Ron Moore's Open Salon Blog

The Forbidden Fruit Bites Back

Mon, 21 May 2012 05:05:24 -0400

Miller High Life for breakfast. Somehow at 4:30 a.m. it seems appropriate to enjoy The Champagne of Beers as I reflect on the 20th anniversary of marriage two. Failed marriage that is. It should have been obvious at the time that when you are engaged in an effort to end marriage one that you don't jump on the next train that arrives in the station. Better to go outside and walk around a bit and enjoy the fresh air. Jesus made me do it.

You see marriage one was His doing. As young and innocent students at Oral Roberts University we felt called to be together; but it was a wrong number and we spent years simply staying together in a sort of arrested development marriage. Why do I blame Jesus for the divorce? He said that the law of Moses simply allowed a man to state that he is divorced from his wife but he (Jesus) brought a new law. Gotta commit adultery to get out. So I did then went home told number one and it was over. Instant divorce Jesus-style.

Jesus didn't explain what to do when the other woman shows up in town as the marrying kind. It was no one night stand to her but a ticket out of Mom's house. So it must be love right? She stayed; I stayed and 20 years ago we made it official. Of course this young innocent had eaten from the Tree of Knowledge so cheating was easy. I even cheated on our honeymoon. I had no idea what this one night stand unleashed in me. My world turned into the Devil's playground and it was wonderful.

Until it turned into a nightmare. One bad decision after another left me with little remnants of the person I spent 31 years becoming. All interests; all friends and even most relatives vanished. So after ending one marriage after eleven years; this one lasted twelve grueling years. We lost a child, she stabbed me, I was hospitlized as suicidal and so on and on and on. It was like all the innocence of life left in an instant in that hotel room and life became an ugly trap.

She escaped after I was fired by TSA for union activities and through it all I lost it all. In a fit of sentimentality and in the belief we would work things out since she was newly under treatment for bi-polar disorder, I signed it all away. This was still during the housing boom so she made a cool hundred thousand and gave me a hundred twenty bucks and told me she was in love with another man as the ink dried.

So I sit here in Statesville, North Carolina the place I landed after a generous former union co-worker read I was homeless. I'm stuck here and poor and not full of regret so much as full of uncertainty. At 51 is this all there is? I have my writng and poetry and little else. I've made mistakes and will make more I'm sure. Ironically, she married the guy she was cheating on me with and they have a lovely life and healthy son. I'm sincerely happy for her. It took a long time to get past the anger and resentment and loss but at some point the game is over and you have to leave it all on the field and move on.

So I'll drink my Miller High Life and hope to raise my blood alcohol level at least to the point where I can have a little pity party and cry it out. Then off to my janitor job and the next day and so it goes. I'm not a bad guy but I am damaged goods. It is easy to crave death; after all I've doubled my life expectancy; my Dad told me as a child I'd never make it past 25. I want to live and I want to find love again. I'm older and wiser and I hope that at my core what is good remains. Just three months and one week until August 28, anniversary of marriage one. I wonder who I will be on that day? Where I will be? One thing is for sure Miller or Bud and maybe Jack if I can afford it will be here with me. Even Jesus can't divorce me from them.

The sweet marrow of memory

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 04:02:13 -0500

I awake from my dream fully aware. Aware of my room, my situation, my life and my bittersweet memories of love and loss. Have I become a cliche? The martyr, the loser, the hero, the lonely guy, the what? I share my bed in this small room with three dogs;fully aware of the discomfort I feel at not wanting to move to disturb them as the dream rushes into my waking mind. I fear that any moment any discomfort on their part will leave me here alone.

I am not a dog person. They smell, they seem undignified and incontinent and after an attack by two german shepherds as a child they terrify me. The larger one a pit bullish type, I don't know what breed, is the most terrifying yet now he lies here with me breathing heavy as he slumbers. He will break down my rickety door to get in my room to see me, or is it the bed?Nevertheless I am not alone in these moments and my discomfort as I refuse to ask them to move over is well worth the sacrifice.

I find myself living here after my last brief period of homelessness as a co-worker out of Christian charity and later economic necessity allowed me to sleep in a room on the floor. A former neighbor offered up this bed and here we are; able to sleep and dream.

I dreamt of my first wife, or was it the second? They were so different and I was so different during each marriage that it amazes me how they become one in my dreams. We are on a bus to one of my favorite places on earth Syria, Virginia where I spent the summer Elvis died building a lodge out of logs with other youth at a Christian retreat center.

I felt renewal and rejection in the space of one dream and now I awake to this life. I can easily dwell on the painful skeletons in my closet but choose to find those few drops of sweet marrow; those moments when they loved me when the future was brilliant and my life was just beginning. What a feeling to be loved!

My writing rambles like my mind but my thoughts are orderly and precise. Like a loss-train they line up and account for all that I earned all that I was and all that I will never be again. I am not fatalistic but realistic that at my age and condition and in my despair life may be blessedly cut short; or extended. It is unknowable which will be the greater torture. Yet I continue to live and suffer and laugh and drink and fall in love with beauty.

I write and know I am alive. Love and memories and feelings are illusory. Words are real. I can see them. I can visit them as often as I like. I can save them for eternity, the good and the bad prose are always here for me. They have saved me and for that I am grateful.

The road to victory in 2012 begins in North Carolina

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 09:09:35 -0400

A year ago as I struggled to make sense of a life that led itself to homelessness and loss I never would have guessed that today I am fully engaged in my new hometown Statesville, North Carolina as a candidate for City Council. During the last ten years I've been a proud Homeland Security TSA Officer who stood up with thousands to serve our country and get our economy and our planes moving again. I was elected the founding president of AFGE Local 1, the national union dedicated to standing up for those who serve in TSA. When I spoke out publicly against the open culture of discrimination against African-American screeners I was given a two year reprimand; when I wrote in The Washington Post that TSA was failing to meet the standard set by Congress requiring adequate training I was fired.

From that moment on my path led to Statesville. After losing my wife, house and car TSA admitted they were wrong and allowed me to serve once again. My follow-up opinion piece in the Post's Sunday Close to Home section decrying TSA's destructive personnel system led to another termination attempt. On the third try I quit and served as a union organizer for SEIU where I discovered my 'old school' labor values did not resonate with the 'new school' of labor 'activists'.

So after 24 months of unemployment I was homeless and wrote about my first day in this space leading to an invitation from a former SEIU co-worker. I had a home in Statesville. Six months later I found a job as a part-time janitor and registered to vote. I found my 'old school' ways still intact and my core values and passion for speaking out for workers still burning inside me.

The first time I attended a Statesville City Council meeting I spoke out against the way city leaders chose to freeze their workers' pay for the third year in a row. City residents are allowed to speak at the second meeting of the month for no longer than three minutes. I decided that while this city and county are dominated by GOP elected officials that I believed that any community that is majority working class is majority Democrat. At the very least a city of working people should be represented by a City Council that respects workers. In my opinion the pay freeze was just one indication that working people are not just powerless but dismissed as having nothing of value to add to the discussion.

On October 11 the voters of Statesville Ward 4 will choose. I am on the ballot. Pretty amazing story right? After Wisconsin et al, an actual old school labor man, a worker who lost everything in the struggle but rose up still fighting the good fight is irresistible to support.

But that has not been the case. I discovered that the new school apparently defines society as social media and rarely ventures out to engage on such mundane matters as local politics. My hope that a few hundred would donate $10 to make a stand against the continued assault against public workers was not realized.

I understand that running a campaign and fundraising are skills and that the new school does not operate on simple loyalty. But the opportunity to win a race in a district that elected Virginia Foxx to Congress and that will be just miles away from the next Democratic National Convention should have been a cause to celebrate and support.

I may have let down my own cause to be sure, but if people like me, non-elite working class citizens, are shunned by the political elite we cannot build a movement and only a movement can prevail in a post-Citizens United world. I plan to win, I intend to continue to speak out and I hope effectively organize. I will do it alone, but we can do better for working people if the political elites from both camps simply take that first step on the road to respect. Listen to us. Then recruit the best of us to run for office and let's equip working people to take back their communities. I believe it can happen and Statesville is a good place to start.

Are the taxpayers citizens or subjects?

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 10:08:46 -0400

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously said that 'If the broad light of day could be let in upon men's actions, it would purify them as the sun disinfects'. Sunlight is the disinfectant that leads to honest governance. If government is to have a moral center it must be transparent. Transparency leads to accountability. It is a concept as simple in its reflection of commonsense as it is difficult to imagine those in power voluntarily providing to the people.

When I walk around Statesville talking to working people it is assumed that the Statesville City Council is corrupt; that elected officials run for office to further a personal business plan rather than as an expression of civic duty. The disinfectant to that level of cynicism is transparency.

Many believe that some if not all Members of Council promoted Streetscape as a means to increase their personal fortune and the value of their personal holdings downtown. I wasn't here during that deliberation but I assume that those owning property downtown, those clearly gaining financially if this project was approved, would choose not to be an active booster of Streetscape and of course would recuse themselves from the vote.

Transparency means that the honest politician is not caught up in the anger of the populace at the dishonest. Transparency is the dividing line and makes all the difference. Without transparency the taxpayers, the shareholders who live in the City of Statesville are mere subjects and this Council is a Council of Lords. With transparency the taxpayers, the shareholders are citizens with an equal voice with an equal opportunity to provide Council with an informed opinion about how their money, let me repeat that, their money, is spent.

The average working person knows that when they borrow money from the bank; when they receive that magical plastic card it comes with a disclosure statement regarding rates, penalties and other outrageous charges that most will never bother to read before signing. Consumers are entitled to protection. Who protects our citizens? Our shareholders? Our taxpayers? An informed citizenry is a threat to elected officials who feel too much transparency is bad for their agenda; for their personal profits.

Our city workers who have suffered under a reprehensible pay freeze in Statesville, must be transparent and accountable to be paid, to keep their jobs. While citizens are only allowed to speak publicly for three minutes each month to their City Council, direct questions are not permitted; or rather they will not be answered. If that were permitted I would ask our City Manager if city workers punch timecards or fill out timesheets. I assume that is the case for our city workers as it is for all working people. The reason? Transparency and accountability. Why are our city workers held to a standard that this Council will not accept for itself?

It is my hope that this Council will advise Staff to research a Statesville Sunshine Law for their approval. The Sunlight Foundation is a valuable resource. In Statesville the City Staff do all the work, so if a measure passed by Council has bad results, well it was recommended by staff, but if a measure produces good results, surely it was the work of our City Council.

What can be done today to begin the process of shining the light, disinfecting our political and governing culture in Statesville? I challenge Members of Council to pledge that beginning with the next meeting and every meeting in the future, to have the opportunity to report about their work on behalf of their constituents since the previous meeting. In solidarity with city workers a time report should be included for the record. I suggest that each Member agree to work the number of hours that will bring their hourly rate to ten dollars an hour matching our lowest paid city workers. If you are paid only to attend meetings our city cannot afford to pay you a rate of roughly $75 to $100 per hour. We are not getting our money's worth and you are working harder tell us. Why keep good works a secret?

Full transparency should be the minimum standard for the Statesville City Council. Transparency and accountability assure that we will have a record to examine and will remove the perception that the Council believes that what is done with our money is none our business. Are the people of Statesville are citizens or subjects? It is time to answer that question.

Equal access for all - even the Barbarians at the gate

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 09:06:41 -0400

Freedom is never free. It is earned through constant diligence to its protection. Those who oppose freedom often mask it in opposition to equality. They argue in coded language that there can be no rights without responsibility...as they define it. They organize working class people to stifle their own freedom on the pretext that they too may be rich someday so we mustn't make choices that benefit the undeserving 'all'.

I am sitting here in the Main Branch of the Iredell County, North Carolina public library reading the Statesville Record & Landmark. On my left is a man listening to the Rush Limbaugh show with headphones that poorly restrain the voice of a man who would rather this building not exist. Later the Republican Women will meet here in a covered dish affair to celebrate, one may assume, the choice by those in their party to burn the book budget of this public library.The County recently approved a budget that slashed, among other things, the funding of new book purchases. Of course, the library will keep the carpets dirty before keeping the latest works of literary achievement from their citizens. Library workers are literary freedom fighters in today's political climate. While they can't keep the barbarians at the gate, in fact they have the same access as the rest of us, they can keep vigilant in allowing ideas in despite the barbarian's determination to keep them out.

This building, this public treasure, is Statesville's lighthouse. It shines on all and welcomes all, even those determined to dim the light. I have written before about the irony that the solution to our crime problem, literacy, literally sits across from the County Jail. Rather than simply curse the darkness I will light a candle and offer an idea.

I wrote the County Jailer last month to volunteer a literary course for the incarcerated. The silence was deafening as no response was received. The other day I noticed members of their community, I dare not call them convicts since some may be awaiting trial, working outside the jail. They wore McBurglar type outfits apparently in an attempt to destroy whatever dignity they walked in with. (Ironically Ronald McDonald was downstairs recently, I don't know if he brought McBurglar with him)

I believe that our community will benefit if those who demonstrate good behavior be detailed to clean the public library. It will be a reward and an opportunity. Those chosen will be permitted to cross the street in their civilian clothes unchained but not unescorted. Before beginning their work each night they will be permitted one hour to choose a book and read it. After their reading hour, they will rotate in and out of work and participate in a reading program, Those needing extra help will find it and those needing the opportunity to write or discuss a favorite book will find it. Each month the group will select a book, take it back with them, and be encouraged to discuss it.

I suggest as a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate grace, the Republican Women who are meeting here in the library can provide refreshments. After all if the burning of the book budget is a regretable byproduct of difficult economic times this may help bridge the gap somewhat. After all we want our public facilities to be clean, our community members in trouble to learn their way out, and our wonderful lighthouse to brightly illuminate our community.