The Forgotten Ones

I want to make this piece available to everyone and come back from outside the firewall this morning. While I hope you’ll consider the piece below that I have titled “The Forgotten Ones,” allow me first to have a bit of a confession here.

We don’t talk about mental health enough. It has too much stigma and is impolite and sometimes seems self-serving. In my usual spirit of transparency and oversharing, let me talk about mine.

I have not had a day off work since January 2, 2020, except for Memorial Day and three days in which I was sick. I actually took several vacation days, but big news broke so I gave up vacation and turned on the microphone.

I do five hours of radio a day minimum. There have been a number of days I have done up to eight. My morning show consists of me talking for 43 minutes per hour for three hours and my evening show is an additional 25 minutes per hour for two more hours for a total of 5 hours of daily radio and 179 minutes of talking off the top of my head with no scripts or talking points. It is remarkable that conservatives in talk radio do not get more attacks from the left given so few of us use scripts and just try to ramble on in an engaging and entertaining way.

On top of those five hours, I have a TV studio in my house and do occasional television hits, plus write two newspaper columns, this site, and run my own website. My weekends during the age of COVID-19 consist of me making multiple grocery store runs and doing all the other errands that must be done for a family that otherwise should not be getting out of the house.

I’m exhausted. I can tell I’m exhausted because I’m becoming way more easily distracted, my thinking is more rambling than normal, and I cannot sleep.

My aunt died Monday. She is my favorite aunt. I have not seen her in person in a year, though we’ve talked and emailed occasionally. She was not actually a blood relative, but my mother’s best friend and she and her husband were just part of the family. She taught me kindergarten, was the first person to sternly lecture me for not doing my best, taught me how to tie my shoes, bought me my first real suit, and introduced me to chocolate cream pie from Picadilly Cafeteria. If you’re from Louisiana, you understand that one.

Her death came somewhat unexpectedly and I would love to go to her funeral. But in talking to my doctor, he said he’d rather me go to China or Las Vegas than anywhere in Louisiana at the moment given the virus. If I went, my wife and kids would then need to spend 14 days away from me upon my return. So I will not go.

The confluence of all these events and lack of rest have pushed me enough that my wife insists I go away alone somewhere and take a break from everything. I actually went to a meeting in person in Atlanta yesterday. I walked in to the room, the man I was meeting with took one look at me, then asked when was I taking a break. It is apparently that obvious that I’m on the verge of an exhaustion related crack up. The daily grind of keeping up with headlines and other peoples’ stupidity has just worn me out.

So I’m going away for a few days. Alone. To the mountains. To sleep.

The dangers of what I do often consolidate into ego, which consolidates to an air of indispensability. I am only indispensable to my family and for their sake I’ll go take a few days away from them and all of you and all my listeners to rest my brain and body and maybe, very badly, hit golf balls terribly.

Allow me to be a lesson for you — sometimes you really need to take a break. I assumed I could wait until my previously scheduled vacation in July. But I can’t. So I’ll see y’all next week.

Now, on to the actual thing I wanted to write about before I get out of here.

The Forgotten Ones

A man emailed me last week and his email cut me to the core.  He said he was really angry about the Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd deaths, but not for the reason the rest of us are.  He, a black man in the middle class, lives with his wife and children on the edge of a crumbling neighborhood. They are saving to move.

He is angry because white people are suddenly realizing what he has always known, but white people are still refusing to look at the rest of the problem.  White liberals who are suddenly railing about the police unions protecting police are unconcerned about teachers unions protecting teachers.  His children are academically successful in a public school.  He acknowledges teachers can only do so much when kids are coming in from broken families where they were up at night listening to gun shots.  But he also knows from his community how many of the kids could do better with better teachers.

He is angry about the failure of public schools and the unwillingness of rich white people across the political spectrum to let him use his tax dollars to send his kids to better schools.  He is angry about white people talking about the violence in Chicago, but doing nothing and deciding that is a conversation best left “to the black community.”  He is angry at the healthcare system for failing black communities and he is angry at the black communities for failing themselves.

I have not lived his frustrations, but I understand them.  Last week, in Chicago, violence took more deaths in the black community.  Progressives want to talk about gun control.  Conservatives want to talk about the collapse of families.  White people generally have decided they should not talk about it and I am unaware of prominent black voices talking about it.

Some white people look at the black community crime rates and conclude the police are doing what they are doing because of the crime rate.  My black friends tell me to understand the issue, understand that many young black men have simply given up in a society that has not given them a chance.  Families have crumbled, opportunities never came, and the public schools have failed.

Teachers tell me they are frustrated because kids come into schools from broken homes.  The oldest siblings are taking care of the youngest siblings because the mom has had to go work to provide for a family without a father.  The teachers are angry because they are held accountable based on the results of tests taken by hungry kids whose souls are hurting.

Saying “systematic racism” is at play actually gives government too much of a pass.  The failure has a lot to do with deciding a government in Washington can fix the problems of Atlanta or Chicago or Lake Charles.  Then there is the failure of thinking a bunch of politicians are going to truly fix a problem when they could instead let it fester and use that to maintain power.

The organization Black Lives Matters has taken the statement of fact that black lives do matter and turned it into a progressive cause that, among other things, seeks to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.”  It is not a Western prescribed structure. It is a structure that works globally.  It is a structure government itself decided was not necessary.  It is a structure that, with its systematic collapse, has seen society crumbling around it.

My correspondent is a black father working in the middle class with a family.  His children are more academically successful than their peers from broken homes.  That is not a coincidence. If we want to rebuild a more just world, we need to strengthen the two-parent nuclear household, not disrupt it.  It is already disrupted and needs repair.

We need to remember the poor kids who cannot escape the teachers unions, which they’ll encounter more regularly than representatives of police unions.  We need to remember the victims of violence not seen on camera.  We have a lot to do, but that work is best done in our communities, not abstractly in Washington.

Georgia’s Legislature Must Formally Investigate Its Election

The Georgia legislature needs to investigate the primary elections in Georgia.  It was a disaster.  There was no malice.  There was no attempt to suppress or defraud voters.  A confluence of events including a virus, severe thunderstorms, gross incompetence, poor training, and new equipment caused the problems. 

To his credit, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger anticipated problems and, over a six day period, mailed every single Georgia voter an absentee ballot application.  Local governments, which actually handle the processing of those applications, did not anticipate the flood of incoming applications and consequently were too short staffed to get them all out in time.

On election day, some people had gotten their absentee ballots, but forgot to send them back.  They showed up at the polls and had to vote provisionally, which slowed down the lines.  Others showed up who had not gotten their absentee ballots.  More than one person got their absentee ballot envelope in the mail, but failed to have an actual ballot in the envelope.  They had to show up too.

Just before election day, some poll workers tested positive for COVID-19.  In Atlanta, five precincts of approximately 7,000 registered voters each had to be consolidated into a single location because of that.  There just were not enough poll workers.  Combine the people showing up to vote with provisional ballots and the consolidated precincts and the crowds grew.

Beyond the crowds, the elections used new machines.  Georgia was under a federal judge’s order to stop using their old machines.  So the state started training for the new machines they were already buying.  When the virus hit, that training had to go to online meetings.  Many of the people training the poll workers were also new to the machines.  That slowed the process down.

Then there were the machines themselves.  If any federal judge reads this, I recommend an order that these machines be prohibited from further use.  While I appreciate electronic voting and, in theory, it should speed up and make for a more accurate count, these machines are a disaster.  Only the consultants who made serious money off them could love them.  Whoever in our state government thought these machines were a good idea should be tied to a horse and driven from the state of Georgia and barred from returning on pain of death.  The machines are that bad.

In 2000, after the disaster in Florida’s election, most states began abandoning paper ballots for electronic ballots.  Both the disabled and senior citizens have an easier time touching a screen than holding a pen to fill in a bubble or punch out a chad (remember them).  Georgia’s machines were stand alone devices into which a person placed an electronic card to activate the machine.  A vote was cast.  The voter hit a button on the screen.  The card popped out.  The voter left.

The new system involvers an iPad to check in the voter; a machine into which an electronic card is placed; a duplex laser printer to print a ballot once voted; a scanner to scan that ballot; and a sorting box under the scanner in which the ballots are secured.  There were too many moving parts and it turns out the scanners rejected ballots on paper that got wet from the storms while the scanners and printers repeatedly jammed due to the thick ballot paper.

These machines should be destroyed and there should be an investigation into how anyone could have thought they would improve the system.  No one maliciously tried to screw up the election.  But it happened anyway.