How Many Trumps Will It Take To Change A Light Bulb?

It will take one Trump to proclaim himself the greatest light bulb changer of all time: “It’s going to be great, folks. There will be light like you’ve never had it before. Really fantastic light. Just wait and see. No one has ever changed a light bulb like I’m gonna change a light bulb! Trust me!”

It will take another Trump to denounce and insult all previous and rival light bulb changers: “They’re all phonies and liars and crooks. They’ve been bringing you fake light. They’re horrible people. But now I’m here, and you’ve never seen light bulb changing like I’m gonna show you!”

A third Trump will be needed to berate anyone who would dare suggest that his previous experience (tying his shoelaces, using a fork, walking, dressing himself, choosing barbers, etc.) ill prepares him to change light bulbs: “I’m very, very talented. I’m going to do an amazing job. I know more about changing light bulbs than professional light bulb changers. Because, you know, I’m very smart. And I’m a winner!”

Another Trump will be called upon to deny multiple failures during his years of tying his own shoe laces: “It’s absolutely untrue that I once tied the laces from my right shoe to the laces of my left shoe, causing me to fall flat on my face as soon as I stood up. But if I did, it was probably for a good reason.”

Yet another Trump will be required to dodge scandals about behavior inappropriate to light bulb changers: “No, I have never, ever changed a battery. Not a cell phone battery, or the battery in the smoke detector, or even a flashlight battery. Anyone who says so is a liar. I’ve never tried to change a battery and I would never think about trying to change a battery. But if I did change a battery, I’d be the best battery changer ever!

Finally, at least one more Trump will be needed to ramp up fear about the horrific darkness that will descend if he and he alone doesn’t change the light bulb: “It would be a disaster! People would die! The world would come to an end if I, and only I – remember, I’ll the only one who’s qualified – didn’t change the light bulb. It would be soooo bad, you wouldn’t believe it! But that’s not gonna happen. Because I’ve been elected – in a landslide – to change the light bulb. And when I do, IT IS GOING TO BE LIGHT AGAIN!”

Oh, one more. There has to be a Trump to buy the lightbulb from another Trump, who will make the light bulb (in China), through Trump the middle man, at enormous profit to all: “But it’ll be the best light bulb that money can buy!”

I’ve lost track. But eventually we will come to the Trump who does the actual screwing. And America will see the light.

Because, of course this would all be merely a theoretical exercise, but for the fact that some sixty-two million Americans decided that one Donald J. Trump was just the person to bring America back into that light. (And despite the fact that sixty-five million were convinced that he was not)

Which brings this levity to where it takes a sorrowful turn. Because sixty-two million of our fellow citizens decided that running the country that leads the world was probably no more difficult and required hardly more wisdom, skill, maturity, humility, self-awareness, respect for facts, consideration for others – in short, INTEGRITY – than it takes to change a light bulb.

They were mistaken.

The irony is that, all along, the sky has been brightening. Slowly but steadily, America has been moving toward its promise. There’s been an effort to intentionally overlook how truly dark America was eight years ago. Absurd claims are made that America has descended from something that was better over the last eight years, that we’ve fallen from an imaginary 2008 in which we enjoyed the higher regard of the world, and greater prosperity and safety at home. But even the resurgence of race as an issue doesn’t reflect something new, but rather something old and festering that is now coming into view under a brighter light. But sadly, in Trump, America has reached for the light switch, and is pulling the shades against the sun.

Good luck with that light bulb, Mr. Trump. Be prepared for a period of darkness, America. May it be oh so brief.

Farewell, Mr. President

Dear President Obama

Today is the last day of your presidency, and I’ll be sad to see you go.

It’s been an amazing, challenging, troubled yet wonderful eight years. You entered office with America so embroiled in war and economic devastation, it almost felt like a set up for failure. You were so full of hope and promise, but how could you possibly measure up to the expectations, and to the need, particularly with such a large target on your back? So much of the world was rooting for you, yet so many Americans were hungry and howling for your failure. How could that be? And how would it play out?

Well, it’s been both rewarding and punishing. For the entire nation, the world – probably for you more than most. That you could even be elected in America, with so much in our legacy of hate yet to be overcome, was astonishing. That you survived that first term, withstood so many attacks and stresses, so many setbacks and disappointments, to win a second term on the upward lift of a second, more strained and wary swell of hope, that too was remarkable.

And now, we’ve come to perhaps the strangest place of all. As your custodianship of the most powerful office in the world comes to an end, you are made to turn the presidency over to a man who is in almost all ways your opposite. Your popularity is higher than at almost any time since your inauguration, and your successor comes into office with the lowest approval ratings of any president since this measure was taken. And yet, hordes of Americans clamor about making America great again, as though you have not been steadily steering her in that direction.

It’s a crazy time. Is America is better shape than when you took office? In so many ways, that is clearly the case. Certainly, there are more people working, more people with health care, and more who are financially secure than back then. But there are also more signs of the hate and the spiritual sickness that has been as much a part of America as our yearning toward democracy and equality. As much as your presidency represented hope and coming together – maybe because of it – there is more of the politics of hate and fear and division than I’ve witnessed in my lifetime. Not since the late sixties have the forces of love and hate been so at war that it seems possible that the nation could come apart. It’s frightening. It’s depressing.

I’ve been recalling and listening to some of your speeches over the last little while. It’s remarkable and eye-opening to see how consistent your message has been. You’ve always talked about hope. You’ve always talked about the work that ordinary citizens must do. You’ve always preached the need for us to seek out our ‘others’ and share with them, listen to them. Maybe that’s what all this madness and confusion is. Maybe it’s the noise of people meeting and confronting their ‘others’, who don’t have much experience of that. The noise of it is deafening and confusing. Maybe it’s that we all want to speak before we are prepared to listen. And maybe we’ll finally shout ourselves out and a calmer phase will come. Maybe these are the wild, incautious teenage years of America, and we only have to survive them to begin to discover the maturity that our better natures promise.  As you’ve always said, it won’t be determined by hoping or despairing. It will take a lot of us doing.

I’ve gotten off track here. Because I wanted to tell you what I appreciate. There’s lots I could say on that, but I’ll keep it at one thing. Nothing to do with what you’ve accomplished, or haven’t, despite trying. I want to thank you for your calm, dignified being, for your determination and your patience, your tears, your anger, but also for being so slow to anger. In many ways, you’ve been like this nation’s father, when it’s desperately needed one. And, probably like with all fathers, it may seem that your words and example have gone unheeded, but they have not. To this citizen and voter, your presidency has been, above all else, about character.

You’ve been a good man, Mr. President. You’ve shown yourself to be a human being, fallible, questioning, committed and loyal, giving, sacrificing and humble. You have served your country and the world well. You deserve a little break from all this. But it’s pretty clear you aren’t going away. Which is a blessing to all of us.

I’m from that generation in which every young black man who showed promise was told, “You could be the first Black President!” There were times I heard it when I halfway thought it could be true. But you know, I’m really, really glad it was you, President Obama. All the best to you as you step beyond tomorrow. I send you my thanks, my respect, my love!

Kirby Obsidian

Cracking it Open

My writing has turned on me. It no longer offers me a place of refuge, where I can go to escape challenges of everyday life. Nor a place to freely and safely explore and experiment with the various dimensions of me. Oh…the exploration and discovery still go on. Writing is an ever fruitful, always reliable path of self-discovery. But it no longer feels so safe; no longer is it always encouraging, or pointing toward possibility. Rather, writing has become a persistent challenge and demand on me: to know what I know, and to do what’s called for.

These days, my writing consistently points out to me – NO, it shoves it in my face, under my nose and down my throat – how huge a gap there is between the self I’ve spent a lifetime fantasizing and dreaming about, imagining that I was growing toward, and the entirely other being I’ve become. And this latter being that I’ve become has too often been protected and coddled, kept safe and secure from the demands of that other self.

It seems that whenever I write, the contradictions of my life find their way onto the page. I can’t escape the realities of my living, and all the ways it strays from what I know is true, what I believe is possible, and what I feel is right.

I think of James Baldwin, whose writing I’ve always admired for its naked honesty. He put all of his own contradictions, struggles and compromises on paper, for the world to read: his crisis of faith when faith could not peacefully co-exist with his humanity, the confession of a sexuality which labelled him perverse, the impossible demands of being an aware Black man in a world that demanded his complicity in the systemic devaluation of Blackness. How could he so boldly expose his every vulnerability and insecurity and still breathe? And have a public life?

There is so much contradiction and tension in every part of my life, so much challenge and sense of danger. And just as I don’t have answers to so much of this, (and have so many ready answers to so much, without courage to embrace them), I just can’t see how to allow my thoughts and words to flow freely, without constantly considering the consequences of doing so, in my relationships, my work, in all the places and roles I occupy in life.

I believe that the only way to deal with this challenge, to break through, is to go forward, to embrace this persistent flow in my words, my writing. A kind of letting go and acceptance is involved. A degree of unselfconscious courage is called for. Why does it feel so scary? Is this what’s held me up all these years?

Election Day is Here!

Over the weekend, I carefully and scrupulously read over my Voter’s Guide from Washington State, completed the lengthy ballot, then emailed it back for tabulation in this quadrennial exercise of participatory democracy. Emailing got me in before the deadline, but my votes won’t actually be counted until my paper ballot is received later this week through the mail, properly signed and dated.


Though I’ve lived in the Greater Toronto area for almost a quarter century, I remain a legal voter based on my former address in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Seattle. I’ve now been an absentee voter for more years than I was a resident voter. I’ve been a registered voter in a few states: New York, Massachusetts, Missouri, Oregon, and Indiana, in addition to Washington (but never in my birth state of Michigan). I never actually voted in New York, because I was away at university in Massachusetts in 1972, the first year when eighteen year-olds could vote, and my absentee ballet wound up in a college administration building instead of in my dormitory mailbox, as I’d expected. So I never completed that first vote. It turned out not to matter very much, as that was the year of the Nixon landslide. My first presidential vote wound up being cast in Massachusetts four years later, for Jimmy Carter. Next time around, after primary season and my first caucus, in Kansas City, and disillusioned with Carter by then, I cast a vote for my first third party candidate, in the person of Republican defector, John Anderson.


In 2004, I did a vote swap. I wanted to give Ralph Nader a boost, but didn’t want to risk Kerry losing a vote he might need to prevail. So I voted for Kerry in Seattle, while a trusted friend promised to vote Nader in New York. But, I wasn’t actually in Seattle. That vote was already my 4^th absentee vote for President, made from Canada. This is my seventh.


A few years ago I became a Canadian citizen, and my dual status allows me to participate in the electoral process of two countries. The voting experience is quite different here from what I became used to in Seattle. In Canada, which has a parliamentary system, one usually gets to cast only a single vote, that is, to make a determination on only a single matter. One reason is that municipal, provincial and national voting doesn’t generally happen at the same time. But the more substantial reason is that, here, you essentially have to align yourself with a party. In last year’s federal contest, I cast a vote for the local candidate for Member of Parliament who represented the party of my preferred national leader, and that was that. Had I really liked the national leader, but thought the local candidate an idiot (or vice versa), I’d have been stuck with a “neither or both” choice.


Contrasting with that, the ballot I just mailed back to Washington was a hefty eight pages. It included dozens of votes. In addition to my choice for President, I also made choices for Senator, Congressional Representative, Governor, lieutenant Governor, Secretary of State, State Auditor, State Treasurer, Attorney General, and several judgeships and memberships on school boards and insurance commissions.

My favorite part of voting in the U.S. – and this varies widely from State to State – is the presence of Initiatives and Referendums. An initiative is a ballot measure put forward by a citizen or citizen group. All that’s required to get a measure on the ballot is a required number of signatures, enough to demonstrate that there is considerable interest. A Referendum, on the other hand, is a measure that the legislature has decided – for any number of reasons, practical or political – to refer back to the electorate for approval. Sometimes there will be competing Initiatives and/or Referendums, representing different solutions to a problem. These measures reflect a degree of direct citizen participation in government. Often these measures have a high public profile and generate huge campaigns that rival those of contenders for office.

In Washington State, the Initiative movement has been very strong, at least in the 34 years since I’ve been voting there. This year alone there are initiatives to:

-         Increase the minimum wage

-         Create a system to finance political campaigns

-         Allow family members to restrict access to guns by the violent or mentally ill

-         Increase penalties for fraud and identity theft targeting seniors

-         Create a carbon emission tax on fossil fuels

-         Push for a constitutional amendment to deny the rights of persons to corporations

In addition, there are a couple of other advisory measures, a proposed amendment to the state constitution, a city of Seattle initiative to improve health, safety and labor standards and protection for hotel employees, and a measure to fund the expansion of the light rail system. The ballot comes with a booklet containing non-partisan explanations of the measures and arguments and rebuttals, pro and con, as well as links to information about supporters and financing of each side.

It took me several hours over the weekend to read up on all of the measures and to make my choices. But it’s a wonderful exercise that forces one to carefully consider the responsibilities of citizenship. And it leaves me feeling that, though I’m long gone, I remain a citizen of my native land, and that I still play a role in shaping the future of a community that I continue to love and that was my home for quite a few years.

This election season, which has been so tortuously long and divisive, is finally ending. It’s been a perfect demonstration of how ugly and messy democracy can be. But as they say, it still seems like about the best system going.

Coming Into The Kefar

Dimona is a city in Israel’s Negev desert. It’s the home to about two to three thousand ex-patriot African Americans known as the Black Hebrew Israelites. I should say African Americans and their offspring, because more than half of the population was born here, since the community was established in late 1960’s. It is a prolific community, created by its founders “to establish God’s new kingdom on Earth”, and as such, it’s very pro-children. Families are the fundamental unit of the community, and many of them are very large. Some of the men have two, three or even four wives, and sometimes a dozen or more children between them.

My father immigrated here in 1973, part of a large group, mostly from Chicago, Detroit and Gary, Indiana, who came here with very little but their faith in what they were creating. There were many hard years, during which they faced financial struggles, deportations, and a fair amount of desertion. Since that time, they’ve won allies and admirers, certainly acceptance. But I’m not here to write a history, but to share the experience of welcome and community I experience coming here.

I first came here twelve years ago, to celebrate my father’s eightieth birthday with him and his two wives. The lived in Tiberius at the time, part of a small contingent of “the Nation” settled in that northern city on the Sea of Galilee. But even then, it was Dimona I was most eager to see and to visit – to see the heart of this community that my father joined so long ago.

Emmah Kaninah, 96 & Abbah Avraham, 92 (9'16)

One of the things that always strikes me here is that the Kefar – the perhaps ten acre square of mostly single-story, densely-packed apartments that holds the heart of the community – is full of my people. They are the people I was born among in Detroit, lived among in my teens in New York City, and encounter in the Black communities all over the U.S. They speak my language and I speak theirs; we share common roots and culture and growing up experiences. In some ways, they remind me, who has lived mostly among white folks through most of my adult years in Seattle and Toronto, of the communities of Black students I belonged to in boarding school and in college in New England: we were from all over the country, but were conscious and intentional in over-coming whatever differences we might have to support our togetherness.

Emmah & friends on the Kefar (9'16)

The other thing that makes an even bigger impression on me, is how healthy, vibrant and truly communal the Kefar is. For years, I worked in Toronto’s Regent Park, Canada’s largest public housing development. I love Regent Park, and it is certainly home to real community, with powerful, loving bonds, healing, grassroots energies and movements, and a powerful sense of identity. But Regent Park’s beautiful community existed on top of and inter-mingled with other communities that were disruptive and discordant and constantly draining it’s health – like the subculture of its violent, street drug trade.

Life in the Kefar, on the other hand, while I don’t suppose it to be trouble-free, is guided by a single vision and a fairly strict code of values and conduct that prevent any oppositional culture from setting roots. I don’t know that I could or would live within this particular vision and code, and this isn’t a time to explore that. By virtue of my father’s belonging, I have a foot in the community, and find acceptance here, but I am a visitor, an outsider. And yet, I look upon the Kefar with love, admiration and even a little, wistful envy.

Kids on the Kefar (9'16)

The Kefar is beautiful. It is humble and simple, but clean and welcoming. Though dense, it feels open. It is the village it aims to be. But it’s the life of the children here that speaks to me most. When I was first here, I wanted to return to Regent Park and scoop up all the children and bring them here. It is safe. Children play unattended, because all adults here share responsibility for their supervision and care. I observed a child of about four approach an adult to ask for assistance crossing the street that borders the Kefar. The adult called over a youth, who promptly responded, escorting the child to the school yard across the street. There are no glass shards, cigarette butts or other kinds of trash lying about. No obscenities or threats are being shouted. When I asked the children for permission to take their photo, they gathered around, eager, giggling and polite, showing no fear of the stranger.

In so many ways, life here is as it ought to be. And it makes me wonder at the extent of what most of us have sacrificed for our modernism and ‘progress’.

Rofe Amadyah's Cactus Garden on the Kefar (9'16)

What We Believe

I’m in Israel. It’s one of those countries on Earth where belief systems have played an incredibly historic and inspirational role, but have also given rise to generations of war and hate. It’s a place of pilgrimages and combat missions, of devotions and heresies, where the concepts of good and evil are probably more present in people’s thinking, and also more contradictory in expression than in most other places. In this part of the world, people seem to be blowing themselves up every day for what they believe.

My visit here is to a community full of true believers. My father’s Hebrew Israelite nation is founded on a pursuit of truth, a truth its members feel was historically denied, about the origins and true identity of Black Americans of African ancestry. It is a belief that directly challenges the truth as put forward by others who have claims to the territory and traditions of Israel. The beliefs of the Hebrew Israelites hold an invitation to me, one with great appeal on many levels. However, I cannot see a personal pathway to accepting the invitation, because it is loaded with so much belief that is contrary to beliefs I have developed on my own journey through life.

I hold to my own beliefs to varying degrees. My belief that the Earth is approximately round is pretty strong, despite my surprising, recent encounter with a sincere and adamant Flat-Earther (Yes! They exist! – though I wouldn’t have believed so before meeting one). This belief holds despite the fact that I have no direct evidence and have neither proved it nor had it proven to me. I believe it mainly because I’ve been told so, and because it seems to make sense, and because it fits in with lots of other bits of knowledge, gained through experience as well as indoctrination, about how the universe I live in is structured.

But my belief in intelligent alien life is much less certain. I belief in that largely because of the vastness of the universe (something else I take at the word of “experts” who’ve written books and have appeared on television). If the universe is truly as vast as they say it is, and populated by billions of suns and their planets, is just seems mathematically unlikely to me that we could be the only beings with the gift of intelligence. And, in the words of one of Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” characters, if we are the only ones, “…it would be an awful waste of space.” But this belief in alien intelligence is not rock solid. I know it stems as much from wanting it to be true as from anything else. In the same way that my belief in Santa Claus persisted a good two or three years beyond being old enough to see through that one, because I so wanted him to be real.

This stuff is on my mind, in part, because of a couple of incredibly provocative books I’m reading. They are Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari, and Mindfulness in the Modern World, a transcript of talks by Osho. Harari says that the ability to create “fictions” and to believe in them is the key characteristic that separates Homo Sapiens (Us) from Neanderthals and other near human beings, and the characteristic that made us so dominant over the rest of creation. Among these “fictions” are religion, democracy, human rights and money. Osho states that all of our ‘religions’, as well as the other life-style theories that drive us, are nonsense, and that we ought to overcome them if we want peace, happiness, enlightenment. Both of these writers, coming at the subject from totally different angles, say that nothing we “believe” has much of anything to do with Truth.

Having written this far, I have to add that I’m not yet twenty percent through Harari’s book. I’ve only read about half of Osho’s (but that’s a different matter, his not being a book that one will actually ‘finish’, I don’t think). There are certainly no conclusions to draw in this post. But my mind is open to looking at all that ‘I believe’ in a fresh way, maybe to looking inward for what generates belief, to understanding why I have often felt a need to believe in something; why, at varying times, freeing myself from a particular belief has caused me to feel lonely and isolated, afraid, or absolutely empowered and free. Harari points out how powerful belief systems are. Osho, how limiting they are. The profusion of today’s wars, and conflicts of religious and political extremism, would support both. One of the key questions to me is: Given that belief is about a deep level of acceptance of a viewpoint, sometimes based on proof, but often beyond the point of verification or evidence, how much choice do we really have in what we believe?

How is this Trump Thing even Possible?

It really concerns and worries me that Trump is doing as well as he is in the polls, and that Hillary is struggling as she is. It causes me to worry about the character, insight and values of the American electorate.

I understand that Hillary Clinton is not an ideal candidate, that there are things about her candidacy, past errors in judgement, and the Democratic party platform that one can question and oppose. What I don't see is how anyone can look at her lifelong record and doubt that she has a deep and long-standing concern for regular people, and that she's worked hard over the decades to promote change that helps them.

But looking at Donald Trump, even supposing that one feels strongly about the "Republican values" he supports, how can one not be troubled by the character and personal values of the man? What has he ever done that hasn't been about self-promotion, about accumulating "personal" power, wealth and influence?

I'm stunned by those who say they distrust Clinton and yet ignore the chronic posing, distorting, misrepresenting and outright lying of Trump? I'm incredulous that people seem to think he will be a good manager of the economy, when all evidence shows that, as a businessman, he's all about lawsuits and intimidation, image and bankruptcies.

I've been asking myself what the explanation could possibly be, for millions of Americans actually wanting the presidency to be in the hands of such an immature, narcissistic and uninformed person. And I haven't been able to come up with any explanations that aren't depressingly cynical.

That so many Americans are just so fearful, that they are soothed by the bragging and bluster of Trump, whether he demonstrates any capacity for backing up his promises or not.

That so many Americans are so hateful, that they simply cannot acknowledge the decency of a Woman who would be commander in chief, any more than they accepted the decency of a Black Man as commander in chief.

That so many Americans are simply that stupid, that they really believe that the entire world (and American liberalism) is out to take advantage of, or even destroy, America, and that we have to attack and beat them down before they succeed.

I seriously fear for my country. This whole movement behind Trump strikes me as the kind of lunacy I see in my paranoid clients, who manage to either distort every fact that would poke holes in their delusion, or simply ignore it. It appears that Trump's supporters are able either to explain away the endless proofs of his unfitness to hold high office, or to ignore them.

I can't understand and I can hardly believe what may be happening.