by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Feb 12, 2026 | Featured, Personal, Politics
I know exactly why America hasn’t risen up together — Democrats, Republicans, and Independents — to protect our midterms and our country. It’s all based on my personal experience as a middle school ice hockey goalie.
I played hockey goalie before face masks were used, back in sixth grade. I was fearless. Bad stuff happened to other people, not me.
The best game I ever played was the first game I ever played, because the sixth graders could barely skate, and most importantly they hadn’t learned how to lift the puck.
I had a simple strategy: When they would skate toward me, I would drop down to my knees and lie down, because if I lay down I could cover the entire face of the goal and most importantly the people trying to score on me couldn’t lift the puck over me. All I had to do was lie down and think bad things happened to other people.
It never occurred to me that lying there with the ice at eye level I could have taken a puck to the face.
My hero was Jacques Plante, the goalie for the Montréal Canadiens. No goalies back then wore face masks. I saw a picture of Plante in a National Geographic about Canada. His face looked like a spider’s web of scars.
In the winter of my sixth-grade year before our first game, I was invited to a birthday party to watch the Boston Bruins play the Montreal Canadiens and Jacques Plante took a puck to the head.
The Canadiens trainer skated out to Plante with a towel to stop the bleeding above his left eye, then guided him off to the dressing room to get stitched up.
The organ played as they mopped up the blood on the ice in front of the goal and we waited for his return. He showed no pain. He was tough and brave. Nobody ever envisioned that anything would ever change.
Early the next season, the coach handed me a flesh-colored plastic face mask. The seventh graders could now lift the puck and they had developed super fast slap shots.
That night I took the mask up to my room and put it on. It fit nice, snug and tight, but then everything changed.
I found a hockey puck and put on the mask and put the puck into the holes for my eyes and felt my eyeball pushed back into its socket. It fit like a key in a lock. I imagined the power at impact of a slap shot into my eyeball. It became real and a shiver went through me.
Even though I had never thought of it before, I started thinking seriously about basketball or, god-forbid, wrestling.
That’s us right now. That’s America. We’ve been lying flat on the ice, telling ourselves bad things happen to other people.
Why did we not rise up together when Trump sent the National Guard into LA and other blue-state cities? When he sent masked ICE agents to arrest just about anybody who is not white under the Kavanaugh doctrine? When ICE was told they had immunity from prosecution for illegal excessive force? When Trump and his administration argued away the two killings by ICE of American citizens in Minnesota, despite contrary video evidence? When Trump and the Republicans voted for $83 billion to fund ICE when $6 billion a few years ago was enough?
More and more it’s looking like ICE is becoming Trump’s masked private army. What if ICE is standing at every voting station?
Why did we not rise up together when Jack Smith recently testified that his investigation found “beyond a reasonable doubt” that Trump himself led the insurrection on January 6 — and has continued to campaign on “Stop the Steal,” even though he lost 61 court cases and won none, and has given all the insurrectionists pardons? You don’t think he might try it again if he has the funding?
Why did we not rise up together when it was reported that he increased his net worth in the first year of his four-year term by over $4 billion at the country’s expense?
We’ve been watching the blood get mopped up in front of the goal and waiting for normal to return.
T.S. Eliot wrote that “humankind cannot bear very much reality.” Reality is all around us as the midterms approach. Jacques Plante’s blood in front of the goal as he’s being stitched up becomes personal.
Once you wake up your mind, everything is real when you are terrified.
I think we’re gonna be OK for the midterms, if everybody who can vote gets so frightened that they show up at the polls — mutually aware of their danger and sharing it — and refuses to leave until they vote. If we are united, we will be OK. United, we will be the real America that we are — the United States, not the Divided States of America.
Imagine your life and the life of all the people you care about if we lose the House and the Senate, with the Supreme Court offering no check to executive power. Imagine the puck going through the keyhole of that mask into your eye socket, the pain and the darkness.
Wake up. Be terrified. Bad things happen to everyone if we don’t stop lying flat on the ice.
by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Jan 27, 2026 | Featured, Law, Personal, Politics
As our country has become more and more divided over the last 10 years, I go back to this little story from a long time ago.
Back when I was practicing law, I was hired to represent a brokerage firm that sold huge airplanes. The firm believed it had been deprived of a commission by the Christian Broadcast Network (CBN), in particular Pat Robertson, who had just run for president.
I arranged a deposition of Mr. Robertson at CBN’s corporate offices in Virginia. The offices were opulent. When I entered, several TVs in the waiting room all showed the same image: Pat Robertson, raising money.
I was kept waiting for over half an hour, and I realized that I would know when the deposition would start when Robertson was no longer on TV and had let somebody else continue the fundraising.
Eventually, I was ushered into a large conference room where the court reporter had already set up. The lawyer representing Robertson and CBN was about ten years out of law school and a sole practitioner. He stood and warmly greeted me as I entered the room.
When Robertson entered, everything changed. My first impression of Reverend Robertson was his extremely elegant bejeweled cowboy boots. All of a sudden, I was in a war room with everyone but me standing at attention.
My impression was confirmed when I asked the court reporter to swear in the witness. The court reporter immediately turned to Robertson and said, “do you prefer to ‘swear’ or ‘affirm?”
I’m still not sure what the difference is, but I insisted he be sworn in and, of course, his lawyer came over the table at me. I fully expected this to be a contentious proceeding, but this seemed a little ridiculous nonetheless. He was in battle mode.
I started out asking whether the airplane that had been purchased had been used for political trafficking, which would, if Robertson admitted it, have put the tax exempt status of his religious organization at risk. Robertson refused to answer the question and of course his lawyer again came across the table at me.
This is not unusual behavior for a young lawyer, particularly if he happens to be representing an instrument of God in southern Virginia. We could not have been more different, but somehow I liked his youthful, pugnacious representation.
I was pretty happy with the deposition. I got everything except that question about the political use of the airplane. (My prior research had revealed that, in fact, my assertion was true.) Robertson had been forthright with his other answers and over the next two hours his lawyer demonstrated nonstop hostility toward me, showing off to Robertson.
At the end, I told them I would be scheduling a conference call with our federal judge to see if my question should be answered. It was a close call whether it was even relevant but the stakes were high for them, and I respected the young man for his tenacity.
When it was over and I was headed back to the parking lot, I was surprised to feel a tap on my shoulder. It was the young lawyer who had been representing Robertson. He was a different person now, returning to the person who warmly welcomed me before Robertson arrived. He invited me to have a drink with him and join him for dinner not far away in Virginia Beach, to go see his favorite zydeco-band, The Subdudes.
Over the rest of the evening he couldn’t have been friendlier. He had gone to a local Christian law school and was looking for work for several months before so he went to a Christian retreat, where he claimed he got this client because he was extremely good at “speaking in tongues.” As we talked, I was convinced that his Christianity was real, even though his marketing strategies were suspect. Anyway, The Subdudes were great and the beer was cold. I bought their CD. He refused my offer to buy him dinner because he said it was a conflict of interest, which I guess meant he thought I was Satan.
Although we were from different worlds, he introduced me to his music as an act of kindness, and perhaps because of the beers we drank, we laughed, asked each other lots of questions about our entirely different lives, avoided conflict, and opened up to each other.
About a month later, the federal judge’s video conference call was scheduled and the case was diplomatically settled.
I never saw him again, but we shared our lives for a short time and the supreme polarization and differences disappeared.
In the end, I think it was because we shared what we both liked: the music and, eventually, each other’s company. We could not have been more politically different. Maybe it was the beer, but I thanked him for a fun evening and actually commented on how different he appeared from when we first met. He smiled and shook my hand and said, “We’re not that different. We’re Americans having fun.”
If we all really want to fix this country’s polarization we should ask each other real questions and not preach to our chosen choir. You might find common ground and make a friend.
You might even get a good CD out of it.
by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Nov 12, 2025 | Featured, Personal, Travel
There is nothing sadder than the moment that you realize you have missed the chance for an apology or an “I love you” that can’t be delivered because it’s too late.
At the end of my recent guided trip to Savannah, Georgia and Charleston, South Carolina I had back-to-back realizations of long-lost opportunities to apologize and to say “I love you.”
I have previously written about the trip that my friends and I took a year and a half ago to witness the history of the nonviolent practices of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the effort to enforce the civil rights laws in the western part of the south.
The focus of this trip was to follow the American slave trade pretty much from its beginning at two of the entry points and places between — from its beginnings to its end. It was a powerful experience and an amazing trip because it shook me to my roots and changed my understanding.
There are people who pass through your life and then before you can truly understand the dignity of their life and the kindness which they showed you before they are gone. In my case, one was Florine and the other was Jane. Both were Black women.
There is a fair amount of written material that documents the slave trade in America but it only becomes real when you are standing in a slave cell in which human beings were held for extended periods of time before they were auctioned into slavery, and after they had withstood the travel, in which 20% of the cargo are lost by the end of that journey.
Ten percent died on the ship and the other 10% were the unruly who couldn’t be sold. Sharks followed these ships across the waters to their destination.
As usual, I had read the dates and about the places, but to walk into slave quarters or visit buildings which have been inhabited during whippings, and experience the culture of slavery made it all real for the first time.
Slave women were forced to be kept pregnant, because they were producing product and this product was valuable. When they were old enough, the children would be sold and be lost forever. At birth, they were given only a first name no last name. After emancipation, they often just assumed the last name of their owners.
Chewing cotton roots was known to be an abortive for female slaves who did not want to bring their children into a world of degradation, however, if a pregnant slave was caught chewing cotton roots, they would receive 36 lashes, which is an unthinkably cruel punishment, especially for a pregnant woman.
Whipping was also administered to punish both slaves and their educators if it was discovered that a slave was being taught to read or write or learned mathematics such as the multiplication tables.
Florine Burk took care of my little brother and I in the late 1950s when we were kids in Washington, DC. She was a heavyset African-American woman in her 50s who had grown up in the South and had gotten her education in a single room school.
She was a force.
She could sing the alphabet and the multiplication tables. She was an avid reader who never spoke about her politics but you could feel by her presence what she thought.
She loved and knew a whole lot about Jackie Robinson and the Brooklyn Dodgers. My brother and I were required to memorize and recite the lineup for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
My brother and I loved her. She would hoist up her skirts and hit long fly balls in the backyard. If my brother or I hit a ball over the fence and through a neighbors window, she took our hand, walked us around the block, got us to knock on the door, made us promise that we would fix the window, and then she took us out to buy the glass and the caulking, and we would put in the window as she watched.
Eventually, we asked her to take us to a Washington Senators baseball game. She refused, and there was no doubt we were never gonna go with her to a Washington Senators baseball game.
Her reason, she said, was that Washington was “first in war, first in peace, and last in the American League.” She said she did not want us to witness bad baseball.
It was the 1950s, but it wasn’t her real reason and you could feel it, but I didn’t know what the real reason was until the last day of our recent trip.
Some things you have to learn late in life, and this trip taught me to look deeper into for Florine’s logic.
The morning before the end of the trip, I went online and researched the Washington Senators and found that they were one of the last teams in baseball to ever hire an African-American. They had drafted a black Cuban pitcher and identified him only as Cuban.
Florine knew her stuff. But this trip made me realize that I did not understand the depth of her character or what life must have felt like to her as a domestic raising white children in a brutally segregated city.
After she retired, she went to Los Angeles to be with family there. My brother and I wrote her birthday cards each year and sent her Christmas cards. After a few years, they would be returned to us unopened. I never told her face-to-face how much we loved her and respected her before she died.
That morning, I also realized the pain of a court clerk at the first trial I ever did in the Circuit Court of Baltimore City. I had been told that if you don’t know the judge or what to expect in the courtroom the first thing you do after you unpack is talk to the court clerk and try to make friends.
The court clerk was an entirely professional Black middle-aged woman who shook my hand and welcomed me to the courtroom when I offered my name and explained why I was there.
I put out my hand and said “I am Bob Bowie. What is your name?” She replied, “My name is Jane Bowie.”
She was instructive throughout the case and helped me when I asked my naïve questions. After the trial, I went over and thanked her and said how much I appreciated that we both had the same last name, and I had “a family friend in the court.” She smiled and laughed and patted me on the shoulder.
Over the next few years, I would see her on the streets around the courthouse and we would stop and talk. We became friends.
On this trip to South Carolina, we went to a museum that had only people‘s first names engraved in the walls at the entry room. I asked why were there only first names and the guide politely said during slavery, there were no last names, only afterward did many of the slaves just pick up the last name of the slave holder.
My family owned slaves in Prince Georges County. Much to my horror, I realized that Jane Bowie most likely came from an enslaved family that my family may have owned.
I was stunned and ashamed, but then I realized, and deeply respected, the kindness that she had offered me in the face of this country’s white supremacist history. Jane, like Florine, vanished 20 years ago and I never had the chance to recognize what she knew and the courage she had in dealing with me.
I fear that even in this generation, our children will look back and wonder how we could have looked the other way when immigrants came to this country and, as punishment, they were separated from their children when all they wanted was a chance to be free to raise them.
If you’ve ever had a blood transfusion, you never know whose blood it was. It was given as a gift from one human being to provide life for another. It’s a reminder of our common humanity, but we never quite live up to the obvious.
by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Oct 21, 2025 | Featured, Personal, Politics, Travel
This past weekend, I was reminded of this excerpt from my book, “The Older You Get the Shorter Your Stories Should Be” (page 169):
As the lions slowly approach, my fellow riders in the safari jeep become either “believers” that the jeep is safe territory or “nonbelievers” who, with every step of the lions, seem to be counting down the last seconds of their lives. They can’t move and the fear becomes palpable. The eyes are wide and the breathing becomes slightly labored.
On the other hand, the believers are happily photographing and silently adjusting their telescopic lenses. The lions grow closer and closer and, within 10 feet, three veer to the right and one veers to the left so that it will be behind us. Everyone in the jeep recognizes that they must keep their eyes on the three lions that will pass to our left within several feet of the jeep, but we will not be able to turn and watch the one lion that is moving behind us on our right.
The believers continue to happily photograph adjusting their telescopic lens to catch the reflection of the jeep in a lion’s eyes. The nonbelievers are breathing softly, their eyes closed, waiting for death.
After a few moments they were past us and we started the engine and continued our day.
(You can find the book on amazon or support local bookstores at bookshop.org.)
by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Jun 17, 2025 | Featured, General, Humor, Law, Personal, Politics
When I started to practice law, Jimmy Carter was elected president. To avoid some unimaginable conflict of interest, he sold his family farm for peanuts. Since I retired from the practice of law 10 years ago, apparently the ethics have changed.
President Trump for his birthday last week gave himself a military parade, which which cost the American taxpayers approximately $25 million and tore up the streets of Washington.
Several news services have recently reported that since the early days of President Trump‘s reelection campaign he has made more than double his net worth, about $5.4 billion dollars.
In the past, I would’ve been horrified, but now my reaction is that it’s a shame I didn’t somehow make a bigger profit back when ethics prohibited me.
Back during those ethical times I would preach to the lawyers at my firm that the easiest way to check your professional ethics is to ask yourself if what you were about to do would be embarrassing if it would become a headline in the New York Times. If so, don’t do it.
President Trump has re-organized and turned upside down the professional ethics of the presidency and the ethics I was used to. Everything unethical or untrue that Trump has done now is routinely front page headlines on the New York Times, which nobody reads anymore.
I have gone back to thinking about how rich I would be if I’d taken on cases that I ultimately rejected long ago because of ethical concerns.
Consider the amount of money I could’ve made if I had taken that case long ago of two Hindu businessmen who came into the office and told me they wanted to incorporate (for personal liability reasons) an ongoing business that provided Hindu Americans a chance to bury their families in the Ganges River for about $5,000 per loved one.
They told me that the contract that they offered guaranteed that the loved ones ashes, with which they were entrusted, would be respectfully sent to the Ganges, a boat would be hired as well as a videographer to make a movie of the ceremony as the ashes were transported in a beautiful urn, and a man rowing the boat out in the Ganges would be filmed opening the container and emptying it so the ashes were visible as they were were gently poured into the river.
The $5,000 would be collected in exchange for the video of the ceremony.
I will admit I was intrigued by this novel, religious practice and I asked about the heavy cost of the procedure and the profit they were making per contract.
Without batting an eye both businessmen looked at me and said it was about 95% profit. I asked them how could they possibly make such a profit and they answered: “We send everyone the same video.”
If you’re using the same video and you are making a 95% profit you certainly don’t have to be greedy. You could include a beautiful hologram of the soul rising from the Ganges and fluttering off into reincarnation.
Also they completely missed the opportunity for relics, swag, and real cool T-shirts.
When you include the total Trump’s family and political friends have made in the “pay to play” access and favors, which have included the opportunity to show your personal love and respect by purchasing Trump bitcoin and Trump Bibles, and such gifts as an airplane from the government of Qatar, no wonder Trump wants a third term.
I was so stupid I refused to represent the two Hindu businessmen, even though they generously offered me a free burial in the Ganges.
I could also have befriended the President by referring him to another client who I rejected. For a while, “viatical contracts” were easy money. Several people had the idea at the same time. During the AIDS epidemic several entrepreneurs were going into hospitals or hospices and offering to buy life insurance policies at about 10% of their face value from those who would soon die. There’s nothing illegal about that, but for me it didn’t pass the smell test.
There is some justice in the world. Once effective HIV treatment became available, they were stuck continually paying for ongoing life insurance policies.
I suspect that the Trump family has already seen the future of medical profit as is evident from the appointment of Robert Kennedy, Jr. and the future of TMD (Trump Measles Deterrent). This is not a vaccine. it is free and called “The Trump Blessing,” which is administered over a Zoom call after you buy some of the remaining overstocked Bibles that will become collectors items soon.
I think the only benefit Jimmy Carter received from his presidency was a gift given by his brother: a couple of cans of Billy Beer.
by Robert Bowie, Jr. | May 27, 2025 | Featured, Humor, Personal
Have you been following the economics of this country recently?
Guess who was invited to President Trump’s private event for customers of his cryptocurrency business on Thursday and given a White House tour on Friday?
I wasn’t!
I called my friends, Peter, Belinda and Liza, to see if they had been part of this same oversight by the President.
Peter, Belinda and Liza and I were neighbors during our middle school years and have been friends ever since for over 60 years, and all of us were there from the beginning of cryptocurrency.
They weren’t invited either!
We concluded that this oversight by the President was not his fault and was due to only one possible interpretation.
Our President does not know a lot of American history or, to be a little more polite, he has not yet become aware of the true history of cryptocurrency.
As the rest of us already know, cryptocurrency was quietly created after Nixon took the country off the gold standard. Quite conveniently, it was the same time the first Topps baseball cards were issued in five-card packs with a card size slab of bubblegum included.
The retail cost was five cents per pack. A penny for each card and the bubblegum was free — age appropriate pre-pubescent genius marketing.
A half century before cryptocurrency entered the world stock market, Peter and I were both early investors in baseball cards, and then found another lucrative market in marble monopolies. We were early traders in pre-crypto middle school cards and marbles during recess.
Peter cornered the marble market so effectively that the marble market collapsed after he won all the marbles.
I tried to make a run on “big marbles” so I dressed up my little middle school self and went to pawn shops and antique stores looking for clear round door knobs.
Regrettably, no door knobs are completely round and thus valueless in the larger marble markets.
As a result — for the good of the market — Peter gave a written announcement handed out to the neighborhood that he would be emptying several boxes of marbles to the neighborhood market for free one late spring Saturday afternoon. It happened out of a second floor window with the driveway below. It was an early example of flooding the market.
Peter emptied five bankers boxes of multi currency marbles, including “puresy boulders” and several stunning “jumbo spirals.” The market was saved and Peter had made recess fun again.
Baseball cards back then were “to die for,” particularly if you had a complete set. Peter had a complete set of baseball cards for the years 1957, 1958, and 1959.
Even in middle school, you knew these people were serious people! Peter was a born collector and became a well known New York art dealer. Liza became a respected museum curator in Washington DC, and Belinda became a brilliant art writer and critic.
In the alternative, when I went off to college, my mother emptied my closets and threw away all of my marbles and baseball cards… and I became a lawyer.
At the same time as Trump’s cryptocurrency banquet and tour of the White House, his administration announced that they would be retiring the penny because it was not cost-effective to produce it anymore. They had determined that it took four cents to produce a penny. Think about the appreciated value of just one card, bought for a penny. Or even better, a complete set.
Ever since Nixon took us off the gold standard, our currency, stocks and bonds, like cryptocurrency, have no value other than the theoretical value according to the market.
However, with marbles and baseball cards, unlike cryptocurrency, there is the added component of artistic beauty. They are self valuing and hold a valuable historical record on the flip side of the picture — batting average and stolen bases and other stats.
Also, the bubble gum is great for the dental economy.
Hold onto your baseball cards and don’t lose your marbles!
