I drove to Maine late last week to visit my dear friend Frank Kadi in a nursing home in South Portland. I don’t think Frank, who remains the same analytical and upbeat thinker as he was years ago, is crazy about his new home but he wasn’t going to allow that to fill up our conversation.

Frank was a union activist and leader for roughly 50 years.

In my experience there were few better. Courage, honesty, and modesty informed his character and presence in the labor movement. And a vision of a just, peaceful and sustainable world animated his every day.

That hasn’t changed to this day, although the journey there is longer and bumpier than either of us thought at the dawn of our political activism.

Few were as skillful as Frank at the craft of building left-center unity or, more likely, center-left unity. Left in his universe was (and still is) a capacious category and an approach to his coworkers on the job and activists in the union hall, labor council, the Democratic Party, and beyond that has no room for sectarianism and bombast.

Never did he wear his working class credentials on his sleeve to impress others and his class loyalties were manifested by action, not rhetorical hyperbole and self promotion. In union halls where the audience was, in many cases, white and male as well as in offices of the higher ups, he unhesitatingly, even where he expected blowback, fought for racial and gender equality and unity.

Moreover, he dared to go against the grain when it seemed warrented. As a young trade unionist, for example, he spoke out against the war in Vietnam when it wasn’t a popular position in Maine’s labor movement and for a just settlement of the land claims suit of the Passamaquoddy and Penobscot tribes back then, notwithstanding the pressures from the powerful pulp and paper workers union to oppose it.

Frank appreciated that political action was a field of struggle on which the trade union movement had to leave an ever larger footprint though not independently from, but through the Democratic Party and its own political action committees. Few things made him happier than labor’s role in the election of Presidents Obama and Biden. And not surprisingly, nothing angrier than the rise of Trump and the MAGA movement.

Frank is uncommonly kind and self effacing. In a conversation he will listen more than talk. And he listens intently and with empathy, no matter who the person is. When he does speak, he speaks from the heart as well as the head and in a language that is broadly accessible, never a vehicle to impress his audience of his erudition or stature.

Frank’s legacy of struggle is one that young trade unionists and political activists in Maine would be wise to draw from. He remains a reservoir of knowledge, encouragement, and sober advice. He’s a brother and friend to me and many others who have had the good luck to know him. Keep on keepin’ on, Frank!

I’m driving to Albany tonight for a John Mellencamp concert. He’s on tour. A little bit older and a little more grizzly. And his voice has a raspy ring to it. I know someone else who fits this description. One difference, though, is the one I know doesn’t go on tour or sing, even though he wishes otherwise.

If you don’t like rock and roll, well you don’t like rock and roll. I still do. Back in the 1950s when it came on the scene, it gave me and my friends permission to dance to a different beat as well as punctured the smug and suffocating conformity of that decade. And the performers – and they performed – were multi-racial and mainly, but not exclusively, male – Elvis but also Chuck, Jerry Lee Louis but also Little Richard, Bill Haley but also Bo Diddley, Buddy Holly but also Ray Charles, Carl Perkins but also Fats Domino, Bobby Darin but also Lloyd Price, Brenda Lee but also Tina Turner.

The songs of Etta James and Big Mama Thornton regretfully, but not surprisingly, never reached our ears in a small town in Maine.

Much more could be said by others who have far more extensive knowledge of R&R than I do. All I can say is that these bold and brash musical artists dared to go where others feared to tread and in doing so tipped the world of a lot of us upside down.

If you can open this, it’s worth reading. To think that Henry Kissinger is considered a venerable statesman only reminds us that the powerful take care of their own. To think that an architect of dastardly war crimes is venerated by so many is revealing and maddening as well as depressing. Kissinger is a low life and he bloodily earned the moniker.

If the “left” is to remain a serviceable category of analysis and struggle, it needs lots of updating. The composition, politics, organizational forms, breadth and depth, and challenges of the contemporary left are quite different from its forebear in the last half of the 20th century.

Sitting in Rough Draft in Kingston NY with a cold Pilsner sitting in front of me. Every year on this day I come here in the early am and lift my glass to my two fallen friends who died in Vietnam fighting a war that was the doing of the war makers in Washington and the money bags in corporate suites. Past time to turn swords into ploughshares.