soulpundit.com

I was shocked and ashamed reading about the oil spill. Years, yes years,  after it started. If you’re like me, the idea of unchecked oil spewing itself into the ocean in such abstract abundance as to surpass a million barrels is a difficult reality to accept. It conjures up images of alien life forms skipping planet to planet like extraterrestrial roaches consuming and decimating resources and in return contributing simply death and destruction. Pictures are now emerging of beaches, bays and wildlife unprepared for the calamity. Unprepared, seemingly in the same as the “experts” who loosed the oily dark leviathan, nature’s unprotected progeny watch, weep, and die.

It would be easy to chalk this conversation up as the high hysterics of a tree huger, but that argument won’t keep oil slicks from embracing shores and silently nauseating a food chain that will eventually break. I just can’t get the idea of swimming in sludge out of my head. And you?

The voices are growing louder for the clean-up, as they should grow louder. Isn’t it scary that we allow companies to literally gamble with our collective lives; determining who lives or dies based on a cost-benefit analysis? I mean we allow folks to drill when they don’t have the ability to stop the poison they’re unleashing. And, evidently, no one in the world is capable of stopping it. That’s like licensing someone who is blind to drive as long as they stay in a parking lot. Once they get out of the lot though, regulations are useless.

So here is the really blood chilling part. If you thought I was talking about BP and the Gulf of Mexico, guess again. That big oil companies routinely lose large amounts of crude, on par with what’s spilling in the Gulf of Mexico in Nigeria and other areas speaks to a failure in the human spirit to care for one another and look out for the interests of our neighbors and ultimately ourselves. The news outlets seldom report it, “developed” countries seldom believe or act on it and we carry on oblivious to the idea that a community’s life expectancy has been halved because an oil spill now contaminates their ground water, their crops and their grazing lands.

Crazy part is, I simply didn’t know. I hate to be one of those alarmist folks but I’m a little scared. And, now that I’m aware, what is it that I do?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/30/oil-spills-nigeria-niger-delta-shell

I can’t remember having the measles, but I think I’d rather have them then to re-write my resume. Not sure why, but that task creates nothing but dread in me. For years I’ve relied on a very, very, close resume guru to handle this nasty business for me.  She knows who she is and names will be withheld to protect the innocent. It seems all she had to do was look at my resume. Then SHAZAM,  job offer.

I recently decided to overhaul my entire resume, starting from scratch. Instead of my normal technology focus, I wrote a transitional resume geared for a different career. This type of resume places the chronological job list secondary to functionally acquired skills. In writing and grouping these skills, I realized I’ve been viewing myself from a purely technical standpoint for a long time.

I was confronted with an unbounded view of my skills that I had been unable to see or define because of the strictly technical focus. A surprising view of myself emerged from the newly constructed paragraphs which outlined how skills used to serve a technology focus could be unleashed in other realms. It was an odd experience. On paper I could see how I could transform into something completely different. The experience opened my eyes, showing me a different way to see myself. Even for those not seeking a new field or new job, I found it to be a neat personal experience, something I highly recommend.

If you’re up for the challenge, here are some links to help you get started:

• http://careerplanning.about.com/od/careerchoicechan/a/transferable.htm
• http://careerplanning.about.com/od/resumewriting/a/resume_writing.htm

Helpful note:

If you want to see functional resume examples, try a Google search and add the following to your search terms – “filetype: doc and pdf“. This will locate actual resumes that are either Acrobat files or MS Word documents. For example, to find an airline pilot’s resume, I might type:

“Commercial Pilot” resume filetype:doc or pdf

courtesy Volkswirt

Bare feet ain’t just for country folk

My hometown of Roanoke, Virginia is nestled in the valleys of the Blue Ridge Mountains. As mountain folks, we’ve had our share of pick up trucks, mullets and, yes, nasty bare feet. There, I said it; nasty bare feet. Crazy that it would take a trip halfway across the world for me to put my foot down on this grimy topic.  For my parents, my parent’s parents and all the country people in possession of their own teeth striving to exemplify dignity, there are places nary a bare foot should tread.

Here on the northern beaches of Sydney, Australia I’ve found folk more country than the most backward, tobacco chewing, tar spitting, ragged-pant-cuff having hillbilly rebel ever could be.  How could I call folks in this cosmopolitan culture backwards? Easy, I’ve never seen a group of people more prone to stroll in bare naked feet. You’d think maybe it was just the kids. You’d be wrong.

What makes barefoot nasty

On a recent trip, we pulled over in one of those rest stops on the road. The ones where you guess the janitorial staff must live in an RV and travel up and down state roads cleaning new toilets everyday. I couldn’t help but wonder if they had cursed this particular rest-stop making a pact to never step foot in the cold cement enclosure ever again. The  flies were meaty, like little hummingbirds. The flies were so big they seemed to bump into people as folks walked into the bathroom. Other flies lay motionless in the off gray sink, basking in the dim haze of an overworked florescent bulb.  I wasn’t sure if they were dead or sleeping it off.

courtesy Nick Sherman

In much of Australia, they’ve gotten smarter about men’s toilets. Rather than develop individual stalls, they’ve taken the cattle call approach. Two adjoining walls that eventually run together in a corner are fitted with aluminum panels that run down into a trough. Water trickles from the aluminum walls to wash everything down the drain. Of course, men are not known for their accuracy in this department and this invitation for indiscriminate placement might seem to help. It doesn’t. Everywhere is wet. I can’t help but do my business mindful to touch nothing and avoid eye contact with everything if I can help it. The soap dispenser should have been filled with penicillin instead of soap. It was filled with neither.

As I’m standing outside, waiting for my son to come out, I see a young boy jump out of a van and dash into the same restroom. He has no shoes on, only bare feet. There is no running after him pleading, “for the love of all that is sacred, put your shoes on.” Nothing. My son comes out, his eyes wide as he points in the direction of the kid that just went into the bathroom.

I’m flabbergasted. From an early age boys and men instinctively know not to stare at a man in the stall next to you; I wanted to violate the rule to be sure I saw what I thought I saw. I Didn’t do it, but that kid did. He went into a public restroom with no shoes on. Ehhhwwww.

Courtesy ColorBlindPicaso

Later the next day we stopped at a gas station. There ahead of me pumping gas into a late-model silver Ford Falcon a man casually crosses one foot over the other. He would be the epitome of cool if he had shoes on, but no, he doesn’t. So his is not.

By this point, I’ve got to figure it out. Isn’t it bad to walk around barefoot? Especially in places where there are chemicals that can blow up or places that harbor body fluids?

When did shoes get so popular?

I give my kids grief for any journey outside of the house not accompanied by the shoes we’ve worked hard to put on their feet. I inherited this aversion from my parents who in turn learned from theirs. If you think about it though, somewhere up the line, some whining, whinging wimp couldn’t suck it up and wrapped some leaves around his feet, giving rise to shoes. For hundreds of thousands of years, the human race has lived without shoes.  I’m reminded of this every year during Black history month when I watch the mini-series, Shaka Zulu. There is a scene where Shaka Zulu eschews shoes, demonstrating the superiority of the human foot by stepping on a hot coal with his bare feet.

Researchers still debate exactly over when footwear was invented. The plant and leather material used for early shoes degraded quickly, leaving few clues for archeologists say scholars. You can look at their study of feet here.

However, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis examined partial skeletal remains of feet in Dolni Vestonice in the Czech Republic. The feet were weaker, which was explained by the introduction of shoes.

This ” shows the reduced lesser toe strength, all dating to about 26,000 years ago,” said Washington University scientists.  In other words, shoes are actually bad for us. Yikes.

“I discovered that the bones of the little toes of humans from that time frame were much less strongly built than those of their ancestors while their leg bones remained large and strong,” Trinkaus said. “The most logical cause would be the introduction of supportive footwear.”

Shoes can’t be all bad, can they?

So there it is. Scientists say, wearing shoes weakens your feet. True, but the bottom of my feet coming in contact New York City subway station concrete weakens my knees. The idea of skipping without shoes next to pumps at a gas station nauseates my understanding. NOT, GONNA HAPPEN!!! Don’t care how weak my pinkie toe gets, I’ll duct-tape that sucker till lack of circulation turns that puppy blue.

In his  stellar article, You Walk Wrong,  journalist Adam Sternbergh crushes myth after myth about walking bare foot. In his article, he explains that adding padding to our feet dulls the more than 200,000 nerve endings in our feet preventing them from transmitting vital information to our brain which in turn coordinates the entire body’s reaction to our feet. Without this information, the brain allows the body to absorb more stress than it should and eventually leads to foot problems.

I knew there was a reason why shoes are necessary

The research is not looking good for my paranoia. But at the root of my paranoia is the nastiness of walking around barefooted. You could step in spit, boo boo or on some dangerous animal like the hookworm. While spit and boo boo are just plain nasty, hookworms are bad news.

These nasty parasites hang out in the intestines of infected animals, then hitch a ride out of the bowels to see the light of day. Once at their final destination, they infect the soil and can infect a person walking bare feet.  The CDC has the gruesome details, check it out.

Like forgotten bogey men of our parent’s day, these nasty critters once prevalent in developed countries, are now, for the most part, ghosts of the past. But you never know when you’re walking on infected soil, do you?

On a serious note though, “Hookworm’s neglected status partly reflects its concentration among the world’s poorest 2.7 billion people who live on less than $2 a day,” says a report issues by the Public Library of Science. You can read the entire report by visiting here.

Knowing what I know about those critters, I’m sticking to my guns. Barefoot folks in gas stations, public restrooms and restaurants – I do not want to see crusty nasty soles while I’m eating my burger – are gross. Sorry, Robinson edict. Now everywhere else, I think I may get a pedicure and let me feet feel the pavement. Oh, and yes, I’ll be passing my misguided paranoia on to my kids, although I’ll let them get away with one now and again.

Uhm, I wasted more than 36 seconds reading this crappy hyperbole but I’m somehow less than pleased. At least I knew what I was getting with Pacman!!!

Study: Pac-Man on Google wasted 4.8 million hours | Geek Gestalt – CNET News

The leadership you know and distrust?

In a recent NPR piece, Americans Distrust Congress? That’s No Surprise, writer Andrea Seabrook interrogated  America’s growing distrust of congressional leadership. Seabrook starts the argument well but just flat misses the big picture. One of the building blocks of her argument is a Pew Research Center survey which indicates 22% of polled respondents (2,505 adults) were satisfied with the government. That is not good. The numbers also show that just 25% had a favorable opinion of Congress; 40% had a favorable opinion of President Obama. Now if that were you or I and 60-75% of those we worked for disliked us, it would be a wise to polish the resume and send out those Linked-In requests before the door hits us in the rump.  In follow-up questions, 56% of the respondents said they were “frustrated with the federal government.” Given the state of the economy, the jobs market and the housing slump, I can appreciate her findings with only two additional words; well DUH!!!!.

Seabrook talks with Congressional scholar Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute. He says the frustration stems from the “permanent campaign.” A great phrase for the continual political push for electoral popularity that spills beyond campaign season tainting the motivation for governing. I call it constantly kissing the public’s @$$.

Continually kissing the public’s @$$ is not good for your pride, your lips and most importantly, the country. It robs the people of tough principled leadership, replacing it with governance by popular opinion, which as we’ll see shortly is contrary to American principles. It’s important to note that the play for popularity stokes the fires of divisiveness, keeping the country divided making vision based leadership and extremely difficult proposition.

The idea that polls should determine policy is un-American and shows a breakdown in our founding principles.

The representative government provided by the constitution was supposed to protect us from this type of fickle temperament.  Check out this defense for the creation of a senate written by James Madison in the Federalist No. 63:

To a people as little blinded by prejudice or corrupted by flattery as those whom I address, I shall not scruple to add, that such an institution may be sometimes necessary as a defense to the people against their own temporary errors and delusions. As the cool and deliberate sense of the community ought, in all governments, and actually will, in all free governments, ultimately prevail over the views of its rulers; so there are particular moments in public affairs when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn. In these critical moments, how salutary will be the interference of some temperate and respectable body of citizens, in order to check the misguided career, and to suspend the blow meditated by the people against themselves, until reason, justice, and truth can regain their authority over the public mind? What bitter anguish would not the people of Athens have often escaped if their government had contained so provident a safeguard against the tyranny of their own passions? Popular liberty might then have escaped the indelible reproach of decreeing to the same citizens the hemlock on one day and statues on the next.

In other words, folks will get themselves worked up and bring about the downfall of the government if they aren’t protected from their passions.

Principled leadership? What a neat idea!!

Politicians should make decisions in the best interest of  the electorate, not what’s most popular. This would be rule by majority which fundamentally sucks chicken nuggets and is one of the reasons our “forefathers” sought to establish a representative government. Leading through vision is what we call principled leadership. Typical of the American political landscape, there is little agreement on the value and usage of principled leadership. In the case of George W. Bush, Republicans applauded him while Democrats derided him. Now that Obama is in office the argument is the same, the sides have merely switched. Carl Cannon wrote a great article pointing to the lunacy of governing by polls instead of principled leadership.

As is demonstrated by the divisions over principled leadership, the electorate is polarized. In her article, Seabrook interviews Scott Keeter of the Pew Research Center who sifts through the data and confirms that “Americans themselves are extremely divided.”  So, as Seabrook concludes, how can we hold our officials accountable for their pandering divisiveness when we as Americans are so divisive? The prudent question; why are we so divided?

As the electorate, we send our politicians to Washington to not only legislate on our behalf but to make the Federal government work for our personal communities through legislative initiatives and federal funds. Sadly, projects destined for our districts other than our own are deemed “pork barrel” while those that fill our local coffers and slim our local mainstreet unemployment rolls are “essential.”

As Americans we won’t give up our guns; primarily cause we’ll need them to shot dead anyone trying to curtail our individualism. There is no judgment on the value of individualism here. It has played a vital role in the rise of capitalism and the generation of the American entrepreneurial spirit. It is simply an assertion that its presence is fuel for a bi-polar political process that rails against pork spending, while individually seeking government grants and subsidies.

Political figures generally are not spared affliction of indidualism and pander to the petty politics that arise out of electorate ME-ism and poll popularity.  Unfortunately, America’s Not In My Back Yard mentality is subject to the laws of reaping and sowing. Our hypocrisy is sown throughout or political landscape and we reap divisive, knee jerk governance and ever shifting foreign political climates. Hopefully we can begin to set aside just enough of our individualism to act in the best interest of our entire country and not just the block we live on.

The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr.


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
A cottage industry of writers survives thanks to the concise yet profound knowledge found in The Elements of Style. It was required reading in college and should be part of the standard work contract. Weighing in at a nimble 95 pages, including the glossary, there are few books more densely packed with wisdom.

In the age of blogs, tweets and megabyte data streams, crisp clear communication is seldom seen. Few endeavor to contemplate how to communicate clearly. The Elements of Style is the guide post in this blizzard of messages. The books is tremendously old, but still recommended reading in writing courses and newsrooms around the world. Why?

Is humor possible while discussing grammar? Uhm, yes. The trick, evidently, is in clarity.

The Elements of Style covers grammar usage, composition, form expressions and style. All of which are critical elements in communicating tone, style and information. Even if I get labeled a nerd, I have to say one of the best books I CONTINUE to read.

View all my reviews >>

I’m sitting in a cafe on a beautiful sunny Friday working at a table outside, when I hear a familiar song wafting above the drone of buses and the chatter of casual conversation. I know the song and slowly the words slip into my ears bringing with them an indescribable comfort. It’s Ray Charles singing “Georgia on My Mind.”

There is a sense of pride that engulfs me when those strings saunter through the air. This is the song I taught my kids when they were young. This is the song the three of us would croon on the way back from school in the afternoons. This was the song that hastened history lessons to them about the South, segregation, the chitlin circuit and even blindness. This is the artist I was so proud to have shared with my children. The same artist who they took as one of their favorite entertainers, happily feeding a jukebox at the  Waffle House on Sundays to hear him croon. In Ray Charles my children found someone who stood up for justice, even when it meant losing something dear to him. They knew his story as much as they knew the song.

Half a world away from my home, I found a joy that comes from the familiar in an alien setting. A world with foreign sounds, strange tongues, and odd tastes is made familiar. As the song faded from the cafe’s speakers, I fumbled to locate my iPod, I was enjoying a high and didn’t want to give it up.

While searching for Ray Charles, I came across some Outkast songs. Now that I was in the space, I curiously pressed play. My earphones bumped and banged as “Aquemini” flooded my eardrums and colored everything before my eyes. A moving expeience still. I had never known how powerful music was. It could transform a foreign landscape into the familiar, with just a couple of touches on an iPod.

With Georgia still on my mind, I began thinking about where I could find a high mountain peak.  I had Eric B queued up, and as Saul Williams once said, “not until you’ve listened to Rakim on a rocky mountain top have you heard hip hop.”

While getting dressed this morning, I looked out the window to see my mailbox was busted. At one time, it stood squat and stout, seven feet from the curb, like a menacing linebacker zealously guarding his turf. Now toppled and helpless, it lay on its side, my insecurities leaking from its cracks for all to see. Luckily, insecurities speak only to those they own and to those wise enough to hear them in others.

Visions of drunken teenagers rampaging through the night toppling mailboxes in an alcohol induced prank spree looped endlessly through the rational part of my brain. The four foot tall letter box, as they are called here in Australia,  lay toppled and broken, unable to testify on its behalf, unable to soothe my growing anxiety and name its assailants.  The beige letter box silently lay there, its cracks shouting obscenities at me.

I put pants on and sauntered toward the crime scene, mindful to subtly spy distant trees in case the perpetrator lie all night in wait to collect the satisfaction of my disappointment. No such luck for them. I was tight lipped and somber like the professional detectives of my favorite crime show, First 48. I looked left and right, selfishly hoping to see toppled mailboxes to my left and to my right. That would mean, in the oddest of ways, that I somehow belonged. I would’ve settled for an empty toilet paper roll rolling aimlessly in the wind or simple chalk marks from an abandoned hopscotch game. Any semblance of dereliction elsewhere would do. There was nothing.

I stood, looking down at the broken concrete mailbox, the sun rising at my back exposing doubts hidden in the dark crevices of my mind. With my feet firmly planted on Australian soil, my transplanted American insecurities continued to grow. I wondered why my mailbox alone lay broken. With its wide concrete base and hefty disposition, this was no accident. As sure as a semi-trailer doesn’t fall over from a gentle breeze, my mailbox was on its side for a reason.

My mind raced, what other secrets could this place hold. As tempting as it is to play the race card, my foreigner card, my English speaking card, or my right handed card, I slide them all back into my mental card deck. I know this paradox all to well. You can never say with certainty that it is what you believe, but you can never rule it out.  So I bent over and picked up the pieces of my insecurity, piecing them together as best I could. There is always the thought, but seldom the proof.

Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace… One School at a Time by Greg Mortenson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Finding your life’s purpose and changing the lives of nearly 24,000 children and their parents in the process is sometimes less about running after defined dreams and sometimes more about listening to the wind. Three Cups of Tea is the story of Greg Mortenson, an extreme mountain climber, who in failing to conquer the second highest mountain in the world, stumbled across his life’s work, changing the future of 24,000 impoverished children and their families in the process.

The book was written by Mortenson and writer David Oliver Relin and published by Penguin in 2006. It was a New York Times best seller and 2007 winner of the Kiriyama Book Prize for Nonfiction. It’s easy to understand the book’s popularity given the region which Mortenson’s work finds him in. The mountain regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan are now at the heart of the war on terror and central to winning that war, says Mortenson, is educating the children, especially the girls.

Mortenson’s story is vividly detailed in this well written book which provides and understanding of village life high in the mountains of the Karakoram Mountain range located in Pakistan and bordered by China to the east and India to the south. The strongly Christian Mortenson is taken care of by a village of strangers after losing his way on an expedition in the mountains. He is cared for with kindness by the residents of the Korphe village and eventually comes to see their leader Haji Ali as his mentor. Through Ali’s eyes, Mortenson begins to realize how inaccessible education is in this part of the world. He also begins to understand that the inhabitants of the area would give anything to have a school and makes a fateful promise to help the village build a school, and in so doing sets his future in motion.

As a precursor to understanding the war on terror and its root causes, this book is invaluable. Throughout the book we see first hand how brutal poverty and lack of access to the essentials of life make them easy targets for Islamic extremists who provide food, clothing and an extremist education that fuels the war on terror. By educating the girls, not just boys, Mortenson believes that the society will in turn become more educated.

Throughout the book we watch as Mortenson is kidnapped, swindled, caught in firefights and even has local Muslim leaders issue religious pronouncements, Fatwas, against him and his work. The journey is an inspiring story that displays how one person’s promise and determination can change the fate of a nation and indeed,the world.

The writing style is fluid and quick. There are some gaps in the writing, for instance the time he initially spends in Korphe is abbreviated and we miss understanding some of the passion that fuels his initial promise. But at 336 pages, the adventure and the rich characters more than make up for it.

Another interesting subtext for this book is religious tolerance and respect for other cultures. As a Christian, Mortenson is primarily educating Muslim children. Rather than providing a Christian based indoctrination, Mortenson strove to provide the children with a balanced education that could save them from the extremism that was popping up everywhere in the country. As an infidel, the Muslim word for a non-Muslim, his mission was that much harder and that much more improbable. When asked if he was a Muslim while in the region, his response was that he was a Christian, but that he respected Islam. That respect ultimately allowed him to go in places and meet people the U.S. military could only hope to know.

Dr. Greg, as he came to be known, was more popular than the president in the region as he served the needs of the poor in exemplary fashion. For Christians called to serve and for those interested in understanding exactly why there is a war on terror and for those daring to be inspired, I highly recommend Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin.

View all my reviews >>

No two ways about it, staring is impolite. So, with great pleasure, I bestowed a wide-eyed Mike Singletary stare on four Australian teenagers eating a meal on the other side of a glass McDonald’s door in a restroom waiting area. For good measure, I pointed at them and feigned a whisper to my 11-year-old son blatantly daring the impolite teenagers to respond to my childish actions. Yes, I’m 40 and I still haven’t learned to always take the high road.

As a 40-year-old black American, I’ve grown accustomed to stares. My parents made sacrifices early in my life and moved us to the regular dinner times and bedtime stories that haunted predominately white suburbs with schools that would fill my childhood and adolescence with rich experiences and naked ugliness. Somewhere in between those two extremes, lurked the stares of unfamiliar friends and familiar enemies. I came to know the unwitting power of seemingly benign stares.

I was surprised to come across a book on the subject, Staring: How We Look, by Rosemarie Garland Thomson. She clinically dissects the peculiar nature of staring and fine tunes the murky details of the age old, unavoidable attraction it wields over our eyes:

We stare when ordinary seeing fails, when we want to know more. So staring is an interrogative gesture that asks what’s going on and demands the story. The eyes hang on, working to recognize what seems illegible, order what seems unruly, know what seems strange. Staring begins as an impulse that curiosity can carry forward into engagement.

Curiosity can be at the heart of staring, but my experiences also knew that staring was a silent segregator, dividing those who belong from those who do not. The teenager’s stares reminded me of those experiences. Their furtive glances and stiffled giggles fired up emotions long ignored, relegated to obsolescence. Anger and rage were normally inappropriate responses to the primary motivator for staring, curiosity.

The problem is, the stare automatically betrays the starers understanding of what is normal, casting the object of the stare, the staree as abnormal in some shape fashion or form.

“Staring offers an occasion to rethink the status quo. Who we are can shift into focus by staring at who we think we are not,” Thomson writes.  This creates the power struggle inherent in the stare that we feel but don’t understand. The staree is defined against a fictional backdrop created by the starer. In the case of two people attracted to each other, the backdrop is mutually beneficial for both the starer and the staree. “Staring encounters nonetheless draft starees into a story of the starer’s making, whatever that story might be, whether they like it or not,” concludes Thomson.

I can remember one of my earliest memories as a child was a staring incident in which I, the starer concocted a story for my staring subject. I couldn’t have been older than five and I was on a trip with my mother to the supermarket. The American era of free love was drawing to an end in the seventies and hippies were everywhere. Following close behind my mother, I rounded the corner in what I believed to be the dairy section. Riveted by what I saw my hand rose with a pointed finger singling out the focus of my youthful attention. I spoke loudly, to my mother’s eventual mortification.

“Momma,” I shouted in semi-joy, amazement, and curiosity. “Is that Jesus?”
My mother’s lowered head and aggressive tugging gave me the sneaking suspicion my answer was, “oh my gosh no, you are such an embarrassing child, please stop staring and didn’t I teach you not to point at people?”
In that moment, I created a world for the anonymous grocery store patron to fit into. Even children have the power to create a world into which adults conform.

So, I grew up practiced in the silent art of staring as most of us do. The suburbs prepared me well to become invisible to the stares that I would so often get. When we notice we are the subject of staring, we are forced to respond in some way. Even the choice to ignore is an initiated action. I recently spoke with a friend, the child of a military officer stationed overseas. While stationed in Japan, he vividly remembers an incident in which children walked up to him and began rubbing his brown skin, which they clearly had never seen before. They stared and touched in stunning amazement.

“I pulled my arm back,” he said, “but my father stopped me and told me to hold my hand out.” As his father explained to him, even if he didn’t understand, he was representing a whole new realm of understanding for those children enamored by his skin and his appearance. His father taught him to smile at the stares; his very presence was educational. He still remembers that lesson to this day.

I can understand this perspective, but the teenagers who had been eying my family, whispering amongst themselves as they gawked at our existence was proving to be unsettling. I had traveled across the world to enjoy the Australian culture and, as a veteran of the staring game, I was seldom unsettled. But the nature of the stares surpassed even my appalling experience on a South Korean bus in 1987. After coming to a complete stop, the bus driver turned to me and stared me up and down the entire time the light was red. His uncomfortable and obtrusive gaze never wandered from my 18-year-old frame. Only the anxious honking of horns from the cars behind him, who clearly had no idea of the wonder he had found, jarred him to unfix his uncomfortable stare and drive the damn bus.

The stare wields the power to render a person’s being, accomplishments, shortcomings and heroics obsolete. Inherent in the stare is the ability to reduce a person to a shell of their real self, substituting perceived stereotypes, notions of value, and worthlessness. In this ocular transaction, there is the potential for tension. My pointing display was evidence of my desire to ratchet up the tension; return the favor to the starer. It hadn’t worked, they continued to take unwanted glances, smirking and joking with each turn back to their table of peers.

In that moment, I was thankful I had talked with my children before they ever arrived in Australia. We talked about standing up for ourselves and never allowing anyone’s words, fingers or eyes make us feel uncomfortable. I communicated to them how important it was to understand people stare because they seldom see black Americans here and as my friend’s father taught him, smiling and educating the curious about who we are allows everyone to win. We talked about ignoring the stares and never internalizing them.

I was satisfied when my daughter came home laughing because a little Australian child around the age of five ran to her mother, pointing at my children, “Mum, look at their faces!!!” My daughter got it, she knew she was complete whole and beautiful and the child was simply amazed by her. Her laughter warmed, she could protect herself from the pressure of the stares. But, there is a point, where curiosity becomes blatant rudeness. I was now there. Question was, what was I going to do about it.

We were in the town of Gimpy, Queensland eating at a McDonald’s after being on the road for six hours. My grump factor was up as I was tired and hungry. The gawking teenagers had tested my patience and it was time to put an end to it, they clearly hadn’t gotten my impolite warning.

As my family walked out of the restroom waiting area toward the cashier and past the teenagers, they looked down at their food and a wave of patience came over me. I stared at their table, no one stared back. Thankful for my second wind of patience, I was happy to put the moment behind me, but as I passed their table preparing to get into the long line to order, I saw at least six other faces from all ages staring blankly at myself and my family. Would it always be like this? My second wind of anger filled me.

Unable to control myself, a smile came across my face as I stepped back to the table of giggling teenagers. Pausing momentarily, as I towered over their table my mouth opened, I didn’t know what was about to slide past my tongue. They had stopped giggling, and were now looking at the black man leaning into their table, their space of private jokes and shared conversation.

“I’m just curious, did you all want to ask me something,” I courteously questioned, distributing an even stare to each of the starees seated at the table? They all quickly said no, hoping to diffuse the awkward situation that was now unfolding. I paused again.

“Are you sure,” I asked again, staring ever more deeply into their eyes. They all again said no.
“Well, let me know if you do,” I offered as I left the table. They didn’t seem as curious as I thought they might, but no matter. I was no longer angry, no longer grumpy, only hungry.