Bobby and Me - What I Learned About My Area's Shortcomings From Its Hero Worship of a Coach

The Bobby Knight face fans saw
hinted at the strains
he inflicted. 

Religion is so popular in Indiana, it’s almost basketball.

Of course it’s the converse of that statement that is often used to describe Hoosiers’ love and grasp of the sport. And thinking of basketball in theological terms would make Bobby Knight something of an Old Testament god.

Knight, who died Nov. 1, coached his Indiana University players and publicly conducted himself in a volatile and unpredictable fashion.

“A player has to fear him on sight for his coaching methods to work for them,” Jim Morris, basketball coach and faculty member at the New Albany branch campus of IU which I attended, said in a class in 1977.

Knight’s highly public misdeeds are well versed – they involve throwing things, grabbing necks, trivializing the horror of rape.

Behind closed locker room doors, he denigrated players, subjecting some to long torrents of obscenities, crude sexual slang, and sacrilegious profanities screamed into their faces. And for this, he was popular with Central and Southern Indiana’s Middle Americans – those people who go to church. And who are glad Indiana is an “at will” state, allowing them instantly to fire a worker from their business who, say, throws a chair in the office.

My image of his quintessential
fans, who loved faith, family and
a screaming blasphemous madman.

I grew up in Southern Indiana and for a while I thought the world of Knight’s on-court strategies of motion offense and pressure defense that brought IU an undefeated 1976 national title. I understood and accepted that the coach was regimented and demanding, but one year later, when a dismal 14-13 season concluded, my affinity with the coach ended as I saw that “demanding” was not the word for his ways.

Sophomore Rich Valavicius, upon quitting the team, said in an interview that Knight heaped abuse on the whole squad, yelling and yelling in the locker room after every loss. The power forward from Hammond, Ind. transferred to Auburn University, becoming the third IU player to leave during or just after the 1976-77 season. Freshmen Mike Miday and Bill Cunningham quit early on, Midday saying he was demeaned by the coach.

The contrast between my rejection of Knight’s tactics and the “que sera sera” attitude among other fans underscored a wider cultural split. I realized just how few people in my area understood a crucial distinction between discipline and abuse. And how few were willing to hold those they admire to basic accountability.

Most of his players had nothing 
but praise. Others felt differently. 

I heard non-witnesses to Knight’s treatment of Miday, Cunningham and Valavicius second guessing them for quitting, calling them “softies” instead of respecting the trio’s experiences with a coach they themselves had never met.

A great university may be about developing critical thinking skills, but the adoration of Bobby Knight among small town folks is a depressing reminder that the bulk of the populace mistakes badass behavior for strength. And thinks that a strongman figure is way to shake up an establishment that doesn’t care about them.

“I would hope that black eye never healed!” a woman who was a co-worker at a small business in Southern Indiana in the early ‘80s zealously responded when I interrupted her lauding of Knight to ask, “How would you feel if he gave you a black eye?”

Much as I liked her and her peers as individuals, when it comes to cultural identity issues, it’s usually futile to use reason with rural Hoosiers, the power base of D.C. Stephenson and Donald Trump as well as the fanbase of Knight.

Sports Illustrated columnist Pat Forde, a one time Indiana beat colleague at the Louisville Courier-Journal, wrote just after Knight’s death about this regional identification with the coach.

“He came to stand for an unwavering commitment to ideals that were perceived to be under siege in some parts of Middle America. He was viewed in some locales as a last vestige of something slipping away,” Forde wrote. “But here was the counterfeit part of idolizing Knight as an exemplar of discipline and toughness: he rarely demanded discipline of himself the way he did his players, and toughness is never exemplified by punching down.”

Others in our area who upon Knight's passing expressed measured criticism of his legacy included coaches.

"He refused to change," Nelson Jackson, a Louisville high school football coach who as a teen had hoped to play basketball for Knight, wrote in the C-J. "He forgot that it was never about him and that he was never supposed to be the story. His boys were."

Though Knight’s endorsement of Trump in the 2016 election is what history will recall as his political foray, few remember the coach’s first public backing of a political candidate. Sit down first -- it’s a shocker that illustrates the unpredictability of Knight.

Birch Bayh, the most impactful liberal U.S. Senator of the 20^th century, was running hard for a fourth term in 1980 when Bobby Knight appeared in a TV ad warmly praising Bayh for his integrity. Though he didn’t mention policy specifics, a typically straight up Knight called for Hoosiers to re-elect the man who was the sponsor of the Equal Rights Amendment, an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, and the creator of Title IX giving full equality to women’s education and sports.

Yes, Bobby Knight did chart his own course and sometimes went counter intuitively. But his sudden turns involved mood more often than politics.

I heard a former Louisville bookstore worker read at an open mic event of his recollection of Knight blowing his cool while preparing for a signing of his own book defending himself in light of his 2000 firing by IU. The coach shouted, and shoved books off a shelf, as related by this person’s reading (which he actually made in a lighthearted tone).

IU athletic staffers told of Knight throwing a clock against the office wall, and of impulsively telling an assistant coach he was fired after overhearing him on the phone saying that morale had sunk during the later Knight years.

Of course Knight was never corrupt, insisted on his players graduating, and gave money to the college’s library, his backers constantly say. That belief in his players’ education was laudable, but being non-corrupt should be the norm, and giving to the library is not a get-out-of-trouble card.

Moreover, l ought to be able to like someone’s motion offense without having to hear Middle Americans overjoyed at the idea of getting a black eye.

                                     ___________________________________________________

Brian Arbenz worked as a sports stringer from 1986 to 1999 covering basketball in Indiana and Kentucky for newspapers and Associated Press.

The inspiring and uncompromising Melissa Forsythe

On a busy afternoon early in my newspaper reporting career during the mid-1980s, an old friend of our paper's managing editor walked into the newsroom in Corydon, In.

Her name was Melissa Forsythe, but this visitor was much more than just a friend of the boss. Over the previous dozen years, Forsythe had been the best television news reporter in our area, a trailblazer for gender equity and workers rights, and my teenage crush.

Street reporting was at the root of
Melissa Forsythe's career

Forsythe, who died in 2022 at 71, had strong professional talents and unyielding personal will that enabled her to push gender and legal obstacles aside in Louisville broadcasting since she became a street reporter at age 22.

Before all that, Melissa Forsythe had been a high school journalism student of our editor Randy West.

"She just exuded talent," said West, who added that it was his mistake not naming Forsythe editor of the high school paper, though he attributes that to an outstanding journalism class of multiple superb students. "You knew she was going to be a big success. I always thought she was going to wind up on national television someday."

West taught at Corydon Central High School in the mid-1960s before becoming editor, and chief photographer of The Corydon Democrat in 1970. Corydon is 35 miles west of Louisville.

Instead of fulfilling her teacher's belief that she was network TV material, Forsythe achieved the status of Louisville's most recognized TV news fixture over two decades, achieving the highest anchorperson ratings at two stations. She became the city's first woman TV street reporter in 1972 just after finishing college at Indiana University, then in a few years she became Louisville's first anchorwoman.

She started off at WAVE-TV defying a socially conservative community's stereotypes of a sun splashed 22-year-old with a petite frame by carrying heavy TV film cameras made bulkier by tripods and rows of lights.

"She came in and got dirty and sweaty with the rest of us," former WAVE colleague Barry Bernson said in a TV news report of Forsythe's death in February 2022.

                      WHAS recalls the trailblazer Melissa Forsythe

Former WHAS Sports director Dave Conrad, who anchored the station's sports reports from 1976 to 93, said Forsythe, the station's news co-anchor for 12 years during that time, had some paradoxical qualities, including being "very outspoken" over professional issues yet a harmonious work colleague.

"She was personable. I would not say overly sociable," said Conrad, who now lives in Marysville, Ind., about 30 miles north of Louisville. "She was professional at all times. She was one of the best, if not the best journalist that I have ever worked with."

Randy West, who now lives in Bloomington, Ind., said he followed the career of his former student on the airwaves and by chatting with Forsythe at various news assignments where both went, including a few runnings of the Kentucky Derby.

''She was a good journalist. She knew what good TV writing was, and it is different from the kind of writing I knew," West said. "If she were going to be in a newsroom and you were going to be working with her, or for her, she wanted you to be the very best and she would help you."

He said Forsythe's quick reactions at sites of ever changing news stories was another of her strengths. I saw that verified during that impromptu Corydon Democrat newsroom visit.

It so happened that on the very day she dropped in, a state investigation had just resulted in charges of financial mismanagement in a county government office.

Instantly, Melissa was on one of our happily donated desk phones, calling in the breaking story to her employer WHAS-TV, who put it on the upcoming noon TV newscast. Even on a social call, Melissa's work went on, and she was unfazed shifting gears.

With the same methodical and probing technique, Forsythe covered stories of international interest, including the world's second artificial heart implant, the rise of singer John Mellencamp, and the deaths of 25 people -- 22 of them children -- when a drunk driver crashed into a church bus in 1988 near Carrollton, Ky. in the nation's worst drunk driving accident.

"I will always remember the work that she did on the bus crash," Dave Conrad said. "In light of the tragedy she was succinct in her reporting. It was factual and not overly emotive, which is what a journalist needs to be in such a difficult time."

Conrad also said an intangible aspect of the television profession helped Forsythe succeed. "She was so photogenic that on camera it looked like 3-D. She just popped out at you" he said. "She had the 'it' factor.... I can't explain what that is, but you know it when you see it."

Forsythe's even toned voice and unflappable style validated an image of seriousness those in the industry tended to hold of her. West said it's not the whole story.

"She was funny. She loved to laugh" he said. "She was very smart.... She read a lot."

Forsythe died at her Louisville home of natural causes, but her family released no more details, reflecting a trait of Melissa herself.

"She was the most private public figure I have ever been around," former colleague Doug Proffitt said during Melissa's posthumous induction into the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame shortly after her death.

Her public persona once took the form of a newsmaker rather than a reporter. By the late 1970s, though lighter minicams had replaced those film cameras which had been so ungainly, Melissa Forsythe deftly carried another burden - this one in the courtroom, rather than the newsroom.

In a drawn out and highly public legal case, Orion Broadcasting v. Forsythe, she won the right to move to crosstown WHAS-TV in 1979, despite an onerous non-competition clause WAVE tried to impose after its station management decided not to renew her contract.

In a case which media dubbed "The Forsythe Saga," the judge's precedent setting decision said that because Melissa Forsythe had not left WAVE voluntarily, the station's pre-existing requirement that reporters not work for a competing station for a full year infringed on her rights.

Though she was an equally great success over a dozen years at her new employer, WHAS decided to drop Forsythe in 1991. She served as the press spokesperson for Kentucky Governor Paul Patton from 1996 to 2000 during the first of his two terms.

While Forsythe was still at WAVE in the mid-70s, I recall reading in a newspaper profile of her that she and other college students had formed a self-made news service to cover the Democratic and Republican political conventions for various local media, phoning in news stories of interest to their clients' regions.

This endeavor stayed in my mind, and a couple of years after I left the Corydon Democrat staff in 1985 I co-founded, with the help of an independent photojournalist, a similar arrangement for regional print media.

This informal news service took us around the upper South and lower Midwest writing feature stories about people -- often athletes and musicians -- to be published by a small set of client newspapers in the hometowns or regions of the subjects.

The crescendo was a working trip in 1987 to Washington, D.C., where I wrote three feature stories for two newspapers about Southern Indiana people who had risen to various heights on Congressional staffs or other institutions.

Financial realities finally caught up with me, but after the gig was no longer viable, I started doing independent wire service reporting for Associated Press and United Press International, also traveling quite a bit.

Though that "it" factor may not so heavily impact print journalism, the many other factors of Melissa Forsythe have gone with me. 

             ___________________________________________________

Brian Arbenz is from New Albany, Ind., where he grew up watching Melissa Forsythe's coverage of his community and the wider Louisville area.

Colleague Doug Proffitt tells "the Hall of Fame worthy story" of Melissa Forsythe:

We never met, but I believe I can count this remarkable man as a friend

Have you ever felt close to someone you never knew? I don't mean via the Internet; I'm thinking specifically of a person who worked as a journalist in the same newsroom where I did -- but his stint, and life, ended four years before I set foot in there.
His name was H. Bruce Walker. He was referred to retrospectively as Bruce throughout my time as a reporter and columnist for The Corydon Democrat weekly newspaper in Corydon, Ind., an historic town of about 7,000 people 35 miles west of Louisville.
The frequency of my hearing his name mentioned soon after I took the Democrat job in 1982 testifies to Bruce's everlasting stature. He was someone you'd never forget, and someone I feel as though I know - not just knew.
I first became knowledgeable about Bruce after I decided during a quiet weekend afternoon following my shift to fill in the blanks on this deceased journalist with such indelible presence. I browsed a Democrat staff-produced booklet I had seen at the front counter called "The Writings of H. Bruce Walker."
I shortly found a person who had been part Henry David Thoreau, part Thomas Merton, and part Dave Barry.
After Bruce died unexpectedly at age 48 in 1978 of a heart attack, the Democrat staff compiled some of his best writings into that booklet. It also included several of their own thoughts and comments from readers about the pain of a shocking loss, but also the joy of having known this man about whom Democrat staffer Ed Runden wrote: "His virtues were plain and simple and uncommon in any age. He was the good and honest man we often speak of and infrequently meet."
Bruce Walker had been a professor of philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago. He had grown up in Whiting, Ind. a densely industrialized city on Chicagoland's south shore.
Bruce's columns gave measured but lively praise or criticism to county government officials for their actions he felt were in, or against the public interest. The columns also talked of such varied things as serving as a lifeguard during his youth on Lake Michigan's Whiting Beach, to General Electric's ominous efforts to win a patent on its new strain of bacteria (Bruce had studied physics and chemistry at Purdue) to the dubious distinction of being investigated by Harrison County's rural electric cooperative.

Bruce and Dietgard, happy with each other
and with simplicity.

The $4 electric bill one month for his family of four was not believable (the average bill was $24, Bruce wrote), but the coop learned what friends of Bruce already knew - that he devotedly practiced simple living and conservation.
Democrat managing editor Randy West told me Bruce would sometimes spot a device or piece of old furniture lying outdoors which a Harrison County property owner might have written off as junk, then buy it for a few dollars and turn it into something useful and restore it to its original charm.
Bruce owned no telephone or television. Democrat sports editor and columnist H. O. Jones wrote after Bruce's death that he and his wife Dietgard raised chickens on their property and expertly gathered plants and berries from the wild as part of their determination to avoid prepared foods with artificial ingredients.

Jones added that Bruce insisted on keeping his old Volkswagen going long past its natural life by rebuilding or replacing "every single bit of its ailing anatomy."
Bruce had great and varied technological savvy and fix-it skills, along with a philosophy of relying on the simplest technology possible.
Randy's farewell column called Bruce "a latter-day Renaissance Man," adding:

"(H)e was accomplished in physics, chemistry, mathematics, politics, religion, philosophy, literature, botany, conservation, organic gardening, nutrition, carpentry, mechanics, farming. The last time Bruce was at our house, he played the piano and did a Greek dance to the music from 'Zorba the Greek.' (Like Zorba, he was an Earthy, sensual man who relished food, drink and tobacco.)"
Bruce was a conservationist, and also a conversationalist.

Office holders local and national, such as U.S. Sen.
 Birch Bayh, felt Bruce's scrutiny. 

"He had few peers as a storyteller. Gestures, dialects, the works," H. O. Jones wrote. "He had a penchant for detail in his storytelling which missed little.... He loved to nose into public records around the courthouse, find discrepancies and write about them. Just about the only enemies he had were the ones he caught with their hands in the cookie jar and readers who couldn't tell the difference between satire and seriousness."
Randy West wrote that along with Bruce's writing prowess and intellect, his easy and colorful speaking style and boisterous laugh displayed during his 1974 job interview helped persuade Randy and Democrat publisher Robert O'Bannon to hire Bruce.
Those traits never failed Bruce during his four years covering the governments of Harrison and occasionally neighboring Crawford County.
"A natural actor, his irreverent impersonations of some local public figures often left us in hysterics," staff reporter Mary Ann Sebrey wrote nine days after Bruce died.
Joy Lindauer, then a recent addition to the Democrat staff, said: "As an admirer of Bruce's writing since moving here four years ago, I marveled at how he came up with such good stories when he only started writing about two hours before deadline. He would spend a lot of time running around the courthouse, talking on the phone, scanning the newspapers, and shooting the breeze with colleagues. Then about 2 o'clock Tuesday afternoon he would begin putting his thoughts on paper in the concise professional way we all became used to in his stories."
This frenetic routine, Joy Lindauer added, did not detract from Bruce's appreciation for simple pleasures like opening his lunch bag at work and declaring: "Oh Boy. Waffles with blackberry jam!" as she recalled from one day.
Even those who did not know Bruce personally understood the love he had for his and Dietgard's two sons, Arpad and Istvan, both named for Hungarian political figures from history.

Bruce's first born son Arpad gets a hoist
from his dad in the natural setting that was
 their home. After Bruce died in 1978,
 his widow Dietgard moved the family
 to Illinois.

"Dietgard, Arpad and Istvan became household words in Harrison County through Bruce's columns. Whether it was telling about their awe of Smokey the Bear or their delight in their new sleeping bags, his love for his little boys shone through."
Randy West wrote: "Bruce impressed everyone he met. He amazed us first by showing signs of being a natural born investigative reporter. Countless times he rushed into our office with the same pronouncement: 'VERY interesting. I just found out that....' County officials soon realized, perhaps nervously, that someone was VERY interested in their work, particularly when it concerned tax dollars, and some of them caught Bruce's carefully-thought-out criticism on the editorial pages. It's pleasant to note that many of those same officials, who often heeded his words, became his good friends."
Much as Bruce and Dietgard found the natural surroundings of Harrison County (after making just one trip there from the Chicago area) perfect for trying lives of simple independence, it was nature that supremely tested their commitment.
On April 3, 1974, the worst outbreak of tornadoes in U.S. history was centered on Kentucky and Southern Indiana, destroying 900 homes in Louisville, and hundreds more in rural parts of the two states, including the dream home of two Chicago-area idealists who had relocated.
Bruce yielded to pragmatism (even Thoreau would have understood), getting a job bagging groceries in a supermarket, then soon seeking work at The Democrat.
The Walkers were not alone in feeling the call of rustic, woodsy Harrison County, which began growing in the 1970s as Louisville professional people, particularly new arrivals to the city, often made the same move, if for lives more tied to subdivision convenience than Thoreau's self-reliance.
Corydon was the first capital of Indiana, and the original State Capitol building (built between 1814 and 1816 of area limestone and logs) still draws visitors who quickly are charmed by a surrounding town square, bed and breakfasts, restaurants, and preserved homes of two early governors. 

Bruce pretends to gloat as he
and Sports Editor H.O. Jones add
Hoosier State Press Association
 awards to the newsroom wall.
It was a yearly ritual at the
 acclaimed Corydon weekly. 

Rollercoastering gasoline prices in the last 50 years have made the city commuter population growth uneven, but Harrison County has steadily attracted esoteric free thinkers, initially via the 1970s back-to-the-land passions. Big draws are Blue River, a waterway ideal for canoeing, and some tall bluffs overlooking the Ohio River where hang gliders step into the sky.
And it has to be said that many like Harrison and its adjoining and even more rustic Crawford County because of their thin law enforcement coupled with ample marijuana, often produced in far corners of the many absentee owned wooded patches and meadows.
When I lived in Harrison and covered news in both counties from 1982 to '85, there still was a seventies live-and-let-live ethos.
But Bruce and his family valued not just the freedom and self-determination their venue gave them in that decade, but also a discipline from lives rooted in religion and philosophy.
"Bruce was a Christian," Randy West wrote, "and he shared Christ's disdain for the Pharisees. He had no time for arrogance, vanity and pretension."
Two column excerpts among the vast array in "The Writings of H. Bruce Walker" well illustrate his grasp of complex problems with which the U.S. is still beset, and the simple values that could solve them, explained by Bruce in the clear and conversational style that won him readers.
He wrote this in September 1978, though the words are central to today's situation:

"Because energy was cheap, we didn't feel a twinge of guilt or even have a remote sense that wasting all this energy was wrong.
"But now energy is no longer cheap, and it never will be again. The days of cheap and abundant oil are gone, and the price of coal is going up. We're in the position of having to learn new attitudes toward energy."

In December 1977, these seasonal words offered timeless advice for anyone - religious or not - seeking to reconnect with truth and authenticity. The conclusion touches me like the words of the good friend I have in the person I never met:

"Times have changed. The simplicity of the first Christmas has become complicated for many into a frenzy of activity that clouds this original simplicity.
"From about the day after Halloween, we're bombarded by advertising displaying hundreds of gift suggestions.... There are hundreds of Christmas cards to sign and stamp and decisions made on who to send them to.
"All this takes place to the strains of 'Peace on Earth, Good will to men.' By the time Christmas arrives, many if not most people are so physically and emotionally exhausted  that the day brings relief rather than joy. But buried in all this, the original simplicity and joy is still there.
"All we have to do is find it."

 

Brian Arbenz lives in Louisville, Ky. USA. The pictures used in this story are reproduced from, "The Writings of H. Bruce Walker" with permission of Randy West, retired editor of The Corydon Democrat and member of the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame. 

The benefits -- and pitfalls of turning to the Crappy Childhood Fairy

The keyboard instead of the couch -
the new posture of seeking help

She calls herself and her YouTube channel, "The Crappy Childhood Fairy," though her real name is Anna Runkle. In this time of unaffordable or inaccessible professional therapy, her deft media presentation skills and openness about her life's story have made hers one of the top go-to names in the burgeoning realm of online alternatives to seeing a therapist.

"I’m not a doctor or therapist," Runkle's Crappy Childhood Fairy website says. "I’m someone who grew up in a rough family that was deeply affected by addiction and all the problems that tend to go with that – poverty, violence, neglect, and shame."

As a child, she sometimes had to shop for food and cook, as the household's adults were not around. And Runkle has said she experienced sexual molestation in the home.

Today, with a persona that blends likability and real world wisdom, Runkle brings insights to hundreds of thousands seeking healing, connection or just some online diversion while perusing YouTube channels.

Her credentials are varied -- she earned a Master of Public Policy degree from the University of California, and has been a professional comedian, a customer experience consultant and a video director -- but when it comes to psychotherapy, the Fairy's qualifications are school of hard knocks.

From her recent past in those jobs, Runkle freely shares with her viewers recollections of her occasional failures to be focused and reliable to colleagues, something to which many of us in the creative fields can give a reluctant nod of recognition.

The Fairy, or CCF has become a big enterprise with paid levels of use and free services, all of which are energized with user posts, which of course make for algorithm assets.

I applaud Anna Runkle's emphasis on healing and accepting responsibility, rather than being mired in past pain.

"The wounds of past trauma really can be healed. It might take a lot of focus and self mastery, but when you can face the part of the problem that you internalized, this is a great day," Runkle said on a 2023 Crappy Childhood Fairy video. "(It's) not your parents, not their failure to ever recognize what they did or apologize to you. It's not anything in the past -- It's you, right now. That is the part where there is potential for change." 

I also like her focus on some simple hands-on healing methods, like the benefits of de-cluttering. "You take back your power from whatever happened to you and you start to change the things that are right in front of you."

There are downsides to Anna Runkle's channel, however. 

In her criticisms of therapy per se, she is sometimes preachy and overgeneralized, treating her own bad experiences as universal.

Runkle once characterized those who criticize her over her negative view of therapy as personally hateful.

Though many of them undoubtedly have been, there is a lack of nuance in this. Conflating all criticisms of her with vitriolic personal attacks can be a tactic to play on sentimentality over reason (this method is sometimes referred to as "outrage bait") and it seemed to have that effect.

Legions who posted in the comments rallied around her as a friend under siege, never asking: were there also criticisms that were not mean or personal?

In the wider YouTube world, there is a problem of impetuous self-diagnosing by viewers. It's bad enough when the online work of a genuine therapist or psychiatrist sparks an "I suddenly realize I've got that" bandwagon. But when a non-professional prompts those inevitable comment thread reactions, it's a worse problem.

Though a YouTuber such as Anna Runkle shouldn't be held  responsible for every viewer's statements, she should set aside her disdain for the therapy profession long enough to tell those who self-diagnose they certainly should consider seeing a qualified healer first.

A particularly bad example came on a thread about the dangers of the toxic trait called people pleasing.

A viewer posted: "Thanks. I realized that my niceness is a mental illness, what a revelation...." And this comment wasn't the satire those words may sound like; it continued in a serious vein.

Whoa! To start with, niceness is not people pleasing. People pleasing is not a mental illness, but a habit. And this viewer was thanking someone not qualified to define a toxic habit in them, much less a mental illness.

As of this writing, eight months after that comment was posted, there has been no cautionary response posted by the Crappy Childhood Fairy or her staff. The "niceness as mental illness" equation is allowed a free pass.

It's no secret that big YouTube operations generally do resort to click bait from time to time to keep the views coming during the ebb periods. But a tactic the media-savvy Runkle used in 2021 was click bait in overdrive, and I saw it as blatant manipulation. 

In a YouTube video headlined "Is This A Healing Miracle? You Decide," she spends several minutes discussing in detail the fate of a loved one who was said by a doctor who examined him in an emergency situation to be weeks away from certain death.

That patient was her ex-husband but still good friend, who was afflicted with cancer. Well, days later he was declared out of immediate danger, and was improving so robustly he was back at his office. The cancer was now called treatable.

It sounded for all the world that this CCF YouTube was raising the possibility that a miracle gave the man his life back.

Well, twelve minutes and some seconds into the video, Runkle says, "That's not actually what happened. What happened was, we had a wrong diagnosis.... There wasn't really a miracle."

But the m-word isn't done on this YouTube. The fact that she and her ex-husband's other loved ones were so relieved that he was not dying after all makes his cancer seem less brutal than if the false diagnosis had never come down.

That has given the group a new appreciation of life. That's the miracle.

Without question, the new outlook is reason to be pleased, and happy for them. But the sequence of this story played with viewers' emotions by suggesting for more than a dozen minutes that the topic was something divine or metaphysical, then letting us know it's a far more relatable use of "miracle."

I don't know that Anna Runkle intended to deceive, but the video's timeline conformed to a standard method of extending YouTube watch times; getting viewers to stay through a certain length of a YouTube -- 15 minutes, I believe -- is generally needed to receive a desired amount of ad revenue.

And seeing the comment thread fire up with religious fervor from commenters -- including lots of mid-sentence capital H for "his" and "him" -- was all I could take. It was another grim reminder of how many people don't notice bait and switch, or don't care that they are being manipulated by it as long as they feel uplifted by a good story.

   Did this video manipulate Anna Runkle's viewers? You Decide:

The video left me demoralized after months of using the Crappy Childhood Fairy channel to some real personal avail.

I posted my problems with her tossing the word "miracle" around so loosely, and unsubscribed -- wiser about the cut throat economics that rule YouTube.

           --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Brian Arbenz lives in Louisville, Ky. USA

My First Ever Weird Experience -- It's Called Retirement

I have been retired for two days and it is weird. Really weird.

I've never known this situation, nor have I ever had a loved one cross into it during my conscious life; my wonderful mother - who was my sole parent - died at 59. My grandparents were retired going back to my earliest memories of them. Transitioning from full-time work to fully retired is all new to me. And disorienting. 

I keep feeling tugs within me to get ready to go back to work as usual, as my two days off are done for the week -- get my food ready for tomorrow, make sure I have bus fare and line up the workplace ID badge, keys and wallet so I can make a quick exit tomorrow morning. And don't drink tea after 4 pm so I'll be rested enough to make that departure. That's how it has been for decades, but suddenly those are needless procedures.

I've made it all the way here - Wow

I don't have to go to work -- and I still get to eat. Nobody can fire me. This goes against our socialization, which holds that if you don't work, it means you are lazy. And you don't deserve to have a roof over your head.

But I'll continue to have my meals, and that roof atop my one-bedroom apartment. That's because of course the rules are different for retirees. They are people who have done their duty and are now rewarded with leisure. Besides, retirees are too weak and frail to do work. And they walk so slowly and never notice their turn signals are flashing, so it's better for everyone if they stay at home all day.

Notice I'm calling retires "they" and "them." That's because I can't fathom that I am in fact a retired person. Yes, I know they -- that is we don't really walk inordinately slowly, and most of us can lift anything a normal daily routine calls for a person to lift. And we notice our turn signals.

Beyond the fact that "retiree" doesn't mean slow and out of it per se, there's also my personal non-standard situation -- no boast intended, but I look about two decades younger than my 65 years and I lost 80 pounds a dozen years ago have kept it off. I'm 6-foot-1 and weigh 177 pounds.

To say I can still do lifting doesn't tell the whole story. Today, at age 65, I can lift and climb stairs much more easily than I could 30 years ago.

Okay, I'm not meaning to sound like Jack Lalanne. In fact, let me tell you that the fine state of health I find myself in today followed young adult and middle years of poor condition and a long list of health troubles. In my mid 20s through my early 50s, I chose a bad diet and experienced frequent overweight, heart palpitations, and periodic bouts with paralyzing agoraphobia (a malady you don't want).

Is it? Or have I found
 my just reward?

So my age progression has sort of been reversed, making retirement even more weird. I'm greeting it more like the day you got your driver's license. A second youth. For the last couple of days, I've been in a gentle euphoria.

Of course, I'll have to see how well my retirement pay, modest savings and Social Security hold up. My expenses are considerably less because I live as a minimalist; for 10 years, I happily have not owned a car or any kind of television.

Nonetheless I may be back to working in a few months, but perhaps in need of only 50 or 60 bucks a week, which could be attained through online writing, an avocation that is usually pure fun for me.

For the moment, however, and perhaps for the long term, this is otherworldly. Things look different. My mood is freed from so much baggage. I feel like I'm in a strangely unfamiliar place without leaving home.

Those observations may sound like the description of someone's positive LSD trip -- at least from what I've heard. I've never used illicit drugs, nor consumed even so much as a whole can of beer. During my teens and college years, I preferred reading world almanacs and encyclopedias and poring over maps to going to rock concerts and parties.

No, I just never kept company with my generation's many iterations of weird. And though retirement would seem to represent the closing of the life stage marked by bold exploration, it seems to be opening up just such a time for me. 

                ______________________________________________

Brian Arbenz lives in Louisville, Ky. USA, where had careers as an independent journalist, statistical clerk for the U.S. Census Bureau, public relations person for social service and social justice organizations, and pizza delivery person.

The Problem With Anti-Work

OK, but...

Discussion of the issues in this era largely lacks nuance and fails to account for consequences. 

Defund the police? Great hashtag that sums up the passions of the moment. But then what? Well, explaining the whole needed reconfiguring of our current criminal justice behemoth would take much more than we can fit into a hashtag, so we'll have to deal with that at some later stage. But the problem is, people reacting to the hashtag aren't prompted to wait for that stage. It's a bandwagon, so jump aboard!

Hashtags have their place, when used for a specific need -- I've known people who got quick action using one when a family member desperately needed to resolve a snag with a certain government service.

But using a hashtag to explain a cause that would reshape a whole national or world institution is woefully inadequate.

Like, what does "anti-work" mean? For some, it's ending the present capitalist arrangement through which our work results inordinately in billionaires becoming richer and the rest of us losing ground.

          ------------------------------------------------

LINK: Amazon's methods make the Anti-Work case

              -----------------------------------------

For others, the term means the esoteric reshaping of human purpose; no longer doing unfulfilling labor to achieve some truly fulfilling end. The labor of our lives should reflect our creative yearnings.

Yet others hear "anti-work" as a lure to take life easy -- with no structural change of the system that is causing the injustices. The open-ended term "work" being attacked in the movement's name leaves those who wish to see a better system replace capitalism vulnerable to their revolution sinking to a far lower level. It could bring a world where the average person despises the tilling of the soil as much as they do the agri-chemical and food corporations who control what's produced from that soil.

Even when workers as a group control their enterprises' earnings, they still have to work, as in do the toils that produce things they want to produce and that people need. Work would still be a job.

And that is not entirely a bad thing, as nice a sound as there is to the idea of replacing the job with creativity.

A job also means a commitment - and not necessarily to the corporate owner, their hedge fund, their PAC, or their dream of flying up to the Karmen Line. 

Having to adhere to a work schedule and to meet the workplace's standards can be the way to compel a worker to honor their commitment to the greater society.

                --------------------------------------

LINK: A more measured approach. The end of 'Workism'

                    --------------------------------------------

Restaurant customers waiting for their food certainly do not want to hear, "Sorry, the chef said they're just not feeling pasta today, so they're making you sandwiches instead of the lasagna you ordered."

Or, for that matter, that the chef suddenly decided that making memes is their real calling, so they just left permanently.

Is it that jobs crush our souls, or that
they don't bulge
our bank accounts?

Anti-work is so broadly defined that it could easily become anti-commitment, a way of thinking that promotes a selfish, callous existence.

Another hazard of launching movements with two or three catchy words is that any political principle or ideology is going to be understood on multiple levels. As a journalist in Louisville in the 1990s, I covered the forming of a new group in a suburban county opposed to what it said was overreaching by that county's zoning agency.

Most were small business owners and were upset  by receiving "Criminal Complaint" notices for such violations as storing pipes outside on their industrial property in sight of nearby homes. The chief founder of this group had wider horizons; his literature said it would also take on the EPA over its nationwide practices.

One year later, the zoning notices no longer said "criminal" and the county zoning agency was talking more with businesses to resolve these marginal violations short of filing complaints.

Satisfied with that, about 90 percent of this group's members had stopped being involved. The founder's hard charge against the EPA would have to wait.

The same pattern could deflate the anti-work realm, if reforms make a job once again a way in which people can afford a residence, receive health care and pensions, get out of college debt and get their weekends back.

The great bane of radical revolutions is the enactment of moderate reforms. Of course, the converse is that by resolutely blocking those reforms, the billionaire PACs make revolution inevitable -- if we give a revolution the beyond-hashtag depth it needs.

Brian Arbenz lives in Louisville, where he opposes corporate greed, but also vague open-endedness in naming a movement.

Apollo 17 Remastered (50th Anniversary) - by HOMEMADE DOCUMENTARIES and Jackson Tyler