Sunday, January 20, 2013
The Secret Of Moving On
I borrow the title of David Pack's album, where he performs jazz-themed covers of hits with his former soft rock band of the 70s, "Ambrosia".
Check it out for yourself. If you like Smooth Jazz, that is.
Change is rampant in our society. As I've grown older, the more difficult I find it to accept change.
Yet it happens. There's nothing I can do to stop it.
Some I welcome with open arms. Others, I prefer to leave it if given the option to take it or leave it.
Notwithstanding, I have made a change of my own.
Today is the last Ken's Korner you will be reading.
I will not be moving my column to another social media site, nor to a newspaper syndicate or other medium.
My sister column, Old School Dad, will also be ending likewise.
For close to seven years now, I've aired my viewpoints weekly on both MySpace and Facebook.
Some of you have emailed me to tell me how much you enjoy reading about what I have to say. Some of you have also emailed me to inform me that you don't like what I have to say and challenge my views.
And I welcome both praise and pontification. As a journalist, it takes courage to speak up, even when my take might not be the popular view.
I'm not afraid to generate controversy. I like to push people's buttons and find out what makes them tick.
Al Julius, a well-known KDKA-TV commentator during the 70s and 80s, did just that. While I'll never receive the accolades that Al received in his lifetime, I'm proud of what I've committed to what I've put to cyber-paper for the better part of a decade now.
And the time has come for me to move on.
It's time to do something else.
I believe I've said everything that needs to be said in my weekly warblings, as I've come to call them.
I don't say anything I don't believe in. And I do my best to get all of my facts straight before I put them 'out there'.
Some will tell you that I'm stubborn as a Texas jackass stuck in the LaBrea tar pits on a chilly day. Some of them might also tell you that I'll give you the shirt off my back or the last few bills in my wallet if you needed them. I'm many things to many people. This is one of my favorite quotes:
"I've been in the public eye for more than fifty years as Merv Griffin, not as somebody else's creation. I've never pretended to be someone I wasn't. If there was anything really important that people didn't know about me by now, then I would have to be world's greatest actor. Forget Brando, forget Hoffman, forget DeNiro...I would have to be the best."
Well put, sir.
I've reinvented myself over the years. From my career to my personal life. As part of the reinvention process, you tend to rearrange your priorities over the years. I've seen myself transcend from hardcore career man to family man who sees the highlight of his day when he leaves the office...as he sits down to dinner with his family who willingly waits for him to come home.
I will be devoting more of my time to improving and developing my journalistic tasks, but you won't hear the last of me, I promise.
In my spare time, I'm also working on a novel. Hopefully it'll be published in my lifetime.
And if not, that's OK.
I'm sure it won't be the first thing I haven't finished. I've got a laundry list of those items.
To those of you who have supported my efforts all these years, I offer my most heartfelt thanks and deep appreciation. The fact that you took time out of your Sunday to read this speaks volumes.
Radio and TV broadcasting has always been a low-level form of show business. In show business, we don't say good-bye.
It's more like "see ya".
And we'll leave it at that.
Sunday, January 13, 2013
School's in Session
DISCLAIMER: The views expressed in the following are strictly that of the author.
Last week, I footnoted my column by promising you a free history lesson this week.
Every once in a while, I will see a vehicle with a Confederate Battle Flag sticker (the one you see atop the General Lee in "The Dukes of Hazzard") on their vehicle, with the caption beneath it stating "If this offends you, you need a history lesson."
That's highly open to argument, since we all have different lessons to teach behind it, I'm sure.
In recent years, I've grown closer to our neighbors south of the Mason-Dixon line. The main reason is because I get more and more tired of cold weather each passing year, but also because I've learned about a culture much more unique and diverse than my own.
As we celebrate the upcoming observance of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, we can never lose sight of the Confederate Flag and just what it means.
By the majority, it still remains a dark reminder of a country so divided by racial philosophy that it split in two halves.
There I digress. Here's my history lesson.
An editorial cartoon in 1864 depicted U.S. President Abraham Lincoln and Confederacy President Jefferson Davis each pulling at an end of a map of the United States. Standing between them with a handful of each man's collar was General George B. McClellan, the Democratic Presidential candidate that year running against Lincoln, yelling at both men "The Union must be preserved at all hazards!"
As they're tugging on the map, Lincoln is saying "No peace without emancipation!"
Davis says "No peace without separation!"
Nonetheless, McClellan lost the election. The Confederacy lost the war. Slavery was finally abolished.
Lincoln was assassinated by a Southern sympathizer.
But the war was far from over. Though the blood was no longer shed on the battlefields, all the fighting was relegated to the Rebel states, now determined more than ever to keep the newly-freed Negroes to a status beneath that of the now-angry poor Whites, steadfastly refusing to accept a people once sold as common possessions as equals.
And I'm sure the general consensus of the newly-freed slaves at first was joyous, but may have dwindled to one of indifference after awhile.
Because slaves were considered property, and not the people they rightfully were, laws were quickly enacted in many former Confederate states prohibiting Negroes to own land to try and eke out a living to support themselves.
In Southern folklore, you may have read at one point or another about a white family with a domestic help that kept house and did other such chores in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
It wasn't because the family was wealthy. The sudden abundance of low cost labor made domestic help affordable for many southern families. It also gave former slaves their freedom while also protecting the security (but hopefully with the absence of the cruelty this time) they had while still a slave.
It would take years to craft laws that recognized African-Americans in their rightful place in American society as human beings with the same rights as Whites.
Unfortunately, among those laws were those that created the practice of segregation that would dominate the deep South for almost a century.
Many political figures in the early 1800s, who supported the slavery movement, tried to justify its necessity in America. Most infamous was John C. Calhoun, who served as U.S. Vice President under John Quincy Adams, calling it "a positive good":
" in every civilized society one portion of the community must live on the labor of another; learning, science, and the arts are built upon leisure; the African slave, kindly treated by his master and mistress and looked after in his old age, is better off than the free laborers of Europe; and under the slave system conflicts between capital and labor are avoided. The advantages of slavery in this respect, will become more and more manifest, if left undisturbed by interference from without, as the country advances in wealth and numbers."
All I can say to Mr. Calhoun is this:
"REALLY???"
While I agree with Mr. Calhoun that one portion of the community must live on the labor of another, especially in a free enterprise system, it does not, at any time, justify involuntary unpaid servitude to a single human being by another.
I always found ironic the fact that most who saw African-Americans beneath them and treated them to extremes as such, still went to church on Sunday and could recite much of the Bible verbatim.
The job is still not done. I believe that for the most part, Dr. King's dream was fulfilled. The biggest proof of that is in the White House, and now into his second term.
Nonetheless, hate crimes continue in this country that target African-Americans, homosexuals, Hispanics, the homeless, and countless others. Will it ever end in our lifetimes? Probably not.
What we can look forward to is the fact that we as a society have advanced by leaps and bounds since 1865. I can see distinct differences in just the past 25 years.
We can't eliminate hate in our culture, but we can reduce the numbers of those who do hate.
The lesson is this:
The Confederate Battle Flag is a symbol of a country divided, but managed to overcome the darkness of the past and successfully chart a course for its future. It should not be regarded as a symbol of hate or dread, but one of change. A culture that would make peace with its past and evolved over time, becoming more recognized for its food, music, architecture, faith base, and even fine arts.
At least that's the way this Southern Yankee sees it.
Class dismissed.
NEXT WEEK: Moving On
Last week, I footnoted my column by promising you a free history lesson this week.
Every once in a while, I will see a vehicle with a Confederate Battle Flag sticker (the one you see atop the General Lee in "The Dukes of Hazzard") on their vehicle, with the caption beneath it stating "If this offends you, you need a history lesson."
That's highly open to argument, since we all have different lessons to teach behind it, I'm sure.
In recent years, I've grown closer to our neighbors south of the Mason-Dixon line. The main reason is because I get more and more tired of cold weather each passing year, but also because I've learned about a culture much more unique and diverse than my own.
As we celebrate the upcoming observance of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, we can never lose sight of the Confederate Flag and just what it means.
By the majority, it still remains a dark reminder of a country so divided by racial philosophy that it split in two halves.
There I digress. Here's my history lesson.
An editorial cartoon in 1864 depicted U.S. President Abraham Lincoln and Confederacy President Jefferson Davis each pulling at an end of a map of the United States. Standing between them with a handful of each man's collar was General George B. McClellan, the Democratic Presidential candidate that year running against Lincoln, yelling at both men "The Union must be preserved at all hazards!"
As they're tugging on the map, Lincoln is saying "No peace without emancipation!"
Davis says "No peace without separation!"
Nonetheless, McClellan lost the election. The Confederacy lost the war. Slavery was finally abolished.
Lincoln was assassinated by a Southern sympathizer.
But the war was far from over. Though the blood was no longer shed on the battlefields, all the fighting was relegated to the Rebel states, now determined more than ever to keep the newly-freed Negroes to a status beneath that of the now-angry poor Whites, steadfastly refusing to accept a people once sold as common possessions as equals.
And I'm sure the general consensus of the newly-freed slaves at first was joyous, but may have dwindled to one of indifference after awhile.
Because slaves were considered property, and not the people they rightfully were, laws were quickly enacted in many former Confederate states prohibiting Negroes to own land to try and eke out a living to support themselves.
In Southern folklore, you may have read at one point or another about a white family with a domestic help that kept house and did other such chores in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
It wasn't because the family was wealthy. The sudden abundance of low cost labor made domestic help affordable for many southern families. It also gave former slaves their freedom while also protecting the security (but hopefully with the absence of the cruelty this time) they had while still a slave.
It would take years to craft laws that recognized African-Americans in their rightful place in American society as human beings with the same rights as Whites.
Unfortunately, among those laws were those that created the practice of segregation that would dominate the deep South for almost a century.
Many political figures in the early 1800s, who supported the slavery movement, tried to justify its necessity in America. Most infamous was John C. Calhoun, who served as U.S. Vice President under John Quincy Adams, calling it "a positive good":
" in every civilized society one portion of the community must live on the labor of another; learning, science, and the arts are built upon leisure; the African slave, kindly treated by his master and mistress and looked after in his old age, is better off than the free laborers of Europe; and under the slave system conflicts between capital and labor are avoided. The advantages of slavery in this respect, will become more and more manifest, if left undisturbed by interference from without, as the country advances in wealth and numbers."
All I can say to Mr. Calhoun is this:
"REALLY???"
While I agree with Mr. Calhoun that one portion of the community must live on the labor of another, especially in a free enterprise system, it does not, at any time, justify involuntary unpaid servitude to a single human being by another.
I always found ironic the fact that most who saw African-Americans beneath them and treated them to extremes as such, still went to church on Sunday and could recite much of the Bible verbatim.
The job is still not done. I believe that for the most part, Dr. King's dream was fulfilled. The biggest proof of that is in the White House, and now into his second term.
Nonetheless, hate crimes continue in this country that target African-Americans, homosexuals, Hispanics, the homeless, and countless others. Will it ever end in our lifetimes? Probably not.
What we can look forward to is the fact that we as a society have advanced by leaps and bounds since 1865. I can see distinct differences in just the past 25 years.
We can't eliminate hate in our culture, but we can reduce the numbers of those who do hate.
The lesson is this:
The Confederate Battle Flag is a symbol of a country divided, but managed to overcome the darkness of the past and successfully chart a course for its future. It should not be regarded as a symbol of hate or dread, but one of change. A culture that would make peace with its past and evolved over time, becoming more recognized for its food, music, architecture, faith base, and even fine arts.
At least that's the way this Southern Yankee sees it.
Class dismissed.
NEXT WEEK: Moving On
Monday, January 7, 2013
Turning Away From Facebook
I have to admire my wife.
She is by far, one of the most strong-willed people I know.
Of the two of us, I was the first to jump on the social media bandwagon. First it was MySpace.com, and then I migrated to Facebook, after finding that MySpace turned out to be a little too juvenile for my tastes.
I do enjoy Facebook. In my line of work, constantly being in the public eye, it not only gives listeners insight into the 'face behind the voice', it also allows me to stay in touch with my radio colleagues and know how they're doing.
Because you never know that one day, you might find yourself 'on the beach'.
That means 'blown out'. Or fired. Or otherwise involuntarily outplaced.
I'm used to being in the public eye. I have been for the past 25 years, give or take a couple. As such, I have to be mindful of my conduct. What I say or do is always under scrutiny, and in these days of readily available digital media and the internet, one outlandish act on my part could be broadcast over the internet that could potential ruin a career.
Thus, I know what's safe to put on Facebook, and what isn't.
About the most controversial thing you'll ever read on my site is what you're reading now.
I don't post 'adult' pictures or sayings on my page, nor do I use obscene language in my Facebook posts nor in this column.
I have however, taken stands on certain matters that have not been popular, and that has cost me a few so-called 'friends'. And when doing so, I often precede it with a disclaimer that limits my views to myself and doesn't cast an unfavorable light on those I work for or others close to me.
Unfortunately, not all of my 'friends' on Facebook feel this way.
They rant and rave about anything and everyone, using four-letter words that would make a sailor blush with shame. Or they choose to 'share' some banal or obscene photo with you by posting it to your wall.
Yeah, that would upset me too.
While Margie isn't in the public eye, she does work for the federal government, and she's very mindful of what she puts out there.
But even she has had enough of it.
I noticed it this past week when I noticed that my relationship status went from 'married to Marjorie Ola Hoculock' to just 'married'.
Did she 'defriend' me, I wondered.
So I asked. That's when she communicated her feelings to me.
I can't say I blame her one bit.
And those who do want to get in touch with her badly enough, know how to go about doing so.
Maybe some day, I too will be that strong.
I can quit anytime.
But 'can' and 'will' are two different animals.
NEXT WEEK: A Free History Lesson
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