KELVIN WADE: The iPinion Years

  Published 2013/05/06  Some people just need to be smacked upside their damn heads. There's just no way around it. I have to start the smacks at the top with President Barack Obama for not getting us out of Afghanistan yesterday. No way should our military be parked in the middle of a wasteland where warring tribes from the 6th century with no interest in being a functioning country blow each other to hell and back. Barack should've smacked his generals upside the head long ago. Senator John McCain needs a smack upside his head. Obviously there's the belated smack for running a 2008 presidential campaign with a slogan of "Country First" while simultaneously giving his slogan the finger by selecting a brain dead bimbette who proved not only was she unqualified to be vice-president but unqualified to be much more than a letter turner on "Wheel of Fortune." But McCain needs a current smack because he never finds a war he's not willing to engage. Whethe...

  Published 2013/05/07 "Dancing at the Shame Prom: sharing the stories that kept us small" is a new 242 page book edited by Amy Ferris and Hollye Dexter published by Seal Press. In this weighty tome are essays by 27 talented women sharing their intimate stories of shame and releasing that pent up pain and reclaiming their lives. The stories are moving, raw and honest but rather than share with readers the stories from the book, I'd like to share one of my own. I couldn't read this book without thinking of my own shame. It's a story I've told before but that I can tell now without wearing that cumbersome cloak of shame. On Mother's Day, May 13, 1990, my older brother Ken got a ride home from jail from a friend after being arrested the night before for disorderly conduct. Ken, a correctional officer at California State Prison Solano in Vacaville, California, put on his uniform, stripping off his nametag and patch and drove to the Parkway Lounge in Fairfield,...

  Published 2013/05/12  It was August 19, 2006 when I met my brothers, Orvis and Tony, for lunch at a Chinese restaurant in Fairfield, California. Our younger brother Scott would be with us from Canada within days. The evening before, Tony had called to tell me that our mother had passed away at the age of 69. She'd been sick and in the hospital, and her death wasn't unexpected. There are few things rougher than having a parent incapacitated in the hospital hovering between life and death. Our ordeal was complicated by the fact that we had to make a decision about whether to remove her feeding tube and let her die or not. It was an agonizing decision because the thought of pulling the tube and waiting for her to slowly starve to death didn't seem dignified to me. We'd put off the decision for a few days. Her death took the decision out of our hands. As we ate, I didn't want to think of the unconscious woman we'd been visiting in the hospital the past few weeks. ...

  Published 2013/05/24  I love going to the movies. From buying the tickets on Fandango so I don't have to wait in line, to indulging in the artery-hardening, wallet-draining snacks, to waiting for the movie to start to the previews of coming attractions, all of the pre-show events are as exciting to me as the feature presentation. And doing it with someone by your side is even more fun. Still, I've had some annoying and downright weird things happen at the movies. I recently went to see the hysterically funny and talented Robert Downey Jr. in "Iron Man 3." My girlfriend Cathi and I tend to sit pretty close to the screen, mainly because most people don't want to sit that close. That way we don't have to put up with people walking past us or sitting in front of us, for the most part. But, with the theater half full, this big ball of a man resembling Bluto walked in four kids all under the age of 6 and sat down two rows in front of us. Shoot. Me. Now. Little kid...

  Published 2013/05/31  There's a lull in the gun debate right now following the defeat of every reasonable measure in Congress. A certain percentage of the gun owning public believes we must have guns to fight government tyranny. Really? Is that what it's about? For most of us, when we think of John Wilkes Booth creeping into that darkened theater box and firing his derringer into the back of President Lincoln's skull and leaping to the stage shouting, "Sic simper tyrannis (Thus always to tyrants!)," we're on the side of President Lincoln. When we think of frame 313 of the Zapruder film that shows President Kennedy's head exploding in Dealey Plaza from an assassin's bullet, spraying blood and brains onto Jackie O and sending a piece of his skull flying 25 feet from the limo, we're horrified and saddened for the nation. And every April 19th when we see photos of the devastated Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City, destroyed by  4,800 pounds o...

  Published 2013/06/03  Controversy swirls around a new Cheerios ad featuring an interracial family. In the ad, a clearly biracial child asks her white mother if Cheerios are healthy. Her mother explains the way the cereal purportedly helps lower cholesterol makes it heart healthy. The little girl runs off with the Cheerios box. Cut to a scene of the girl's black father waking up on the couch with a pile of Cheerios covering his chest. General Mills had to disable comments on YouTube for the commercial because of the hateful, racist posts the ad garnered. Though the overwhelming majority of the comments were supportive, still there were those that referenced Nazis and disparaged African-Americans. No doubt a large part of this story is just about YouTube. If you go to the comments section of almost any YouTube video you'll see some of the most vile comments from hateful trolls. These are most likely jobless Xbox-playing guys, living with their mothers, whose only sexual outlet...