My friend Alex recently turned 70.
And I can't begin to imagine how he feels.
Oh, there's nothing particularly mysterious about the standard issue sense of having accomplished the feat of making it through life for seven decades. I'm only a couple of years behind Alex on the timeline myself and I'm sure we could both tell you youngsters stories about good times, bad times, trials, tribulations, ups, downs, aches, pains, thrills of victory, agonies of defeat, both the devastating heartbreaks and overwhelming joys which have come as standard equipment on life on this Earth and in this country in the last seventy years.
But, were that sharing to be an actual event, I could do no better than to serve as opening act. Leaving the much deserved main presentation to a very gifted and gracious man who has just turned 70.
Because when it comes to knowing a thing or two, because he has seen a thing or two, Farmers Insurance knows from zilch when compared to the seventy years lived thus far by my friend Alex.
And here's a plot twist I'm confident no one saw coming.I don't have the first clue as to what any of those things are.
Or, more accurately, I can only guess what scenes would play out if "Life Of Alex" were to suddenly appear on my Trending Now list on Netflix.
Because while I am delighted, and proud, to call him my friend, I actually know very little about Alex and his life. We met just a few years ago, in a social setting, and, shortly after, came to find that we both frequent the same golf course. We have, in the last few years, exchanged pleasant conversation, an admittedly risky golf tip or two and he has honored me with an expression of his appreciation of my writings and commentaries.
So, we were bound to be good friends, if only because the man clearly has really good taste.
But, with an exception or two, all dealing with whatever he has experienced since I met him those few years ago, I don't really know very much about Alex at all.
I do know that he is an accomplished musician, a much respected veteran teacher and a once upon a time competitive level tennis talent. Not to re-mention the golf skills that he takes both in good fun, and moderately deadly earnest. (I don't know many other non-professional golfers who show up at a driving range to prepare for a community golf tournament scheduled for the next day).
I also know that he is cordial, gracious and a delight to visit and speak with. I do know there is a sense about him that says this is a man who not only makes lemonade out of life's lemons, he's inclined to insist on paying for your glass should you both share some. Without any hint of syrup or saccharine, pretense or Pollyanna, Alex presents as a positive guy who does what he can every day to be a part of the solution, whatever the problem might be.
And while I'm confident that he would defer and resist any effort to single him out for acknowledgement, it occurs to me, as I think about his milestone birthday, that acknowledgment is more than appropriate at this time and in this place in the aforementioned timeline.
My friend Alex is black.
And he's turned 70 with the ever present smile on his face, the ever present presentation of kindness in his heart and the ever present sense that there is still more, so much more, that is good about life, and America, than there is not.
In one of the darkest periods this nation has ever experienced.
And, as I offered at the outset, I cannot begin to imagine how he feels.
Nor would I presume to ever conjecture as to what he has experienced and/or what impact those experiences have had.
But there is a remarkable 'compare and contrast', for lack of a better term, I envision that strikes me as not only relevant, but even important, to share with the current chaos and upheaval on display in 2019 America.
Simple arithmetic tells me Alex was born in 1949.
So, his childhood years were the 1950's. The years which saw the first Pulitzer Prize ever awarded to a black; the first African Americans in the NBA; Juanita Hall, the first black woman to win a Tony Award; the first black NFL quarterback; the pioneering emergence of Chuck Berry and the report from the Tuskegee Institute that there had been no lynchings in the United States for the first time in 71 years of tabulation. The years that saw the Supreme Court rule racial segregation in DC restaurants, and shortly after, segregation in all public schools, unconstitutional.
And the years that saw a Florida NAACP official killed by a bomb on Christmas Day; iconic entertainer Nat King Cole assaulted on stage during a segregated performance in Alabama; a mob of 3500 whites attempting to prevent a black family from moving into an apartment in Illinois.....and just two years after the Tuskegee report, a fourteen year old Chicago kid named Emmett Till...lynched while on vacation in Mississippi.
Alex turned 11 in the first year of the 1960's.
The Civil Rights Act of 1960, protecting all citizens' right to register and vote, regardless of color; the first black winner of the Heisman Trophy; the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi; the first black winners of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a major NASCAR race, the first competitor in an LPGA tournament; the unprecedented gathering of over 200,000 people in Washington, DC as Martin Luther King delivered his "I Have A Dream" speech; the landmark Civil Rights Bill of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965.
And the years that saw attack dogs and fire hoses turned on men and women and children to prevent civil rights demonstrations in the streets of Birmingham; the Governor of Alabama standing in a college doorway and blocking two black students from enrolling; a Baptist church bombed on a Sunday morning, killing four young black girls; the abduction and murders of three young civil rights workers in Mississippi; racial riots in Watts, California and Newark, New Jersey.....and the assassinations of NAACP leader Medgar Evers....Malcolm X......Martin Luther King.
Alex came of age, 21 years old, in 1970.
The 70's....the first black mayors of Atlanta...Newark...Detroit...Los Angeles; the first black Congressional representatives elected from the American South since 1898...the first black competitor in the Masters golf tournament......two black students shot and killed by police at Jackson State University in Mississippi; the courthouse killings in San Rafael, California....the Attica Prison riots.......
And a black man born in America in the late 1949 lived through those segregationist 1950's, the turbulent civil rights revolution of the 60's, the storm just hovering above the calm of the racially tense 1970's 80's, 90's into a 21st Century that saw racial drama explode on one front or another, first with the darkness of dark skin, and even darker heart, of pure evil, hypocritically cloaked in the shroud of deity worship, flying airliners filled with everyday Americans into buildings and a field in Pennsylvania, then, later, the almost blindingly bright shining of change with the election of the first black man to the office of President of the United States.
A landmark event that inspired both the very best of what mankind can be when frontiers are conquered...and the very worst of what mankind can be when old ways are sent to the scrap heap and resentment and retaliation result from those for whom old ways can only be pried from cold, dead fingers.
And then came Trump.
And the Age of the Demagogue.
Demagogue. A political leader who gains support by appealing to the prejudices of ordinary people...rather than by using rational argument.
Appealing to those prejudices by, and here's where it gets almost hilariously ironic if you're hip to the writings of Malcolm X.... any means necessary.
In Trump's playbook, stirring the fear and anger and hatred one color can have for another when the stirring is expertly executed.
Make no mistake. His stirring is expertly executed.
And though he will, obviously because of his sociopathic narcissism, always and forever deny any cause and effect resulting from his cheap shot tweets, his snide inferences, his wink wink silences when his adoring lynch mobs scream out "shoot them", even a reasonably bright 8 year old could recognize, if not racism in the letter of the law definition, then most certainly racial inflammation, instigation.
Inciting.
Inspiring.....
.....sick minds with guns.
In El Paso.
In Dayton.
And Alex smiles warmly. And offers a firm handshake. And gracious, friendly words of greeting.
And a look in his eyes that simultaneously reminds that kindness is not to be mistaken for weakness.
Graciousness not to be confused with complacence. Courtesy not to be misinterpreted as acceptance of wrongs done.
And wrongs yet to be done.
But what a remarkable testament to strength of character. And resilience.
And a determination to rise above, set an example, inspire young minds.
To find that part of his heart and spirit that frees up the love, kindness, courtesy and goodness, even after 70 years of what most certainly had to be challenges to that heart and spirit and, even, soul that those of us whose pigment took us down another path will never, ever begin to fully grasp.
And to remain, and present, positive, affirmative.
To, props to Michelle Obama, "go high....when they go low..."
I can't even begin to imagine how many times he has had to go high. Or how low the lowest of what he has seen and experienced has been.
Alex is now 70 years old. A good and gracious guy. And a humble man whose humility will most certainly result in resisting any acknowledgement of the extraordinary qualities I've described.
But, in this situation, modesty provides no curtain whatsoever for the light shining behind it.
It's my privilege to call Alex friend.
And on the 70th anniversary of his birth, I celebrate with him, for him...and about him. And all of those who, like him, have endured, overcome and continue to light the darkness.
And if, given who he is, the kind of man he is, and where he stands at this time in his life, he feels a mixture of emotions at this birthday, I can honestly offer that, in that context, I know just exactly how he feels.
Because, given what I know, I have mixture of emotions, too.
Joy.
Gratitude.
Appreciation.
A little sadness.
And, truth be told, not just a little anger and resentment.
That a cardboard cutout of a decent human being is being given the honor of occupying the highest office in the nation.
And having millions of people make excuses for his inexcusable behavior, words and actions.
And the criminally abusive manner in which he pours gasoline on fires of intolerance and bigotry and prejudice....even fanning the embers of those long ago flames which had even begun to finally, simply, just smolder.
While a man who has lived 70 years lives inside a skin thats color has certainly taken him on a more challenging journey than so many of us will ever know or be able to understand. A journey that has required strength, resilience, endurance....and a priceless form of courage.
A man who, unlike that cardboard cutout of a decent human being, really does know a thing or two.
Because he's seen a thing or two.
And still smiles warmly.
As he shakes your hand.
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