Wow! I've been doing a lot of healing today.
Do you ever feel unheard?
"Leslie was a short, white guy with glasses and unkempt hair. He didn't stand out until that afternoon when hundreds of students headed from classrooms toward the building where anti-war activists were distributing get-out-of-Cambodia postcards for students to mail to President Nixon. The students, filled with earnest fury, rushed up a low, grassy hill to the building where the postcards were being handed out. In their path stood Leslie, alone. He was yelling at them.
"Listen!" he shouted. "It doesn't make any difference whether we end the war unless we solve the problem of racism!" Nobody listened. They ran right by him. The war was the thing. Racism was last year's problem."
LA Times Magazine
May 31,1992
SHOUTING IT LIKE IT IS : We Can Solve All the Scandals We Want, but Until We Target Racism, We Are Doomed
May 31, 1992|Bob Baker | Bob Baker is a Times staff writer.
I've been waiting half my life to tell somebody about Leslie Goldman. Always figured I'd wait for some desperate moment. Now it's here.
http://articles.latimes.com/1992-05-31/magazine/tm-1271_1_racism
HERE's the story:
Shouting it like it is!
HERE'S THE STORY:
I never went to any of my high school reunions because I compared myself to others and I never felt I measured well.
I was always following causes that were unpopular.
I never really fit in,or so I thought. I never felt my life amounted to much . Can you relate?
I decided to go to my 30th high school reunion.
I did have some good memories of high school, as well as some difficult memories. It was in high school that I first became physically crippled
It was also in high school in my senior year where I felt my father deserted me. He wasn't at my graduation. He was somewhere off on the East Coast attempting to find my stepmother. She ran away . I was on crutches when I graduated . Numbers of my friends were athletes. One of my best friends from grammar school was s star athlete but never talk to me. It was if I did not exist . We had some kind of falling out that never healed years before.
One of my best friends from my earliest days in East Los Angeles, where I grew up with Ira .
He went to USC and became a pharmacist. I had journalistic talents and won national awards in college, but I never amounted to anything professionally as a journalist, or so I thought. I also had photography talent, but the only job I got offered after high school was working in a dark room . That was the worst of my skills .
I was getting more and more crippled day by day by the time I was graduating college .
It was right out of college that my life got picked up from the direction I thought I wanted to go and set out to pasture in nature, studying with and helping write books for a charismatic speaker and doctor who wais just getting over the fact that he had been arrested for teaching people that if they used green juices, they might overcome cancer
The doctor was pretty down trodden at the time I came into his life.
He pretty much left me alone the first six months I lived with him at a Health ranch where people came to get well.
Years later by the time I was 30 or more. I was sort of a New Age lleader llin San Diego but our community kept shifting. People would move in and out of town. I felt like the mayor of the New Age one year, and then had no one to talk to the next, or so it seemed.
It took a lot of courage to go to my 30th reunion. My friend from childhood, Ira, was at the reunion. I was really feeling at the time that my life had come to nothing.
Then Ira asked me a question.
He wanted to know how I felt about the story that had been written about me in the Los Angeles times . I had no idea that there was a story that had been written .
He told me he had saved a copy of the story,and he sent it to me.
The first paragraph was stunning.
The story had been written by one of my college fellow journalists who made it big.
The story began with the paragraph that I quoted above, I've waited half my life to tell someone about Leslie Goldman . I thought I'd wait till some desperate time . Now it's here .
Isn't life like that?
We feel like no one knows about us and then you hear that you've been in a major magazine but never knew it, sort of seen my many people?
I once knew a Rabbi Who talked about being scratched . By that he meant deeply wounded ,
Sometimes we never really get over it that we've been scratched.
But then comes a day when perhaps we realize that we were meant to be scratched that we might be a gift to life .
Today I had a dear friend who I've known for decades sharing with me a teaching. Loneliness is my muse, he said.
Maybe I'm never intended to receive or accept all the love that I imagine at time I would like .
On the other hand maybe I have more love in my life that I am even know, and it would be good to simply accept, as he said, my loneliness as a gift.
I may never get over the fact that I was never married, or that I never had children. I may never get over the fact that in the story of my life that I created,I was intended to spend years out of the sense of closeness that seems so natural to go with being human .
My doctor friend said that his grandmother taught him to be careful what you wish for, because you may have to acceot everything that goes with that.
So here we go . Being grateful once again, and doing my best to simply accept the life I have, scratches and all. I have so much to appreciate.
Just sending love to you .
Thanks for listening .
January 17, 2017
6;06 pm
WRITING JANUARY 17
MARTIN LUTHER KING FOLLOWUP
#PlantYourDreamBlog
http://www.curezone.org/blogs/fm.asp?i=2350638
LONELINESS IS MY MUSE
http://www.curezone.org/blogs/fm.asp?i=2351016
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"Listen!" he shouted. "It doesn't make any difference whether we end the war unless we solve the problem of racism!" Nobody listened. They ran right by him. The war was the thing. Racism was last year's problem."
May 31, 1992|Bob Baker | Bob Baker is a Times staff writer.
I've been waiting half my life to tell somebody about Leslie Goldman. Always figured I'd wait for some desperate moment. Now it's here.