It makes me nervous knowing the re-election of President Barack Obama rests partially in the hands of Ohio voters and in the trustworthiness of the shaky Ohio electoral process. 
  

This election-era talk about lifting, taxing or not taxing America’s middle class doesn’t land or resonate with me. When I hear numbers like the possibility of $250,000 tax breaks for the wealthy, it’s drowned out by the white noise poverty thrums through my head or the rumbling hunger makes in my gut. It’s official: I am distracted by my own poverty.  

There is a lot wrong in the brutal beating of Pat Mahaney, a 45-year-old white man, by six black teenagers in North College Hill. Sadly and somehow brilliantly, this is a teachable moment about to pass us all by if we don’t start grappling with and then telling some truths.  

Like a lot of Cincinnati neighborhoods, mine — Walnut Hills — is segregated and there are fine, even invisible-to-the-unknowing-eye dividing lines separating beauty from filth, danger from safety, white from black and the strugglers from the affluent.  

It’s an oversimplification, but I do not like Willard Mitt Romney and my dislike plays “Tag! You’re it!” with the smallest annoyances.

  

Washington Park is a social experiment so vastly successful Cincinnatians might be unaware of the nuances in its meaning.
We’re still spastically drunk off the park’s new-park smell.  

How is this still even on the table in 2012? Why hasn’t unprotected sex among blacks — the population with the highest HIV numbers — been more closely associated with self-esteem, because you must not love yourself if you let someone push up unprotected.


  

When I rode into Denver in the blazing summer of 1984, I  befriended two native Coloradans in classes on the Denver campus of the University of Colorado, the same campus once attended by the orange-haired gunman accused in the midnight massacre of 12 people in a multiplex cinema in Aurora July 20 during a premiere of The Dark Knight Rises.  

It must be comforting and indeed relaxing to come from near and far and land at Sawyer Point for three days, look around and see throngs and gaggles of folks just like yourself everywhere you look. Aaaah, whiteness. Take a deep breath. Smell it.


  

Eyes rolling. Heavy sigh. Gays and lesbians are some of the most tedious people. A worrisome, worried lot. I get being out. I do. I am. It’s this new way folks come out that is funny and boring, and when I say “folks” I mean celebrities, stars, rappers, singers, athletes. You know, the ones living in such rarified air that after they post, tweet or air the news of their gayness the rest of us — yawn — already knew, they have the literal luxury of being able to live their lives without really being stung by the realities of homophobia the rest of us live with.