Show Overview
What’s the best predictor of your child’s emotional well-being? It’s not great schools, hugs, or Pixar movies. Researchers at Emory University found that whether a kid knew their family history was the number one indicator. Raja Badr-el-Din and Mark Valentine of Ramblin’ Stories, both 23 years old, intuitively knew that. They sensed that without the stories of elder seniors, their lives would be 
somehow less rich, and their struggle would be greater. That’s when they cooked up a scheme. They fixed up a 1973 Chevy milk truck and took to the road, recording the stories of whatever elder showed up. Along the way they learned one of the great truths of life, plus how to get a cheap hot shower on the road.
Their adventure reminds me of something I would have done at their age…and would still do! Oh, that plus Ken Kesey’s magic bus ride of 1964, an event that touched a match to the powder keg of the 60’s.
Rock on guys! Be the change…
What you will learn from Raja Badr-el-Din and Mark Valentine:
- About our connection through Aging2.0, an organization supporting innovators taking on the biggest challenges and opportunities in aging.
- The loss they felt not knowing their family stories
- Young people want to know the stories of their elders, but are not sure how to start the conversation.
- Talking with older people resonates with younger people
- The biggest thing we can do as a species is listen to each other
- How talking with seniors gives them perspective
- Their goal is to foster intergenerational communities by promoting a culture of storytelling around older adults
- 1973 milk truck is an elder magnet
- The trick they use for showering on the road
- The math for determine what’s “old”
- Smuggling cheese during the war
- One of the secrets of life: people who did what they loved stayed young and full of life
- How they are learning to avoid the big black hole
- John Prine’s “Hello In There”
- The single greatest factor for a child’s happiness
- Zig Ziglar’s lesson about vocal nuance
- What survivors valued from 9/11
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Presto and grazie!
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I Am a Racist
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.
Mark Twain
I often hear nowadays, people being accused.
“He’s a racist.”
“She’s a racist.”
“Trump’s a racist.”
“So and so’s a racist.”
What I have yet to hear is: “I am a racist.”
So let me be the first.
I am a racist.
Yes.
I see the ugly thing, creeping around my soul like a roach in the kitchen. I squash it, but sometime later, there it is again.
I know there is a nest somewhere, eggs hatching, a source deep within me, hidden away where it’s easy to deny. There is where I'll find the library of my false beliefs, the lies I tell myself over and over, so often they become grooves cut into my gray matter, like fissures in rock where the water runs down, cutting deeper and deeper, until fissures become swales, and swales become canyons.
When did the first racist raindrop fall? I don’t know. As a child, for sure. How many drops of poison does it take to pollute the vessel of pure water of which we are born? When, exactly, does a person become a racist, and who gets to decide?
I don’t know, but then, neither does anyone else.
I don’t believe in permanence. That’s one thing the Buddhists have taught me.
Everything changes.
We can become aware of that library of false beliefs, that nest of nasties that colors our perception of things, often for the worse. Awareness alone brings change. We can cut new grooves. My challenge as a human being is not to deny that I am a racist, for that would be as foolish as denying I have cancer when I really do. My challenge is, rather, to stop the cancer from metastasizing and poisoning the whole man.
I doubt I will ever fully eradicate my racism. Unfortunately, I suspect some vestige of it will always be with me. But what I can do, and what I do do, is expose myself to experiences that lessen my racism, those being travel, kind and honest conversation, and breaking bread with “the others” whenever I can. These experiences, like wind and rain, smooth rock and, over time, lay low even the highest mountains.
So when I hear the angry crowd shouting, "He’s a racist,” I want to ask:
“Who among you is not a racist? Stand up then and take a bow...for you are surely a god.”
I moved to Substack!
Hi there. If you've read this far, then you enjoy, or are at least intrigued by, my ideas. If you want to learn more, jump over to my new website on Substack, where I continue to write about travel, the second half of life, and other mad musings.
