St. Patrick's Day

I saw this article yesterday on The Detroit Free Press online. Dan Margulis created this social experiment to bring attention to the issue of immigration by going back to the past when Irish were treated like a plague on America. Unfortunately the people that really need to have their eyes opened, will just sneer at this. 

Sweet and Savory Bacon Twist recipe from The Detroit Free Press

I want to try this recipe, they look pretty yummy!

#He's Not My President

Mike Luckovich - November 4, 2016

Needless to say anyone that knows me, knows that I did not vote for the #orangepresident - and I am now feeling alienated from those that did, because I am left with no other conclusion than that they have just as much hate in their hearts as he does.

I had originally meant to write a post before the election, not that I thought I would change anyone's mind. Writing it now is because I am part of the over half of the country that voted for Hillary Clinton because she was the best candidate for the job. I didn't cry on election night, but I did have to turn off the TV because I could see she was losing, and it was a gut punch and surreal.

There was a very good opinion piece on The Detroit Free Press today from Brian Dickerson that hit on several things that I have felt this past week. One is that I feel like I'm going to be in mourning for the next four years. The second was that I could not understand how the same people that voted for Trump would not want him at their dinner table. But that was my problem, I kept trying to use logic through this whole election, and unfortunately his supporters weren't, and still aren't.

Every horrible thing that came out of his mouth couldn't sway his fans, while it disgusted the rest of us. Trump is mocking the 'elite' press, but I understand why they predicted that his campaign would fail the same way I did - it was because of how repulsive he is as a person. We all assumed at some point all of his crap would catch up to him and it never did.

One of the saddest things I read yesterday was the percentage of people that disliked him and still voted for him anyway.  I have a message for everyone that voted for him, voted for a third party candidate, or didn't vote at all - I hope you can live with your conscience with what is to come.

Tonight I was further disgusted by his campaign manager expecting Barack Obama & Hillary Clinton to make more of an effort to unite America. Are you kidding me!?! Honey, you backed the wrong horse. The one person who should be making the effort to heal the wound in America is the same person that ripped us apart in the first place, and obviously he is not capable of either seeing this, or doing anything about it because he is not a leader. How ironic that she was calling on two people that actually are to do the job.

There's so much more that I was originally going to say, but I don't have it in me right now. I just hope that there is still an America left in 4 years for us to get a real president and get back on track.

150th Anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation

Abraham Lincolns' 1856 visit a sign of Michigan's abolitionist current

 By Louise Knott Ahern, Lansing State Journal 

In a small park in Kalamazoo, hundreds of Michiganders gathered to hear a future president speak under a waning August sun.

He warned of the dangers of a divided nation and the scourge of partisan politics, but he also extolled the promise of American freedoms.

"We are a great empire," he told the onlookers. "We stand at once the wonder and admiration of the whole world."

But there was one great stain on the nation, he warned. A stain called slavery.

It was 1856, and the man was Abraham Lincoln.

It would be the one and only time Lincoln would step foot on Michigan soil. He came to Kalamazoo as a member of Congress to campaign for John Fremont, the presidential nominee of the new Republican party born in nearby Jackson.

Lincoln told the Kalamazoo crowd, "This is the question: Shall the government of the United States prohibit slavery in the United States?"

The nation's attention is focused once again on the 16th president with the recent release of "Lincoln," a much-anticipated movie by Steven Spielberg, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, that explores the controversial signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, a precursor to the eradication of slavery. The proclamation, freeing all slaves in the Confederate states, was issued by Lincoln 150 years ago on Jan. 1, 1863.

Being the birthplace of the party he embraced was likely one reason Lincoln made his way to Michigan. The state also had begun to embrace an abolitionist agenda by then and was a crucial stop for escaped slaves on the Underground Railroad.

Several sites in Michigan have been confirmed as places where escaped slaves hid on their paths to freedom.

Though it would be a mistake to call Michigan an early leader in the abolitionist movement, said Carol Mull, an historian and author of "The Underground Railroad in Michigan," pockets of strong anti-slavery activism kept the movement alive.

"Most people prior to 1850 were rather passive on the issue in the state of Michigan," Mull said. "Most people just hoped it would go away on its own and didn't take an active role. The people who did faced censure from their neighbors and their communities for what was essentially breaking the law at that time -- helping people escape from slavery. But that said, there were still many people who did help."

By the time Lincoln came to Kalamazoo, more Michiganders were embracing the anti-slavery movement, many of them angry over the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act.

The act created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska and gave voters in those new regions the ability to vote on whether to allow slavery within their borders.

Lincoln urged Michigan voters to support Fremont and to take a stand against the policies of expansion.

"Have we no interest in the free territories of the United States -- that they should be kept open for the homes of free white people?" he asked the crowd in Kalamazoo.

"As our northern states are growing more and more in wealth and population, we are continually in want of an outlet, through which it may pass out to enrich our country. In this we have an interest -- a deep and abiding interest. There is another thing, and that is the mature knowledge we have -- the greatest interest of all. It is the doctrine, that the people are to be driven from the maxims of our free government, that despises the spirit which for 80 years has celebrated the anniversary of our national independence."

I read this article in the Detroit Free Press from December 30, 2012. It caught my eye of course due to the mention of my hometown of Kalamazoo.

There Is No Simple Solution

Okay, it's finally time for me to sound off on the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

I have read a lot of commentary from people far more eloquent than I am, and I don't have everything linked here, but these are two articles from The Huffington Post from today, that I think are worth reading. The first is from Janelle Ross featuring individual stories as well as statistics for gun related deaths of children in the U.S. The other article is about the National Shooting Sports Foundation that ironically is based in Newtown Connecticut.

It's hard to know where to begin. I posted Mitch Albom's editorial from the Detroit Free Press a week ago. He was asking when we were ever going to find it okay to talk about gun violence in the U.S. His subject was Bob Costas who was battered for bringing up the subject after the murder/suicide involving a football player. As Jon Stewart pointed out on The Daily Show, if conservative pundits think it's not appropriate to talk about gun control right after a shooting, then we would never be able to talk about it, since there is at least one every single day in the U.S.

Another Free Press writer, Rochelle Riley had a editorial right after the shooting took place, and she sadly ended up referencing one of her own previous articles after the mass shooting in Aurora Colorado this summer. And that was her whole point; that we keep having this kind of violence, but nobody wants to do anything real about it, and she's sick of that hypocrisy.

And so am I. We cannot as a nation, continually entertain ourselves with violent media, whether it be video games, movies, or television, and then ask why when it happens in real life. We are hypocrites to watch this stuff, and not think that life imitates art. Our tolerance for violent movies and television continually increases, to me it's not a coincidence that the violence in our every day lives has increased along with it.

And the irony is not lost on me that the first victim of Matt Lanza was his mother, who owned the gun that was used to kill her. It blew my mind, when a friend was quoted as saying that she had them for protection. Protection, from what? She lived in an upscale neighborhood in a nice community.

After the shooting in Aurora this summer, I saw on the news that gun sales had dramatically increased. Then the question came to mind; I wondered if there were people in the theater that had a concealed weapon, and if so, did they make any attempt to use it to disarm James Holmes. If the reason that most people get guns is to protect themselves, how many times does that actually happen?

The NRA thinks that we should have more guns to fix the problem, not less. Having armed guards at every school in America is their solution. If shootings only occurred in schools, then that might make sense, but that's not reality. In the last week, the shooting in Newtown was the only public shooting at a school. There were two people killed at a shopping mall in suburban Portland Oregon 4 days earlier. And this week, there have been at least three other shootings with multiple victims, and not at single one at a school.

The head of the NRA also said that "the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun". I hope someone mails him a newspaper clipping about the shooting death of a girl here in Washington state earlier this year so he can see how wrong he is. A police officer's young daughter died in an accidental shooting when he left his loaded revolver in the family vehicle and another one of his kids shot her with it. If the police can't even be responsible with their own guns are there really any "good guys"?

When a mass shooting happens, every wants to arm themselves instead of take a serious look at why we have so much gun violence here. Having access to guns is a big part of the problem, but so is why they are used. Domestic violence and drug & gang related violence. When you consider that 1 in 17 Americans suffers from some level of mental illness, why should it be so easy for them to get their hands on a gun?

People that are driven to harm others will find a way, but should they be given such an easy route to harming as many people as possible in a matter of seconds? We want the freedom to have anything we want, but we don't want to accept the responsibility that comes with it.

Mitch Albom - The Detroit Free Press

This commentary is from the Detroit Free Press this week. The writer is Mitch Albom who is not only a novelist, but a sports and commentary writer for the paper.

I thought this was a pretty thought provoking essay, I hope you enjoy it.

Bob Costas' “Sunday Night Football” halftime commentary supporting gun control sparked a Fox News Channel debate Monday, Dec. 3, 2012, on whether NBC should fire him. / Evan Agostini/AP

By Mitch Albom

Detroit Free Press Columnist

Stick to sports.

I've heard it often. So have many of my colleagues. NBC's Bob Costas just heard it in spades.

Costas focused his halftime commentary last Sunday night on the horrific murder-suicide involving Jovan Belcher.

The Kansas City Chiefs linebacker, the day before, shot his girlfriend, drove to the training facility, and eventually shot himself. It was tragic. It was news. It certainly could elicit commentary.

Costas spoke for about 90 seconds, and mostly agreed with an online columnist who criticized our violent culture and said that if Belcher "didn't own a gun," he and his girlfriend would be alive today.

He never mentioned "gun control."

He never said "Second Amendment."

No matter. You bring up guns, you step on a landmine. Within minutes, Costas was being pelted on the Internet, and in the days that followed, it became a global hailstorm. He went on talk shows. He even called it a "mistake" to discuss that topic in a football game setting. But the more he explained, the more he was flooded by negativity. A Fox News person who called him "a sanctimonious ghoul."

At the core of this was a sentiment that even became a headline in several places:

Stick to sports.

If only it were that easy.

From Ohio State to Penn State

Here's the problem for folks in our positions. We'd stick to sports. But sports won't.

We'd much prefer a world where the Tour de France was just a bicycle race, where Plaxico Burress didn't shoot himself, where the showers at Penn State never saw anything worse than a towel flick.

We'd love a world where Barry Bonds was merely a home run hitter, where Josh Hamilton only chewed bubble gum, where Ohio State's football players never sold a piece of clothing, where Mike Tyson respected women.

Don't you think those who love the thrill of athletic competition -- and I believe most sports journalists do -- would rather cover a photo finish than a photo of Brett Favre's genitals? Handoffs over holdouts? Dunking instead of doping?

I've been around this business a long time. I don't know many who got into it to cover dirt.

But dirt comes with the job. Because real life doesn't stop at the out-of-bounds markers. Sure, you could comment on the Belcher story and not suggest guns played a part. But Costas felt it was relevant. He's not some apple-cheeked kid. He's 60 years old, a TV veteran commentator. Whether you agree with him shouldn't change his right to hold an opinion -- especially in a segment where he is supposed to give his opinion.

From Royko to McKay

But we are a knee-jerk society. When someone angers us, we feel obliged to yell back louder. It was sadly amusing to hear cable news commentators label Costas's calmly toned words a "rant" -- as they ranted like hyenas.

The truth is, in today's world, demanding a sports commentator "stick to sports" is hypocritical. Are you sticking to sports when you say that? Or are you saying it because you disagree with his opinion? A Nebraska newspaper writer pummeled Costas, saying "just shut your trap and tell me who scored." Does Costas tell him to shut his trap and talk about the corn crop?

Mike Royko wrote great pieces about politicians as well as athletes. Norman Mailer wrote great essays on war and on boxing. Tom Wolfe wrote as finely about racecar driving as about the space program. Jim McKay broadcast the Olympics and the Munich tragedy. Should they all have been told, "You're one thing. Do nothing more than that."?

Of course not. I wish, in this position, that I never had to deal with drunken-driving deaths, substance-abuse violations, gambling scandals, paternity suits, barroom brawls, suicides or the off-the-field behavior of everyone from Reggie Rogers to Pete Rose to Kobe Bryant, Michael Vick or Belcher.

But we have no choice.

Stick to sports?

This is sports.

Contact Mitch Albom: 313-223-4581 or malbom@freepress.com.