Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

Saner citizens of a crazy nation

05.25.2021 by David Murray // 1 Comment

When you check into any mental health facility, they put you through something they call the “intake assessment,” where you list your mental health history, as factually as you can, so all the staffers you’ll deal with there have a common set of facts to work from.

After the horror of George Floyd and the screaming American aftermath, I was feeling a little crazy myself. So a started to do an “intake” of my own. A race intake.

I’ve always had this feeling that well-meaning Americans like me think it’s mostly Black Americans who have had traumatic and confusing experiences, and white Americans who should sympathize and trouble-shoot, from a position of relative orderly calm.

But I think growing up white in America drives you to a kind of madness—easy to conceal by changing the subject and discouraging others from “focusing on race.” And I think accounting for it and copping to it is one step down the road toward being able to see white supremacy as something more subtle than hoods and swastika tattoos.

Or something like that.

I sent this to a Black friend awhile back. She asked me what was the point. Beyond what I’ve drunkenly slurred above, I didn’t know, and I don’t still.

White reader, Black reader, maybe you can help.

***

The first Black person I ever met was in kindergarten. And I was confused, because his name was Chuck Green.

There was a famous TV show about Daniel Boone, popular in reruns when I was maybe in first grade. I don’t remember the words to the theme song, only to a parody that kids my age—six years old—would sing: “Daniel Boone was a man, yes a big man. But the bear was bigger, so he ran like a n— up a tree.” (Did they—we?—know not to sing that around Chuck?)

The next Black person I remember meeting was Angela Clark, who was the only Black kid in my class of approximately 270 kids who matriculated through the public schools of the white upper-middle class town of Hudson, Ohio. I know not one more thing about Angela beyond what I have just said, aside from that she was … quiet?

[Hudson, Ohio, was once home to the abolitionist John Brown, and also a stop on the Underground Railroad. When I grew up there in the 1970s, there were more plaques than Blacks. My mother wrote in a literary journal that she wanted to move at one point, because “the only blacks the kids see here are on television.”]

The mechanics at the Marathon station on Main Street were Black—Everett and Coleman. My dad too-frequently described them as “good friends of mine.” I can’t remember if I overheard my mother calling him out on the statement, or if I just sensed her skepticism. 

She was 15 years younger, and had dated a Black man in the late 50s or early 60s, in Detroit; he was arrested on a trumped-up jaywalking charge, for being with her, she said. She considered herself—especially in opposition to my comparatively old-fashioned Republican dad—a progressive on these issues. This photograph, from her time as a high school camp counselor in 1957, made her scrapbook.

And in 1964, working as a copywriter at an ad agency, she wrote a newspaper ad. “If you feel sure civil rights is moving fast enough,” began the headline over a grainy black-and-white photograph of a racially ambiguous child in a crib, “try to imagine your children waking up Negro tomorrow morning.”

Dad grew up in the twenties and thirties in the very southern, southern Ohio town of Middletown. He told us stories about an all-day cleaning woman/cook named Mamie, who would fix him sandwiches to eat when he ran a block home from Lincoln Elementary. She would also make the family dinner in the evenings, before going home to presumably make dinner for her own. Dad spoke of her fondly, in the same tone he used when he talked about Everett and Coleman.

Dad’s younger brother David, my uncle after whom I was named, employed a similarly versatile servant named Esterleen, starting in the 1950s and lasting until at least 2000 (!).

“Leen,” as she was called, was wonderfully friendly to us kids whenever we were down there—friendly in a super-smiley way that no white person had ever been friendly to us. She cooked for us on holidays, and we had only passing thoughts about what her own family was doing for dinner on those nights, and whether they missed having her there. She would take a break from her cleaning chores every afternoon, and watch one or more soap operas with my Aunt Zodie—and a lot was made of that. Anyway, David and Zodie always called her “family,” and took pride that they paid her to cook for special events even when she was well past her prime.

(We weren’t in Middletown all that much, but Esterleen sure is vivid, and I am astonished to be old enough to be able to tell you this antebellum-sounding tale in the first person.)

Uncle David told me that when he was a kid in the 40s, the public swimming pool on the Black side of town was called “the ink well.” He added, “Terrible!”

I don’t know what age I was when my dad first shared his theory that there was nothing inferior or superior about black people or white people, but that each just had a visceral, perhaps natural disgust toward the other race. There was no disparagement of Black people in our house, but my younger sister did remind me of our shock one day in the car when Dad got mad at a Black motorist and shouted (not so the man could hear), “You … monkey’s uncle!”

Dad loved “The Cosby Show,” though his ad agency had hired Bill for some commercials and he was supposedly a big asshole to work with.

After an almost perfect Republican voting record beginning with Thomas Dewey, Dad, then sick with pancreatic cancer, voted for Barack Obama for president, and cried in disbelief afterward that he had lived long enough to vote for a Black man for president. Just barely. He did not live to see the inauguration.

In college, I saw Do the Right Thing. It was stranger to me than Alien.

Soon after I moved to Chicago, I rode the Lake Street El past the hulking, dismal Henry Horner Homes public housing projects, while reading the book about life there, Alex Kotlowitz’s There Are No Children Here. It seemed to me that I was looking directly at the biggest problem in America.

At my first job, in the early 1990s, two Black employees—they were actual sisters—marched into the CEO’s office one day in January and said loudly enough that people outside the office could hear, “Hey, how about you make Martin Luther King Day a company holiday and give everybody the day off?” Startled, he said, “Okay?” And from then on, we had MLK Day off.

Someone closely connected with a Chicago police detective in Black neighborhoods told me that the police routinely beat confessions out of suspects with phone books because they don’t leave marks, and because the police’s attitude was, “They’re going to say we beat ‘em anyway, so we might as well.” 

In our late twenties, my wife went to work as a school teacher on the West Side of Chicago, and started bringing poor Black kids home, to sleep in our house when there was too much trouble in theirs. I went along with this, despite extreme and not fully understood discomfort and resentment. I took a special interest in one of the kids, a sweet and handsome teenage artist named Bryant. He liked to drive around in the decrepit, roofless truck I had at the time, because he liked to admire himself in the big side mirrors.

One day as we rattled down Division Street, Bryant casually asked me why I drove such an unreliable bucket of bolts when I didn’t have to. I said I liked the adventure of it—because you just never knew what was going to happen! 

“Dave?” he said, cautiously.

“Yes, Bryant?”

“Sometimes, I think white people don’t have enough problems.”

***

What my Black friend actually wrote in response was, “What does this mean? What do you want us to take away from this? I can see the tangled history with race. But what have you discovered? What has that tangled history left you with? What would you like us to do with this, become because of it, learn from it?”

No. It’s not a teaching document. It’s a learning document, for me, and for anyone who knows me. If it moved you to do an intake of your own, on paper or in your head, I think that would be terrific. But that, too, would be mostly for you.

But to Bryant’s question of two decades ago: I think white people have plenty of problems—especially those of us who want to get to the end of our lives having become (let alone having raised) saner citizens of this insane nation that we love, nevertheless.

Categories // Efforts to Understand

These days? Driving around Illinois isn’t just tourism, it’s adventure travel

05.18.2021 by David Murray // 1 Comment

Illinois is promoting a post-COVID return to Illinois tourism with commercials that convert the REO Speedwagon song, “Time for Me to Fly” to “Time for Me to Drive.” I travel Illinois byways on a motorcycle, so for me it’s, “Time for Me to Ride.”

In anticipation of Illinoisans’ road-trip reacquainting, I thought I’d offer this piece, first published here in October 2016—a month before Trump was elected—about a backroads trip I took across rural Illinois. A version of it appears in my book, An Effort to Understand, under the title, “Other Life, Not So Far Away.” —DM

___________________________________________________

A very good writer who grew up in a small town in Illinois and now works as a writer in the city wrote a really thoughtful piece last week about why the people who go for Trump, go for Trump. “I was born and raised in Trump country,” David Wong writes. “My family are Trump people. If I hadn’t moved away and gotten this ridiculous job, I’d be voting for him. I know I would.” 

I have just enough authority to praise the piece because I ride my motorcycle on backroads through the rural, red counties in Illinois.

Over Labor Day weekend last year, I took Ogden Avenue out of Chicago and rode it on a southwest diagonal through many of these counties down to the Mississippi River. I recorded a little of what I saw and felt on the way there and back. Reading Wong’s piece, I felt like I was back on Rt. 34—but this time, riding past the hundreds of Trump signs that are surely there now. Excerpts from Wong in italics, excerpts from mine in Roman.

***

As a kid, visiting Chicago was like, well, Katniss visiting the capital. Or like Zoey visiting the city of the future in this ridiculous book. “Their ways are strange.”

And the whole goddamned world revolves around them.

Every TV show is about LA or New York, maybe with some Chicago or Baltimore thrown in. When they did make a show about us, we were jokes—either wide-eyed, naive fluffballs (Parks And Recreation, and before that, Newhart) or filthy murderous mutants (True Detective, and before that, Deliverance). You could feel the arrogance from hundreds of miles away. …

Hey, remember when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans? Kind of weird that a big hurricane hundreds of miles across managed to snipe one specific city and avoid everything else. To watch the news (or the multiple movies and TV shows about it), you’d barely hear about how the storm utterly steamrolled rural Mississippi, killing 238 people and doing an astounding $125 billion in damage.

But who cares about those people, right? 

To those ignored, suffering people, Donald Trump is a brick chucked through the window of the elites. “Are you assholes listening now?”

***

Urban sprawl turns into rural road in Oswego—you feel it. And you could probably get a good country breakfast at Plano, Sandwich or Somanauk, but I didn’t take any chances. I waited until I hit Mendota, about 100 miles west.

I had waited long enough. Having been hurtling face-first through the wind for a couple hours, I walked into Ziggies Family Room Restaurant in a zombie state familiar to me, from lots of back-road rides through America and Canada (my Triumph passed 20,000 miles on this trip). I tried to appear as a normal human being despite the intense introversion that two hours of engine meditation creates. Tried to appear as a normal American through the self-protective shell you build to keep Chicago out. Tried not to rub my helmet-itchy scalp while ordering my eggs. 

Six old guys sat at the next table over, theorizing about why a tractor axel had broken one day and not another day, talking about a record flathead catch (81 lbs., and the guy threw it back!) and debating with some humor and at great length the proper size of a regulation corn dog, thus to determine what constitutes a “jumbo corn dog,” being advertised on the Ziggies menu.

The waitress finally gave in to her curiosity about the spaced-out drifter at the counter, and she asked me where I’d come from. When I said Chicago, she said her sister had dated a fellow in Chicago once.

“Chicago’s not so bad,” she said, provided you learn a few tricks about city life. For instance, she learned the hard way never to give homeless people money. Because if you give money to one, they’ll gather around you by the dozens.

“Give them toothpaste or soap,” she said. “Anything but money!”

***

The foundation upon which America was undeniably built—family, faith, and hard work—had been deemed unfashionable and small-minded. Those snooty elites up in their ivory tower laughed as they kicked away that foundation, and then wrote 10,000-word thinkpieces blaming the builders for the ensuing collapse. …

Rural jobs used to be based around one big local business—a factory, a coal mine, etc. When it dies, the town dies. Where I grew up, it was an oil refinery closing that did us in. I was raised in the hollowed-out shell of what the town had once been. 

You open the classifieds and all of the job listings will be for fast food or convenience stores. The “downtown” is just the corpses of mom and pop stores left shattered in Walmart’s blast crater, the “suburbs” are trailer parks. There are parts of these towns that look post-apocalyptic.

I’m telling you, the hopelessness eats you alive.

***

The next stretch is farm fields punctuated by happy speed reductions into towns so small—Dover, Princeton, Wyanet, Sheffield, Neponset—that when you hit Kewaunee (pop. 12,676), it feels like a metropolis, and you’re glad to back out to the country, and to Galva (pop. 2,758) and then Altona (pop. 531) and Oneida (pop. 700).

I stopped and listened to the Altona Tigers marching band, rehearsing out of their uniforms; they didn’t sound good, but they sounded wonderful. I think it was also in Altona that I took a photo of a Lutheran church sign, “Worrying is like praying for what you don’t want!”

***

The rural folk with the Trump signs in their yards say their way of life is dying, and you smirk and say what they really mean is that blacks and gays are finally getting equal rights and they hate it. But I’m telling you, they say their way of life is dying because their way of life is dying. It’s not their imagination. No movie about the future portrays it as being full of traditional families, hunters, and coal mines. Well, except for Hunger Games, and that was depicted as an apocalypse.

***

On the return trip: the utter stillness of Labor Day in the country. I rode through many towns without seeing a soul; I was looking for a tavern for lunch, but even most of those were closed. I resigned myself to wait until the big city in Kewanee, where they’d just be wrapping up their annual Labor Day Hog Days Festival and some places would have to be open. But then I spotted Mary’s Restaurant, on the eastern outskirts of Galva. There were a few cars outside. 

Eight locals and a middle-aged biker couple nursed beers in dim light. The kitchen wasn’t open, so the only food available was chicken soup and chili, simmering in crock pots. Six dollars, all you could eat, out of Styrofoam bowls. And so utterly home-made, passing it up would have been like snubbing your grandmother.

The Cubs played the Cardinals on the TV. It emerged that half the crowd was Cub fans, half Cardinals’. The Cubs were winning, but the Cub fans knew this was the Cardinals’ year, and so did the Cardinals’ fans.

“You must be Mary,” one of the bikers said to the woman behind the bar.

“Who else works on holidays?” Mary asked, rhetorically.

***

So yes, they vote for the guy promising to put things back the way they were, the guy who’d be a wake-up call to the blue islands. They voted for the brick through the window.

It was a vote of desperation. 

***

I pulled off to look at the Hennepin Canal. A little later, I rode past a no-trespassing sign, a quarter mile down a narrow path through a soybean field to the base of a wind turbine, for a picture. I rode through the parking lot of a rollicking biker bar in a grain mill near Langley, but didn’t stop for a beer because I wasn’t feeling bold enough to walk alone into a place called Psycho Silo.

In the next town I saw another church sign—someone ought to collect these messages in a coffee table book—that said, “Living without God is like dribbling a football.”

And I rode to the back of a cemetery at Wyanet and lay down in the grass for a nap. Though I was exhausted, unseen insects tickled my arms and neck each time I started to drift off.

***

“But Trump is objectively a piece of shit!” you say. “He insults people, he objectifies women, and cheats whenever possible! And he’s not an everyman; he’s a smarmy, arrogant billionaire!”

You’ve never rooted for somebody like that? Someone powerful who gives your enemies the insults they deserve? Somebody with big fun appetites who screws up just enough to make them relatable? Like Dr. House or Walter White? Or any of the several million renegade cop characters who can break all the rules because they get shit done? Who only get shit done because they don’t care about the rules?

***

I sat at a hundred red lights, burning from above in the 90-degree late-afternoon sun and baking from below by the heat of my own engine, as Rt. 34 turned back into Ogden and a record-long strip mall and then the city and a family of eight sisters almost killed some of themselves running across Cicero and cops ran a red light just because it was the ghetto and I almost crashed my bike trying to get a stupid video shot of the approaching skyline as I emerged from the bridge at Ogden and Western.

It didn’t seem like Labor Day in the city. It didn’t seem like any holiday at all. Who works on holidays? Mary in Galva, insects in Wyanet, and all Chicagoans, just to survive.

What kind of a life is this? It’s a rigorous life, at least. It’s our life, for sure. It’s important to know there is also other life, not so far away—and to see it, as clearly as we can, to the extent we can will ourselves to slow down and look, make eye contact and see, calm down and communicate.

Categories // Efforts to Understand

How’s the book launch going? It’s just getting started.

04.27.2021 by David Murray // Leave a Comment

Two months ago as the launch day counted down for An Effort to Understand, I worried that after well over a year of anticipation, publication would be a letdown—a fast burn, and a flameout. I also worried that the launch frenzy itself would be exhausting.

Absolutely the opposite. In almost all my conversations about the book on radio and podcasts and in book talks, the book has felt not like yesterday’s ideas that I’m being asked to rehash, but a convening trampoline for discussion with others about how each one of us—and thus, all of us—can better contend with one another (and with ourselves), in a really confusing time.

One friend, probably not alone in his sentiment, teases me regularly about how easily self-promotion seems to come to me, and asks me when the hullabaloo will die down.

Never, I hope!

First of all, I love hearing the different ways people find the book.

People I know:

A Black friend sends me a picture of my book on top of one by James Baldwin and tells me both are keeping him up late. A white conservative elder of the communication business is one of dozens of communicators who have taken it upon themselves to write independent reviews of the book, on their own sites. “This may be the best book on communication I’ve ever read,” he writes. My own sister tells me she’s listening to the audiobook, for the second time through. So does the speechwriter for the president of the University of Wisconsin. Friends and acquaintances sit me down to explain to me in person and at length how much they loved the book, and which parts they loved most. Some of them apologize to me for knowing it would be good but being surprised it is this good.

And people I don’t:

“I like this kind of book,” a random NetGalley reviewer writes. “It’s full of seemingly common-sense wisdom that isn’t so common. It’s full of lots of stories some of which provide lessons and some of which simply made me think or smile. This book is like reading a ‘Everything I Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten’ type book. A light easy read, perfect reading bit by bit out on the back porch or before heading to sleep. It just feels right, like your favorite blue jeans or an old pair of slippers.”

Some other comments, from Amazon and elsewhere:

If I could, I’d buy a copy of this book for every single person in America. It’s that essential.

As one whose passion and profession is talking about racism, I’m not often inclined to take advice about the rhetoric surrounding race. But this book did something few others have: it made me go “hmmm.”

David Murray takes everything I thought I knew about how to communicate and turns it inside out and upside down. This is funny, brilliant, full of great stories and insights and like nothing you’ve ever read before.

You can’t read the first page of Murray’s book without turning to the second. Then you’ll just barrel along, and by the time you take a breath on page 6, you’ll realize—if you haven’t already—that you’re in the hands of a great writer.

I found pearls, hope and humor in these pages.

David Murray’s essays are about to be required reading for the undergrads in my Political Speechwriting class—not just because David’s got a great way of turning a phrase, but because of his sense that listening is just as important as speaking. Young people need to learn that great communication can be powerful and life-changing, but it must also be kind and humble. David Murray is a great teacher of both.

Consider not only purchasing a copy for personal use, but also getting one for your most challenging communication partner.

It’s full of the kind of “push-you-to-your-limits” wisdom that we’ve eradicated from our lives with the self-selection of social media feeds and cable news. The kind that reverberates in your mind because the sound of it is so fresh and new.

There are books you read to escape. Books you read to learn. And books you read to evolve. Author David Murray delivers on each of these genres, leaving us laughing, contemplating, and cross-examining our deepest motivations and social media intent.

There is wisdom in these pages. The author succeeds in persuading his readers to look in the mirror and ask, in this most polarized of times, can’t I be better?

David Murray’s writing feels like he’s talking directly to you. It’s like the two of you are sitting at a neighborhood pub and you ask him what’s on his mind. … This book captures David’s best thinking. On every page, I found myself nodding my head in agreement with his sharp observations, audacious opinions, wonderful wit, and his bare-to-the-bone heart and soul expressed in words.

I expect that for months to come I’ll be reminded during conversations I have with friends, family and students of something I’ve learned from him that is worth sharing. Murray DOES understand something about this country.

I don’t know what I can possibly say to get you to read this book, but you should. If you are a writer, or a leader, or an HR professional, or a musician, or an activist, or an anarchist, or a human being, this book will suck you in with sincerity and, like a long talk with a great mentor, give you things to quietly chew on in your own time.

A must-read for all people.

Now, clearly some comments have been over the top—”David Murray is one of the great essayists of our time.” … “David Murray is a national treasure.” To keep those from going to my head, I just read the worst review, in a super-snotty accent: “This book was perfectly titled because it was ‘an effort to understand’ two hundred and twenty five pages of very boring opinions and insights.”

(My friend Joel Hood’s puppy wasn’t a fan, either. Or was he the biggest?)

But mostly what’s exciting is the kinds of conversations the book leads to—especially during book talks I’ve done with communication teams and other professional groups, with college classes and other student groups.

A single example comes to mind: During one book talk, a young Mexican woman—a DREAMer in waiting—told me she had married into a family that doesn’t approve of her very presence in this country. Does she have to make an effort to understand them? By the way she spoke, you could tell she loved her husband, and even that she seemed to love his family—or at least seemed deeply committed to winning their love and trust because she knew it was important to her marriage. She asked me how, in such a situation, do you make “an effort to understand”? I put the question back on her, because she sounded like more of on expert than me. “How do you do it?” I asked. She spoke for a few minutes about how she goes about talking to her in-laws and listening to them and showing them the kind of person she is—and how she also takes breaks from it when she gets too upset or too angry or too tired—and how she tries again. When she was finished, she had the look on her face that Studs Terkel once recalled an interviewee expressing: “I never knew I felt that way before.” I added a couple of lines from the book that underlined what she said, and I think everybody in the group was touched by the exchange—including the two of us.

Yes, I could have conversations like that every day.

I had a foreshadowing of this great feeling a couple years ago, after I gave a speech in the Dominican Republic, about the meaning of communication. During the Q&A, a young woman rose from the balcony to ask how you find an idea that you feel strongly enough about that you can actually stand and connect a hundred people to yourself and to each other.

“I don’t know,” I said, putting my hands on my knees in faux exhaustion. “I just know that it takes at least fifty years!”

And when you feel you’ve found it, you don’t want it to end.

To schedule a book talk with David Murray for groups of 10 or more, write to Benjamine Knight, at psacoo@vsotd.com.

Categories // Efforts to Understand

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