You Are What You Do

July 9, 2017 By David Griesing 1 Comment

The story about Cowtown and Grant Harris, as told in this week’s Yeti sponsored video, plays like a bedtime story. It grabs you by the emotional lapels at those first shots of galloping horses far below. And it never lets go.

Once upon a time and somehow, improbably, up to the present, the oldest rodeo in the United States just happens to be 7 miles from Exit 1 on the New Jersey Turnpike, or 20 odd miles southeast of Philadelphia as the crow flies. It launched in 1929 to attract bigger crowds to the Salem County Fair, and with a few fits and starts during the Depression and War years, is still going strong.

The self-described “Best Show on Dirt” runs every Saturday night from May to September. Its roster includes 7 separate events: bull riding, bareback riding, saddle bronc riding, steer wrestling, girl’s barrel racing, team roping and tie-down roping.

In saddle bronc riding, the cowboy holds on with one hand while keeping the other raised towards the heavens in the hope that he can stick to the saddle for the whole 8 seconds. A smooth, rhythmic ride is what scores the best. In girl’s barrel racing on the other hand, the prize goes to the fastest. Riders enter the arena at full speed, rounding each barrel in a cloverleaf pattern before galloping to the finish line. Timed to a hundreth of a second, the Cowtown tag for this event is “Nothin’ beats pretty girls and fast horses.”

All two hours come with non-stop commentary from the master of ceremonies (“Talk about closer than a coat of paint! Let’s put our hands together and appreciate a good ride!) and banjo playing by groups like Dave and the Wranglers, as reported by an erstwhile anthropologist writing for the Times.

Grant is fourth in a line of cowboys named Harris to run the Cowtown Rodeo. But while he was born to it, he grew to become a champion bull rider out West when his father decided to sell the place. The stamina and skills that win rodeos on a competitive circuit are far different from those it takes to run a business with rosters of weekly competitors, stalls full of livestock, a couple dozen employees, and a village of buildings sitting on hundreds of acres. Should he leave a job he was good at to become the CEO of a rodeo?

It was the first time that Harris had to grapple with his statement: “What we do is what we are. I don’t know how to do anything else.”

Harris not only returned to run the institution that his dad was leaving, he also had to adapt the Rodeo to changing customer tastes. When he got involved, Cowtown’s weekly competitions were seen on TV, but as Americans left its farms for its cities, Harris needed to keep the crowds coming. And succeed he did. First time visitors are always surprised at the length of the lines, the enthusiasm of the crowds, and how red-and-white signs for establishments like Russ’s Electric of Pennsville, Farmer’s Bank of Mullica Hill, Pole Tavern Equipment identify the regular viewing boxes that are filled with locals.

Today though, at 62, Harris faces another quandary. It’s about what will become of his life’s work. His daughters Courtney and Katy grew up in saddles right next to him. But they’re grown now, and as we learn from the clip, Courtney marries a cowboy and moves out West, while Katy stays closer to home, marrying an electrician named RJ. You can see how capable his wife Betsy is—what a working partner she’s been—but how are they going to carry on? Should they sell their land and business to developers when the interest on what a sale is likely to net would be more than the Cowtown Rodeo clears in a year?

Each Harris family member has to decide given how each has lived. Because what we’ve done and will continue to do is who we are.

After some bare knuckles truth telling—in the form of Harris counseling RJ that he and Katy “would have a difficult time growing together in their marriage” if he doesn’t get involved with the Rodeo’s operation—the family decides to stay put, with Katy and RJ continuing the tradition. Harris says that he needs no more money than he has already. But in the family members’ tear-filled eyes, there is a deeper calculus than that.

Nothing else we can imagine doing could ever bring us more.

Some of this story is about passing on a legacy. Who will care for the garden I’ve grown? Who will go on meeting the needs that my work has met? Who will fill my shoes and my reputation when I’m gone?

Some of this story is about furthering a legacy. How much is the work that you’re offering who I really am? Does my talent, skill, and experience “fit” this role, or would it be more fitting to do something else? What does my head say? My heart?

And finally, some of what Cowtown is about is good storytelling. Long before Yeti made videos like this one, it was selling coolers that people thought improved their status so much that they reportedly were stealing them out of one another’s boats and trucks. (Particularly in the South and Midwest, “if you’ve got Air Jordan or Lululemon money, but prefer to unwind by bass fishing and deer hunting, you can say it with a Yeti.”)

That was the first good story that Yeti told. But over time, the company also came to see videos like Cowtown as a way to connect with customers whose passions it shared. And it seems to be working. Since Cowtown (its latest) launched a couple of days ago, it has had 53,000 views on YouTube, which doesn’t include people like me who caught it in a social media feed.

Now I can’t wait to go and live part of this story too.

One Way That Conviction Works

July 1, 2017 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

As a kid, I loved Otis Redding’s songs, especially “I’ve Got Dreams to Remember” and “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.” I still can’t say too much about that voice, those arrangements. Listen for yourself. Silk degrees.

After his groundbreaking performance at the 1967 Monterrey Pop Festival (“resplendent in a teal-green silk suit”), Redding hosted a bash at his Big O Ranch in Georgia. The local newspapers crowed: “Otis is having a royal barbeque.” He was all of 25.

But it was less upbeat for some in his guests. The Black Power movement was on the rise and many of Redding’s inner music circle were white, like R&B producer Jerry Wexler. “People were talking a lot of trash,” Wexler recalled. “What is whitey doing here?” For his part, Redding wanted everyone he loved to be around him as he moved from his mostly African American fan base and into pop’s mainstream. Redding did what he could to un-ruffle feathers across the divide he was straddling, but his guests could still recall the tensions decades later (from a new book about Redding by Jonathan Gould).

I grew up at a time when you could hear what people were calling “soul music” on the same radio station (WAVZ) as the Beatles and Glen Campbell. (Today, it’s hard to imagine that kind of musical or audience diversity at any point “on the dial.”) But back then it was possible to think that the venues where you could see these performers would have the radio’s audience. That wasn’t even close to being true.

As the Sixties wound down and the Seventies got started, I went with a friend to see the Temptations at the Oakdale Theater. It had gently elevated seating-in-the-round, with a tent overhead and open to the summer breezes down below. Sitting almost anywhere gave you an immediate 360, so it took no time at all to discover that we were the only white boys in the house. As the Temps got going—“Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” “I Wish It Would Rain”—maybe the audience was just as surprised to see us, but before long it seemed that everyone had switched to pretending that we just weren’t there. I’d never been a minority before, and it almost felt like I was crashing somebody else’s party. But the next couple of times, there was no doubt about that at all.

Five or so years later, a college friend went with me to see Patti Labelle (and her group Labelle) at Assumption College. I was thinking a good-girls-from-parochial-schools kind of environment. Moreover, Labelle had Top 40 hits with lyrics like “Gichie, Gichie, ya ya dada/Gichie, Gichie, ya ya here…” that they sang in costumes straight out of “Star Trek.” It would be fun, but hardly high-risk entertainment. Still as I settled in, it gradually dawned that once again I was one of only two white boys in the house.

But who cared? Patti was on fire as the set got going, and my second memory of the night was her telling us that fans always brought her drugs after a performance (figuring she had to be “on something” to deliver like that), but what she wished they’d bring her was a good hamburger, “because working this hard makes you so damn hungry.”

Everyone laughed, and the girls slid into a Gil Scott-Heron number called “The Revolution Will Not be Televised.” It’s an angry song, with some spoken word delivery that foreshadows rap. It’s also long, building in momentum and rage as it goes along. A minute or so in, Patti had the room in her hand. But just then, people starting turning around and looking our way, talking loud, leaning over—what are you doing here?—as we clutched our armrests in the middle of a long row. This’ll be just like shooting fish in a barrel, I thought.

And Patti thought so too because she put “Everybody settle down” into the song’s narrative a couple of times, and when no one did, she stopped the music altogether, which left some of the outcries hanging in the air above us. I don’t remember what she said next—maybe “we’re all in this fight together”—and tempers began to cool as the house lights came up. With all eyes looking from Patti to us she said: “Everyone is welcome here,” and that was the heartpounding end of it.

More than a decade later and this time in Philly, I either hadn’t learned or didn’t want to because I was making a beeline for The Rib Crib, a take-out joint one neighborhood away. It was a Friday night, the middle of summer, there’d be a big crowd on a main street, the place was practically “an institution,” and Fran would be with me: what could go wrong?

This time it was Charlie Gray who came to our rescue. Once inside, we were packed like sardines, the only “out-of-towners,” and the crowd in front of and behind us started getting rowdy about whether we belonged. “What are you doing here?” “Go back where you came from.” It was already loud in The Crib but our being there took everything up a notch and Charlie noticed.

Technically, we weren’t the only white people this time. Our shoulders were touching autographed pictures on the wall: Charlie with Al Martino, Charlie with Frank Rizzo, Charlie with Sylvester Stallone, so we recognized Charlie as he tried to break through the crowd towards us. A booming voice preceded his big heart, telling everybody just how welcome we were, how honored he was to have us, what could he do to make us more comfortable, maybe some sweet potato pie on the house, and just like that everyone went back to looking forward to their ribs.

Otis, Patti and Charlie tapped into their power and declared what they stood for when something important to them was at stake. They already knew what to say and how to act because surely they also knew already what it was like to be “different” in a suddenly hostile place.

Your experiences clarify what you value most; how you’ve lived and worked determines your priorities. And it’s with both in mind that you’re able to care for yourself and others the next time around. That’s why Patti and Charlie never hesitated when it came to standing up for me.

I loved great food and music enough to put my pride (and maybe my safety) in the hands of strangers. But it was always about more than the risk. By stepping outside my lines, maybe, hopefully, I would gain enough clarity and power to find my generosity too.

Jury Duty is a Slice of Life That You Want to Have

March 12, 2017 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Jury Duty is a Slice of Life That You Want to Have

My reflex on getting called to jury duty is still “how can I get out of it,” but I know that’s mostly the reptilian, fight-or-flight part of my brain. Who’s asking, and why are you picking on me? But these days one of my higher order functions is quicker to declare (just a little more loudly): I hope that I’ll be fit enough to serve.

When put on notice for jury duty, nobody wants their routine to be interrupted, to rub elbows with strangers, or spend days in an airless courtroom for the bus fare plus change you’ll be paid. The first impulse is running the other way. But on the flip side of “No-o-o-o” are some pretty persuasive “yeses.”

Jury duty is a call for neighbors to come together and decide whether someone else who lives or works here has failed to act in the ways they’re supposed to. The first question worth asking is whether you want to have a say in the matter or leave it to someone else? In the 2016 presidential election, 40% (or more than 92 million eligible voters) left it for somebody else to decide—perhaps the most alarming statistic in America today.

“Being a good citizen” used to be all most people needed. You didn’t ignore the jury summons, the IRS letter, or a chance to vote for your representatives. Well no longer.

More of us are scofflaws today—literally scoffing at the law—because (maybe, hopefully) these civic obligations will just forget about us altogether if we keep on disregarding them. Here in Philadelphia, so many ignore their calls to jury duty (175,000 out of 545,000 summons issued in 2015) that the court system has simply thrown up its hands when it comes to enforcement. Of those who respond, my guess is that many do so grudgingly. This is A VERY BIG (AND RESENTFUL) VOICE that says: “I just don’t care enough to help decide ‘what’s acceptable’ and ‘what’s not’ for those of us who live here.”

I’d argue that jury duty is at least as “citizen-gratifying” as marching with a protest sign, but there are other benefits that may sound less like a civics course for those who still need convincing.

I was picked for a jury this week, so these benefits are fresh in my mind. Lawyers never used to get picked, but this was the third time for me. Aside from seeing one of the jobs I do from an entirely different angle, the two most compelling pluses involve connection and storytelling. Here’s what I mean.

The deeper we dive into our phones, the more disconnected we become from other people. There is nothing like a closet-sized jury room to introduce you to members of your community. In your hours together, you share snippets about lives and work, while your deliberations together are an intimate opportunity to encounter them through their senses of right and wrong. Close quarters seldom get warmer than that.

Particularly in big cities, the other jurors are likely to come from different “walks of life” than your neighbors next door. The bubbles we increasingly inhabit have everyone looking more or less the same and agreeing about nearly everything. A Philadelphia jury allows very different bubbles to touch and merge for a brief common purpose, and that’s been a cause for optimism each time I’ve experienced it. When you fear that America’s sky is falling, you are reminded how FUNNY, WISE, HUMBLE and DECENT other members of the public can be when you come together this way.

The stories you see and hear as a juror also tend to make the ones you’d otherwise be following pale in comparison. Sometimes the vivid characters or plot lines emerge from friendships that develop among jurors. As often, they’re from the comedies and tragedies that are playing out in front of you in the courtroom.

The comedy is usually unintended. This week, for example, counsel for a widow suing her husband’s doctors had such a strong accent that when he introduced himself all he could communicate to us clearly was his first name. His elderly client entered the courtroom in a wheelchair that appeared to be stolen from one of the airlines. And the attorney for the doctors had a skirt that was so short she practically mooned us when she sat down after introducing herself. There are no second chances to make first impressions like that.

But the stakes involved in “who’s telling the better story” can also be soul crushing or inspiring. I’ve also been on a jury that had to decide whether to impose the death penalty. Before we were selected, the testimony from the potential juror pool on their beliefs about crime and punishment said more about personal character than you’re likely to hear anywhere else.

The defendant in this case had allegedly killed his confederate in a drug deal, along with several potential witnesses who were unlucky enough to be there too when it all went down. The prosecutors thought they were hotshots. The accused was a 20-something who seemed impossibly blasé about being there. Whose facts would we believe—whose story—with this many lives in the balance?

Every trial is not a murder trial, but it’s also true that the rest of our lives rarely approach the influential place where jurors go to work everyday. As a juror, you’re helping to decide how one storyline in your community draws to its conclusion. For a little of your time, you become a character in the narrative, part of its truth as well as its consequences.

A version of this essay appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer on March 12, 2017. It also appeared in Newsday, the Charlotte Observer and Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Settling For vs. Endorsing a Candidate

August 17, 2016 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

The difference between settling for and endorsing a candidate is known only to you. It’s a thin line, and the ballot box will never tell the rest of us which. That doesn’t mean there is no accountability for the choice that you’ll make. The personal accountability for what you’ll do (and won’t do) this time around seems sharper than ever.

The 2016 Election has devolved into A Parade of the Unacceptable. As well as the Embarrassing, the Puerile, the Deceitful and the Self-serving: all of it egged on by a largely complicit press eager to bring us “reality TV” as real life. But there are genuine risks and opportunities for each of us behind the entertainment curtain. A moral stake in the outcome. Our votes should be about more than wanting one candidate over another for American Idol.

When we manage a moment or two of seriousness, our asides seem to be about everything other than our convictions.

Here in heavily Democratic Philadelphia where I live, they say to me “Yes, there’ll be a little vomit in my mouth before I vote for her, but look at the alternative.” Republican friends elsewhere are more likely to say: “He’s such a bully that he’ll disrupt the entire system she and her cronies are trying to hold onto — and maybe that’s a good thing.” None are supporting a candidate for what they’ve stood for or that their lives have demonstrated when the television lights are off.

On the other hand, every single ballot in America will offer better alternatives in November. They’ll also allow you to write in somebody other than Pokeman, that is, not a cynical protest vote but the name of a man or woman you could actually follow as a leader. There is time between then and now to rally the like-minded around such a person, who might even be available to lead us next time if not this time.

Elections should be about what you believe in, not ulterior motives. While politics may be the art of compromise (like sausage-making), that’s not what it should be when you vote. Because sometimes — this time — their sausages aren’t worth eating.

And you don’t have to.

Also published in Medium @worklifereward.

In the Wake of Charlie Hebdo: What We Hold in Common

January 11, 2015 By David Griesing 5 Comments

From a certain perspective, could those men who were shot by French police yesterday be any more inspirational?

Masked, sheathed in black, executioners pointing their weapons at a pleading, fallen policeman outside Charlie Hebdo’s offices just before they fired their fatal shots. An image on the front page of every newspaper in the world that said “You’re watching, we’re doing.”

We just walked into the offices of some of your grown-ups, men and women who made their livings mocking our beliefs. We shouted to God while we mowed the clowns down in a hail of bullets. Who’s laughing now?

I walked into a kosher market, because it’s better when there’s some punishment for the Israeli oppressors too. I called the authorities and said, “You know who I am,” and oh, by the way, “If you take down my brothers, I’ll kill more of these Jews.” Yes, we talk to one another and work together. In fact, we’ll will be talking for years about we’ve accomplished today, and how little you could do about it.

“How just three brave men who believed in martyrdom could disrupt an arrogant nation and rivet the world’s attention” is our story. We kept our heads down long enough to escape surveillance by your overburdened security systems. There are just too many of us now for you to keep track of. And you will be reminded again that we are out here waiting. You will be reminded again very soon.

If you and your family feel unwelcomed by society in the West, or are unemployed, undervalued, feeling bored or disrespected or both just about anywhere else, this is a way to take your talent, redeem your life, find your inspiration. Yes. Jihadist recruiters had their second best week after 9/11 this week, while we mostly responded with… sentiment.

If you and I are not afraid, surely it’s not because of our drones, or American advisors trying to mobilize frightened Iraqi troops, or even those women brigades of Kurdish Peshmerga warriors who are maybe the closest thing we have to our own “superheroes” in the battle against militancy.

But beyond our own adolescent yearnings for fast solutions and simple justice, there is surely fear along with the tug of something deeper that calls upon us to engage with this asymmetrical challenge more seriously–far more seriously than this week’s opportunity to set down some flowers and light some candles on blood-stained sidewalks. A pretty cheap response, when it comes down to it, because it costs us so little. In a clash of world-views, do we need any more reminding that three lone gunmen (and the legions behind them) are much more serious about the drift of the world than we are?

But still…in the coming weeks, we’ll be debating racial profiling (“I am Ahmed,” after all) and how no American college would allow its student newspaper to print politically incorrect cartoons like Charlie Hebdo’s.

Surely we’ll buy more guns (because after Sandy Hook, gun advocates said the tragic might never have happened if those first grade teachers had had their own guns), and just as surely someone will use theirs to shoot somebody who looks like the Enemy. Then, of course, we’ll have polarizing arguments about what it all means. But talk is cheap too. In the coming weeks, it will still be our sentiment and endless talk around those who want to annihilate the freedoms that give us the luxury of all this sentiment and talk.

We take our values for granted. We’re no longer even sure about the ones that we share. But Said and Cherif Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly were not confused. Going forward, there will be plenty of people who want to provide for us a black & white moral clarity (Ms. Le Pen if you’re in France, fill in the blank if you’re in the U.S.). But wouldn’t it be better if we started re-learning for ourselves how to become clearer about the values that we’re committed to?

In a recent op-ed entitled “Democracy Requires a Patriotic Education,” former dean of Yale College Donald Kagan wrote the following about what he fears we are (and are not) being taught in our schools today.

We look to education to solve the pressing current problems of our economic and technological competition with other nations, but we must not neglect the inescapable political and ethical effects of education.

We in the academic community have too often engaged in miseducation. . .. If we encourage rampant individualism to trample on the need for a community and common citizenship, if we ignore civic education, the forging of a single people, the building of a legitimate patriotism, we will have selfish individuals, heedless of the needs of others, the war of all against all, the reluctance to work towards the common good and to defend our country when defense is needed. (emphasis added)

Maybe you cringed when you read the words “legitimate patriotism,” but Kagan is right.

We need to figure out how to stand together again, what we hold as precious in common and would be willing to champion together. They are the values that we would be willing to fight and even die for. Try to imagine what they are if you can. Try to imagine us coming together as citizens and finding the collective spirit to fight a war like World War II today (with all hands-on-deck, not just a few “volunteers”) and you can sense the gulf between our illusion of shared purpose and the reality.

We need to bridge this divide—moving from sentiment and debate to principles we share (whatever they are)—and do so quickly, before others jump in to do it for us when we’re even more afraid. After all, is there anyone who doubts that there is a gun pointed our way, and that it could be any of us there on the ground, pleading for life?

What is necessary is not cheap, but the alternatives, well we are starting to see the alternatives.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

(William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming)