Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

Sunday musings…

1) Vicissitude. Fancy word for weather, especially if you need a particular weather pattern at any given moment.

2)) Hero. To be a hero one typically demonstrates courage in the face of personal danger, usually involving the selfless decision to put others before self. As a young man I find it hard to argue that this doesn’t describe John McCain. One could certainly disagree with the positions Mr. McCain took as a politician in the second phase of his life, but one would be hard pressed to argue that he hadn’t done enough in the service of his country over 60 some years.

RIP John McClain. Citizen. Patriot. Hero.

3) Health. CrossFit, Inc. has pivoted. Some among you will rejoice, for the direction that appears to be taken is in line with your own philosophy and goals. Those here who revel in the challenge of elite fitness will no doubt feel that this is a betrayal, a clear step backwards and toward mediocracy. I have a few friends who remain employed at CF, Inc. and they would doubtless like to hear me speak out in favor of this evolution. At the same time there are a few friends who are quite dear to me who would much rather I simply declare my days living in CF nation over and move on. CrossFit in all of its iterations has changed, and so, too, have I.

For many years I have written around this time of the year, just after the completion of the Games, about the peculiar and poorly understood triad that has comprised what we all know as “CrossFit”. It is a business, CrossFit, Inc., one that has as its charge the necessity to be self-perpetuating and to provide for the financial well-being of its owners. This should be self-evident, but over the years commentary has often come up that seeks to present CrossFit the business as some kind of public good. It is not, nor has it ever been. CrossFit, Inc. has succeeded over the years as a business, and in so doing it has made decisions that outsiders have both lauded and loathed. For many, how they interact with the company we call CrossFit is determined by who has been affected by these decisions and how. A pivot has occurred; you and I did not have a vote. CrossFit, Inc. will likely continue to prosper.

Second among the three traditional pillars of CrossFit is the Sport of Fitness. With the possible exception of aerobics competitions in the Denny Terrio age (the spandex!) and that old ABC series The Superstars (O.J. in a boat!), CrossFit likely deserved wears the mantle of the founders of fitness competition. Beginning with a friendly barbecue and leading up to a multi-day tiered competition shown on live network TV, there is no doubt that fitness competition is now here to stay. Early announcements suggest that the pivot will dramatically lower the direct involvement of CF in the competition season, but that CF will have the ultimate say at the highest level. No one you or I talk to has any real idea what this means, and supposition along those lines is wasted effort until we are all told exactly what CF has in mind by CF. The CrossFit Games have changed often over the years and they have changed again. Full stop.

Where most of us come in contact with CrossFit is in the third priority: fitness as a conduit to health. It surely seemed as if this was the least important of the three parts of CrossFit, at least until this past week, but it has always comprised the massively overwhelming majority of participants. Whether on CrossFit.com or in a local affiliate, almost everyone fell under this category;  most of those who thought they were part of the Sport of Fitness were fooling themselves at their own risk. With the creation of a CrossFit health movement and an L1 program for CrossFitting physicians, CrossFit, Inc. appears to be signaling that its public face will now be directed here. Note that I say “appears” because I am no more in the know about this than you or anyone else.

This is a good thing.  To de-emphasize the competitive aspects of CF is to re-emphasize the health aspects of CF that were outlined in “What is Fitness” in CFJ #2, the seminal thesis that brought so many of us here in the first place. I wish we could all go back and look at the threads on the old Message Board, 95% of which had to do with getting healthy. How will this affect the kind of CrossFit we see coming from CFHQ? Again, who knows. CVFMAHI has undergone countless lines of evolution outside of the direct umbrella of CrossFit. Individual trainers have gone out on their own and modified CrossFit in ways that reflect what they learned training people themselves (think James Fitzgerald, once known as OPT).  Entire movements with companies attached have been launched to provide clients with what they feel is a better way. A perfect example of this is The Brand X Method and the Martin family who are without a doubt the world leaders in youth fitness. Who will be right? Who will thrive?

Who knows?

In the end the entire conversation has changed over the last 10 years, and more people are sitting at the fitness table than ever. The line between healthcare and fitness continues to be a bright dividing line. Barriers continue to exist between the fitness world and both public health and public education. Will this pivot at CrossFit, Inc. start to blur those lines, or at least build bridges across them? Will we see some other organization, perhaps one that began within the CrossFit universe but now exists as a separate, growing galaxy like Brand X share the load or even take the lead?

The only constant in CrossFit in the years that I’ve been here is change. Change brings with it opportunity. My prediction: this turns out pretty well for CrossFit. The fitness world is much, much bigger than it was 10 years ago. One would do well to listen very carefully when CrossFit directly addresses this pivot publicly. This will also turn our pretty well for people who may have been part of the CrossFit world but are no longer associated with any of the 3 parts of CrossFit outlined above. One would also be well-advised to closely watch the direction taken by the Martins and others in the fitness world as well. There will be many benefits that come from that one, big original idea. They will come from many places.

After all the Theory of Relativity was simply the on ramp to what we now know as Quantum Physics. The highway of fitness progress is now fed by a growing number of on ramps that come from many directions.

I’ll see you next week…

–bingo

Sunday musings…

1) Bollocks. Testicles. Who knew? The whole kerfuffle over the Sex Pistols album title makes a ton more sense now.

2) Directed. “Use as directed.” I’m not sure who is more surprised. Mothers when their offspring open up some something or other and just fly into using it (and it works), or said offspring when they fail to check the directions and whatever it is they opened doesn’t work.

For the record this is also a problem in areas that are a bit less trivial than a tiny drone received as a birthday gift. Like medicine.

3) Knots. “Miles per hour plus the glamour of the open sea.” –Mark Childress.

Not terrifically accurate, but who’s gonna argue with that little bit of poetry?

4) Despair.  Why is it that so-called “great literature” always ends in despair? The boy never gets the girl and vice versa. Every family is rendered asunder whether or not they deserve that particular fate. Why?

Lettie Teague wrote about her summer reading, all of her books centered in some way around wine as a pivotal character. Upon reading the headline I was excited to have some fun, happy reading for a change. Yah. About that. Even the consumption of epic wines was spoiled by the despair that prompted the binge or that which ensued.

Jeez. Winston Churchill managed to help save the world when he drank. How come no one can write literature with a happy ending?

5) Change. Inspired by by near lifelong friend Bob.

I watch the ripples change their size
But never leave the stream
Of warm impermanence
And so the days float through my eyes
But still the days seem the same.  –David Bowie

Grand baby birthdays. Siblings and their offspring passing milestones. 40th high school reunions. There is no escaping the passing of time. Along with the ebbs and flows there has been but one, single constant: change. Each day seems so much like the one just passed, and yet a glance ever so slightly further back brings an awfully quick reality check. Change has been afoot. “You haven’t changed” is such a lovely thing to hear, yet it, too, cannot withstand even a passing glance in the mirror.

There is nothing new or even remotely weighty about noting change. What is significant, though, is the importance of both acknowledging and accepting change, however disruptive it may be physically or emotionally. One must be able to see change and react accordingly, no matter how difficult it may be for either an individual or for those who may be highly interested spectators. I think of my good friends from California, true pioneers in both the CrossFit movement and subsequently independently in the larger fitness world. They have looked at how their world, their lives have changed, and they have accepted the need to change as well. For them it begins with the closing of a beloved, iconic gym which is rightly famous worldwide, the loss of which has been met with an international tsunami of tears. Yet they have seen the change and have accepted that the time had come.

Some changes are so disruptive that they turn lives upside down even when you know they are on the way. Our friends Bob and Kathy begin the journey toward an empty nest as their only child begins his senior year in high school. So, too, my brother and sister-in-law must adapt to the changes brought by college graduation and their sons’ retirement from competitive sports. No longer will Randall and Joanne plan each week around their boys’ games. My sisters and their husbands are soon to follow. Will those changes be any less impactful given foreknowledge?

Someone, I’m not sure if they like me or not, once asked at what age I would choose to be frozen if such a thing was possible. How old would you choose to be, with all of the attributes of that age but no prospect of any further growth or development? It’s an impossible question, a cruel koan which cannot be solved. How can one possibly choose between the youthful feet attached to the running shoes that are so joyfully and maddeningly soaked by your child and the archless soles doused by a grandchild? Which is better, to have the agility to dance away from your son’s aim lest your shoes be ruined, or to happily submit to the realization that the laughter of your grandson is more than worth the fact that you can no longer save the shoes regardless.

Besides, the shoes have changed, too. They’re waterproof now.

Changes are happy and sad, big and small. We lose parents and friends. Special places like our friends’ gym close taking with them any chance they may change us for the better. Heck, it looks like I’ll be changing hips sometime soon, a change I for some reason thought I’d be the only one to escape. It makes me sad to hear parents tell a child “don’t change; stay like this forever” because that is one wish that will never be granted. Nor should it. After all, there is only one way to assure that change will never come.

I am not done changing
Out on the run, changing
I may be old and I may be young
But I am not done changing   –John Mayer

Change is life. To change is to be alive. Embracing change is to live.

I’ll see you next week…

–bingo

Chief Justice John Roberts gave a commencement speech to a group of 9th graders this year in which he wished them “bad luck”. Now, lest you think ill of the Chief Justice, that he was being churlish and mean-spirited, what he meant was that he wished that these young people would experience some degree of hardship in their youth so that they would develop tactics to persevere as adults when those same hardships inevitably arose.

“I hope you will be treated unfairly, to that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope that you will suffer betrayal, because that will teach you the importance of loyalty. I hope that you will be lonely from time to time so that you don’t take friends for granted. I wish you bad luck from time to time so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life, and understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either.

And when you lose, as you will from time to time, I hope every now and then your opponent will gloat over your failure. It is a way for you to understand the importance of sportsmanship. I hope you’ll be ignored so that you know the importance of listening to others, and I hope you have just enough pain to learn compassion.”

My hope for each of you is encapsulated in Justice Roberts’ conclusion: I hope that you will have the ability to see the message in any of your misfortunes, and that you will express appreciation for the people who help you overcome them.

Let me leave 2017 with a final thought, inspired by Ben Reiter’s review of the movie “I, Tonya”.

“Each of us, “I, Tonya” suggests, is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done–or, in Tonya’s case, the worst thing she might have done.” In our present days of instantly available and infinitely scalable opinion, we should add that we are more than the worst thing that someone says we did.

Let us, each of us, resolve that in 2018 we will look first to that which is good about each other, and endeavor to see that each of us is more like the best thing we’ve ever done than not.

Hi. My name’s Darrell and I buy activity trackers.

Like most everyone else, I’m sure, it started off innocently enough. For me it was the Nike Fuel Band. Man…was that fun! Looking back it really didn’t do all that much to be honest. As far as I can tell all it really did was tell me how many steps I did, and maybe there was some other kind of movement it tracked. Heck, Nike made all kinds of a big deal out of the “social aspect” of the Fuel Band. How I could follow groups and compete to see who got how much Fuel and I never even did any of that.

It was the fireworks that got me, I think. When you made your Fuel goal, whatever that even meant, your band erupted into fireworks.

Thinking back that might have been enough. A Fuel Band, daily fireworks, and I might have stopped right there. Ah, but as is so often the case when you are an early adopter, my Fuel Band was not really a ready for prime time grown up product. It broke less than a year after I put it on for the first time. But me? I was hooked. I imagined all kinds of cool stuff you could do with a REAL tracker. A tracker that could measure something real and meaningful like…wait for it…WORK. I’m a CrossFitter after all. WCABTMD is my ultimate goal. Of course I’d want to track my work done.

So began my quest. The research wasn’t quite as in depth, my dive not as deep as my initial jump into CrossFit so long ago. Imagine how long it took to get through a few pages of CrossFit.com or the original CrossFitKids.com with a dial-up or early stage cable modem. No, this was a high speed/high churn journey. Next up was a Garmin Vivofit which taught me that I should care about sleep. Not just sleep of course, but the measurement of my sleep. Who knew? Years ago I’d researched sleep and I knew I should be getting some multiple of 90 minutes (cycles) each night, but now I could measure that, too.

Naturally the VivoFit was inadequate: no points for a PU. So, too, the Jawbone Up came up short. I gave some thought to the Athos wearable garment sensors, but my craving for measurements wasn’t deep enough to prompt me to buy something that only told me when and to what degree a particular muscle group was firing (although it would have been a cool way to dial in my deadlift and squat technique).

Over time it became clear that the entire fitness tracking industry was just one big shill for the endurance community. All of them were dedicated to measuring your aerobic activity. Period. [Note to Coach Glassman, and everyone in the functional fitness community: if you want growth in your part of the fitness world get a viable tracker of work capacity on the Apple Watch] I had great hopes for the Mio Slice and the BioStrap because you could dial in specific exercises and get activity credit when you did them, not just when you were running, biking, or rowing. Alas, although they were light years ahead of my beloved little Fuel Band they, too, were not ready for prime time. It was comical to see what they decided I was doing when I exercised.

Although my disappointment was painful I was in too deep to just give up. Surely, science would step in with something more meaningful than how many steps I got each day. Enter Heart Rate Variability as a proxy for autonomic nervous system health, ergo fitness. Could this be it? My BioStrap was now matched against both a Zoom HRV and a program on my phone that used the camera to measure HRV. The science was great.

The data was meaningless.

Now desperate I turned off everything except my alarm clock and my cheap little $15 Casio with a stopwatch. Yes, you read that right: I went cold turkey. I hit the pillow and woke up without any kind of measure other than “did you sleep well, dear?” from my wife Beth. 3-2-1-Go, start the stopwatch on my cheapo watch and go as fast and as hard as I could. Sweat angels instead of rushing to check my numbers. No plugging my results into Strava or Beyond the Whiteboard or anything else. It was hard. I couldn’t tell whether the shakes were from the WOD or from trying not to reach for my BioStrap and my phone.

But I made it through. I did give a thought to buying an iPhone when I saw it could do a one-lead EKG (an EKG on your wrist!), but I managed to resist. Recovery is hard, especially if you can’t watch your heart rate go down. No, no, no, I meant it’s hard to not want to put on one of my trackers. You know, just to check. The urge is getting weaker each time I go to the gym now, so I think I’m in the clear. It’ll be tough if something comes out that can really tell me what work I’ve done, what the area is under my curve, but I guess I’ll have to deal with that if it ever actually happens. For now I am free of activity trackers of any and all kinds.

Although I really do miss those Fuel Band fireworks.

Sunday musings…

1) Tech. There are no longer any toll booths on the Mass Pike. Big Brother simply knows you were there.

2) NoNo. Meeting up with ages-old friends in our mid-50’s the topic of what children will call grandparents came up. The best one? “NoNo”. Can’t you just see how this one happens? That Mom who had all kinds of rules when you were a kid following behind the toddlers and telling them “no, no” every time they pick something up?

Not a one of us had the guts to let that one stand, but every single one of us thought about it.

3) Name. What’s in a name, eh? I met the husband of a long-time ago friend this weekend for the first time. (As an aside, we would be friends who saw each other all the time if we lived closer). The last name was different from my friend’s maiden name, but something was just a little bit more than different. After looking and looking I finally asked. Turns out these two wonderful people just couldn’t bear to give up their family names, but at the same time they wanted a shared last name for their own family.

No hyphens for them; they just put their names together and started with a new, shared name. How lovely.

4) Beginning. Beth and I are cruising along the highway on our way to my primordial home. We just spent the weekend in the company of many of my college classmates at a 35th college reunion. Such a funny tradition, coming together every 5 years to remember times so long past in a place that pretends it is always and ever as it was when we were there (my alma mater is 224 years old). A part of you kind of expects that you and everyone else will be just like you were when you showed up for Freshman Days, your role and your place as immutable as it is when you go to a family reunion.

And you arrive and realize that neither you nor any of your classmates bear more than a passing resemblance to the children who were emptied out of the family wagon 39 years earlier.

5 years ago I was doing just exactly what I’m about now, writing about my Reunion. My abiding sense that day was of opportunity missed (there were a bunch of folks I really met for the first time at my 30th who I wished I’d known in school). This year? It’s funny, really. Along with fantastic, ridiculous and over-the-top success and prosperity, the most interesting among us were those whose victories were balanced by challenges that maybe didn’t turn out so well. There was a certain humility that I don’t remember from years past which came out as we talked about our marriages, our children, and for some of us our grandchildren. It was very nice, actually, openly and honestly sharing those kinds of things with peers who we would have felt too competitive towards in years past to take that kind of chance.

Leaving reunions has always felt like so many Brigadoon moments: always the same. Nothing new. No growth and no change. It’s different this year, for whatever reason. Driving away this time actually feels like a new beginning. Weird, huh? We are even taking a new route “home”. Off I go as if I’ve graduated once again, this time with a recalibrated sense of who I’ve become and where my friends and I fit together at the start of the rest of our lives. Reunions are meant to turn our view back, but it’s forward I look with a new appreciation for where I am rather than where I (and my classmates) used to be. Forward, consciously choosing those friendship opportunities not to miss this time around.

Some of us take a bit longer to finish college I guess.

I’ll see you next week…

–bingo

“[True] innovators are on the edge of the inside.” Friar Richard Rohr

I once wrote that “if you’re not living on the edge you’re taking up too much space.” This is a bit different. Effective innovators and those who are early extenders of their ideas cannot be so far outside of present orthodoxy that their innovation is ignored, however correct they may (turn out to) be. An innovation or discovery that is too radical to even be examined might be shelved simply for being too far outside the inside, thereby denying countless individuals its benefit. Incrementalism occurs in the middle, but innovation that scales happens just barely inside the border.

Think about my fitness program, CrossFit. What would likely have been the result if step one had been the spectacle of the CrossFit Games, ca. 2017? We all know the answer to that: Constantly varied functional movement at relatively high intensity (CVFMHI)  would have been deemed ludicrous for all but the elite athletes we are seeing perform in the East and South Regionals this weekend, rather than a legitimate option as we seek a public health solution to the well-being of a broader population. The sentinel signal of the innovation was initially ever so slightly inside the outer boundary of the fitness/health orthodoxy: train consistently using irreducible full-body exercises at higher intensity utilizing proper movement patterns. Others have noted the importance and effectiveness of interval training, notably Michael Joyner, M.D, at the Mayo Clinic. While a sense of the importance of the glycolytic energy pathway existed before CrossFit, it took an innovator far enough outside the middle to realize its potential and make it the primary focus of a program.

The world of my day job is also populated by innovators who were just radical enough to nearly become outcasts. I always think of the great Charles Kelman, M.D., the inventor of what we now know as phacoemulsification. When Dr. Kelman began his research on using high frequency ultrasound to dissolve a cataract through an incision roughly 15-20% the size of what was then typical, no one could fathom why that would even matter. Fast forward to our present day ability to remove a cataract through a 2mm incision. Because of that first innovation I can now replace a cataract with an implant that allows someone to see both near and far with no glasses. Imagine!

Once true innovation occurs it moves inward, but a next wave of innovators lurks near the edge. Like so many benign Salieri’s to Mozart they build upon the original innovation within their own, smaller zones. This is no less disruptive than that original innovation; it simply occurs in a different part of the world. Shortly after CrossFit erupted in the general fitness world a second wave was brought by innovators in youth fitness by Jeff and Mikki Martin of Ramona California. Their program is now known as The Brand X Method and they lecture on their evolved programs for youth fitness all over the world. In a similar fashion Brian McKenzie, an ultra runner looking for a way to train more efficiently and with fewer injuries, used the principals of CrossFit as applied to endurance training in what was originally known as “CrossFit Endurance”. B Mack is also continuing to push the envelope in his PowerSpeedEndurance program.* It was only the growing acceptance of the original innovation that prevented these next-wave innovators from being OUTSIDE the edge of their particular parts of the fitness world.

The logical extension of CFVMHI, what we are witnessing each weekend as The CrossFit Games season is upon us, has long since passed me by. It turns out that for me all I’ve needed was an early update to the original inspiration (classic, early vintage CrossFit.com with CrossFit Strength Bias v3.3 layered on); more and more actually brings me less of everything. Others who I am quite fond of have had a different journey. One of my daughters-in-law is doing a modified CrossFit Endurance protocol for example, and is winning her age group in 5K races while pushing my granddaughter “The Nugget” in a race stroller. My grandson “The Man Cub” will doubtless train using the Brand X principles that have evolved from the original CrossFit Kids program. My friend Julie continues to push the limits of human everything as she competes on a CrossFit Games team while developing new medical paradigms, all before graduating from med school here in Cleveland. Unlike yours truly, more and more brings Julie more and more. Innovators in the world of eye care similarly bring us new techniques from the edges of our world, the latest being the once unthinkable ability to treat floaters with a laser.

CrossFit is now firmly established as both a system and a business. Small incision cataract surgery using ultrasound is the standard of care. We would do well to remember that time when this was not at all the case, a time when only one innovator sat just inside the outer edge. What is to come in any number of other areas–medicine, finance, digital, what have you–will come from the same place. Some of us caught on to CrossFit really early. Wouldn’t it be great to be out near the edge and catch something like that right in the beginning again?

*To my knowledge neither the Martins nor Mr. MacKenzie are presently associated with CrossFit, Inc.

Why is it that some folks, particularly younger people, succumb to peer pressure while others somehow find the will to resist? Why, for example, does one kid accept the offered illegal substance while another says ‘no thanks’? What is it that compels the group to pile on, but one outlier says ‘enough’?

Millions of words have been spilled on this topic of course, and I’m certainly not qualified to add to the psych canon, but I’ve noticed a couple of things in CrossFit Kids groups that remind me of how a certain guy I knew walked away from an entire peer group, twice, rather than cave to pressure.

It’s easy and simple, hard and complex all at once. It has to do with success and succeeding, and getting ‘caught’ in the act of that success. Kids who regularly and routinely succeed at difficult tasks of any kind start to have a stronger belief in themselves that transfers to other stuff. Kids who are held to standards that they must self-police tend to develop a stronger sense that they can make an ethical or moral call without the need for the external confirmation of the group. You count every rep; you move through a full Range Of Motion. You make the call, or if judged you accept the call of the judge. CrossFit Kids does not hold the sole franchise for this, of course. The “First Tee” golf program, school chess programs, lots of other places exist where this type of belief in self gained through achievement and accountability exist.

It’s never too late to start this process, of course, because the dangers of peer pressure, groupthink, and the psychology of the mob do not magically disappear when we reach the age of majority. Where do you fall on this continuum? Can you think for yourself in the face of peer pressure? Do you have that inner sense, that mental muscle memory that lets you be confident when you are sure that the group is wrong? When the time comes are you strong enough to stand alone?

CrossFit Kids programs are one way to provide youngsters with the inner strength necessary to stand up to peer pressure.

No matter what the story eventually turns out to be, there is very little that is good that is likely to come out of the Trayvon Martin debacle and the ongoing Zimmerman trial. Not for the Martin family, not for Zimmerman the neighborhood watch guy, and probably not for society as a whole, at least for quite a while. Why? For the simple reason that it is now 2013, we’re still having this conversation about race and profiling, and nobody has yet demanded the kind of change that would have prevented this tragedy.

Let’s go back a bit, shall we? How about a trip to 1979 and suburban Rhode Island. I’m driving the family beater, my close friend in the passenger seat waves at a police car as we drive by on our way to the mall. My close friend, STILL my close friend, happens to be a very large Black man. You guessed it–flashing lights followed by “license and registration (no please).” Why? A version of Driving While Black. Not a lot of young Black men in my home town. At the time this particular young Black man was a student at Williams College and would go on to have considerable business success as adult.

“Come on, Darrell. That’s ancient history. Things are different now.” Well, let’s move forward a bit. Dinner at the White house (ironic, huh?) sometime around the year 2000. My good friend the Rev. Mel and his beautiful wife are joining us at our house for dinner. Mel, a black Baptist minister, drives a bullet-proof Mercedes sedan. Never more than 5 mph over the speed limit. The Woodards were late for dinner. When I teased him about it Mel just shrugged his shoulders and said “DWB.” Even impeccably dressed for a dinner out, Mel was still a Black American man. Apparently not a lot of Black men driving Mercedes in Cleveland at that time.

Now? A young Black man in a hoodie returns from an errand, surely guilty, in the mind of the security agent, of something until proven innocent; apparently not a lot of young Black men in hoodies in that neighborhood. A non-Black man approaches the youth, surely someone to be feared (by the young Black man) until proven otherwise. The fault, my friends, lies on BOTH sides of the conversation. At this late date in history it no longer matters what came first, you know? One side of the conversation needs to openly acknowledge that the vast majority of the other side does NOT participate in violent criminal activity. This part of the community needs to openly acknowledge this unassailable fact and aggressively teach that lesson to people of all ages. The other side of the conversation needs to openly acknowledge that their ARE small parts of their community who DO engage in violent crime, and to go about the hard work of isolating the criminals as the outliers they are and shunning them as a pox on BOTH communities.

We need to be done with the blame game. Indeed, indulging in finger-pointing at this late historical stage is also a type of enabling. By taking the easy way out, blaming this one for not fighting harder against unsupportable prejudice, or pointing the finger at that one for some weak justification for criminal behavior based on whatever, is quite simply enabling the prejudiced and the predators to both continue their pathologic behavior patterns. In my opinion the fault lies on both sides of this divide. There is no rational way to decide who goes first when it comes to solving these two problems.

NONE of us could have personally influenced the tragic outcome of that encounter in a random Florida neighborhood. ALL of us…Black, White, and other…have the duty and the responsibility and the ability to do the hard work necessary to prevent what STARTED it. There is no “you/he/they” have to go first.

We should all start now.