Back With My Ocean Again

Copyright © 2017

by Ralph F. Couey

A month into the new contract assignment and things are beginning to sort themselves out. There's always differences, but the change from broiling Arizona to temperate California was a welcome one.  At least until this past two weeks.

I've always had tender feelings towards the massive body of water that is the Pacific Ocean.  I spent ten years criss-crossing it's surface while in the Navy, but the feeling goes beyond mere familiarity.  The Pacific has a realm of beauty that, in my mind, far surpasses its iron-gray eastern counterpart.  Most of its area encompasses the warmth of the tropics, from the gentility of Tahiti to the harsh heat of the Solomon Islands. For the most part these are places of great beauty, and what we generally think of as idyllic.  Along the west coast of the U.S., the interplay of golden sunlight, deep blue waters and the tawny sand and green hills beyond creates a pallet that eases the eye and soothes the soul.

Whenever we visit California, I make it a point of going to the beach and watching the sunset.  As an experience, it recalls those lonely evenings at sea when I would stand on deck with a lump in my throat missing my family.  Hawaii has beautiful sunsets, but the colors are stronger, bold reds and oranges, breathtaking in their own way.  But California's colors are gentler, tending more towards calming pastels.  It is that softer tone that touches me so deeply.

The Worst Days, Or Our Finest Hours?

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

From Wikia.com

Copyright © 2017

by Ralph F. Couey

Autumn is always a time of the year with some uproar attached. With summer ending, kids are going back to school which lends an air to not only their lives, but adults as well that playtime is over and it’s time to go back to work.  Even our games reflect that change.  Baseball, a timeless game is being supplanted by the clock-driven urgency of football and basketball.

But this year has been altogether different.  The world has been swept by the news of a series of disasters and tragedies, all compressed into an unimaginably small space of time.  Three Cat 4 hurricanes made landfall, Harvey in Texas, Irma in Florida and the Caribbean, and Maria which wiped out Puerto Rico.  Nate also made landfall on the Gulf Coast, but as a mere Cat 1, didn’t get the headlines of the other three.  A devastating 7.1 earthquake struck Mexico City, with the kind of death and destruction typical in a place where building codes are an afterthought.  The drumbeat of terrorism continues with notable attacks in Canada and France, along with the depressingly regular toll of dead and wounded throughout the Middle East.  On October 1^st, Stephen Paddock, a real estate millionaire from Mesquite, Nevada executed a minutely planned mass shooting from the 32^nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas, firing into a crowd of some 22,000 attending a country western concert across the road.  59 died, over 500 were wounded.  To this point, ten days after the shooting, his motivations remain a mystery.

Bad news is something to be expected in life, albeit in isolated doses.  Rare is the time, however, when so much misery is thrown at the human race in so short a time span.  People are resilient for the most part, but we all may be suffering from a form of mass combat fatigue, especially the poor folks for whom these tragedies have been up close and personal.  While this spate of bad news has been terrible, this is not the only time we’ve been on a bad streak.

The Difference Between Posturing and Doing

The start of it all.

© 2016 NBC News

Copyright © 2017

by Ralph F. Couey

Written content only

There was once a time when we could turn on the television on a Sunday afternoon and be treated to the thrilling spectacle of a National Football League game. It was a time when we could indulge in our baser instincts and forget, for a time, the often ugly world that lay in wait just outside our windows and those stadiums. For three or four hours, we could forget the bad things in life and just focus on having fun. Sports has been for a long time the great unifier. People of vastly different backgrounds and opinions could find common ground and comradery in the mutual affection of The Team.

But that fun often obscured the ugliness that lay below that glistening veneer. Racial minorities have had to suffer numerous indignities heaped upon them for no other reason than their race. Baseball, basketball, football, golf, all took unconscionably long times to integrate. And can anyone name a black or Hispanic hockey player?

I just finished James Hirsch’s exceptional biography of Willie Mays. It would be hard to identify a ballplayer who was more beloved than the Say Hey Kid. But as Hirsch explores the often brutal world of a black ballplayer, and to a greater extent black people in general, in the 1950’s and 1960’s, the reader begins to understand the undercurrent of frustration and even anger that inhabits them. And despite the best of intentions, this is something white people will never truly understand.

The Civil Rights Movement got its start through protest. Protest sustained the movement during its difficult maturation. While things are far from perfect, they are substantially better than they were back then. Progress, while helped by protest, was attained by people of courage choosing to undertake efforts aimed towards change. Protest that is not backed up by constructive action becomes an empty gesture. Also, the protests should be designed to call attention to the cause, not overwhelm it. It is a common thing for protesters to burn American flags. The problem is that the act is so overwhelming, so outrageous that the reason for undertaking the flag burning is completely lost. If you were to ask someone about the last few times someone burned a flag, to identify and explain the cause for which the protest was staged, I’m willing to bet you’d get a blank stare in return.