Why We Are Talking About the Rebuttal and Not the Actual Speech

 

Photo from AJC.com

I never listen to opposing party rebuttals after major political speeches.  

They are pretty much exactly what you expect them to be, and after years of hearing them, you know pretty much what they'll say to the word. It's usually the party's platform, shrouded in facts of vague connection to truth. 

So I didn't listen to Sen. Tim Scott (R-South Carolina) speak after President Joe Biden spoke to the nation (honestly, I only listened to the first few minutes of that too). 

But I've heard and read snippets of Scott's rebuttal, which I think did what it was intended to do. 

Here is why. 

Joe Biden should have been in his second term as president right now.  Tragic personal issues and needed time to heal didn't allow that to happen.  But Biden would have been a shoo-in to become president after President Obama. 

Biden has pretty much been seen as pretty moderate, although a true Democrat.  He is old guard political acceptable to the other side of the aisle, even through these most highly-charged partisan times since the 1990s.   

But, that didn't happen. 

Hillary Clinton ran, and though I think would have been a good president, she was what I was afraid she would become - a lightning rod.  A prod.  She is a Clinton, the entire reason the Republican Party has been strategizing and restrategizing on how to beat Clintons.  Since 1992, the GOP has worked tirelessly to paint the Clintons as the Devils of America. And we all know that if you stamp labels on things hard and repitively, people start believing it, even if there is no really solid merit or reason. (Donald Trump was GREAT at this tactic.)

So Hillary losing to Trump wasn't as surprising to me.  He said what everyday angry voters want to hear and she was a Clinton.  The only prods needed.  

Four years later, most Americans see that the presidency wasn't a place for Trump as the person.  He was there for what he represented to people, mainly as he said what they wanted to hear and continues to do so.  But most of the nation was ready to return to some simile of normalcy in politics, whatever that may be in these polarized times.   Immature Twitter rants and raves just got exhausting for everyone, even Twitter. 

So what Biden now represents is a political time when some old white guy is president and most of us are paying less attention daily to what is happening at 1600.  Oh, we care way more than we used to.  Way more, and are more attentive.  But our everyday lives aren't shrouded with what the president has said or done or wondering why he wondered if drinking bleach would help. 

Biden has also talked of things that people want to hear, not too much controversial stuff.  So there isn't too much to wonder in why his approval ratings are pretty good now.  We've taken a big American breath so far and turned on to another channel. 

Which brings us back to Tim Scott. 

Why did he stand there last night and offer the rebuttal to the President's address? 

I think for two reasons. 

One, the GOP hasn't got too much to say about Biden's proposals.  They aren't fired up mad about any of it, except for their usual "oh, it costs too much" argument that only comes about when Democrats are in power, even though Republicans have been horrible stewards of our money.   People just aren't upset at what Biden has pushed so far.   

So what do you say to oppose?  Pretty much anything to distract from the actual speech that you are offering rebuttal.  It can be as nonsensical as saying that racism doesn't exist in America.  Even most Republicans will tell you that it does and many would even say it needs eradication.  But, to counter sense, you offer a loud brand of nonsense, taking attention away from the original message you are refuting. 

Scott has done that.  Everyone is talking more about what he said versus what Biden said.  Mission accomplished there. 

Two, there is a world of Trumpian voters who don't want to hear anything about racism in America.  Nothing.  The only race problem to them is either a made up one by black people or a rain out of a NASCAR race.   

Republicans these days rarely speak to the entire country or try to sway someone like me to their side. They spend it trying to fire up their base of angry folks who like storming buildings.  Scott followed the Republican playbook, as if anyone should be surprised. The fact that Scott is black - in their eyes - gives some legitimacy to what he said last night.  So again, he did what he was supposed to do. 

So, yeah, I'm not surprised at what Scott said last night.  I do think he was played by his own party and put in a position where not even real Republicans will believe him.  Even they know racism has been part of the American fabric and you can't just talk it away.  He sounds out-of-touch and like a race panderer, something that will forever maginalize him in his own party.  Scott allowed himself to be sacrificed when Republicans knew they would win nothing last night.  

Scott just was there to accomplish two things.  Job well done, sir. 

Our Community Needs Community, Not More Cliches

Photo by Saul Young/Knoxville News Sentinel

This won't take long. 

An Austin-East High School student was shot and killed by police at 3:15 p.m. the afternoon of Monday, April 12 inside a bathroom at the school.  For whatever reason, he was in the bathroom with a gun and refused to surrender.  He shot an officer and was killed when the officer returned fire. 

I worked in Knoxville in a couple of stints as a reporter.  I also was twice a student at the University of Tennessee - my first year out of college in 1984 and again when I returned to school in 1992 before graduating in 1995.  Besides being here in Atlanta and growing up in Nashville, Knoxville was the place I spent the most time in my life.   I have many friends there, memories there (good and bad) and it is a place that is close to my heart.  

But aspects of the Knoxville I know haven't changed much since 1984.  

For those who don't know much about Knoxville, it's a sort of sleepy small city in East Tennessee.  It's kind of isolated from the rest of the major cities in Tennessee as Nashville in comparison is a major growing metropolis while Memphis is as far away in distance as it is in politics and racial make-up.  Knoxville sits in the middle of very conservative East Tennessee.   

For a while, I lived not far from Austin-East High School.  It sits inside of East Knoxville, which is seen to be the heart of black Knoxville. It's a very proud, close knit area that truly supports this predominantly black school.  Basketball games and football games (Austin-East homecoming games are as big as some HBCU homecomings) are like one of the main things to do in East Knoxville.  

East Knoxville still struggles with it's identity and influence though.  The huge development boom in West Knoxville - which is predominantly white - is completely opposite of what has happened for decades on the Eastside.  Affluence is still an unattainable hurdle for many in East Knoxville. 

Unfortunately - and this isn't even an East Knoxville-centric thing as this is true all over our nation - where there is struggle, there are overly negative reaction on how to achieve affluence, or even what affluence even is. 

In our nation, we have a young black culture who has grown up seeking the spoils of life through violence.  Anger.  Dispair. Espeically those who have little compared to others.  Guns are the means to quelling that dispair and getting what you want, unfortunately mostly from those around you who dont have very much either. 

Hell, it doesn't even matter how much they have.  Guns are supposedly the answer to whatever the question or desire is for many of our young people. 

Austin-East has seen this issue bubble up too many times among its students.  Too many times in just the past few months:

- While in a car, a 17-year old boy accidentally shot a 15-year old A-E student, killing him on Jan. 27. 

- Two boys - one 14 and the other 16 - were charged with fatally shooting a 16-year old A-E student who was driving home from school on Feb. 12.

- A 15-year old A-E student was found shot to death in her home, not far from the school on Feb. 16.

- And a 15-year old A-E student and aspiring rapper was killed on March 9.  No one has been arrested in that shooting. 

Why are all these young people seeing guns as the way?  Why? 

Yes, it's in their music.  All over it, to be honest.  None of it is really based on reality. It's more like life imitating art that glorifies, overly simplifies, overstates and exaggerates this life that kids again imitate. It's all in every phase of their pop culture. Hell, it has been since the 1990s.  But it's a stupid cycle.

Yeah, white kids have the same issues.  But I ain't white and my issue and my focus are on my family, my people.  Someone else can work on white folks issues.

Here is my nut graf (journalism speak for my point).  What the hell are we doing about it?  Seriously, what are we doing to stop this?  

I'm completely over and tired of the cliched "So-So Strong" social media memes or adding the "I Am Whoever Suffered the Latest Tragedy" addition to profile pics.  It is way past time for people, for us, to REALLY deal with the issues that keep causing these tragedies over and over again. 

Many of these kids, who are running around with guns they don't need, aren't being raised anymore.  They are being fed and housed, and that's it.  No discipline. No parenting worth a damn.  Too much buying them expensive cute clothes as babies, not enough forcus on talking and teaching them the right way as children who quickly grow into teens with their own minds.  

But, they are smart.  Smart enough to make their own good decisions if they are armed with reason to make those decisions.  Yes, life is hard. Harder than hard for some people. Trust me, I know. I watched this all play out when I was a young in the projects and saw friends shoot each other, kill each other, go to prison or just die inside themselves too young.  

But life is truly what you make it, and that's what these kids need to understand.  It's not Boyz in the Hood if you dont try to live Boyz in the Hood.  

We also have to parent better and community better. We have to actually talk to those who aren't great at parenting.  We have to actually reach out to them.  We have to go into these neighborhoods, these homes, these apartments and see them eye-to-eye and talk to them.  We have to claim our community by being community.  Talk to these kids, especially when they are young. Positively influence them and their parents who often need it themselves.  

We have to reach people in these communities.  We must. They need to learn early, and I mean EARLY in life that a gun doesn't arm you to solve an issue.  That's not real life, despite what some Lil whoever tells you. 

As David Gillette, an older cousin of the young rapper who was killed said to The Knoxville News Sentnel "These kids are trying to survive.  I'm not making excueses for them but our community is giving them nothing else they can look forward to."

Until we do any of this, we are just talking until we are light blue in our social media profile faces.  And nothing, I mean NOTHING will change. 

My New Season in Life

By ADD SEYMOUR JR.

The past couple of months have been a lesson for me.

It has been one of those lessons that hopefully we all will have to encounter: things that go with getting older.

Someone could have handed me a manual, a guide book, or even Cliff Notes for me to prepare.  Heck, they could have told me at just what point I'd need to be ready for all that I've been seeing and experiencing.   But life so doesn't work that way.

On July 25, I will turn 52 years old. 

At first glance, some would say, "well, heading down the backside of the hill."  Others may say, "Hey, you're still young at heart."

There are elements of truth to both sides.

But one thing you learn quickly at this age is that there won't be as many as of your friends still on the trip as there were before.  And that's the part that has been so jolting the past couple of months.

First, I lost one of the most dearest friends I've ever had when Jerri Wyatt Little lost her long battle to cancer.  Jerri and I met as goofy young people at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville back in the mid-1980s.  It was an instant connection -- as friends, though I think we both kind of knew that with time, we could have been something much more significant.  We were always together, walking, laughing and talking about life.  Our theme song - Oran 'Juice' Jones' song "The Rain."  Why?  It was just as silly and funny as we were.  We sang it to each other and together all the time, even after we reconnected three decades later after life put a pause in our friendship.

Even then, as middle-aged folks with busy lives -- her with career, kids and spouses, me with career stuff -- it felt like 1986 when Jerri and I would Skype or talk on the phone, even though we were now in the 21st Century.  We truly loved each other.

So when she told me that she was fighting for her life, she talked about God's grace and how she was getting stronger and better.  It wasn't about dread.  It was about the promise of tomorrow.  That gave me life.

But ever since last fall, the calls were less frequent. I knew she was still fighting.  And even after every phone call or text would go un-answered or unreturned, I was still hopeful that it was just another pause in our loving friendship.  I got a text from another close friend of ours that the pause was even more significant.  Jerri lost her battle in June.

I was devastated and cried in front of colleagues.  It hurt.  Still does.  You don't get many friendships like the one I had with Jerri.  There are just a few people in life that you just click with on every level. She was my friend.  And I miss her.

Then just a week or so ago, I was perusing Facebook and ran across a post from a long time friend from my hometown of Nashville, Tenn.  She was lamenting the death of Lisa Stewart, a childhood friend of hers.

I stopped and thought, "Is that the same Lisa Stewart I went to Tennessee State University with, both of us dreaming of careers in journalism/communications??"

Lisa and I had lost touch not long after I left Tennessee State to take a job as a reporter in another city with a black newspaper.  That was the early 1990s, a time we both knew we wanted to be members of the media.

She and I met as communications students at Tennessee State and instantly bonded.  We talked the same career language, but we also talked about life and growing up in Nashville.  We ate together a lot, rode around in her little brown Honda, went to media events (I wish i still had the recording she made of me asking Chuck D a really bad question during an appearance of his at Vanderbilt University in the late 1980s).  And we used to just talk.  And laugh.  Well, Lisa talked because she talked a lot.  And fast.  She was high energy.  But she was sweet.

Even after I left Nashville and had long lost her number, I wondered about Lisa.  I heard she may had gotten married and kind of settled down. I was hoping she also would have parlayed great radio and television internships into a great job at home.  But over the years, I wondered how Lisa was doing and if sometime we could laugh and talk again.

After seeing Facebook, I realized I would not.  That was the same Lisa I remembered.  She was killed by a drunk driver.  But from everyone I talked to, Lisa continued to be that ray of light, that high, loving energy, that she was as Melo-D at TSU and at WFSK radio where I trained her.  Sigh....

The lesson?  At 52?

As long and as dark as some days can be, life is short.  I've reached a point in my life where the news of close or longtime friends passing will come more often than before, even though I've lost many friends and family members over the years.  When you're younger, you see it more as an anamoly.  When you're 52, you see it more often as you sometimes find yourself looking through the obits in your hometown paper.

Death isn't new to me.  I had a cousin who was killed when I was barely a teenager.  My grandmother died my first year in college.  My father lost his battle with his demons when he was 45.  I had a friend who I still think about, Karl London, who lost his battle with cancer when I was 14 or 15.  We've all gone through it.

But now, it seems I'm always hearing of a classmate, an old friend or acquaintance, or one of my friends' parents or loved ones seeing their circle of life close.   I can't say I am surprised because, well, at this age, you know.  You are beginning that season.  It reminds me of an episode of "The Cosby Show" when Cliff wondered why his dad, Russell, was reading the obituaries every day.  Now I kinda see why.

Oh, it's not a morbid, sad thought.  Well, maybe sad in some ways.  But really it's just one of those realities of life that becomes clear to you.

My mother told me not long after a close relative passed that death is part of life and it's just God saying that person has done their work and it is their time.  We have to accept it as God's loving will.

I get that. I do.  One day, maybe that will be said of me.

So as another birthday comes for me, I thank God for another deep, fulfilling breath of life and seeing others close to me take in the same.

But I know each day that I've truly entered a different season in life.

Gentrification at 1615 Fifth Avenue North

By ADD SEYMOUR JR.

I think it was a dark Camaro. 

All I remember is it probably was the perfect single guy’s car in the early 1970s.  Small, with not much of a backseat, even for a car during that era of small cars that were actually massive.  I often sat in that hard middle area that wasn’t really a seat in back.  But I do remember the “Let’s Do More in ‘74” sticker that was on the back of the car.

Horton drove it.  He lived in the upstairs apartment of my grandparents’ home at 1615 Fifth Avenue North in north Nashville back then. I couldn’t tell you too much about him, only that he was dark skinned, had a beard, kinda thickly built, but also a really friendly guy.

My mom, my two brothers and me lived just a few miles away on the other side of the river in James A. Cayce Homes, a large housing project in East Nashville that still stands today.   When mama didn’t own a car, but we were planning on spending our usual Sunday afternoons at Granny and Granddady’s house, she’d hail a cab – or we’d jump on the city bus and have a pleasant walk through the neighborhood – to their house.

We’d spend the day playing in the school yard across the street, meeting up with some friends in the neighborhood, or just sitting on that swing that gave us hours of quiet contentment on that peaceful porch. 

And then around five or six, Horton’s car would magically appear on the street, just beyond the tall, manicured hedges that surrounded the house. And he’d happily give all four of us a ride home in that little car back to the projects. 

All of those simple memories flooded my mind when I drove over to 1615 Fifth Avenue North on a May day in 2018, more than 45 years later. 

Can’t tell you what ever happened to Horton.  He eventually moved out. At one point, we moved into his old apartment upstairs and then to small house in the lower-middle class suburbs.

But that house in north Nashville always was special.

It was where my cousins, aunts and uncles from Indianapolis flocked to a couple a times a year during the summer months, flooding that house with young energy, loud laughing, lots of stories and plenty of playing pretty much one song on our grandparents’ piano in what were like mini family reunions.

Yet as life does, things evolve and they change.

That house, with those thick manicured hedges eventually was sold after my grandmother passed and my grandfather moved to a house closer to other family members. 

Over the years when I’ve visited to Nashville, I’ve gone over to 1615 Fifth Avenue North.  I went by there today.

The hedges are gone.  The porch swing is only a memory to us who rested in it.  The house has been remodeled.  The occupants, well, they don’t look anything like Horton or the rest of us.

In fact, the Salemtown neighborhood, which had been full of older, hard-working, blue-collar black families, has been remodeled.  It’s now full of young, upwardly mobile, white people who didn’t know the area existed during the time I was growing up.  Maybe they did and since it was a mostly black neighborhood in north Nashville, probably thought it was someplace they shouldn’t be day or night just because it was in north Nashville and off the city’s most historic and beloved black artery, Jefferson Street.  But the only unlawful stuff you’d see in that area were a few prostitutes like Big Mama, who everyone knew and waved at.  She’d wave back as she quietly stood near the old car battery shop, drinking a beer out of a brown paper bag.

But now the neighborhood is full of new condos, new apartment buildings, latte-walking yuppies who look like they’ve discovered the holy grail of living.  I wonder if they even think about what the neighborhood’s history is.

Do they even care?

Or maybe they think they’ve come and saved what they were told was a decaying, crime-filled haven of old houses and limited dreams.

Standing outside of 1615 Fifth Avenue North in front of the old Fehr School, down the street from old Morgan Park Community Center, I doubt if any of them care.

That hurts.  Your roots are trampled and turned into history the current storytellers could care less about telling or even knowing about.  As if it didn’t matter.

For us who came before them, it hurts.  And its a damn shame.

No Wonder There are Fewer TV Sports Viewers. Networks Have Driven Them Away

It's Saturday, a lazy one and too freaky hot during a typical Southern July to be outside doing much of anything.  

So what does one do? Watch sports on TV, of course.

Or do you?

I'm a cord-cutter. I don't have cable or satellite TV anymore and likely won't any time soon. Unfortunately, watching any sports requires you these days to at least have a service like Sling TV for a la carte network choosings, such as ESPN.  I've had that for a few years now.

But that's more effort than I'd like to make.  I like turning on the TV and there are sports.  Especially on a Saturday afternoon.  When I grew up, I could watch NASCAR, maybe an IndyCar race, a major league baseball game, or two, and other major sports pretty easily.  It's Saturday and that's what you'd do.

Today, that's not true.  I turned on the television today because for as long as I remember, Breakfast at Wimbledon, the championship matches for tennis biggest event, is on early in the morning on NBC.  Not now.

ESPN took over Breakfast at Wimbledon and they are forcing you to pay to watch it.  Or see it hours after you knew Venus Williams lost and how she lost, when they finally show it on ABC.

And major broadcasters and sports leagues are wondering why fewer people are watching sports on TV, especially the coveted younger viewer.  A magazine study found that the average TV sports viewer is getting older and older.  Baseball, which has done everything and nothing to make sure they've marginalized everyone but conservatives and/or white guy fans, has seen the average age of their TV watching fans go from 52 to 57 years old over the last decade or so.  The NFL - their average viewer is 50 (my age) and their number of viewers has dropped eight percent over the past year.

Pick a sport and the trend is the same.

Here is where I impart my wisdom.

I point to networks' insistence that you pay to watch sports on TV.  We ain't doing it.

People have tired of the high cost of cable and satellite TV and are turning away more and more.  But the networks are hell bent on making you watch sports on some niche network.  If you don't buy a ticket to attend, they think you are going to be a ticket to watch from your living room couch.  Well, we aren't doing it.

Still, on a Saturday afternoon when you used to be able to count on being able to watch some baseball or something, you get some B-level, X-game type sport on TV, if any sports at all.  There was NO baseball on network TV today.  Nada.  Nothing.  And won't be any on tomorrow.  Or the rest of the week.

So if fewer people are paying for cable or satellite, and millennials aren't sitting around dialing up Fox Sports South to watch a horrible Braves team, who is being cultivated as a fan?  Your audience will be the same conservative white guy types who are still thinking the good old days of the 1950s when lily white, not diverse and very closed to pretty much everybody else, is just around the corner. News to them: ain't gonna happen.  That's not America anymore and will never be.  We've evolved, thank goodness.

So your TV audience is not only getting smaller and older, and you're gaining no new audience members since you've pretty much locked out the people who would have grown up thinking about watching baseball that was easy to watch back in the 70s and 80s.  They have to pay for it.  Today's 24-year-old who didn't grow up with Monday Night Baseball at his fingertips for free, where he could have easily just said, "eh, I'll watch since its on," or could count on it being on, could care less if the Braves are on channel three-hundred-whatever.  

Networks stopped cultivating sports audiences and now they expect them to want to pay for a product that they haven't created a lifestyle for wanting to watch.   What idiot thinks that is going to change? It makes no sense.  Creating a bunch of millennial-focused shows where loud-mouths opine in some supposedly hip way about pretty much nothing newsworthy is not going to change that.  Believe me.

When the networks start programming sports on free TV REGULARLY, creating a lifestyle, a habit, for sports fans, more and more will watch again and the nearly 60 year old football fan will begin to start looking more like the athletes who are usually less than half that age.  There is a place for pay-TV sports.  BUT its not the be-all, end-all.  Today's sports fan is proving that.

Tonight, I was hoping for baseball on Fox.  Didn't happen.  But Premier Boxing was on, so I watched a couple of matches.  But by 10 p.m., the announcers said those lame matches were the undercard for whatever the main event was.  But the only way I could see it -- turn onto their affiliated cable channel Fox Sports 1, which, of course, I don't have.  End of my sports night, and all I got was a bad appetizer.

And they want me to watch sports on TV???

Clinton Win 25 Years Ago Results in Handel-Ossoff Campaign Mess

By ADD SEYMOUR JR. 

It’s ironic that it was 25 years ago this year that Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton came out of nowhere and trounced Republican favorite George Bush to win the presidency.

It’s a race that Republicans never got over and it inspired a new kind of Republican Party.  It also ushered in a very troubling kind of American campaign system.

The result – no, not just Donald Trump - but the $50 million Jon Ossoff-Karen Handle battle for the 6^th Congressional District seat that covers the northern suburbs of metro Atlanta.

In what has been one of the country’s most painful, obnoxious and irritating Congressional races ever, it has been of prime importance to both major parties.  For Republicans, every seat in Congress keeps them in power and buoys the stink-filled Trump presidency.  For Democrats, any way to chip away at Trump and Republicans in power helps them in the long term.

But the lessons of the past 25 years have shown themselves in this local national election. 

Republicans decided not long after the saxophone-playing Clinton took the White House, Republicans realized they had to change.  Not only them, but how they related to the voting populace.  Clinton, a native Southerner, out-Southerned the Republican Party, and that became the final straw in what politics had been for the previous 20 to 25 years.

The wonk-ish way of talking to voters was over.  The idea that the other side had a version of being right was abhorrent. Who is right and is wrong is most important.  Not working together.  Us and them.  The lines had to be drawn and they had to be deep.

Talking points gave way to simplistic messages that fed emotional voting decisions, not rational ones. Labeling the other side with names such as “liberals,” “big government,” “tax and spend,” and using them at every point possible became the mantra.  No matter who the Democrat was.  That’s who they were.

At the same time, Democrats remained stuck in the mud. Maybe it was the Clinton presidency.  Maybe it was the fact that the nation was deeply enthralled in an economy that was chugging upward as information technology, cell phones and the Internet took over.   But the messaging was the same.  The talking points were the same. The campaign style was the same.  The Democratic Party was Al Gore, while the Republican Party was building something stronger with soldiers like Newt Gingrich.

The Gore-ish style has been a loser.  The Southern Strategy, Part Deux, simply made all of the nation’s changing style one in which it became immoral, costly, unsafe and un-Christian.  

Campaigning changed with it.  Look at the Handel-Ossoff campaign.

Ossoff started off with commercials that didn’t mention Republicans.  It was about fixing overspending by both parties and keeping the nation safe by tapping into his national security experience.

His plan: be the man in the middle that most Americans, those in the middle who have tired of the politics of fear and hate, that will fix the ills of both parties while doing what Republicans say they are best at – keeping us safe and saving us money.

Problem one is he sounded a bit wonkish.  Problem two is he didn’t currently live in the 6^th District, even though that’s not a requirement and he did in fact grow up in the District. Problem three, Ossoff overstated his national security experience, though it wasn’t that big of deal.

But it was fuel to the Republican fire.  Handel, buoyed by money from outside the District (so was Ossoff but far from as much money as Handel got from Republican coffers), leaped on Problems two and three.  And never let it go.  Handel could have been a piece of bacon, a banana, an oak tree, or a can of soda.  At best, she has been a loyal Georgia Republican.  Mainly, she has climbed the Georgia Republican tree, accomplishing nothing more than name recognition.  One of her ads touted one of the issues that she championed was voter fraud.  Problem is, voter fraud has never been a problem in Georgia.  That was a national strategy to push Voter I.D. laws that made it tougher for mostly Democratic voters to participate in this American process.

Anyway, she and her national money leaped on Ossoff’s problems two and three and hammered them endlessly.  Endlessly.  Television ads rarely touted Handel. They called Ossoff a liar who is a liberal, would raise taxes, would only vote for Democrats and didn’t have “our values.”  Nancy Pelosi in California was his closest ally, according to these ads, as was a complete lack of knowledge in keeping America safe.

No facts.  No truth.  Nothing even cited. Didn’t matter.  It was all about getting the same Republican base angry at the immoral Democratic Party who wants to take away the guns of Americans, raise their taxes and push the nation into the brink of a cataclysmic bankruptcy.

Meaning, the politics of fear.  The emotions coming from someone taking away from REAL Americans who work hard while the other side wants welfare, health care and everything else for nothing. 

Ossoff is like other Democrats – swing back a little (his ads talked about her accomplishing little in each political office she’s had and even using a taxpayer financed Lexus for herself), but hardly with the verve of the new Republican Party.  

Ossoff’s ad spending paled in comparison to Handel’s.  A commercial break in Georgia would be an ad of older people calling Ossoff a liar and liberal without even trying to use facts to back that talk up. And then before a commercial break ended, the same ad again.  Over and over and over again.  Ossoff’s ads were numerous, but far less so. Look it up.

So the lessons of the past 25 years have had their impact.  It’s the campaign strategy based on messaging and emotions versus the campaign of a little of that, but more of the wonkish talk that meant George Bush and not Al Gore.

It’s a sad state of American politics. The Republican Party and their campaigning on fear and untruths and getting people to vote “against” and not “for,” is torpedoing our Republic. It is stoking the fire of a divided America. The us against them dividing line they have drawn is killing this great nation.

Democrats aren’t much better as they are slow to move and slow to represent.  And slow to represent some of the issues that are credible Republican concerns. 

Our country’s major political parties are failing Americans.  Because of it, America is failing.

It’s a damn shame. 

Change Your Ways to Compete or Close

If you read the letter that is posted here, you will see that Stillman College, a historically black college in Alabama, is in a dire situation.  This letter tells alumni and supporters that if they don't get immediate help paying back a $39 million loan to the government, Stillman may have to close their own doors.

I have a number of thoughts on this, some probably not popular.  But I am a realist and it's time to face facts.

I think there are too many HBCUs in this nation.

Before you get into your emotional, knee jerk feelings, lets look at why I say this.

HBCUs have served a great need in this nation for students who were not always able to attend predominantly white institutions and for students who need a different kind of educational experience, or want a different kind of educational experience than what predominantly white institutions can provide.  That need is still sorely needed.

But of the roughly 107 HBCUs in this country (two of them, Bluefield State and West Virginia State, are actually predominantly white HBCUs that are 75 and 72 percent white), a growing number are struggling just to keep their doors open.

That is a huge problem.

Why is this happening?  Mainly it's funding. Schools like Stillman, which has 750 students, are private and not privy to state funding (which has been unfairly dwindling for public HBCUs in most states).  Many are still run on a funding model that is based way too much on tuition and fees.  If they raise their already private school fees, then students and their parents are more often now being forced to make economic decisions.  Big State is going to much cheaper than Private HBCU.  And the student loan situation in this country isn't what it used to be.  They are much harder to get now than they were in the 1980s or nineties.   So fewer students mean less money rolling in on tuition and fees which means the bills aren't getting paid.

At the same time, HBCUs are having to compete for students like they never have before. The decades-long selling point of being the black place of last resort, or being a place that a black student will truly be focused on, isn't playing to the millennial class as it did to Baby Boomers.  They just don't think that way, although the recent issues black men have had with police in this nation, along with the Black Lives Matter movement, has led to a slight uptick in some HBCU applications.

But, for example, when predominantly white institutions like Kennesaw State University, Florida State University, the University of Georgia, or UCLA offer some sort of African American Male Initiative program, it forces HBCUs to have to step up what they are doing as they not only have to compete with predominantly white institutions for students based on facilities, programs, etc.  They are also increasingly having to compete on a level of focus as non-HBCUs are now starting to look at trying harder to attract, retain and graduate black students -- though most still have a looong way to go with that.

But how does a school compete for students today?

Part of that dilemma has been the fault of HBCUs.  Many have spent far too long in doing what Morehouse College President John Silvanus Wilson Jr., said while he was executive director of the White House Initiative on HBCUs: they were playing the violin instead of playing the trumpet. Meaning they were still talking more about what ails them instead of extolling what they are great at doing.

While that is true, even truer is some have not found a specific niche to be able to extol.  Students are looking for a high quality education that allows them to compete for high paying jobs.  While many HBCUs are focused on keeping doors open, they lag further and further behind in being able to compete on a foundational basis in 2017.

Don't get me wrong or twist me out of context here.  There are a great number of HBCUs that are competing and in some ways outperforming predominantly white institutions. I can run off a long list of them.  But there are a number that just aren't able to in 2017.  If you can't provide basics, such as wireless internet, or up-to-date food offerings, how are you going to pour money into needed liberal arts upgrades of high technology science, technology, engineering and mathematics programs that students are asking for?

The sad answer is many cannot.

That's why you see schools with 750 students struggling to keep their doors open. Cash-strapped and bells-and-whistle-wanting students want more. You can't just be an HBCU that is just an HBCU and expect to compete for students -- and donors -- anymore.

So what has to happen?

Unless the HBCUs that are struggling find a way to solve the funding dilemma so they can focus and compete, some likely need to close.  Tuition and fees-driven funding models are not going to work anymore.  When student populations dip, so does funding. What do you do then?

Ask Stillman College.

Or Morris Brown College. Or Knoxville College. Or St. Paul College.  Or Bishop College. Or Friendship College. Or Kittrell College. Or Mary Holmes College.