Apple and the Rise and Fall of Man

The serpent was slier than any creature the heavens wrought. It approached her and in a quiet, an oh so quiet whisper, he seduces her, smiling, looking her in the eyes, he says sit next to me, she sits. The serpent says “I can make you powerful; your husband he too can be powerful. Right now you are in the dark, but the light is not far, God knows of your darkness but chooses to keep you there; if you eat from that tree, it will make you as powerful as God himself. There will be light, no death, only the light that will make you Gods yourself.”

She was anxious, she asked herself “who is this creature, what is this creature.” But the creature knows her thoughts, he says “God has made the heavens and the earth, everything from the stars to the depths of hell, but the power is not his own, he keeps it for himself. The fruit from that tree your husband has named apple will give you the power of God, so eat, share with your husband and you will see.”

She succumbs, and gives the fruit to the man, who eats also, and the eyes of the two of them were opened.

Flash forward 2000 years and humanity is succumbing to another Apple, except there is no sly serpent, but a first class sales men from Cupertino, CA. The upcoming release of the new IPhone and its operating system has me pondering what new powers I can wield. While it might not make me god; it does me all knowing; no I can’t make a woman from a rib or man from dust, but I can create HD movies with the tips of my fingers, something the bible never attributed to god. Apple has made me a super multitasker, I can check email, talk, figure out the name of a song, find a restaurant, and send video all without resting on the 7th day. So I welcome the new IPhone and its features. Why, because I remember the darkness, colorless phones lacking style and swagger; however unlike our greatest ancestors this byte of the apple will pay off.

Adventures In Love

For 30 years he had always been a good father, husband, lover and friend and today he looked across the table into her eyes and instead of remarking on how wonderful their lives were and how happy he was, he said quietly but forcefully, “I am leaving you. I don’t love you anymore. I want a divorce.” She blinked in confusion and wondered if she had hallucinated. She leaned forward and attempted to force her lips to say, “Excuse me” but before she could get it out, he repeated himself this time louder: “I am leaving you. I don’t love you anymore. I want a divorce.” She looked into his eyes. They revealed nothing. His face was stone. Wait. He meant this. He was serious. She had heard him correctly. Like it had just appeared she saw his weekender at the door. He slowly rose from the table and without another word or a backwards glance, strode out of the door of the home they bought together 25 years ago. Her breath caught in her throat as she was smacked with the realization that her entire life just fell to pieces. She had planned on retirement with him. They had kids in college. Their oldest was trying for a baby. They were to be grandparents soon. She sat like a stone: numb and lifeless. Hours must have passed. The house they had raised a family in was empty. The life they had worked to build together was gone. Tears begin to stream down her face and her pain reverberated through the empty rooms. She didn’t know if she’d ever stop crying or if she could ever get out of that chair. The love of her life was…..gone.
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In researching this piece, I found numerous women who have posted messages on message boards who tell a similar story. Many have never worked outside of the home and are for all intensive purposes, helpless. These women sacrificed careers for family. They had never saved for retirement or even gave it a second thought. They built their lives around their families. Now, their kids are grown and just when they thought it was now time to rekindle the flame that smoldered for the last 30 years, their devoted husbands walk out on them. They want to know why. They thought everything with their husbands was in perfect working order. They thought their marriages were solid. They were the ones that younger women sought for advice on how to maintain marital bliss and they had given it freely. These women often remark, “Sure, there was no passion but we had each other.” They are surprised and devastated. They had no idea that he felt this way. They had no idea he wasn’t happy. He never seemed anything other than content. Yes, maybe the romance and excitement had waned but isn’t this what happens when you add kids, work and the stress of juggling finances to any marriage? Were they not just like millions of other couples entering their third stage? Weren’t they….happy?

Divorce after 30 years of marriage, also known as a grey divorce, has been on the uptick in the Western world and is such a rare event that few have bothered to study it. Some researchers state that these grey divorces of those aged 65 and over have increased to 10% in 2001. Overwhelmingly, the majority of divorces occur within the first 8 years of marriage. These are often the young struggling divorced mothers that we hear about and read about in national reports concerning the overworked and underpaid who are worried about their futures. No one thinks about the 55-65 year old woman with grown newly independent children and how a divorce after 30+ years can devastate her life: these women lose their life partners and their financial security and cannot count on their energetic youth to help them spring back.
Many therapists cite a meltdown or a midlife crisis as the cause of these events. What else can lead these otherwise sane men to abandon their wives without the slightest indication of his unhappiness? Stephanie Coontz, a professor of family studies at Evergreen State University and author of "Marriage, A History," has a very different answer; she says that couples breaking up after 20 to 30 years together are becoming increasingly common. "In the past, even if a marriage was unhappy, couples stayed together. What else could you do?" Coontz said. "The idea that you could meet another person at this stage was totally foreign. But now, people in their 50s and 60s are healthier, can look forward to another 25 to 35 years of life … and have more options, including a much higher chance of meeting a new partner." Although the chances of meeting another partner have increased overtime, there is a wide gap between the remarriage rates of men and women with women being much less likely to remarry than men.
Personally, I do not buy any of the simplistic assertions that we are living longer and that men are having a crisis of sorts that cause men to walk out on their families. Actually, according to a survey from the AARP, more often than not, the women are initiating the divorce, though this is not what is reflected in the current media reports of grey divorces. Time and time again, we are reading that these women are claiming that they had no idea anything was wrong. They were under the impression that their lives were the picture of domestic felicity. In many cases, the comfortable lives they were living were largely for the comfort and happiness of these women and the children. We are seeing that comfort and happiness for men and women tend to mean two completely different things. In her world, nothing was wrong and in his, everything was and her happiness blinded her to this fact as often happens in relationships. Many of these men are yearning to recapture the sense of adventure and exploration that they gave up for marriage and children. We see these men as walking out on their families when they are really waling into a life not marked by the discontents of civilization that say they must be complacent with a life that consists of little more than going to work and coming home to a Sam Adams and a Red Sox game and a “honey do” list.
What men seek when they leave their wives after 30 years is a new beginning and a sense of adventure. They are yearning to blossom out of the mundane lives they’ve lived for the last several decades in order to explore the world and rid themselves of tireless familial obligations more biologically suited for the feminine.
Wives should encourage their husband to go and explore before it’s too late. Instead of yet another weekend with her mother, she should send him off on his annual trip with his college buddies to go fishing or camping. Wives should encourage his golf outings and other hobbies that make him feel like he can escape the reality of ordinary family life. Wives, if you can get him away from the house without a wife and the kids a couple times a year and encourage his hobbies (even if they are slightly dangerous), you may be able to prevent one of those late evening conversations that mean the end of your 30-year marriage.
Many will point to Al and Tipper Gore’s recent announcement of divorce as being completely antithetical to my argument: here is a man who lived a life full of adventure. He has been a senator, vice president, presidential candidate and is currently the world spokesman on the all things environmental. What many pundits will admit is that Gore could have run again in 2004 and defeated his nemesis, George W. Bush. Gore could have also run in 2008 and been the anointed one and Barack Obama still would have been the senator from Illinois, but he didn’t. He stated that Tipper could not deal with another campaign and his family wanted him to spend more time at home.
Presidential candidates will admit that longing to be being president, once in your mind is an itch that does not stop until you are six feet under. Who knows if Gore would have been a great president? What he knows is that he was elected once to the presidency and there is a better than average chance he could have done it again, but for his wife. Now that Tipper is home alone, I wonder if she thinks she would have been better served letting the man fulfill his dream of trying to change the world rather than keeping him at home civilized and discontent.

Kwame Kilpatrick

Kwame Kilpatrick stood in the courtroom and begged for forgiveness. His lies in the text messaging and perjury scandal that rocked Detroit in 2008. Kilpatrick speaking softly portrayed himself as a bit beaten. He claimed to be a victim of a vindictive prosecutor who is fixated on the old Kwame Kilpatrick, the one who lied in a police whistleblower lawsuit when he denied being romantically involved with his then chief of staff Christine Beatty. He claimed to be a good husband, a new person, but Judge Groner’s response was simple “Your testimony in this court amounted to perjury” the end of the line had been reached for Kwame. He will now spend the next 2-5 years in prison. His law license has been taken from him, Compuware, the company paying is 120,000 dollar salary will be releasing him at the end of the month.

It is a strange and interesting result for a man to whom the mantle had been passed in 2002. He was crowned the hip-hop mayor: a new breed of politician from the streets who could understand the plight of the city while displaying an amazing aura of cool. In his 2002 inaugural address, Kilpatrick said:

“I stand before you as a son of the city of Detroit and all that it represents. I was born here in the city of Detroit, I was raised here in the city of Detroit, I went to these Detroit Public Schools. I understand this city. ... This position is personal to me. It's much more than just politics.”

All this was news to people who knew him. His mom, Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick had been a state representative (a seat Kwame took over after she vacated the seat to run for congress) and is now a member of congress where she has served since 2003. His dad, Bernard Kilpatrick was a chief of staff for a Wayne County Executive and now runs his own consulting firm. Kwame had never been what he said he was, and is no more hip-hop than the suburban middle class children who drive their expensive SUVs while singing along to the latest Lil Wayne.

All of this came to a head in the courtroom on May 25, 2010. For once, someone saw right through the mayor. The man who disgraced his office by inviting strippers into the mayoral mansion. During the first 33 months of the Kwame administration, he managed to rack up $210,000 in city issued credit cards to pay for travel, meals, and entertainment. He managed to install a 131 million dollar radio system that was used by the Detroit police and fire departments. He gave out no bid contracts and wantonly squandered the resources in the most economically depressed city in the country. Yet, in 2005 he managed to win re-election. How? He won with 53% of the vote, a victory he secured by sending his staffers to nursing homes to help dying patients fill out their ballots.

So who was the real Kwame? Probably a pimp who managed to jive is way into Black people’s hearts by providing them hope that even their hypersexual, irresponsible, earring wearing entitled sons can finagle their way into positions of power. There should be no place for that in our community. We should expect our politicians to speak without using colloquial terms, treat their offices with a tremendous amount of respect and more importantly love their wives and children. While this is an ideal, it is not one that we should be willing to compromise from the start. The mayor should be about the people’s business, not auditioning for a rap video.

I do not doubt that people will say it was racism, but I want to remind them that Kwame plead guilty and agreed to pay a fine of 1 million dollars to Detroit in payments of $79,000. Instead of paying his fine, he lived in million dollar homes, sent his wife to plastic surgeons and rode around in expensive SUVs. Some may see the sentence as too harsh. Kwame’s lawyer has already said that it seems as if they are "out to get" Kwame. It is a harsh sentence but unlike most things in Kwame’s life of privilege it may teach him and others that follow suit a valuable lesson: there is no space in our lives for people who take more than they give, misuse others for personal gain and take advantage of poorer and weaker members of the community to advance their own motives.