Juneteenth Eve

https://futureinsight.org/blog-and-news/juneteenth/

I was vaguely aware of Juneteenth; emphasis on vaguely.  I knew it referred to a day, maybe all the days, in the teens of June, June 13 – 19.  If I had to guess one, I would have guessed June 19^th.   It would have been a good guess but a guess, nonetheless.

I did know it was a black thing… a black day of some kind.

I never really paid much attention to it, until today.  This year of pandemic and, more recently, the year of truly trying to face and solve racism in this country.  It is making this Juneteenth more important than ever.

What then is Juneteenth?  Why is it important?  Why are some businesses and organization closing at noon tomorrow in honor of it?  Why are others, such as GM, taking an 8:46 minute, the amount of time George Floyd had a knee on his neck, pause of silence?

 

Juneteenth is the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States.  Dating back to 1865, it was on June 19th that the Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger, landed at Galveston, Texas with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved were now free. Note that this was two and a half years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation - which had become official January 1, 1863. The Emancipation Proclamation had little impact on the Texans due to the minimal number of Union troops to enforce the new Executive Order. However, with the surrender of General Lee in April of 1865, and the arrival of General Granger’s regiment, the forces were finally strong enough to influence and overcome the resistance.  ~ Juneteenth.com

 

I did not know.  I should have known.  I feel ignorant and naïve.  I definitely feel more ignorant than naïve.  I feel like I am, in fact, living up to the stereotype of being a white male in his sixties who is a beneficiary of white privilege.  It is a most uncomfortable feeling.

I see all the discussions, posts, and articles of Black Lives Matter vs. All Lives Matter and statistics of police killing Black people vs. police killed by Black people and Black people killing Black people.  I understand the perspectives on either sides of the ‘vs.’ in both cases.  And, where am I?  Naturally, to any reader of this blog, I am in the middle.  Not being fully in either camp, both camps accuse me of being in the other.  I am a bigoted racist pig and socialist liberal whack job at the same time.  I am used to most everyone telling me I am wrong.

I am seeing food companies changing the branding of Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben’s, Cream of Wheat, and Mrs. Buttersworth all saying that they will be rebranding their products to eliminate the racial caricatures.  These companies are all doing the right thing.  And they are doing the right thing to protect their sales and maybe even a chance to rebrand and increase sales.  I see that some folks are lamenting the changes to these iconic brands.  Me?  I could care less.  They are products.  Products come and go.  This grand gesture is probably long overdue.  Do I relate to the loss of brand images I have known all my life?  Not one little bit.  Brands are always changing, refreshing themselves, and such to increase sales and consumption.  These changes by large corporations are for those very reasons.  The hilarious thing to me in this regard was that, until today, I thought Mrs. Buttersworth was… white.

Juneteenth should be observed.  I should observe it and will be much more mindful of it moving forward.  It marks the official end of the abhorrent era of slavery in this country.  We are still dealing with the consequences of that horrible part of our history.  My observing it starts with this post.  Tomorrow, I will take 8:46 minutes to reflect and pray. 

Peaceful people have been protesting to finally end the discrimination, the bigotry, and racism that hangs over us.   I surely hope and pray we can.

Clean Desk?

    I love a clean desk.  I really do.  The problem is that I do not often have one.

I clean my desk at my school office before the start of each school year.  It then gets progressively more and more cluttered until the following August.

I clean my desk in my home office maybe three times a year mostly because we are have family over or having a dinner party.  As my office is the closest room to the front door, I am given the assignment, well more like a directive, to clean it up whenever we have company.

When I say my desks get progressively more cluttered, I understate what really happens.  Actually, I am astonished at how quickly both desks get cluttered.  I have file cabinets and wastebaskets but am apparently have no clue of what they are for.  I truly make a resolution each time I clean too keep the desks clean and organized.  It would, truly, only take 5-10 minutes a day.  I might do it for a day or two, but it never lasts. 

As my desks get cluttered, the effective work space gets smaller.  Maybe, like blinders on a horse, the clutter helps me focus more on whatever it is I am doing.  Yeah, that must be the reason. 

Does it really matter?  If I kept my workspaces tidier, would I be more productive?  I am not the first to ask this question.  I am not the first to write about it.  According to 2014 article in Forbes, Albert Einstein noted, “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?”  The article went on to talk about a study that investigated clean desk and cluttered desk people:  “a tidy… desk influences people to be more conventional, more generous and to make healthier choices. But, perhaps more interestingly, working at a cluttered desk positively influences people’s creative thinking ability.”  Hmm, I am going to have to say guilty as charged.

In January, I wrote a piece The Dawn of a New Year and New Decade.  I was feeling pretty good about the coming year and the start of a new decade.  The Corona Virus, at that point, was something that was only in China.  I really did not expect that I would be working from home for three months.  I was unaware I would be on the Emergency Management Team of North Park University.  That team has since transformed into the Reopen North Park Team.  With my professorial duties, which I refer to as my “day job,” I spend a lot of time in my home office.  Currently, my days are full of MS Teams (think Zoom) meetings.  I have not had so many meetings since my last corporate gig. 

Both of my offices and desks are in a constant state of organized chaos, basically they are always a mess.  Every day I think about de-cluttering and clearing my desk and office.  Do I do it? No.  At least, not until we h

Annie Leibovitz for Vogue
improvisedlife.com

ave a dinner party

In that same January blog, I included a photo of Karl Lagerfeld, who passed away in 2019.  It was a beautiful photo of the iconic designer at work at his incredibly cluttered desk.  That photo makes me feel better, less guilty, about my cluttered desk.

Maybe, I’ll just stop beating up myself for not having a clean and tidy desk.

Bewildered and Angry

It has been eight days since three policemen in Minneapolis killed George Floyd.

We all saw the video.  We saw police officers take a restrained man’s life.  We heard him plead that he could not breath.  We saw the people videoing this heinous act pleading with the police not to kill him.  All to no avail.  It was horrible.  It was unconscionable.

Action was not taken until the protests started.  Protests that people spontaneously gathered to express their sorrow and indignation for the crime we all witnessed.  People gathered in numbers and crowds that defied all social distancing protocols.  We may see a resurgence of the virus, that is not even a news story these days, earlier than we expected.

In the midst for a pandemic, we have seen our country unravel even more.  It is very upsetting from any aspect I try to look at it.  It speaks to our inability to deal with racism and the inability of our leaders to do the right thing in terms of the looting.

The news is rife with stories of pallets of bricks and bottles showing up on the streets of our cities.  It is clearly the work of anarchists and agitators.  Fox News is sure it is leftists and MSNBC is equally sure it is right wing extremists.  Me?  I am hope It is not the work of the any government entities who believe their party or point of view will gain favor from the violent and looting parts of all this.  Law enforcement should be investigating who are working to create this chaos and arrest them. 

From what I can surmise, vast numbers of people are shocked and would like to see our country live up to the sentiment expressed in our Declaration of Independence:  “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”  The first amendment of the Constitution states:  “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”  The right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.  We have to live up to these ideals.

These principles were written when slavery was still legal in the south and women did not have the right to vote.  Over the years, we have generally come to believe that all men are created equal means all people are created equal.

Am I naïve?  Probably.  On May 1, I wrote Contagion:  Promise of Utopia?  A month later, I feel foolish for that naivete and I feel angry.  We are better than how we have handled the contagion and the killing of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery.   This is a stark reminder that we need to push education and invest in creating good jobs here for all Americans.  Only this will strike at the roots of racism which are poverty, disparities in education, the dismal standards of our education system, and a lack of any meaningful industrial policy.  This to me is the path to true equal opportunity.  We should be the shining example for the world and not what I am watching on television as I type this.

I pray that we can emerge from this and live up to the noble ideals we espouse.  Ten years from now, I hope that murder of George Floyd is looked upon as a turning point for this nation. 

Briefcases

     Women have purses and the women in my life have impressive collections.  There are purses for casual and formal use.  They have their everyday favorite purse.  They have bags of a variety of colors to match outfits and seasons.  They have leather purses and other materials.  I used to make light of their collections, emphasis on the “used to.”

I have my own obsession with bags.  My bags are not man purses but briefcases.  I have an embarrassing number of them… at least twelve.  I have a three Tumi’s, four Hartman’s, and other brands.

Unlike students of all ages these days who have backpacks, I did not get my first briefcase until I was in college.  It was a brown leather lawyer’s briefcase.  I believe my Dad got it as a gift or promo item and gave it to me as it probably wasn’t his style.  I was glad to have it to carry my math books and notebooks around.  But, it was not exactly my style either… at the time.    I really wanted what was the de rigueur bag of the 1970s in Detroit:  a hard case black Samsonite briefcase.  I bought one when working at Ford and going to night school at Wayne State University.  I felt very cool with that briefcase.  To this day, I cannot recall where the brown leather lawyer’s bag went.

When I moved on to Rockwell International Automotive, they issued me another black Samsonite with a Rockwell International logo on it.  I thought that was pretty cool and I used that briefcase for five years until I left Rockwell and carrying their logo on a briefcase just felt uncomfortable.  So, I went back to my original Samsonite which was no problem.

It was no problem, until I moved to New York to work for Colgate-Palmolive.  In commuting on the train from CT to Grand Central Station and walking up Park Avenue to the offices, I quickly understood that my Samsonite was an unfashionable dinosaur in the Big Apple.  In the first few years there, finances were pretty tight and the Hartmann briefcases that were the stylish standard were out of my price range.  So, I used my Samsonite humbly and it did the job. 

Colgate did offer me a choice of two briefcases.  One was a lawyer’s briefcase, and another was a pilot briefcase.  Both were leather.  I went with the pilot bag as I was not ready for another lawyer’s briefcase and I needed the pilot briefcase to carry the books and binders needed for my job.  I still have and use that pilot bag.  The Samsonites?  Long gone.

After a few years in New York, our financial situation improved, and I decided to get a cooler more fashionable briefcase.  The Hartmann traditional hard cases were still in fashion but were quickly being replaced by soft bags with shoulder straps.  The brand that was up and coming was Tumi.  The only that caught my eye was a black ballistic nylon beauty.  I paid almost $400 for it which was a crazy amount of money.  A few years later I bought another one but larger.  I used those two bags through the rest of my time in New York and my first few years in Chicago until the Great Recession hit.   

When I began to teach and had to again carry lots of books and papers, the Tumi’s which were showing their age were not the best options.  I first bought a roll along Swiss Army bag which was perfect for three seasons but a poor winter choice.  So, I bought a large capacity Kenneth Cole backpack.  This last bag was perfect for teaching.  I used it exclusively for few years.

Along the way I picked up a few slim shoulder bags, all at deep discount, for when I don’t have to carry much.  I have a black Swiss Army, a goldish Hartmann, and a timbuk2 all in ballistic nylon.

I took my larger Tumi to the Tumi Store and inquired about having it refurbished.  Instead they gave me a $200 store credit and I bought a sweet grey and cordovan lawyer’s gusseted bag with a shoulder strap.  I only use this bag for going into boardroom visits which these days are few and far between. 

A valued colleague called me out for my huge Kenneth Cole backpack challenging me to get something more compact and stylish.  So, I went back to the Tumi Store and bought a beauty of a slimmer camoflauge backpack that is now my everyday bag. 

I thought I was done buying anymore bags until I saw The Intern.  In this 2015 movie starring Robert DeNiro and Anne Hathaway, De Niro played a retired executive who out of boredom applied for an got an internship position with an e-commerce women’s clothing company started by the Anne Hathaway character.  When De Niro reported to work, he was sporting a 1973 Executive Ashburn briefcase, a hard shell briefcase, with the distinctive “kachink chink” sound when you opened the latches.  This briefcase was basically made retro-chic in this film where De Niro’s protégé went out and bought one on ebay.

ebay? Well, I had to have a look.  I was impressed with the offerings and have basically bought five vintage briefcases in the past few years… for a fraction of the original prices.  I have bought a slim Tumi leather bag and a rare Tumi hard case.  I

gave the latter to my son.  The de rigueur Hartmann bags from when I first moved to New York?  I now have two:  one beige and the other cordovan.  I have a beauty of black Hartmann lawyer’s bag coming full-circle to a style I was not originally enamored with.

My favorite buy was a classic hard case made in South Africa clad in water buffalo leather.  I first saw and wanted this briefcase in South Africa in 1990.  I saw the briefcase in a gift shop at the Johannesburg airport on my way home after providing Quality Management training to Colgate’s Africa and Middle East Division.  I fell in love with it but just couldn’t pay the $600 they were asking for it.  On ebay, I saw the same briefcase for… umm… $30 and immediately bought it.  It arrived and it was pristine, almost never used, condition.

I use these retro-briefcases about once a week.  Students and colleagues are fascinated with my collection.  It has been a fun little hobby though it is now my wife’s turn to makes light of my “purses.”