Growing up I spent a lot of time in my teens burning off energy splitting wood. In part this may have been because the wood was in the driveway in the way of the basketball net. In retrospect that may have been a clever parental ploy to encourage the splitting of wood.

During the pandemic, with indoor gatherings not allowed. I would gather wood in my urban forest to burn in the cold night air with socially distanced friends. That included large unsplit tree trunks, that at first were to wet to split.

After a wet winter and seven months they are now ready to split. I watch myself with sledge hammer and wedge, and wonder what that young man would think of this now grey haired man splitting wood. I know that If I could say something to him, I would tell him “ a life isn’t a life if you don’t live it, so live it as if each day is a gift, because it is.”

© words and picture Dan DeMarle 7/22/21

Currently there are a number of bills in the 21-22 legislative session aimed at restricting voting in NY. The Brennan Center for Justice has identified the following bills as restricting voting access. These include in the Assembly

A04326Requires a government photo identification card to be presented when casting a ballot

A04569Provides that absentee ballots shall not be mailed or delivered to a voter unless such voter has specifically requested to receive an absentee ballot

A04901Enacts the voter registration integrity act

A04929Relates to prohibiting ballot harvesting

A04969Clarifies the qualification to receive an absentee ballot and clarifies the process for delivery of an absentee ballot

A05783Relates to absentee voting application deadlines

A06970Establishes an electronic absentee ballot application transmittal system

https://www.nyassembly.gov/leg/?default_fld=&leg_video=&bn=A04326&term=2021&Summary=Y

In the State Senate the following bills have been submitted.

S1540 – Prohibits sex offenders who are on parole and in civil confinement from voting in certain elections

S1805 – Relates to prohibiting ballot harvesting

1853 – Enacts the voter integrity act

S264 – Relates to absentee voting application deadlines – Signed by Governor on 7/16/21

Bill S3625 – Relates to providing valid government issued photo identification when casting a ballot

S3820 – Authorizes any registered voter to vote by absentee ballot

S4447 – Relates to implementing driving privilege licenses and requiring a social security number to register to vote on an application for a motor vehicle driver’s license; repealer

S6540 – Voter ID law for first time voters

https://www.nysenate.gov/search/legislation?searched=true&type=f_bill&bill_printno=6540&page=1

I grew up enclosed in white racism. Reading “Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and you” by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi. I was struck by how many of my childhood heroes are really just racist tropes. It took me decades to unlearn the messages I learned in my childhood.

I grew up loving Tarzan. I did not know that Tarzan came from a cultural response to the great boxer and fighter Jack Johnson who as a black man kept humiliating white challengers. You may know the phrase, the great white hope. Well he defeated them all. Hence the need for a white male hero to defeat all those Africans and apes. Remember those apes, they show up again in the next paragraph.

Then as the Black Power movements rose, the culture came up with a blockbuster to encourage all Whites to fear that Black Power. The Planet of the Apes – where white astronauts land on a planet run by apes (just another derogatory name for black people). I loved those movies.

Then in the 1970s when the idea of the slum, and of fear of powerful black men was running rampant, the new powerful white hero rose up from the streets of Philadelphia, Rocky.

I grew up with those figures. I enjoyed those movies. Yet I was clueless as to what the real message of those movies and figures were. Now, I know better, and maybe now you do as well.

© words by Daniel DeMarle 7/19/21

While Rochester and many other cities have seen a rise in violent gun deaths so far in 2021 everyone likes to point to their favorite issue of the day to tell us what is causing these deaths. This includes attacking any progressive politician they can possible point to. So lets go through the facts, our current upswing in violent deaths is due to:

bail reform

poverty

black on black violence

the fact Biden was elected

the ongoing decline of the American family

progressive female politicians

the Supreme Court

Guns

OK the answer is the Supreme Court, particularly the deceased Honorable Justice Antonio Scalia, and the rest of the Roberts court, Roberts, Kennedy, and Alito, and and many other previous and subsequent Supreme Court Justices who have taken the Second Amendment and turned it into a open spickit for conservative christian causes and the Republican NRA.

And of course guns.

© words by Daniel DeMarle 7/6/2021