Reilly, who referred to the late doctor as “Tiller the Baby Killer” at least 28 times from his bully pulpit on Fox News, radical anti-abortion opponents terrorized Dr. Tiller’s family, staff, and patients for years.

Inspired by a belief that women had a right to safe, clinical abortions, Dr. Tiller endured thirty years of death threats, a fire-bombing of his clinic in 1986, and survived after being shot five times by Shelley Shannon in 1993. Scott Roeder, after months of stalking the doctor, finally succeeded in the name of the radical anti-abortion movement, murdering him in cold blood during services at a Lutheran Church in Wichita, KS., on May 31, 2009.

Abortion is legal in the United States, and Dr. Tiller provided a lawful medical service to the women of central Kansas. Mr. Roeder, age 52, will not be eligible for parole until 2060, when he will be 102 years-old. I hope he takes a long hard look at the walls of his prison cell, because he’s going to die there.

Why We Needed Healthcare Reform Now

After a long, drawn out battle complete with racist, hate-filled diatribes courtesy of the Tea Party protestors and a Republican opposition that brought nothing to the table except a warped desire to block every initiative of the Obama presidency, I was overjoyed when our chief executive signed the healthcare bill this week. For the first time in months, Democrats seized the initiative and delivered on one of the President's campaign platforms.

The system is broken, plain and simple. Our unregulated, for-profit health insurance companies have become the scourge of the middle class and working poor. Unlike many of my friends and some family members, I believe that affordable healthcare in one of the wealthiest nations on earth is an inalienable right, not a privilege. According to the Health Affairs website, 52 million Americans will at some point be without insurance in 2010. That's one in every six Americans, and it's absolutely shameful.

Thankfully, the entire healthcare bill is available online at opencongress.org. In numerous debates I have had with conservative friends and foes in the last week, the vast majority of them are relying on information from Fox News or the usual right wing scare tactic of e-mail chains filled with lies and outrageous claims. I can rebut ninety percent of their falsehoods with specific sections in the bill (healthcare for illegal immigrants, IRS access to our bank accounts, health care rationing, ad nauseum), yet they only believe what Glenn Beck told them about "the socialization of medicine in this country" and refuse to use their reading skills to separate fact from fiction. It's not only maddening, but also a sad indictment about the paranoid inroads that these so-called pundits have made on the American psyche.

It reminds me of the Jack Nicholson outburst from "A Few Good Men."

"You want to know the truth? You can't handle the truth!"

I understand that people are scared of this legislation. Not only is it a significant change to the current healthcare system but it also contains some ambiguity regarding cost reductions in the Medicare budget. I think it's also realistic to question whether the nonpartisan, Congressional Budget Office's assurance that the legislation will reduce the deficit by 138 million dollars over the next ten years and 1.2 trillion dollars in the following decade is accurate. It's not a perfect bill by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a start.

Regardless of whether the number of Americans who die each year because of their lack of access to affordable healthcare is 40,000 or 25,000, we must accept the fact that is an atrocious legacy of our system. All of the right wing's incessant lies about government run "death panels" have in fact been a sanctioned corporate parade of death for years. Shareholders profit when the insurance company drops a sick newborn or cancer patient from their rolls, and the consumer or their family member pays that price, sometimes with their life.

Hello Spring...

It’s been a long winter for my family here in northern Indiana. We had snow on the ground for nearly eight consecutive weeks and it seemed like we would never see a day where the mercury hit fifty degrees. It wasn't a particularly hard winter. My kids only missed a half day of school due to the weather, and that was due to a fog delay of all things. No major snow storms, just four or five inches here and there, a seemingly never ending reload whenever the earth threatened to melt the white stuff away.

Well, it finally happened two weeks ago. Several consecutive days of fifty degree weather finally allowed us to see grass in our yard. Even the black squirrels were happy. Instead of hanging out up in the trees or digging through last year’s flower boxes on our deck, the squirrels have been darting around the property checking for hidden stashes of walnuts. The birds seem happy as well. Cardinals and even a Red-Wing Blackbird have been making touch and go landings in the backyard, ever vigilant of the Cooper’s Hawk that has taken up residence in our cul-de-sac.

Both of my kids have abandoned their video games, computers and the television, instead spending their time outdoors playing with friends or sharpening their baseball and softball skills. They haven’t broken any windows yet (which seems to be a spring ritual), so we go about our chores in nervous anticipation of that first hard sound of shattered glass. Between playing family games of “horse” in the driveway and cleaning up the collateral damage of broken limbs in the yard, we have rediscovered the joy of being unburdened by coats and mittens.

Even our neighbors appear to be on a “spring high.” The dog walkers have an exaggerated bounce to their step and contented smiles on their faces. The kids are getting fewer after-school phone calls and more knocks on the door inviting them to jump on a neighbor’s trampoline, play hopscotch or shoot hoops. People are out working in their yards, pausing from their tasks when we drive by, and shouting greetings that I haven’t heard in six months.

I’m not quite ready to dust off my golf clubs or get the bikes down from the racks in the garage, but it won’t be long. Summer is a marvelous season, but spring is the time when we shake off our chilly exteriors and embrace civilization again.

Vacation

I am on the last day of a three day break that was supposed to last a week. We haven’t done a whole lot (went to the movies, had a cookout with the in-laws, laid around and dreaded going back to work on Monday), but I find myself wondering if we will ever get back to the days of taking that much needed summer hiatus of year’s past. Like many typical American families, we have grown accustomed to taking one week every summer and heading for the beach or the mountains. Unfortunately, over the last three years I haven’t managed to get out of the state with the wife and kids due to work commitments and our son’s grueling baseball schedule.

Frankly, this has been the summer from hell. Between working a job that has become increasingly stressful and unfulfilling as my hours have continued to increase to the point that I’m working ten hours a day, six days a week, my son tore his MCL playing baseball and my wife tore a calf muscle playing kickball. In the course of a just a few months, we have become a family that was constantly on the go to one of crutches and doctor’s appointments. No baseball was the perfect excuse for scheduling a quick trip to Savannah or the mountains of Tennessee , but the thought of carting one half of the family up the Appalachian Trail on a dolly didn’t sound like a whole lot of fun, not to mention the fact that my nine year old daughter would probably hop on the daddy-pulled four wheeler as well.

So here we are rapidly approaching school and we have yet to have that defining moment of summer’s past. How do you give your kids that “wow” experience when you live in the northern part of a state that has a cooler-than-normal summer season that lasts about as long as Janet Leigh in the shower scene from the movie “Psycho?” We have to drive four hours to southern Indiana just to see hills (the kind of land buds that the glaciers laughed their asses off and didn’t even give a second glance to as they headed east millions of years ago). Hell, the tallest point in Indiana is in the middle of a corn field in the east-central part of the state where I grew up. How many Sherpa’s would it take to summit a corn field?

We’ve already done the Lake Michigan day trip this summer, a quick 75 minute drive to Saint Joseph, Michigan, on a chilly weekend in June. It’s a beautiful town on the lake, but about the only thing it has in common with the sunny Gulf of Mexico is water. And let me tell you, it’s really cold water. It’s the kind of water that comes out of a drinking fountain that’s so close to 32 degrees it gives you a brain freeze. If I ever want to experience water that cold again I’ll just go jump in the Elkhart River in January.

I guess I’m just thankful that I’ve got pretty good kids. The type of kids that understand how hard we work to provide them with the creature comforts of a decent life, don’t give us a whole lot of grief when we fall asleep at the movie theater watching a PG movie, and say “thanks” when we deliver them safely home from practices and sleepovers. When I look at our lives in that dimension, I can rest easy at night knowing that even if we didn’t make it past the state line for a ten day vacation, my children understand that we are doing the best we can.

And that’s all I can ask of my family. Work, love, and dream of a better tomorrow.

This Journey

As my son, Ethan, quickly approaches his fourteenth birthday, I’ve found myself reflecting on the wondrous journey that has brought us to this first summit in our lives; the beginning of manhood for himself and the long, slow recognition of this milestone on my part. There is a hint of sadness in this realization, even though I’ve know for years this day was coming. I guess I thought it would be a little later in his teen years (like sixteen or seventeen, which is around the time I started pulling away from my parent’s arms). Either way, I should have been prepared for this unmarked date on my calendar, but truthfully, the years have raced by so quickly that I find myself stunned at where we find ourselves today.

In many respects, he is still the same delightful child that we brought home from the hospital bundled in a blue blanket. He is honest, respectful to adults, opens doors for little old ladies, and works hard at school to bring home honor roll grades. His sparkling brown eyes and infectious laugh still bring a smile to my face, but at the same time he is beginning to assert his independence in a way that sometimes leads us to hours or days of sullen silence. In this supposedly enlightened age of cell phones and instant communication via text messaging, I’m still struggling to loosen the reins and set him free.

Trust is like swimming. I know he can dog paddle from one end of the pool to the other, but could he save himself if he got swept out to sea by an invisible rip tide? Those parents who can cut their kids loose at the county fair with a twenty dollar bill (o.k., maybe two twenty dollar bills) and brief instructions to meet at the entrance in three hours are a marvel to me. In my heart I know he will almost always behave and do the right thing (like staying away from strangers who look like Billy Bob Thornton on a three day Budweiser binge), but I cannot seem to get past that parental hump in the road that our children have to learn from their mistakes.

I’ve also noticed subtle changes in the bonds that have wrapped us together over the years. Many of the activities we used to do together have been cast aside for his need to constantly be around his friends and my growing need for down time from a life that has become more stressful in the last twelve months. Those frequent intersecting times when we would go to see a movie, play golf, or go fishing have dwindled to the point where we seldom spend just father/son time together. Looking hard into the mirror, I have belatedly started coming to grips with the fact that, like his mother and younger sister, he is an extrovert- and I am an introvert.

But the bond between a father and his son is a funny, quirky sort of thing. It hits you very hard and at the least expected times. It happens after a frosty exchange of “Why you can’t spend the night at your friend’s house three nights in a row.” It happens after a bad game where the ball just wouldn’t fall through the basket. It happens when I’ve said the word “no” so many times it flies out of my mouth before I’ve had a chance to consider the question.

Just when I think this impenetrable wall is sliding between us, when I think he only needs me to put a roof over his head or give him spending money, he will ask me something that knocks me back a few steps. Something like “Are you proud of me for getting straight A’s in school last semester?” It’s times like these… that after I’ve assured him how very proud I am and that he has the potential to do or be anything he wants in life, that I find myself getting teary with the knowledge that he is my lovely son, and that we have a bond so strong and resilient that it will never be broken.