Loving life, cycling, hiking, skating and family. Living with Lynch MSH6. Grandma of 6, and wife of no ordinary Joe and arguably a better half! Renobikehikers:)
When Allyson Felix became pregnant, Nike threatened to cut her sponsorship contract by almost 70% because of her pregnancy.
They told her:
“You should know your place… and just run.”
Amid all this, at seven months pregnant, Allyson had to undergo an emergency C-section due to a serious complication.
Her baby girl spent over a month in the neonatal intensive care unit.
But two years later, Allyson qualified for her fifth Olympic Games, with her daughter in the stands cheering her on.
Allyson left Nike.
And she founded her own shoe brand: Saysh One.
At the Tokyo Olympics, she ran wearing her own sneakers, carrying the motto:
“I know exactly where my place is.”
With 11 medals, she surpassed Carl Lewis and became the most decorated American track and field athlete in history.
And to all women, she gave this message:
“I raised my voice and built this company for you, so that you’ll never have to train at 4:30 in the morning, five months pregnant, just to hide it from your sponsor.” ❤️
On July 31, 1968, a young, black man was reading the newspaper when he saw something that he'd never seen before. With tears in his eyes, he started running and screaming throughout the house, calling for his mom...
He would show his mom, and, she would gasp, seeing something she thought she would never see in her lifetime.
Throughout the nation, there were similar reactions.
What they saw was Franklin Armstrong's first appearance on the iconic comic strip "Peanuts."
Franklin was "born" after a school teacher, Harriet Glickman, had written a letter to creator Charles M. Schulz after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot to death outside his Memphis hotel room.
Glickman, who had kids of her own and having worked with kids, was especially aware of the power of comics among the young.
“And my feeling at the time was that I realized that black kids and white kids never saw themselves [depicted] together in the classroom,” she would say.
She would write, “Since the death of Martin Luther King, 'I’ve been asking myself what I can do to help change those conditions in our society which led to the assassination and which contribute to the vast sea of misunderstanding, hate, fear and violence.'”
Glickman asked Schulz if he could consider adding a black character to his popular comic strip, which she hoped would bring the country together and show people of color that they are not excluded from American society.
She had written to others as well, but the others feared it was too soon, that it may be costly to their careers, that the syndicate would drop them if they dared do something like that.
Charles Schulz did not have to respond to her letter, he could have just completely ignored it, and everyone would have forgotten about it.
But, Schulz did take the time to respond, saying he was intrigued with the idea, but wasn't sure whether it would be right, coming from him, he didn't want to make matters worse, he felt that it may sound condescending to people of color.
Glickman did not give up, and continued communicating with Schulz, with Schulz surprisingly responding each time.
She would even have black friends write to Schulz and explain to him what it would mean to them and gave him some suggestions on how to introduce such a character without offending anyone.
This conversation would continue until one day, Schulz would tell Glickman to check her newspaper on July 31, 1968.
On that date, the cartoon, as created by Schulz, shows Charlie Brown meeting a new character, named Franklin.
Other than his color, Franklin was just an ordinary kid who befriends and helps Charlie Brown.
Franklin also mentions that his father was "over at Vietnam."
At the end of the series, which lasted three strips, Charlie invites Franklin to spend the night one day so they can continue their friendship.
Robert Mueller died last night.
He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving.
He had integrity.
And tonight the President of the United States said good!
I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good.
I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word.
Good.
This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather.
That is what is happening. That is what has happened.
The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming.
America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner.
And the church said nothing.
Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary.
Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him.
Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart.
JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn.
These men are something more painful than monsters.
They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again.
Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing.
Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less.
That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him.
And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it.
When Trump is gone, they will still be here.
Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous.
That morning is coming.
Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say.
He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true.
He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad.
The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it.
That is all it needed to be.
A man died. His family is broken open with grief.
That is all it needed to be.
Instead the President said good.
And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸
Gandalv / @Microinteracti1
@cityofsparks@DonaldForSparks@RenoBikeHikers
Late fall 2024 RTC & City of Sparks gathered @ Ardmore Park to celebrate Oddie Blvd renovation.
The maintenance on Oddie is virtually the same as it was prior to the renovation.
At night it's difficult to maneuver these paths.
@NevadaSportsNet@rgjpreps
2021 File photo.
@rgj Jason Bean 👋did a fantastic job highlighting Ku Stevens story. National media picked it up. Google / Youtube
Ku ended up at WSU. He was going to walk on at powerhouse Oregon but did not read any follow up story.
https://t.co/lQI6zSeoWj
@NevadaSportsNet@NevadaWBB@RGJpreps
LMU #55 owned the paint offensively, but who missed the 4 FTs.
Nevada needs to clean up their inbound pass plays. Very shaky.
Thank you Nevada for having the kids day at Lawlor. Noise was off the chart. 🤪💯
The 1/2 time magic show was simply WOW! 🤡
@RenoBikeHikers Here you go! My wife, bless her heart.
She is now STARTING to use her camera bought 2 years ago. Panasonic G95 with a $200 200mm lens.
No stills. She is new school. Videos are the rage.
The long video shows first Sparks goal. Count the number of touches b/4.....GOAL!