Hammer Mill Days

What the hell, Mitch. That's just a little speck. No way that's big enough for us to play on. No way in frozen hell. When astronomers stumble upon some new deep space option, like that dwarf planet recently detected some three times more distant than Pluto is to the Sun, they think, "eureka!" To us, it's just another potential gig. We're that proverbial hammer, always looking for a nail. Appropriate metaphor for a band that lives in an abandoned hammer mill. I know, I know ... all the planetoid-huggers out there are going to accuse Big Green of being money-hungry, selfish twits. Not true. We are crazy motherfucker selfish twits, in point of fact, and when we see another ice world out there, we can hardly wait to pile into some poorly designed space craft and slip the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of our cold hard money god. So, yeah ... on second thought, I guess we are money hungry selfish twits as well. It's the crazy motherfucker part tha...

This week saw stories about campus uprisings (some successful) relating indirectly to the Black Lives Matter movement and yet another Republican debate about practically nothing. These seemingly distinct phenomena are not entirely unconnected, particularly when you consider the economic focus of the G.O.P. debate and the very racially exclusive history of the expansion of the middle class during the second half of the 20th Century. Living in my hermetically sealed white man's world, I am witness to a lot of head scratching about why students at, say, University of Missouri are so upset. Of course, all my white companions know of this is what they hear on the evening news or via online sources, which only brings them the events of the past few days. The long history of abuse, exclusion, marginalization, incarceration, injury, and in some cases killing is not encapsulated in these very brief reports. So naturally, it seems nonsensical. My life isn't exactly typical, but my fa...