"A hard head makes a soft behind..."

Get the Point!

When I was in sixth grade at Lucy Moten Elementary our homeroom teacher, Mrs. Barbara Trueblood, would occasionally exit the classroom to handle business or take a comfort break during the long school day. Whenever she did, she would leave one of our well behaved classmates, folks like Nikkii Gillispie, now an award winning school teacher, Randnetta Scott, now a pharmacist, or Dorian Nasby, now a high ranking business executive, to stand at the front of the classroom and "take names" of the less well behaved students who were talking, laughing, or doing something other than the assignment that had been left to take up our time. 

Nikkii Gillispie (Williamson) has been one of my dear friends since our school days at Lucy Moten/FAMU High, but when we were kids, she often was a much feared classroom monitor because our teachers ALWAYS believed her testimony over the knuckleheads like me 😆…

Suffice it to say that I was a not so well behaved sixth grader, so I usually found my name on the chalkboard offender list by the time Mrs. Trueblood came back to class. To make matters worse, when our classmate-monitors initially wrote our names on the board, if we continued to talk, laugh, or cut up, they would put checks beside our names for each time they said "stop" or "be quiet" and we didn't.

The checks were important, mind you, because Mrs. Trueblood's punishment for finding names on the chalkboard was to have the offending student open up their Merriam-Webster's Dictionary and copy two full pages—each word, definition, colon, semi-colon, and period—onto as many sheets of notebook paper as necessary. Each "check" beside your name meant an additional two dictionary pages—an assignment that took hours to complete after school or during our recess or lunch hours. 

While I and my other misbehaving friends understood the stakes of cutting up behind Mrs. Trueblood's back, we were defiant and did so anyway because we were 11-year old boys who didn't understand why our teachers wouldn't allow us to work and socialize at the same time. 

But the key word, I remind, is "defiance”—and we surely paid for it!

Yesterday, former President Donald Trump was arraigned in the United States District Court in Miami on 37-counts of intentionally taking highly sensitive classified documents after his presidency had concluded, storing them recklessly at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, and obstructing the Justice Department's investigation into the documents last year. 

While Trump now becomes the only president in American history to be indicted in federal court, I can't help but conclude that his total defiance is the SOLE reason that he is now facing a possible prison sentence. 

Seriously, all that Trump had to do last summer after the Justice Department lawyers called his lawyers and said that there were documents missing according to the National Archives was to open up his resort and allow those investigators to remove those boxes from his bathrooms and storerooms and take them to their proper spots back in Washington, D.C. 

Classified documents found in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom last year…

But the now 77-year old Trump, much like the 11-year old Chuck Hobbs, was defiant and driven to do things his way. And, just like 11-year old Hobbs spent the equivalent of days in punishment writing those dictionary pages—Trump now finds his name on the federal court chalkboard in a case that threatens his freedom. 

Now, when I was 11-years old I never, not even once, said to Mrs. Trueblood upon her return to class, "well, Nikkii, Randnetta, and Dorian's girl friends were talking and giggling, but their names aren't on the board." First, none of those girls were even close to as boisterous as the boys and, second, I was raised back in the day to know that just because my "other little friends" were misbehaving didn't mitigate the punishment that was coming to me. 

And yet, the primary defense that I hear from Trump and his followers is "but Biden and Hillary did it, too." What makes this defense moot is that Mr. Biden, Mrs. Clinton, and Trump's own vice president, Mike Pence, accidentally mishandled classified documents but when alerted, they quickly and fully cooperated with federal investigators to ensure proper return and storage. 

But not Trump, as his own words—caught on audiotape and confirmed by his own former lawyer’s notes—show him boasting to friends that he shouldn't have documents of battle plans, troop placements, and homeland security—but the former POTUS showed them to his uncleared friends anyway, thus, the reason that this "witch hunt," as he loves to call it, has finally snared the witch—and its name is Donald John Trump.

Like many of my readers, whenever I misbehaved as a child, the elders used to say before reaching for a belt or switch, "a hard head makes a soft behind." Seems to me that Mr. Trump is learning this painful lesson late in his life and with two more indictments pending in Georgia and D.C., it will be interesting to see if he actually learns anything at all before leaving this Earth for good.

Stay tuned…