The Tao Of Brother T

I’ve been working n a new novel. It started out as a way to deal with my grief. I guess it’s worked, because I’m down to the rare moment of melancholy. What I write today may seem painful, but I view it from a place of gratitude. I lost my Mom back in January. She had a three year battle with cancer and eventually her body gave up. I was fortunate enough to be her caregiver for the last two years of her life. For this, I am eternally grateful.

We were close, my Mom and I. Through the years, I had years where I was the seldom-seen kid, times when I moved back home, and other times where I was somewhere in between. When I moved back in with her for the last time, we became two peas in a pod. There was nothing that I wouldn’t do for her, and as time wore on, she became more and more dependent on me. I remember thinking, “This is what the next twenty years of my life is going to look like.” And I was fine with that.

This story is not about how Mom lived, but more about how I lived. To tell that story, I have to take you back a decade or so. Back to when I was “That Guy.” I was pretty much of a heathen when I was growing up, and that mentality carried forward into my working life. I was selfish, vain, drunk and irresponsible. Everything that happened to me was someone else’s fault. You all know someone who is “that guy.”

Anyhow, about ten years ago I finally escaped the service industry. I’d been running restaurants for the better part of fifteen years, and every career move was a step down on the food chain. I was a angry, burnt out mess. The escape pod picked me up at the right time. I got into a job that meant that I could give back some of what I had taken. The change was not without its growing pains.

At the beginning of 2012, my Mom had a houseful of invalids. In a three month period, my grandmother would almost die, my step-father would pass, and I would move 1300 miles away. Gram ended up in assisted living. Mom had the weight of the world on her shoulders. In this place of struggle, a ritual was born.

My grandmother was a demanding woman. She was sharp as a whip, pretty as a princess and always dressed to the nines. Even well into her 90s she was still doing her makeup and dressing every day. My mother was driving twenty-five miles each way almost every day to take care of all Gram’s needs, including some days stopping at Meijer AND Walmart to get the brands that Gram wanted. Mom might spend all day at the facility, but she still called Gram every night at six o’clock to say “Goodnight.”

I think I was still in Denver when I found out about this nightly call. I remember thinking, ‘why didn’t I think of that?” For the next six years, I called Mom every night at seven o’clock. Then, in the summer of 2016, just like any other night, I made the nightly call. I was in throes of the election season, and I was up to my neck in campaign work. She said, “Your brother says I have to tell you so I will. I have cancer.” I gutted the election out (that’s another story) and went home in early November to get her through the last six weeks of her chemo and radiation. Two months later, she got a clean bill of health and I got my marching orders to move to Philadelphia.

The next year was excruciating. They tell you that you’re cancer free. What they don’t tell you is that they’ve destroyed your immune system and some of your basic functions of life. Like swallowing, for example. We had our nightly calls. I would make the eight-hour drive home as often as time would allow. Finally in 2018, I got to move back to Columbus for good. We settled into a routine.

I’ve never been married, I don’t have any kids. I’ve had a few serious relationships in my time, but at no point have I ever had anyone who I was responsible for. Remember? My middle name is irresponsibility. I came home to a very fragile girl. I honestly don’t know how she stayed alive during the previous year.

My entire restaurant life had been spent snapping at people, belittling them, demanding more than they should have to give. My new job had changed me for the better, but I still was fairly uncivilized. It was almost like I had to train myself to be a human being again. I had to learn to manage my mood.

Mom was disabled, There is no better way to put it. They’d burned her vocal cords, so she could barely talk. She couldn’t swallow, so they put in a g-tube in her stomach. She had rheumatoid arthritis, so it was hard for her to use the syringe for her feedings or the grinder for her seventeen different medications. She could barely walk, let alone get up the stairs to her bed. I became her cook, her nurse, her maid, her driver, her bodyguard. Not only that, I became her window on the world. It was my job to make sure she had some sunshine in her life. It became my occupation.

One thing they don’t teach you in school is how to act when you’re around sick people, old people or little kids. There are some times in this world where you absolutely cannot wear your emotions on your sleeve. Dealing with someone who’s chronically ill is one of those time. Your frustration can wait until you walk out of the room. It was a learning process. I started doing things I never would have dreamed of.

Every time I walked into the room where she was sitting, I would say “Hi!” It would be upbeat, enthusiastic. I wanted her to know that she had my undivided attention. I might say it six or seven times a day, and that was fine. It was my thing. I would say “I Love You!” multiple times a day. I said “Good Night My Love!” every night and “Good Morning Sunshine!” every day. I tried to never bring her down. I never let her see me sweat.

Mom spent the last two months of her life in hospital rooms. I was there most of the time. I kept up all of my rituals. Even when she felt like shit, I could say “Hi!” and get her to smile. In the end, I think I kept her alive for a few weeks after she was ready to give up. I was selfish in that way. But I’m hoping that her mind was at ease when she slipped away.

If you take anything from this essay, I hope it’s this. In this crazy time of Covid-19, we have the ability to keep our loved ones going. It’s easy to get mired in “woe is me,” but it’s way more fulfilling to make someone smile, to ease their burden. Maybe in that simple act you can ease your own burden as well.

peace, my friends

lies a painful wedgie!

Last week on Twitter I saw a nice little human-interest video from reporter Homa Bash in Cleveland. During my years in Cleveland, Homa Bash and her co-workers were the funny and light-sided take on the news (except for that Jay Z incident. That one still burns me). The video in question shows parents and kids stepping out of their front doors and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in unison. It was the typical cutesy video that you get from human-interest reporters, whose job is to find good things to break up the depressingly serious side of the news. I’ve seen Homa Bash, and Cam Fontana in Columbus, and Patrick Wright in Greensboro and many, many others do countless stories just like this one. So why do I feel the need to write about it?

Video Read the comments.

If you haven’t been living under a rock (or if you’re my age or older), you know that Twitter is a vast wasteland, where trolls run free and hobbits are in constant danger of annihilation (I’m kinda a hobbit-troll hybrid, but you know that if you’ve ever read my stuff). The trolls came down on this one furiously. This eighteen-second video spawned a firestorm of “racist” and “white nationalist” comments from the left. This kind of stuff happens everyday on both sides of the fence. What is it these Right and Left wing “do-gooders” don’t seem to realize? That the “fence” is miles away from either of their positions. A better analogy, there are two fences, and they are miles apart.

*

Think of the political landscape as a football field. Put the Right fence on the fifteen or twenty yard-line. Put the Left fence on a similar yet opposing yard-line (I’m over here). What you have is sixty or seventy yards between the opposing Wings.

Another analogy might be imagining (my apologies in advance, neighbors!) Canada and Mexico at war and America being caught in the crossfire.

And still another way to think of it is a circular firing squad, with the Right and Left are two halves of the circle.

Now imagine the Left side collapsing and opening fire on each other.

We are cannibalizing ourselves and NOBODY is winning.

*

So, what is fueling this extreme rage on all sides of the landscape? In my ten years of traveling this land, I’ve seen an exponentially increase in hypersensitivity and tribalism. This isn’t hyperbole. I’ve skewed pretty far to the left for a long time, but I could always see what motivated the good on the other side. What I’ve seen is a sharpening of rhetoric that drives us apart. The power brokers at the very top have weaponized some simple wedge issues and used a sledgehammer to drive them home. Normal folks are fatigued by the constant fighting.

“Seize the Guns” vs. “Background Checks” vs “Gun Control”

“Abortions for Everybody” vs. “Access to Women’s Health” vs. “Baby Killing”

“Medicare For All” vs “Affordable Care” vs. “Love My Insurance”

“Common Courtesy” vs. “Freedom of Speech” vs. “War on Christmas” 

“White Nationalism” vs. “It’s okay to love my Country” vs “Patriots”

The list goes on and on. The bottom line, for every staunch defender of a <name your position here> on either side, with most people stuck in between. The last five years or so, we have gone down the path where facts don’t matter. Every opinion is now taken as fact by someone, and the echo chamber gives credence to even the most ludicrous stances.

Is there an easy fix? No, there is not. I can only hope this virus and the aftermath bring us to a new era of civility, a time when we can sit down and have a conversation about something without turning it into a WWE cage match. In one of those, someone can always be counted in to be the heel.

Back to the video. Shortly after it aired, detractors on the left jumped on the video as an insidious plot by a group of suburban parents to indoctrinate their kids into some kind of white nationalist cult. Is that possible? Of course. Is it also possible that the parents wanted to get their bored kids out of the house for sixty seconds? Of course. The answer probably lies somewhere in between. To be honest, Each parent probably had their own motive for being out there at that moment in time. No person is as evil we give them credit for, and very few are a wholesome. We all fall on that sliding scale somewhere in between.

Someone, probably a close friend, is going to take offense to this post. I welcome it. I ain’t perfect. I don’t even play it on television. I’m just trying to be a good dude.

Fu*ck it, a boy must dream, right?

A long-distance friend of mine reached out today. We don’t always see eye to eye, but we’ve developed a mutual respect over the years. She shared a story with me that I think you need to hear. She asked me to protect her anonymity, so I’m not going to get too specific. I was surprised and touched by her faith in me. I can be irreverent and snarky at times, but when the cards are on the table, I call them as I see them. I don’t pull my punches. Here is her story.

Long story short, her son is a Medical Doctor. He’s around forty years old, married with children and in good physical condition. He worked out every day, ate a low fat diet and did not smoke. He was a social drinker. About ten days ago he started feeling ill, but felt he had a responsibility to keep working. By the end of the week he went home early and headed straight to bed. He was feeling so bad he had to write himself a prescription for the current recommended medication. (I’ll get back to this later) Over the weekend his condition worsened. His family forced him to go to the hospital. He is now on a ventilator and fighting for his life.

Like a lot of people in my generation, my friend didn’t take this virus seriously. This is not an indictment of her. It’s more an allegory on the echo chamber that we’ve become. My friend is no fan of Trump, but she does tend to lean to the Right. I don’t think she would ever take Trump at his word on anything. In fact, I suspect she is leery of everything that comes out of his mouth. But the POTUS has been bloviating for almost three months about the virus being benign, inconsequential. He is a very convincing liar, especially when his sycophants back him up. So now, when the chips are down, we are wholly unprepared to limit COVID-19’s footprint.

Getting back to the son. I mentioned that our young doctor wrote himself a prescription on his way home from the office. When his wife, who is a registered nurse, took him to the ER, they turned her away at the door, told her to go self-quarantine with her children. But first, they wanted her to run home and grab her husband’s meds, because the hospital was critically low. This is totally against any hospital’s procedure. They want to know the source and efficacy of everything they put into someone. Let me repeat:

THEY TOLD HIS WIFE, WHO IS AN REGISTERED NURSE, TO RUN HOME AND GRAB HIS MEDS BECAUSE THE HOSPITAL WAS CRITICALLY LOW. Let that sink in.

My friend lives near a large and fairly well-to-do city. From the outside looking in, I wouldn’t think they would lack for facilities and services. Her son is a doctor, so I’m guessing he didn’t have to worry about delays of treatment or a lack of insurance coverage. And yet the hospital was out of the anti-viral medications and supplies they need to treat his case. This is not an isolated incident. All across the country, hospitals are running out of beds, ventilators, masks, gowns, protective gear, medications. EMT, doctors, nurses, admissions people, police officers and transit workers are being knocked down by the virus. Facilities are being overrun. And still we talk about it being “no worse that the flu.”

So who is to blame for all of this? Nobody is to blame for a pandemic. Once the virus escapes into the wild, the only thing to do is try to contain it. Limit the damage. We have failed in that. The days have passed when we could look to our leaders with confidence in a time of crisis. These days, everyone has an agenda. The media tells us what the corporate overlords want us to hear. The President has proven that he values his feelings over the best interests of the country. He is a small and petty man. He is not responsible. He has never been “responsible.”

The moral of this story: Don’t be a tough guy. This is a cautionary tale. Despite all of his training to the contrary, my friend’s son tried to tough it out. I can only pray that he pulls through. My friend told me this story in hopes that others would not try to “tough it out.” My friend was lulled into a false sense of security. No one is secure. Everyone is at risk. Be smart. Protect yourself. If you start to feel sick, use the online resources. If your condition worsens, go get a test. Do not let yourself die thinking that this is “just the flu.”

America has always had a tough guy mentality. We tell ourselves that we are the strongest and hardest working. The internet and the 24-hour news cycle have amplified this flaw in our national consciousness. There comes a time to say “Enough.” Protect yourself. I pray this young doctor makes it. And I pray the rest of us do as well.

Back when I was in the restaurant biz, I developed a reputation as the guy who could handle the problem children. (Translation: I developed a reputation as a sucker.) In retrospect, that has probably been a factor in the downfall of a lot of my jobs. I would take the worst worker of the bunch, give them way too many chances, and get screwed every time. They say the definition of insanity…

I could have nipped it in the bud. Back in my earliest days of management, I went to my HR manager with a request for a re-hire. She said,

“Now T, I’m not going to tell you that you can’t rehire G. I will tell you this, rehiring an old employee is like getting back with an old girlfriend. The longer you are spit up, the less like you are to remember what caused the break. But the troubles will always return, and usually worse than before.”

Don’t you know it’s true? It’s easy to re-hire someone who you’ve worked with before. You don’t have to train them. But if they left under bad circumstances, they will likely do so again. And it’s just as painful every time.

I spent the majority of 2012-13 in Denver, Colorado. I could go on and on about the weather, the mountains, the spirit of the Great American West (and I probably will at some point). But I want to tell you about a particular night I spent in Aurora, Colorado. 2013 was an off-year election. There wasn’t a lot going on politics wise in Colorado that year. That being said, we never stop doing what we do. Aurora was holding a city council race and a union guy was on the ballot, so we decided to put him over the top. When you think of Aurora, the first thing that comes to mind is probably the theater shooting. Most folks don’t realize just how large Aurora actually is (350k people).

We had a very tiny crew that year, so I spent some time canvassing. I was out in Aurora knocking on doors when I walked up to a house whose yard was inundated with gopher holes. A nice woman opened the door and stepped out onto the porch. I introduced myself and told her why I was there. Then I asked her the same question that I ask everyone at the door.

“What is the biggest issue for you and your family?”

She didn’t hesitate. “The prairie dogs. I know your candidate and I like him. But his opponent actually knocked on my door and told me that she’d take care of my problem.”

Yeah right, I thought. A politician is going to personally come out and eradicate a thousand prairie dogs from this neighborhood. I gave the standard talking points on why we chose our candidate and what made him better, then moved onto the next door.

I turned the corner and started working my way down the next street. About ten doors away I turned up a driveway and made my way onto a porch. One of the great things about being out on the street in beautiful weather is that you can take in all the sights. This house had hella sights to take in. The yard was full of hippie shit. I love hippie shit. There were dreamcatchers, streamers and windchimes dangling from the porch. I peered through the screen door and saw a middle-aged man walking around. I gave the door my signature “shave-and-a-haircut” tap and he hollered,

“Let me grab a beer and I’ll be right out.”

We exchanged pleasantries and I sent my opening salvo. “What’s the most important issue for you and your family?’

“It’s funny you should ask that.”

“Why is that?”

“It’s the prairie dogs, dammit!”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I just wish people would leave them alone. They’re my friends.”

It was a ‘holy shit” moment. And it just goes to show you that there are two sides to every story, and that one of them isn’t necessarily wrong.

I was just about ready to jump back into politics. Unbeknownst to me, things were about to get very real.

In 2010 the Republicans pulled off a nationwide coup that was nearly as devastating as Pearl Harbor. The Lefty crowd was still patting ourselves on the back for electing Barack Obama, choosing Hope over Fear. Rather than wringing their hands, the Republicans went to work. They targeted State Houses and Governorships across the country. Few states felt the sting as badly as Ohio.

I still view it as kismet. I walked into the job interview with high hopes. I had requisite experience, a passion for the work and, as I told you before, I’m a wizard at job interviews. The Field Director and I hit it off immediately. It was like we were brothers from another mother. He too had spent some time at Citizen Action, albeit years after my tenure. Within the first minute it was clear that I would get the job pending a second interview. The conversation progressed to how I could become a Field Director. I’m pretty sure I threw my hands up in the air and said “Whoa, wait a second.” I hadn’t escaped from twenty years of management jobs to go right back to being someone’s boss. At the time, I still had delusions of being an award-winning crime writer. Dreams die hard.

“I know what kind of hours you have to work, B. Time is more important than money to me at this point in my life. In fact, I’d like to do this job four days a week. You see, I write books.”

He got this stern look on his face, one that I’ve seen maybe three times in the eight years that we’ve been friends. “This work is too important, T. We expect everyone who takes this job to be on-time full-time. We’re going to pay you a good wage plus bonuses and pay for your health care. All we expect you to do it be here forty hours per week and to do a good job while you’re here.”

I thought I had overplayed my hand. I said, “I can do that.” And that was that. I walked from the dark side into the light.

sI had my first union job, fighting for worker’s rights against some of the same corporations I used to work for. About six weeks later, Governor John Kasich signed a bill into law that would seriously roll back those right in the state. The bill was so hated that only one state senator would publicly sponsor it. The so-called Senate Bill 5 would restrain the rights of unionized state workers to collectively bargain.

COLLECTIVE BARGAINING: When a group of workers negotiates with management as a unit, typically for wages, insurance, benefits and working conditions. This bargaining unit usually takes the form of a union and must be ratified in a democratic vote of the proposed unit’s members.

Specifically, Senate Bill 5 allowed for the negotiating of wages, but eliminated any other bargaining rights. This was particularly troublesome for first responders and teachers, who already had to go into their own pockets for supplies and safety equipment. Roughly a half-million workers were affected by the new law. Mass protests erupted at the statehouse. I was there on day one.

In Ohio, the citizens have the right to repeal any law, but only if they can muster enough statewide support to get it put on the ballot. At the time the bill was signed into law, the threshold was 400,000 verified signatures to put the repeal on the ballot. In addition to that, a minimum number of signatures needs to be distributed among 44 of the state’s 88 counties. Progressive groups, including my own, set a goal of 500,000 signatures in the next three months. My team crisscrossed the state, going to all the tiny hamlets that were off the beaten path.

I mentioned early that only one senator would sponsor SB5. She was from a rural “safe” district where she’d won by a large margin the previous November. We took the fight directly to her home town. I can recall canvassing on her street, her husband following close behind, trying to explain away her heinous act. We got a chuckle on the ride home that night. In the end, 1.3 million signatures were collected, 900,000 being valid.

I estimate that I talked to over 4000 voters in that election cycle. It was a nightly education in what people really want and need. I had people from the Right and the Left tell me they expected bloody revolution to break out. I heard from voters who said their single biggest issue was the city not fixing the potholes on their street. I also heard the litany of “birth certificate, Muslim, Kenya” bullshit from the burgeoning Fox News crowd. It was alternating hope and despair. I loved it.

In November of 2011 we went back to the polls to vote on Senate Bill 5. It was a resounding win for the good guys. We got more votes than Kasich did when he was elected. It was also a foreshadowing of things to come.

In February of 2011, I began a nearly eight-year journey that took me to eight different states and 11 different cities. I saw the Rocky Mountains, The Rust Belt, New England and The South. I worked with hundreds of vibrant young people, who in turn knocked on hundreds of thousands of doors. The quest: to spread the good word of progressive values and reach into the core of the American psyche. The pertinent questions can be boiled down to: “Why does fear overshadow common sense?” and “What can we do to pull the country kicking and screaming back to the American Dream.” Enclosed are the lessons I’ve learned along the way. You’ll also learn more a lot about me than you ever wanted to know.