Today's BLOG post is another potpourri experience... Jeremy is home from U.C. Santa Cruz for the holidays, so I got him to stand still for a couple of pictures.  I went looking for a picture of police officers to go with the text and hit the jackpot with the row of motorcycles.

Symptom of a sick society…

A mob chanting, “What do we want?  Dead cops!  When do we want it?  Now!”

A couple weeks ago I joined friends attending a rally in City Heights to express concern over the death of a young man in Ferguson, Missouri.  The emphasis there was concern over a death of an American in an American city, a death that could have been prevented.  The majority of the people attending the San Diego rally were joining their voices in raising a call for an end to senseless death… period.  

In the year 2015 I will begin my eighth decade of life.  I’m guessing the phrase “In retrospect”  is loaded with much more significance than it carried when I was a teenager. I remember some experiences fraught with intense feeling when I was twenty-something and thirty-something, but I don’t remember doing much thinking and reacting retrospectively. I was the parent of young children then, children who are older now than I was then; and I’m guessing that I was impatient when they insisted that they wanted something NOW!  I had/have wonderful children.  In retrospect I am keenly aware of my good fortune to have been gifted with such persons as they were then and are now.  

An important task of parents and teachers and all elders in a community is to teach active patience, deliberate patience, learned patience… and to teach the importance of hesitating and being sure before insisting “I want it now!  Children must learn that “I want it now” belongs in that linguistic bank of expressions reserved for dire, very special circumstances.  An important responsibility of adults in any community is ensuring that young people grow into adulthood having learned that they may not get everything they want; and if they do get what they want, getting it probably happen at the exact moment when when they become aware that they want it. 

I remember my Dad saying that my Mother wouldn’t say shit if she had some of it on her hand.  It was his way of telling me to be careful with language.  My siblings, our cousins, our neighbor children were cautioned, “Be careful what you ask for because you might get it!” 

…SO, “What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want it?  Now!” scares and sickens me.  Chanting for the death of anyone is unacceptable. 

On my bicycle ride today I stopped to take a picture of the replica of Juan Rodriquez Cabrillo’s flagship San Salvador that is nearing completion down by San Diego Bay across from the airport.  It occurs to me that Cabrillo and his crew had to practice patience on their voyage to explore the west coast of North Americas.  On June 24, 1542, Cabrillo’s expedition sailed out of the Guatemalan port of Navidad near the modern day city of Manzanillo.  On San Diego Bay Cabrillo’s ship anchored for six days probably somewhere on Point Loma’s east shore not far from where a group of dedicated volunteers are building the exact replica of The San Salvador.  After leaving San Diego, they sailed up the coast perhaps getting as far north as Oregon.  Cabrillo died January 3, 1543, on San Miguel, one of the Channel Islands.