10/6
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| ....always.. |
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| Maxwell's 111th Street and 5th |
Walking through Central Park, there’s a fashion shoot going on. And a rap video. A feeling of fall….
Covid has led to a backlog of appointments at the Apple store Genius Desk. I wind with a reservation for 10:45 PM. Long serpentine waiting lines and multiple health security check before I make it in. And masks on everyone,
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| New York Black Yankees |
Today I’m repping the New York Black Yankees, circa 1935 with a cap and repro utility shirt. They were founded by the entertainer dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Played their first games at the Hebrew Orphan Asylum grounds. From its founding in the mid 19th Century until 1919, they took in over 13,500 orphans. Many, however, were “half orphans,” children of single mothers with no support. The 1915 Child Welfare Act brought aid to widows with children and reduced the need for homes for “half orphans.” When the Black Yankees signed the pitcher extraordinaire Satchel Paige, they were finally welcomed to Yankee Stadium. One historic footnote…the Yankees wanted the HOA campus on Amsterdam to build a stadium to compete with the Giants at the Polo Grounds at 155th and the Harlem River. They offered the HOA Bronx property. But everybody stayed were they were, Yankee Stadium arose in the Bronx and HOA became part of the campus of the City College of New York, the Harvard of the working class. The Black Yankees also played at Hinchcliffe Stadium in Paterson, New Jersey, one of the last remaining Negro League Stadiums in the US. Here the Black Yankees once threw a no-hitter against the House of David, a renowned barnstorming team which forbade shaving or haircuts for religious reasons.
We are continuing our conversation on Erich Fromm. In his view, there are three basic continuums in human behavior and communities. One, form archaic to progressive, Two, from neurotic to productive. And three, from animal to human. Our life is determined by a combination of forces. The choices we make create consequences with diminishing opportunities for choice. There is also a tension between reason and emotion. An emotion that causes suffering ceases to control once we gain a clear understanding of it.
(Clyde recalls the volunteer who made reflexology consultations available to homeless persons and they were as popular as the food lines. )
As our choices calcify into patterns, we step by step lose our freedom to choose. We tend to see freedom of choice in the last step, but From argues inevitability has set in many steps previous. Our freedom is tied to our capacity to reason.
In our choices that are harmful to others, we don’t become an animal, who has not reflected on their choices. But we can become inhuman, even demonic. Steve P tells the story of a conversation with an Attica State Prison inmate who argued that he had "done what he had to do.” Steve challenged that, And later the man began their next conversation with “I’ve been thinking…” and that he had begun to consider other possibilities.. 
Maxwell's on 111th
When Russ raises his usual question what is our job, today it seems one of them is to help each other to have critical awareness of our decisions. To strengthen awareness of the rational. To understand real possibilities. Awareness of consequences. The will to make the right choices and the ability to accept the pain that may accompany those choices.
Fromm, thinking of the Pharaoh in Exodus, the more bad choices we make, the more the heart hardens.
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| God is good.... |
The sky is dark the wind picking up. I walk north to 125th where a favorite street vendor was killed yesterday by a shop lifter. Checking out the signs of witness along the street. Make the circle and retie to my neighborhood spot. I choose to sit outside for my drink before the weekly “Gluey Zoomy” show.
The night ends with the Vive Presidential debate. After the debacle of the last debate, it seems, on the surface, almost normal. Pence makes himself, by comparison, almost decent. Although he too, interrupts. And now this staunch moralist has become a genteel liar, which in some ways, is even more scary than Trump. As if this reactionary yet resolute conservative has been corrupted by his relationship with Trump. In Fromm's words, archaic. At the least. And with.a hardened heart,
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