The short life and appalling death of Raymond Zack, an avoidable American tragedy.

by Dr. Jeffrey Lant
Crown Memorial State Beach, Alameda, California is the kind of place you come to breathe and shake off life's trials and tribulations.
The panorama is just what you think the Golden State should be...a place of possibilities, not inhibitions. Here the air is superior to any French vintage... the chill waters are bracing and playful....
Here the very birds fly higher because they are contented at such a place... and in the distance, clearly seen, is the great structure of one of mankind's signature triumphs the Golden Gate Bridge... which sends every spirit soaring...
It was here that Raymond Zack came to die... and where the people charged with protecting life assisted Raymond take his, to the astonishment, wonder and outrage of the world.
Raymond Zack, born July 23, 1959.
Raymond was, like so many millions of us, a son of America's great heartland; Ohio born and bred. His life moved to the rhythm that is so quintessentially ours...
He was a product of Columbus' Catholic schools...  where he learned good manners, the importance of being a good man and valuable citizen... and where he glimpsed, at the hands of his dedicated instructors, the reality of God Everlasting. At 6'3" tall, this giant of  a boy excelled at track and baseball... people saw him above the crowd and, with a wink and nudge, said the boy had talent.
He went, and went proudly, to Ohio State.... as American as any educational establishment in the land. It was here, upon graduation,  that he entered the community of educated men and women...  And where he decided to answer Horace Greeley's great exhortation "Go West, young man, Go West!" And he did, attracted by the dazzling sunshine and even more dazzling possibilities of California, the pot of gold at the end of America's rainbow.
But California life, for all that the sun was radiant, gave Raymond Zack more than his share of life's troubles. His family life was turbulent, confusing, never restful though he was the beneficiary of his foster mother's affectionate care and unceasing concern.
He weighed 300 pounds now and, like millions of his countrymen, was challenged by the complexities of food and the clear and present dangers of overindulgence. Chagrined by his bulk, Raymond, bit by bit, withdrew from the body politic and faced the secret sorrows of isolation and loneliness, the abiding reality for too many of his countrymen.
His mother died in November 2010... and though there had been confusions and disappointments there, still she was his mother... and her loss magnified his burdens.
Then, in the midst of a great recession, where California's profound promise was tarnished, Raymond lost his job at the St. Vincent de Paul Free Food Distribution Center where, along with Mrs. Dolores Berry, his foster mother, he had helped everyone who came. Now the man who had helped so many... was himself in need of help. This, too, was, quintessentially American for too many...
Raymond, with a "God helps those who help themselves" attitude, tried hard to do what he'd been taught to do; to keep his chin up and a stiff upper lip; to do what he could... to stay cheerful in the face of adversity.
But bit by bit, like so many, his resilience and hope were worn away. Raymond's dark days were nigh...
In the still of the night...
We shall never know where Raymond's anxious forebodings carried him, alone at the midnight hour. At such a time a man may turn to booze, women, any dissipation to dispel the gloom... but Raymond seems to have faced his great matter alone... and in profound despair. This, too, is reality for millions of the dispossessed and fearful.
At some irrevocable moment in his profound human misery Raymond decided the game was not worth the candle... and that it was time to move again, out of very life itself.
Thus, on May 30, 2011, while his countrymen were celebrating the sacrifices made by others to the benefit of all, Raymond Zack decided to make a sacrifice, too -- of himself, since living life was just too painful and without hope.
And so he waded into the chill waters at Crown Memorial State Beach, about to be the venue of muddle, confusion, bumbling... and death. A great American tragedy was about to commence... unnecessary, scandalous, an event that enhanced no one and left Raymond Zack, floating face down, his life's work at an end.
Seen by many.
Remember, Raymond Zack was a big man, 6'3", over 300 pounds. He moved slowly, deliberately in the shallow waters. He was clearly seen though his purpose, at first, was not. Still, as Raymond walked into deeper waters, residents were concerned; a 911 call was made... alerting police and firefighters that some kind of incident was underway.
In just 4 minutes help was at hand... and at hand help stayed... but without lifting a finger. And here is where an avoidable tragedy morphs into disbelief, reproach, scandal, and incomprehension.
Not one of the many lifesaving professionals on the beach, not a single one, did a single thing to forestall the tragedy that could so easily have been prevented.
Later these officials, pummelled by an incredulous world, worked overtime to manufacture excuses they hoped would appease, mollify and cover.
Fire officials said that because of budget cuts no one knew the necessary rescue procedures. But this excuse was quickly blasted... when it was shown the department had money, but no sense.  Other officials said rescue policies did not cover the case in point.
A police spokesman said officers stayed out of the water because Zack was suicidal and posed a possible threat.
A boat was requested to take officers to Zack... but those requesting it never indicated the matter was pressing.
In short, at every moment where judgement, help and assistance were required... the professionals at hand, our honored paladins, were without judgement, help and assistance.
And so, in full view of the world, in full view of his hysterical foster parent, 86 year old Dolores Berry, who unsuccessfully begged for celerity and assistance, Raymond Zack died...
In the way of these things, everything the system could have provided Raymond in life only emerged when he was dead... in such ways does America expiate its negligence.
Now there are flowers on the beach where he died, a crowd gathers daily to reflect and wonder; bishops make Raymond the subject of their learned lamentations. Municipal officials investigate and dismiss the inept. All this is good, right and proper.
But we must not forget the man at the center of it all, Raymond Zack, dead too soon at 50. He meant us well, each and every one of us. Now, prematurely, he rests in the bosom of the Lord; may he find the peace there he never had here. 
About the Author
Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is CEO of Worldprofit, Inc. , providing a wide range of online services for small and-home based businesses.  Republished with author's permission by Ray Wisniewski

Listen my children and you shall hear of Sarah Palin's version of the midnight ride of Paul Revere. So, who needs facts anyway?

by Dr. Jeffrey Lant
Sarah Palin came to Boston June 3, 2011 with her traveling circus of friends, children, grandchildren, and hangers on... On vacation, she wanted to show herself off to Boston while instructing her claque in the finer points of American revolution history, so much of which took place right here.
Frankly, we were glad to see her since our tourist business was hard hit by the recent recession and is only just recovering, glad that is...
... until she started lecturing us locals on what we know best: our own history, whose facts she so scrambled that she  managed to turn Paul Revere from our celebrated hero into a stooge for the British, a spy treacherously working for the very people we were fighting against, our 18th century owners and oppressors.
Here's what she said after a visit to Old North Church when she was asked about Paul Revere's historic ride, April 18, 1775. With the ringing certitude she's made all her own Professor Palin commenced her mangling.  Revere, she said, "warned the British that they weren't going to be taking away our arms. By ringing those bells and making sure as he's riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free."
Except for the  part where Palin says Revere got on his horse and rode... Professor Palin is wrong on every single point.
Revere was not on a mission to warn the British. (Where does the lady get these ideas anyway?).
He rode to warn the colonists to get up and defend themselves for the "British were coming", by sea.
He didn't work alone but as part of a team of brave people who each, once briefed, had to get up and get out fast, to warn the colonists along their appointed route so that they could defend themselves and the arms they had dangerously, laboriously assembled.
If Paul Revere had done what Palin said he did ("warn the British") he would have been snuffed out by the locals as a dangerous snitch, a traitor, not raised to the pinnacle of national respect and  admiration.
This entire imbroglio, this tempest in a tea cup, should never had taken place. Palin could have chosen to do what I did when I took my nephew Kyle out to the same historic sites.
First, get a guidebook and read it.
Second, visit the superb visitor centers along the way. They are packed with pertinent detail and good (air-conditioned) films, a real pleasure to see and get out of the humidity, too.
Three, pepper the well prepared park service employees and local volunteers in period costumes with all your questions. They've heard it all and, in my experience (for I've taken friends and family members thither many times) are well qualified, well versed, and always warm and welcoming in the New England fashion.
Sarah, of course, chose none of these sensible alternatives.
Sarah likes "going rogue" about this, as everything else. It means she does things, everything, her own way... and those who don't like it can lump it. She so liked the idea and the phrase that she titled her autobiography "Going Rogue: An American Life". (Simon and Schuster 2009). In Palin's "Alice in Wonderland" world whatever she says, no matter how wrong, is right and anyone criticizing her, however right, is always wrong.
Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, her Fox colleague, was the latest victim of Palin-think. Sunday June 5, he discovered why even suggesting that Palin could be mistaken ever about anything is like fighting with a skunk. And we all know what that means...
The daring but hapless Wallace suggested that Palin had erred in her Boston lecture on Revere. But Palin wasn't about to suffer that. What? Sarah! Make! A! Mistake! Not just impossible... but inconceivable. And what's more, that was just another instance of "gotcha" journalism, bad people out to get her. (In Sarah's conspiratorial world there are always such evildoers at hand  for Sarah's world is lined with paranoia.)
"You know what?" Palin spat at Wallace, "I didn't mess up about Paul Revere. Part of his ride was to warn the British that we're already there. That, hey, you're not going to succeed. You're not going to take American arms."
There was more, lots more, delivered with the usual ingredients of her verbal Molotov cocktails... surety, disdain, condescension and her usual "Look brother,don't tread on me. Get off my back" nastiness, which can in an  instant turn her smile into a sneer. Make no mistake about it, Sarah's a tough customer and any suggestion that she's not as good as the Virgin Mary directs her firepower at you, while her stiletto comes down hard on your foot, the better to make her point -- maggot, don't mess with me.
And this to Chris Wallace, a professional colleague at the Fox Network!
She went on, fire and brimstone at the ready, for Palin always comes armed with the arsenal of the street fighter:
"Here is what Paul Revere did. He warned the Americans that the British were coming.., and they were going to try take our arms and we got to make sure that we were protecting ourselves and shoring up all of ammunitions and our firearms so that they couldn't take it," Palin said June 5.
"But remember that the British had already been there, many soldiers for seven years in the area. And part of Paul Revere's ride --and it wasn't just one ride -- he was a courier, he was a messenger. Part of his ride was to warn the British that we're already there.... You are not going to beat our own well-armed persons, individual, private militia that we have. He did warn the British."
And that, she suggests, is that. But, most assuredly, that is not that... and not just because she misstated a few facts which are all easily available in libraries and online. Even Boston's own Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his famous poem "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere" (published 1863) erred in focusing solely on what Revere did, to the detriment of his many other colleagues who also rode hard for freedom that April evening.
No, Palin's fault is the assumption of infallibility with which she  now approaches everything, great and small. That every word she mispronounces is faultless; every sentence she twists and destroys is perfect.... and every fact she gets wrong was in fact just previously misunderstood and is now clarified by her. This is not an American citizen and possible presidential candidate. This is the first, infallible American pope... and a woman too. And if you purists in the Vatican suggest that a non-Catholic and a woman will never be pope, Sarah will tell you different, thundering with words like schism and anti-pope at the ready.
For you see, Sarah aims for bigger fish than the White House with its tiresome term limits and insistent people always to propitiate. Sarah aims for the very seat of St. Peter and a lifetime audience commanded to listen and obey...
"A cry of defiance, and not of fear, A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door, And a word that shall echo for evermore..."
The word of our Sarah urbi et orbi "In the hour of darkness and peril and need"... Amen! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
About the Author
Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is CEO of Worldprofit, Inc., providing a wide range of online services for small and-home based businesses. Dr. Lant is also a historian and author of 18 best-selling business books.  Republished with author's permission by Ray Wisniewski 

'Where the Iris grows... That is where I want to be....' The flower at the end of the rainbow.

by Dr. Jeffrey Lant
Author's  program note. To put yourself in the right mood for this article, go to any search engine and find one of Tennessee's four Official State Songs, "When It's Iris Time In Tennessee," words and music by Willa Mae Waid. It's a lovely, lilting tune, wistful as all songs are which are sung by those far away from home... remembering.
It is early June, and the irises are now to be found in profusion around the City of Cambridge in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. I  saw the first one the other day in front of my favorite Chinese restaurant Chang Sho. And though I was busy with one of the necessary errands which constitute too great a part of human life... I stopped.  The beauty of this ecstasy in the mud insisted.
There before me was a dazzling thing dressed in cloth of gold, the exact shade of the cream soda I drank too often as a boy fifty summers ago on the humid prairies of Illinois; the cream soda you craved, you gulped, which gave you sticky fingers, but never quenched your thirst; (so clever were its makers).
In an instant omnipotent memory was present, the way unstoppable memory will do. This time it reminded me of something I had read in the memoirs of Sir Henry Channon, the man who had deserted his Chicago roots to find his proper perch in life in London as a Member of Parliament... and collector of royalties.  He was a  boulevardier, a word for which we have no good English equivalent... a thing which tells us much about the French who do.... and the English.... who don't.
Sir Henry, universally known as "Chips", was a boulevardier, man about town, about London town.  As such he attended the first Garden Party at Buckingham Palace after World War II. He happened to be gossiping with one of Queen Mary's relations when this very symbol of "They'll always be an England" arrived, blinding in cloth of gold. "Cousin May," he said, "is rather overdressed", to Chips' scandalized amusement.
And so was the golden iris in front of me, as if some careless maharajah, rushing, had dropped this most expensive of materials in the mud, later to fulminate against the loss, blaming his chauffeur.
But just as Queen Mary had calculated her breathtaking appearance to touch drab lives with grandeur... so did the flower in front of me, largesse for a drab world, overburdened, as I was myself, with the littlest and most nagging things.
The flower's unexpected appearance was lavish, excessive, a sharp pronunciamento, "Good people," it boldly proclaimed. "I have come amongst you to cheer you, to uplift your spirits, to give you the gift of exuberance and excess... of profusion and prodigality. Seize them now... for they are yours for just a moment."
Here was the true work of the iris, the flower that takes its name from the Greek word for a rainbow... and not just any rainbow either... but the rainbow which at its end delivers the treasure you seek at such a place... a treasure of unceasing magnificence without end.
At  rainbow's end, you find irises of every color... a gift of superabundance, without limits, where too much and even more is your birth right. This is the place you have sought your entire life... and which the open sesame of the iris delivers with only one command, "Find bliss here."
Facts about iris.
Iris is a genus of 260 species of flowering plants  with showy flowers. As well as being the scientific name, iris is also very widely used as a common name for all Iris species.
The genus is widely distributed throughout the north temperate zone. Their habitats are considerably varied, ranging from cold and montane regions to the grassy slopes, meadowlands and riverbanks of Europe, the Middle East and northern Africa, Asia and across North America.
Irises are perennial herbs, growing from creeping rhizomes, or, in drier climates, from bulbs (bulbous irises). They have long, erect flowering stems, which may be simple or branched, solid or hollow, and flattened or have a circular cross-section. The rhizomatous species usually have 3-10 basal, sword-shaped leaves growing in dense clumps. The bulbous species have cylindrical, basal leaves.
Iris is for show.
Other flowering plants have many uses culinary, medical, as balms, salves, to clear the mind and the heart.
Not the iris.
Iris is designed for show... not merely to brighten space... but to change the entire orientation of a place, from mundane to brilliant. This is no trivial thing when you think of the unending multitudes striving to find both meaning and escape from their burdensome, colorless lives. For these people, and they are everywhere on earth, the iris is a plant of resolute optimism. Where there is a single iris, there is hope. And where any iris has once lived... there hope lingers, insistent that things can be better, beauty can be achieved and circumstances entirely altered for the better, one militant iris flower at a time. The revolutionary iris shouts, "Beauty here, beauty now, beauty forever!" It is insistent that you, if you but take the time to stop and perceive, shall derive full measure of this beauty, for a life without such beauty is no life at all.
Poets and iris
All poets have not understood the imperial function of the iris, with its life-changing mission... but poet Chris Lane does. In his poem "Purple Irises with hues of gold and fragility," he writes
"Oh, this beauty with for my eyes to see I cannot keep them for only me with friends true I shall share and next year bring to them the joy I find in a purple world with hues of gold and fragile love."
Lane knows that the iris turns him and every one perceiving it into a devoted zealot, one who must proselytize with so much beauty, earnest in spreading its unbounded joy to friends and total strangers, too. Iris has a mission and when it seizes your attention, you will have that mission, too.
The role of the adamant iris is clear: it beautifies now and finds dedicated adherents to beautify later. Iris exist in a realm of beauty, beauty today, more beauty tomorrow, cycle after cycle of beauty for all who see it, the task to enlighten those who suffer because they have not.
As such the iris reject literary renderings which turn them from their great mission into mere flowers.
They reject Georgia Gudykunst who writes "May your blooms be floriferous and in good form."
They reject Edith Buckner Edwards "Iris, most beautiful flower, Symbol of life, love and light."
They reject the celebrated D.H. Lawrence,  in his poem "Scent of Irises."
"A faint, sickening scent of irises Persists all morning...."
These poems do not have and therefore cannot convey and assist the unending work of iris and its significance for improving the lot of people worldwide and enriching their lives. This needs constancy,  consistently and profound belief.  And it requires the unceasing ability to touch wounded lives and make them bold advocates of universal beauty.
There is a hint of this in Willa Mae Waid's heartfelt song "When It's Iris Time in Tennessee."  For she senses the deep power of  iris... its ability to revive us... and uplift our spirits. This is the magic of iris.... and it was all present, every bit of it, in the iris dressed in cloth of gold which had my full attention just the other day as it kept steady watch for people like me who required its succor and were the better for it.

About the Author
Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is CEO of Worldprofit, Inc., providing a wide range of online services for small and-home based businesses. Republished with author's permission by Ray Wisniewski