Wonderful World

June 12, 2013 //

What a Wonderful World! We all know that song, made most famous by Louis Armstrong and played so often in commercials these days.

It’s a noble sentiment and an incredibly positive way to view the cultural, social and cosmic forces that surround us.

Unless of course you read the newspaper or checked out the cable news station as I did one day last week as I was sitting in the lounge waiting to board an airplane.

Item: A newborn baby boy was flushed down the toilet by his 22-year-old mother in China. Incredibly, neighbors heard the baby crying and called for help. The firemen couldn’t get the baby out of the pipe but were alert enough to saw the pipe away from the toilet, and the baby was extracted intact from the pipe at the hospital.

That’s somewhat of a happy ending but what kind of person stuffs their baby in a toilet and leaves it to die. What kind of cultural forces are at play that would make a young woman behave in such an evil way.

Item: Social workers in California ignored repeated blatant signs of abuse by a sick woman and her psycho boyfriend and eventually they killed the woman’s eight-year-old boy.

Young Gabriel Fernandez was discovered with a fractured skull, three broken ribs and his skin was bruised and burned. He had BB pellets embedded in his lung and groin. Two of his teeth were knocked out of his mouth.

His mother’s boyfriend told authorities that the boy was beaten for lying and “being dirty”. Gabriel had been left at home despite six investigations involving the boy’s mother.

Item: A California woman was taking a stroll in her desert neighborhood when she was mauled by a pack of pit bulls. She had suffered over 150 puncture wounds and a dog was still tearing into her when Sheriff’s deputies arrived at the scene.

The woman died and the dog’s owner will be tried for murder. The 29-year-old man owned 8 dogs and there had been at least three other reports of attacks since January, yet the dogs were left in his custody.

Three very powerful examples of man’s inhumanity to man, especially disturbing because the victims were a newborn baby, a child, and a totally innocent bystander.

Add to these the recurring nightmares of American soldiers dying in Afghanistan, unbridled abuse against women around the world and in the US military, global warming, tornadoes in the mid-South, and drought throughout the southern part of the country–reading or watching the news can be a very sobering activity.

Many people have told me they just avoid the news because it’s so damned depressing. It’s hard to argue with them, but I’m a news junkie and always will be and hopefully I can occasionally find a story that will reaffirm my faith in human nature.

Unfortunately, it didn’t happen on that day. All of my sports teams had lost their games. the smog in LA was burning my eyes, and the Mayor of Toronto was still refusing to respond to allegations that he was smoking crack cocaine.

And just when you think things can’t get worse, teen heartthrob Justin Bieber is reported by CNN to be driving his Ferrari way too fast and sneaking into night clubs although he is underage.

What is this World coming to? Play it again, Louie, keep reminding me about the skies of blue, the red roses too, and the bright blessed days ahead!

Tags Louis Armbstrong, news, wonderful world

Categories La Conner Weekly News, Mel Damski

Fate!

By Mel

May 29, 2013 //

Do you believe in fate?

I almost died in a car accident on Sunday. I love to tell stories and I’ve been known to exaggerate but this really happened.

I was driving North on the La Conner Whitney Road and slowed down to 35 mph right before the intersection with McLean Road, just like the traffic sign dictates.

A guy coming west to east on the cross street was tooling along at around 50 mph and didn’t seem to notice that he had a stop sign. He didn’t see me in my old Mercedes and was about to broadside me on the driver’s side with his SUV.

I would have been toast. They didn’t have side airbags in 1982, not even on German cars.

I honked and pulled hard right, into a skid. He pulled hard right as well. It was a near miss. I’ve directed scenes like this many times, with high over head cameras.

Shaken, I jumped out of my car, but the douchbag in the SUV pulled out and headed on his way down McLean Road. He never even made eye contact with me.

A cyclist saw the whole thing. At least if I had been obliterated, he would have told the world that it wasn’t my fault. He asked if I was alright, and although I was badly shaken and I’m still popping Advil, I was happy to be alive.

Alive and wondering: what if I had left town 5 seconds earlier. I’d be dead for sure. Or if he left his house earlier we’d never have crossed paths.

The only reason I was driving so slowly is because I got pulled over the previous night in that little speed trap. It was late, there was nobody around, I slowed down but not enough and a cop pulled me over.

He couldn’t have been nicer, explaining that while it seemed random when nobody was around, the reason for the lower speed limit there is that it’s a dangerous intersection and you probably won’t be killed if you’re going 35 instead of 50.

Of course, that’s if the other guy honors the stop sign. What an irony it would have been if I got clobbered because I slowed down, because I would have been long gone if I went my usual 40 mph in that spot.

These near death experiences certainly beg questions about fate–this was simply about timing, about being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

If you jump out of an airplane, or drag race, or don’t bother to fix your brakes, you’re tempting fate. But sometimes through no fault of your own, you are clobbered.

Think about the guy who lost both legs at the Boston Marathon. If he ran a little faster or a little slower, he’d be fine. The two misguided morons who planted those bombs certainly were hell bent on changing the course of history.

But the runners were doing something we can only admire—pushing themselves to their physical limits. Their families and friends and onlookers were there to support them. The three people who died in the blast, an 8-year-old boy and two young women—all with most of their lives ahead of them—certainly weren’t enemies of Islam.

Two days before my near miss, my wife Susan called me to tell me that she had just been in a car accident. I asked if she was alright and she said she was fine. I said I’d call her right back.

Now I have a confession to make. I couldn’t take her call because I was waiting on a long line to get an autograph from Edgar Martinez, one of the great Mariners baseball heroes. He was signing bottles of tequila at a liquor store in Bellingham.

I was near the front of the line and didn’t want to have to start all over again. Edgar and I had a very brief, very superficial chat, I got my autographed bottles and immediately called Susan back to get the details.

You could say she was tempting fate, driving in Los Angeles, especially during a Friday afternoon rush hour. But she was driving cautiously and was hit from behind as she slowed to make a turn.

You can wonder and you can ponder but it’s very difficult to understand WHY things happen the way they do. The puzzle has launched and promulgated many different belief systems, lots of different ways of trying to understand why bad things happen to good people who do nothing wrong.

All I can do is say what happens, happens. I don’t know if it’s for a reason, I don’t know if it’s part of a master plan, but I know I’m very happy that my wife is teaching school today and that this is a my column and not my obituary.

Tags accidents, fate, near misses

Categories La Conner Weekly News, Mel Damski

Greatest Generation of Mothers

By Mel

May 22, 2013 //

Family holidays can be tricky, because families are complicated.

Mother’s Day has become particularly challenging because of the continuing dissolution of the nuclear family. Divorce creates issues, and many families are now spread out across the country and the globe.

My day was particularly bittersweet, because I had to work, filming in Vancouver because of a scheduling quirk, far away from my mother in Palm Springs and my wife and kids in California and New York.

Rachel, my mom, recently moved into a very nice assisted living situation, but she is an extremely feisty 92-year-old, and she fought for her independence for as long as possible.

When she recently started to have issues with her eyesight, my siblings and I campaigned to get her to give up first her car and secondly her two-bedroom apartment.

There is a very funny scene in the movie “Where’s Poppa,” in which George Segal tries to tell his mother, played by Ruth Gordon, that she has to go to a ha, ha, ho, ho, hoooooo…he can’t bring himself to say the word home.

We brought Rachel to one place to check it out and assured her it was filled with dynamic older people. Because of lousy timing, the only people who were still in the public rooms were basically comatose, expressionless people, who lingered in their wheelchairs and walkers after lunch.

The active people had taken off to do gardening, watch a movie, discuss books, play cards — you name it — and the woman showing us around tried to divert us away from these less ambulatory people, but my mother doesn’t miss a trick, and there was no way she was going to this place.

The next day she called me and said she was “horrified” that a son of hers would expect her to live in a “place like that,” and we weren’t to discuss it anymore. I knew exactly how George Segal’s character felt in that movie.

But a couple of weeks later, my mom fell out of bed, had to call my sister to take her to the ER, and decided that the time had indeed come. We found another place that she liked better and started the arduous, emotionally challenging process of weeding out a lifetime of cherished possessions as she was moving into a smaller space.

Because of my work schedule, I couldn’t be there the week of the move, but the extended family did a magnificent job of making the transition as comfortable as possible. When I made my Mother’s Day phone call, Rachel sounded like she was adjusting well.

Corbin Bernsen could have had a much tougher Mother’s Day. His mom, the actress Jeanne Cooper, passed away last Wednesday at the age of 84.

You might have heard about this, because she was a very popular actress who spent the last 40 years in the soap opera The Young and The Restless.

Corbin followed in her footsteps and is a vital cast member on my series “Psych.” He was totally upbeat on Sunday, focusing on what a remarkable woman his mother was until the very end of her life. Instead of mourning, he is celebrating the “astonishing” life she led.

Six weeks ago, she taped her final scene, and it aired last week. Corbin said it was as if she knew this was her final act. In the scene, she refuses help and walks alone up a stairway, turning back over her shoulder and adlibbing the line, “Good night.”

Jeanne grew up in the hardscrabble town of Taft, California, where her father toiled in the oil fields. Her mother died when Jeanne was only 14. Life was a struggle, but Jeanne somehow managed to go to college and fulfill her dreams to become an actress.

Rachel has lived through a depression and a holocaust that destroyed most of her extended family and is still around to enjoy nine grandchildren and will soon have her 12th great-grandchild, and she is surrounded by love and admiration.

Jeanne and Rachel are members of that Great Generation of women who could not be held back, would not use hardship as an excuse for failure, and lived to see their dreams come true.

They have been and will forever be a great inspiration to the rest of us, who have been privileged to bask in the brilliant illumination of these remarkable women.

Corbin says he is left with a very human emotion.
“I just miss her,” he said.

Mindful of his loss, I can’t wait to get to Palm Springs to visit my mother in her new ha, ho, hooo…home!

Tags Corbin Bernsen, Happy Mothers Day, Jeanne Cooper

Categories Mel Damski

Don’t You Know

By Mel

May 8, 2013 //

Well, look, I think, well, I don’t know how to exactly find the right words for this, um, well, you know, heck, it just seems to me, well, probably others as well, you know, but, I’m just finding, maybe you’ve noticed it, too, that well, um, people don’t seem to be able to, you know, talk anymore.

Hey, is it just me here, you know, noticing this, you know, kind of trend.

Hey, what really kinda blows my mind, well, at least is kinda surprising to me, is, you know, it seems to happen in all quarters, even, like, people who are in the media, sort of.

I mean, c’mon, wouldn’t ya think, you’re like famous, like on TV all the time, like wouldn’t ya think you’d be able to, well, how do I put it, you’d be able to put a sentence together.
Or two. Or three.

Listen, I know, I know, I know, hey, we all got lots of stuff floating around in our, well, in our brain pans, or whatever you want to call it, but, listen, um, look, I’m as distracted as the next guy, you know what I mean, and me, of all people, well, you know, I found myself doing the same thing.

Hey, look, it’s not like I’m better or smarter than, well, than any of you, so here I am, thinking, well, you know, just so you don’t think that I’m a D-bag for calling everyone out on this, what do you want to call it, like a trend, I guess you would call it, a trend, right?

So, look, if you’re still with me here, and, hey, I wouldn’t blame you if I’ve lost you by now, right, hey, we’re all human here, right, but you know, there is a solution and, what the hell, I’m going to, well, I’m going to try to, anyway, try to share this, I guess you’d call it a, you know, a secret.

THINK WHAT YOU ARE GOING TO SAY BEFORE YOU START TO TALK!
DON’T EMBARK ON A SENTENCE LIKE IT’S A PATH INTO THE UNKNOWN.
AND WHATEVER IT IS YOU HAVE TO SAY, DON’T SAY, oops, um, well, you know, YOU KNOW.
Dig?

Tags communication, language, proper speaking

Categories La Conner Weekly News, Mel Damski

You Shouldn’t Live in the Past

By Mel

May 1, 2013 //

KINDERGARTEN PALS –

Julian “Julie” is the boy on the left, Mel is the kid with the big necktie second from left, and Danny is third from right in the second row behind the plant.

It was a neighborhood school, and we walked there together. They lived halfway between my house and the East Hills Elementary, and they would fall in with me in the morning as I passed their houses.

The crossing guard was Anita Conroy, the first woman crossing guard in New York, soft-spoken but assertive, and our parents felt comfortable in the early 1950s letting us walk to school unaccompanied.
Danny, Julie, and Mel. After school, we would stop at either of their houses, because my parents both worked. We’d have milk and cookies and watch Howdy Doody and Rudy Kazootie on that cool new invention called TV.

We followed this routine until fourth grade, when Danny moved away to who knows where.

Because we’re planning a high school reunion, a lot of people are coming out of the woodwork. Last week Julie, now Julian, emailed me and said he had heard from Danny, now Daniel. He tracked Julian down online and asked if he knew where I was. Reconnected, Daniel attached class pictures from those early years in emails.

Daniel Sanders lives in Hangzhou, China. We arranged a phone conversation, and we spent 45 minutes filling in the last 56 years or so. Daniel ended up going to high school in London, England and college at Princeton. He’s a social scientist, working for Reach of Louisville, an organization that supports at-risk kids in Kentucky and Ireland. As a data analyst, he could live anywhere. He was divorced, fascinated by China, and made himself into a mail order groom. He fell in love with a Chinese woman he met online and moved to Hangzhou.

Daniel & Wife

You shouldn’t live in the past, but it’s a place I like to visit.

Mine was a very happy childhood, so I like to go back in time to try to find clues of the mystery of what made me the man I became. I volunteered to help organize the 50th reunion, and we are busy trying to track down as many members of the Roslyn High School Class of 1964 as we can find for an event in October of next year. So far, we’ve found about half — 170 or so. At least 33 have passed away.

We’ve had the great fortune of finding Anita, the crossing guard, and Miss Smith, our first- and second-grade teacher.
Some of the people we are finding didn’t really enjoy those high school years and were adamant that they weren’t interested. Mostly, people are excited to reconnect, and there have already been several mini-reunions as people find others who are living in close proximity.

We have a lot of doctors from our class and many people now living in Florida. There’s a small Washington State contingent, Dr. Jerry Eisner from Mount Vernon, president of our Ham Radio Club, and Dr. Jay Zatzkin from Tacoma, who was the star of our high school golf team.

I flew back recently for an organizational meeting. We divided up the chores — entertainment, accounting and banking, class yearbook — online and in hard copy versions. Mostly it was people-finding, which is a challenge after all these years, even in the digital age.

As always when I visit my hometown, I parked in front of my boyhood home, where one of my classmates lives now. I visited my elementary school, junior high and high school, all of which were open that day for a weekend basketball program.

Okay, I hear you. Get a life, Zookeeper. But I love going back in time, trying to figure out how that young boy became the man I am today. But the best thing about this trip down memory lane is reconnecting with people that I spent a great deal of time with growing from boy to man.

Yesterday I spoke to Teddy Huber, now Ted. He wanted to know if his first girlfriend, Susan Rothenberg, would be at the reunion because he has something he wants to give her. It’s an ankle bracelet, and he bought it at my parents’ jewelry store and had it engraved 54 years ago. He lost his nerve and didn’t go through with it.

I can’t wait to see her face when he finally gives it to her.

Tags East Hills Elementary, high school reunion

Categories La Conner Weekly News, Mel Damski

The South SHOULD Rise Again

By Mel

April 25, 2013 //

Should the South rise again?

You bet your grits it should!

Because it seems to me that that Big Red blotch on the national political map must represent a lot of very frustrated people, who feel that they are very out of touch with current national trends.

My suggestion is that they revive the Confederate States of America (CSA) and allow any of the original states of the Confederation to vote on whether they want to opt in or opt out.

My guess is that Virginia, North Carolina and Florida will opt out, but not without a nasty fight, and the rest will be more than happy to fly the Confederate flag.

We shouldn’t stand in their way. As I recently watched the movie Lincoln, I kept wondering whether Honest Abe, were he able to time travel, would think that bloody Civil War was worth it. I know he would give me a truthful answer.

The CSA would consist of nine states: Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, South Carolina, Ken-tucky and Tennessee. Rick Perry would be the President, and Herman Cain should be the Vice President to help stem the “black flight” that will likely accrue.

All 50 states circulated secession petitions following last November’s election on the government’s We The People website, but only a few amassed the 25,000 signatures needed to warrant an official response from Washington. Texas led the way with 127,000 thousand signees.

The government passed — something about the sanctity of the Union — but sanctity, schmanktity, they should have graciously let them have their own damn country. If they supported the Arab Spring, why not the Southern Spring?
Just think. All of those Obama haters wouldn’t be around anymore.

In Alabama, Obama got 10 percent of the White vote, and in Mississippi he got 11 percent. Obama got half the percentage of votes that John Kerry got in the Deep South. My guess is Hillary Clinton wouldn’t fare much better.

Obamacare, which most of those people think is — excuse my language — socialism, would have a much better chance of penciling out without those nine states, which feature the five most obese populations.

And this is not to say the CSA wouldn’t be a pretty cool country. If they ask my opinion, which is not very likely, I would recommend New Orleans as the capitol city. That city rocks and is a lot more fun than Washington DC.

It will be a wild and woolly shoot-from-the hip kind of country. Guns will proliferate and even teachers will be locked and loaded. It’ll be every man and woman for his and her self, and you’ll be expected to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

Atlanta and Dallas would be the major business centers. Oil and energy would drive the economy. Austin would be the high tech center. New Orleans would become a major international port, especially benefiting from emerging markets in South America.

It would be a sports lover’s paradise. The best college basketball teams in the world would be Southern, and so would the best college football conference, the SEC.

Actually, it would make all-American pro sports leagues more international, and it would make the Olympics a lot more competitive. LeBron James against Kevin Durant for the gold medal — now that I want to see.
Their official national anthem would likely be “Dixie,” which was the case during the Civil War, but unofficially it would be Hoyt Axton’s “I’m a Good Old Rebel” featuring the verse “for this Yankee Nation I do not give a damn.”

“Why should Vermont and Texas live under the same government?” wrote Peter Morrison, a Texas Republican. Another Texas lawmaker called for “an amicable divorce.”

Even Abe Lincoln would have trouble disagreeing with that sentiment, and he gave his life to keep the marriage intact.
It’s been almost 150 years since the Civil War ended, and it’s obvious that this is a Union that wasn’t made in heaven, and y’all know I ain’t just whistlin’ Dixie.

Tags Confederate States of America, CSA, secession from the Union

Categories La Conner Weekly News, Mel Damski, Politics

Lou Gotz

By Mel

April 5, 2013 //

Every time I see my college roommate, he asks me how Lou Gotz is doing.

Lou Gotz is my nom de plume. I use it whenever I don’t want to use my real name, but Lou actually had a very brief journalistic career.

When I wrestled for Colgate, I was also a sports writer for the “Colgate Maroon.”

Imagine trying to get someone to cover wrestling at an all-men’s college in upstate New York, let alone travel with the team for an away match in, let’s say, Pittsburgh!

So Lou Gotz became the wrestling correspondent for the paper. Needless to say, it’s not kosher for an athlete to write about himself or his team, but it was that or no coverage at all.

Of course, I couldn’t help using my anonymity to have some fun. I had a very combative friendship with one of my teammates, Sandy Mintz, because we had to wrestle against each other in practice.

Lou Gotz was unusually critical of Mintz and would write something to the tune of: “In the 167-pound weight class, Sandy Mintz eeked out a close victory against a weaker opponent, while Mel Damski breezed to victory against great odds at 177.”

It drove Mintz crazy, and he would say, “Mel, you’re on the paper, who the f… is Lou Gotz.” I said for some reason he and I were never in the same place at the same time — much like Clark Kent and Superman — so we had never actually met.

Twenty years later, I told Dr. Sanford Mintz, a prominent psychologist in Miami, that Lou was I, and I was he. Having experienced a lot of therapy on both sides of the couch, he took it well, and we still laugh about it.

Lou Gotz retired from journalism and sadly, that was not the lamest chapter in my journalism career. As a first year sports writer on Long Island, I was covering the Long Island Nets in the nascent American Basketball Association.

The Pittsburgh Pipers were in town with their star player, Connie Hawkins, who had played high school ball in Brooklyn. His mother was at the game, and I approached her with a couple of other reporters.

She was a tall woman and was wearing sunglasses, even though it was indoors and nighttime. This might have tipped me off, but I plunged ahead and posed the question. “Mrs. Hawkins, when was the last time you saw your son play basketball,” I asked, while the veteran sports writers standing nearby all started to look at their shoes.

“I’ve never seen him play. I’m blind!” said Mrs. Hawkins.

Soon I was writing for “Newsday,” mostly lighter stuff, but occasionally a hard news story came my way. I was sent to a tough neighborhood, where the locals had barricaded the streets in and out to keep drug dealers away.

I parked my cool old Oldsmobile convertible right next to the barricade, grabbed my notepad and bravely strode to the neighborhood leaders to interview them.

While I was asking my first question, one very tough-looking guy took out his Bic lighter and set my notepad on fire.
My momma didn’t raise no fool, so I turned away, trying to look cool and composed, hopped into my car, and backed into a street lamppost. Hard.

At least I brought some levity to a very tense situation.

Robert Moses was known alternatively as The Master Builder and The Power Broker — he built the parkway systems and most of the public housing in the New York City Metropolitan area, and many books have been written about him.

He lived in Ocean Beach, a small community on the Atlantic Ocean side of Long Island, and he was trying to use his tremendous influence to close down a night club two blocks away that was keeping him awake at night.
It was the kind of off-beat story that I specialized in, and I got some great quotes from the bold owners and patrons of the Ocean Beach Inn, who wore tee shirts declaring “Save the OBI.” When I called in my story, I was told to get a quote from Robert Moses.

I responded that it was 11 o’clock at night, and I wasn’t going to wake up an 80-year-old man to ask him to talk about how much he hates being awakened at night.

When I came in to work the next day, my story ran on page three, but there was no byline. I was being punished because I didn’t have the kind of killer instinct that a good reporter needs to succeed in journalism.

My editors were right — I was barking up the wrong tree — and luckily I was able to acknowledge that and find a less constrained way to tell a story. Now that I’m back reporting on the news, it’s good to know that Lou Gotz is ready to bail me out if I get into a tight situation.

Tags reporting the news

Categories La Conner Weekly News, Mel Damski

The Return of Mr. Newman

By Mel

April 5, 2013 //

BACK ON DUTY – Mr. Newman, who could not adapt to city life in Los Angeles, is back at his old job, keeping an eye on the Swinomish Channel.

Great news for all of you boat people: Mr. Newman is back guarding the Swinomish Channel!

Mr. Newman, as many of my readers know, is our cat. Because we were spending most of the winter in California, Newman ended up in Los Angeles living next to a very busy road.

Undeterred by a 12-foot wall, he managed to escape at will and occasionally would dart out across the very busy Crescent Heights Boulevard.

A handyman working at our house witnessed two near misses and declared that Newman only had seven lives left.

This created a rift within the family as to what would be best for Mr. Newman. There were the sensible people who said he never should have been brought to LA, the emotional people who said he needed to be with his family and cat mate, Sid, and the person in the middle, me.

It came down to a theological dispute. Some felt we should leave it in God’s hands.

I argued that everyone should read Spinoza, the Dutch philosopher, who believed that God endowed mankind with common sense and expected us to make good decisions.

The Spinozites won out, and Newman had a very nice flight in his cat carrier under a seat of a Virgin Airlines 737.

When he was released on our driveway, he was a kitty in a candy store and didn’t know what to do next. He immediately headed into the woods that had become his beloved stomping and hunting grounds.

Because I will start my commute to Vancouver this week, we have worked out a joint custody arrangement. Newman will spend weekdays with a wonderful family with two young girls and the weekends at home with me.

Now that he’s back in his home woods, he won’t come out on the wrong side of a confrontation with a coyote, God willing.

Tags cat custody

Categories La Conner Weekly News, Mel Damski

To Serve and Protect

By Mel

April 3, 2013 //

We’ve heard many stories of ordinary people risking life and limb to come to the aid of total strangers.

So when we hear about prominent people who turn a blind eye to horrible crimes against the very people they are supposed to be looking after, it leaves us all with a feeling of disgust.

Cardinal Roger Mahony of the Los Angeles Dioceses of the Roman Catholic Church, Joe Paterno the storied Penn State football coach, and now a high-ranking Air Force officer each decided that the reputation of the institution they represented was more important than the well-being of these innocent victims.

Air Force Lt. General Craig A. Franklin, commander of the Third Air Force in Europe, ordered the release of a fighter pilot who had been convicted on sexual assault charges.

The pilot, Lt. Col. James Wilkerson, had been found guilty by an all-male jury at Aviano Air Force Base in Italy, but because of prehistoric military laws, a senior officer has final say even when, as in this case, he isn’t a judge and didn’t attend the trial.

General Franklin must have thought he was serving the greater good of the institution that has rewarded him so well throughout his career, and I’m sure the same could be said for Cardinal Mahony and Coach Paterno.

The Los Angeles Archdiocese was recently compelled in court to release documents that proved beyond any shadow of doubt that Mahoney was aware of the severity of the charges against a perverted priest named Michael Baker.

Baker was eventually sent to prison on 12 counts of felony oral copulation with a minor involving two boys. After Baker confessed his crimes in 1986, Mahony sent him to get therapy at a Church-run facility in Arizona and then he allowed Baker to return to his ministry.

Baker was reassigned to a residence attached to a church that also operated as a school. There he struck again. The Church just settled for $10 million in another case involving Baker. The suit was brought by two men, now in their 20’s, who claimed they were molested as 12-year-olds by the same priest in the late 1990’s.

The Archdiocese said that the settlement puts an end to the matter and allowed Mahony to attend the coronation of the new Pope. But the lawyer for the two young men, Vince Finaldi, said that Mahony should not be considered absolved of his role in the matter. “You have a priest who is confessing that he sexually molested two kids, and you don’t pick up the phone and call police?” he said.

Similar cases have taken place within the Church, most notably in Boston and Philadelphia and throughout Europe and has been a major factor in the decline of the Roman Catholic Church in those places.

It is beyond my comprehension how men who devote their lives to doing the Lord’s work can live with themselves when they choose to turn a blind eye to the welfare of children who are under their supervision. What kind of twisted reasoning could they possible use to persuade themselves that they are doing the right thing?

Joe Paterno was more than just a football coach—he was a legendary leader of young men on and off the field. A statue on campus were erected in his name. Nike named a Child Care Center after Paterno in Oregon.

How ironic is that? Joe Paterno was aware of ongoing charges that one of his football coaches was sodomizing young boys in the shower in the Athletic Center. Rather than turning Jerry Sandusky over to the authorities, Paterno allowed Sandusky to have access to Penn State facilities and the abuse continued.

Paterno stuck his head in the sand—nobody wants to really think about stuff like that happening under your watch—and thereby became an accomplice to heinous acts against young boys.

Sandusky was finally tried and convicted and Paterno’s legacy as a great coach has been destroyed. Nike took Paterno’s name off its Child Care Center. The statue at Penn State has come down.

Now it’s time for the Air Force to act. Last year, the former secretary of defense, Leon Panetta, said that while there 3,191 reported cases of sexual assault in the military in just the year 2011, the actual number of episodes was believed to be as high as 19,000 because most women do not report the assaults.

With a growing number of women serving in Congress, the boys club that runs the military is going to have to clean up its act.

Hopefully General Franklin will be forced to step down. The Department of Defense is openly discussing changing the policy that allows a senior officer to overturn a conviction.

“The appearances of this are devastating to victims of sexual assault throughout the military,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, a former prosecutor. “It looks like somebody taking care of one of their guys.”

She could have been talking about Joe Paterno or Cardinal Mahony. Let’s pray that our future leaders care more for individuals than institutions.

Tags child abuse, sexual abuse, sexual assault

Categories La Conner Weekly News, Mel Damski, Politics, Society

F-Bombs Bursting On Air

By Mel

March 25, 2013 //

It was considered really bad form to use the F-word in polite company in my youth. My friends and I were even reluctant to use it amongst ourselves, lest God would strike us with lightning, and if you were Catholic, it would cost you at least a few Hail Marys at confession.

When I got to college — an all-male college — one of my football teammates who grew up in a coal-mining district near Pittsburgh managed to use an F-word in pretty much every sentence. He used it as a noun, a verb, an adjective, a compliment, an admonition — it all depended on tone and context.

This always made me laugh and desensitized me to the force of the word, but I was still a product of my upbringing, and I always felt that it was inappropriate and offensive to use the word in public.
If someone used the word around children or women, especially older women, I would admonish them publicly, which, of course, was extremely embarrassing to my kids.

I think I’ve lost this fight. If you turn on the television today, there are F-bombs exploding all over the place, and not just on cable TV.

In 2003, the FCC approved the use of the F-word in all media, as long as it wasn’t used to describe the sex act — an admission of sorts that the word had evolved to mean many different things, some of which were not offensive.
I get it. It’s just a word. Sticks and stones and all of that. My younger son uses it around his mother, even. And this is a boy who grew up going to Catholic schools. I’ve given up chastising him for it because his generation has been totally desensitized to the word.

Have you ever watched “Deadwood”? It’s as if it was written by that kid I played football with, the coal miner’s son.
It’s amazing how quickly things change in this Age of Instancy. In 1981, Charles Rocket adlibbed an F-bomb on Saturday Night Live and was fired for it.

In 1999, I directed an episode of “Chicago Hope, and in the script, Mark Harmon’s character says of a case: “shit happens.”

We had to appeal to the head of the network, but he agreed it wasn’t gratuitous and was an absolutely appropriate thing for that character to say in that situation. And so we made a little bit of television history.

It’s a very different story when it comes to the N-word. Quentin Tarantino’s movie Django Unchained is set in the South during slavery, and the N-word is used often, and this has created some controversy.
Tarantino wrote the script and says that for you to tell that story without liberal use of that word would be totally unrealistic. Some African-Americans who felt Tarantino used the word gratuitously in “Pulp Fiction” said in this case, Tarantino had a point.

We have not become desensitized to the N-word because it is so associated with hatred and bigotry throughout our history and, unfortunately, that is still the case if you read the racist rants on blogs following the reelection of President Obama.

Hip-hop artists and some young black man have adopted the N-word as a term of endearment, but it is used ironically.

There is undoubtedly a sense of freedom in using a word that only they can get away with using.
But I don’t see the N-word becoming acceptable to the FCC except in very rare situations — where it is being discussed in its social context. The word was actually used in the television series “All In The Family” way back in the day, but that show was designed as an indictment of prejudice.

For me, when I hear a white person use that word to describe an African-American, I know immediately that is not a person I want to ever share another moment with.

Perhaps in the generations to come, racism will only be a footnote in a history class. We are certainly becoming a much more open-minded society as we are becoming more multi-cultural. And that we reelected a black President sends a message to the haters that if anyone needs to get on a boat to leave these shores, it is the haters themselves.

For now, let’s leave the N-word to the hip-hopsters. And as for the F-word, I still don’t recommend using it around Grandma and Grandpa!

Tags censorship, swearing

Categories La Conner, La Conner Weekly News, Mel Damski