The following is the second in a series of three excerpts from David Ranney’s longer piece “Reflections: Well, How Did I Get Here?” Prior to going away to college, my interaction with Black people had been limited conversations with a Black cleaning woman named Louise. I loved her and would go down the basement of […]
Archives for September 2023
How Did I Get Here?, part 1: On My Futile Attempt to Become a High School Athlete
What follows is an excerpt from a longer piece that explores how a red, white and blue diaper baby, raised by conservative Republican parents in a largely conservative Republican and all white suburb in a conservative religious tradition grew up to become first, a social justice activist and eventually a Marxist Humanist revolutionary. The longer […]
A Rainy Night in Georgia
In 1977, I was a signaler (radio operator) in the South African Army, the infantry. I was stationed in a camp called Mpacha, which was a few hundred yards from the border of Zambia in the Caprivi Strip of northern Namibia. When we signalmen weren’t on patrol, we had shifts in the Mpacha base underground […]