Friendship

My mother was right about friendship. I was eleven or twelve years old and hanging out with a pal who I called friend. He was, for lack of a better word, charismatic, sort of in the way Lucifer must have appeared to John Milton as he wrote Paradise Lost. He attracted followers, of which Meschery was one. I remember the day clearly, I came home late. past my curfew. My mother confronted me. Not in a mean way, she explained that I had changed since I had started paling around with Joe (not his real name). Joe, she told me, was a selfish young man. All he wanted was whatever was best for himself. He used friends. She cautioned that there were people like that all over the world, and I would have to recognize them. My mother provided other example's of Joe's personality, and slowly I began to understand what she was talking about. She never told me I couldn't be friends with Joe. If she had, I probably would have ignored her. Simply and systematically she listed Joe's negative qualities. They amounted to all the fingers of both my hands.
I went to bed thinking. I woke up and never played with Joe again. Thanks Mom.

I don't know if Bill Belichick's mother is still alive. If she were, I wonder what she would have said had she heard her son's friend, Donald Trump, brag that he groped women. What would she have said had she heard Donald Trump call Mexican immigrants thieves and rapists? What would she have told her son had she seen Trump making fun of someone with a disability - those ugly faces he made, those ody disfigurements he mimicked? Would she have sat her son, Bill, down and told him the man for whom he voted, was not worthy of loyalty? I would like to think she said, "My son, you have an entire team of players who deserve your loyalty, many of whom are people of color, men far more worthy of your loyalty than Donald Trump.

I wonder if that would have made an impression on Bill Belichick..

In the future, all the people who voted for Donald Trump will discover whether he is worthy of their loyalty as citizens of the United States or whether their vote for him has been a profound mistake.

Trump Makes Faces   by Tom Meschery

I am sick at heart looking at the next President of the United States
mimicking the tortured spasms of a palsied man, the grotesque
flinging of his arms he can control but sick men can't
because his presidential spirit is mean, and he wants to ridicule.
He will sit in the oval office, behind him the Stars and Stripes,
the window opening onto the White House lawn,
the light of our nation warming his back, and if the mood
strikes him, he will fall from his chair into convulsions 
and  think it's hilarious, and around America there will be
men and woman who will find his antics humorous
and laugh their heads off, those same people I recall
from the halls of schools where I taught, who laughed 
at the crippled boy, the girl with  cerebral palsy.
They saw their meanness as a joke, the ha, ha, ha
that will resound from the highest office of the land
through the halls of Congress, the streets of our country.