America the Beautiful

Twenty-one year old American Southern Black Woman, Coco Gauff, French Open Tennis Champion 2025

This is what America also looks like today to the world. This young woman stood not only for herself, but with hand over heart, represented the United States during the National Amthem played during her championship moment.*

There is a story here that is All-American, in Ms Gauff's own words: ‘Americans who look like me’

She nailed it on the court and in the public eye. She showed us the possibilities too often hidden by racial prejudice that restricts rising to the top. She kept her cool under pressure and demonstrated to a whole generation of women, no matter their color, and especially their color, what success feels like against all odds. She beat the odds!

There have been other role models in sports and politics and business, but as this champion said following the match, It means a lot, and obviously there's a lot going on in our country right now with... like, everything,” Gauff said “But just to be able to be a representation of that and a representation of people that look like me in America who maybe don't feel as supported during this time period.

Words spoken from a platform watched by millions around the world matter. How come this Gen Z woman gets that when those parading around the world on serious business have no idea? Coco Gauff said the truth through a megaphone to the entire world. She IS as American as apple pie!

*https://www.the-independent.com/sport/tennis/coco-gauff-french-open-donald-trump-anthem-b2765874.html

Unprecedented Means Nothing

When I wrote for a Cape Cod newspaper, each week I filled twenty pages with community news stemming in large part from local officials' meetings, school calendars, police logs, and random unexpected events. The photos were shot with a K-1000 film camera, always there on the front seat of my car. Burning the midnight oil on an Olivetti manual typewritter in a rat-trap building for low wages felt satisfying somehow. The community counted on the small, local rag for information. It was the only way, other than word of mouth, doubling as fact-checkers around every corner. If I got something wrong, I heard about it. Immediately! It seems like a long time ago. Everything has changed except the news which just keeps on coming.

These days I still read the printed word, albeit online. There is too much information and then again not enough. For every headline there are myriad reports on unprecedented events. Granted there is truth to that, facts belie the gravity of what is actually happening on a regular daily, hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute basis. This is a concern. At least to me and maybe to you.

Unprecedented means "never done or known before". If everything that is happening all the time is unprecedented then let's tell it like it is. The news du jour reporters say over and over how the horrors of rule-breaking by rulers has "never been done before" by comparing news stories in (their) recent memory. A headline screaming "unprecedented" is juxtaposed against every egregious political shenanigan pulled off by some other unsavory politician in the past. Most notably, Nixon with his 1972 Watergate scandal and McCarthy with his 1950 communism attacks are often cited. Both were once unprecedented to be sure and have become a current events litmus test.

When words are overused the meaning is reduced to nothing. Each time the press looks backward to frame a story, today's headline is obfuscated. The story is not in the "never done before", but in the shocking facts needing to be told, clearly and deliberately. The fact is there is nothing else with which to compare today's stories because these stand completely and utterly on their own like "9/11" terrorists taking out the iconinc twin towers and the American atomic bombing in Japan. Nothing compares to these. Each was once and for all. Today is once and for all.

I am not a Historian, but for nearly fifty years I have been an avid news follower. There are many who can explain how we got here, and we should understand our stories and more importantly our own part in them. But as far as I can see, what matters most at this moment is not referring back, but looking ahead; not comparing other bad times, but seeing today's reality for what it is: A NEW World Order Taking Shape. That is today's headline, or should be, printed in 30 point bold for all of us to read and heed because this sets aside every other story written to date.

“I hope one day you will stand tall knowing your father was not absent out of apathy, but out of conviction. And I will spend my life making up for the moments we lost – starting with this one,”

A graduation ceremony at Columbia University in New York City on Tuesday was filled with boos and chants of “Free Mahmoud” as students voiced their displeasure that Mahmoud Khalil remains in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention in Louisiana and was unable to join the rest of the class of 2025 in graduating.*

While Mahmoud's wife and one-month-old son took his diploma for him in NYC, I was attending my grandson's graduation from University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. The commencement closing address was a quote and a charge from a former U of C President who held that post in the 1930's. George Norlin wrote essays and gave speeches which were critical of the Scopes "monkey" trial. He rebuffed the blandishments of the Ku Klux Klan governor of Colorado, who offered him legislative support in return for firing Jewish and Catholic faculty. After a year in Germany as lecturer on American Civilization at Berlin University in 1933, Norlin spoke and wrote articles warning of the dangers of Nazism and anti-Semitism. Hitler, he told a journalist, was not someone with whom you could go fishing. Unfortunately, few listened to Norlin's warnings. Like Churchill, he had the dubious fate of living just long enough to see his warnings come true.**

If one is to compare and contrast two University Presidents under pressure from the Government nearly a century apart, it could not be clearer that one caved while the other stood tall. When I heard "the charge" which has been read each and every Commencement since Norlin's tenure, I was struck by how relevant that message is today for my grandchildrens' generation. How similar the actions of a state legislature in the hands of the KKK spewing unthinkably, awful demands to expel and fire Jews and Catholics from an American University. How close we are coming to failing the biggest test of our lifetime. Reminders are everywhere in the photos of students on US campuses being abducted without warning. These students, foreigners and citizens alike, might have met a different fate in the 1930's when President George Norlin spoke on behalf of the University:

The Norlin Charge:

"You are now certified to the world at large as alumni of the university. She is your kindly mother and you her cherished sons and daughters. 

This exercise denotes not your severance from her, but your union with her. Commencement does not mean, as many wrongly think, the breaking of ties and the beginning of life apart. Rather, it marks your initiation in the fullest sense into the fellowship of the university, as bearers of her torch, as centers of her influence, as promoters of her spirit.

The university is not the campus, not the buildings on the campus, not the faculties, not the students of any one time — not one of these or all of them. The university consists of all who come into and go forth from her halls, who are touched by her influence and who carry on her spirit. Wherever you go, the university goes with you. Wherever you are at work, there is the university at work.

What the university purposes to be, what it must always strive to be, is represented on its seal, which is stamped on your diplomas — a lamp in the hands of youth. If its light shines not in you and from you, how great is its darkness! But if it shines in you today, and in the thousands before you, who can measure its power?

With hope and faith, I welcome you into the fellowship. I bid you farewell only in the sense that I pray you may fare well. You go forth but not from us. We remain but not severed from you. God go with you and be with you and us".

David graduated Magna Cum Laude from the College of Engineering

*New York Times May 22, 2025

**https://libraries.colorado.edu/about/history/george-norlin#:~:text=George%20Norlin%20wrote%20essays%20and,firing%20Jewish%20and%20Catholic%20faculty.