There is a website called Chicks on the Right, founded by two conservative women, Amy Jo Clark and Miriam Weaver. The site is similar to many that promote only one side of the spectrum, politically and ideologically. I don’t really care about that.
What I do care about is that earlier in the week, while doing a Google search about Mark and something I was thinking about, I came upon this post, first. The writer, someone writing under the pseudonym of “Miss CJ,” called my late son a “hippie moron.” Then, in trying to get back to the post, I discovered this one.
Can you imagine missing your son each and every day, and then reading someone saying she wasn’t even sorry about his death, even going as far as to gloat about it? This is the kind of hater BS that makes me angry and close to being crazy. You never stop loving your son and wanting to protect him, even after he’s been killed.
I thought I’d write today’s post in the form of letter to the two founders, appealing to their compassion and empathy, and perhaps, their “better angels.” But this is likely an exercise in futility, akin to reasoning with the unreasonable.
Here goes:
Hello,
I’m Jim Baumer, Mark Baumer’s dad.
The name may not register with you. Mark is my late son—the one that your writer, Miss CJ, called a “hippie moron” during the fall of 2016, when he was out walking, prior to being hit and killed by an SUV the following January. Not only did this writer totally mischaracterize my late son, but she employed common stereotypes directed towards anyone not playing by her narrow parameters of what is “right and good.”
I have found a number of disturbing things written and posted about my son on the web over the last year, following his death. Usually, I try to address them, but I obviously missed these.
If you have children, a part of me would like to think that there’s an ounce of compassion under your ideological certainty, but I can’t say for sure that there is—at least based upon the tenor of the content on your site. As editors, by allowing falsehoods like this the light of day—especially about a young man who was a kind and committed soul who can’t defend himself from the grave, it leads me to the judgment that you are both deficient in basic human decency and empathy.
Try to summon a shred of compassion and decency (if you can) and imagine what the last year has been like for my wife and I, having lost an only son. Mark was 33 when he was killed.
To read someone calling him a “hippie moron” made me angry. Admittedly, he was a hippie, if being a hippie meant not having a car, walking or running wherever he went in Providence, Rhode Island where he lived, and having the smallest carbon footprint of anyone I’ve ever met. But to call him a moron—this made me ugly. You never stop being a dad, even when your child becomes a man. In that regard, I’m kind of old-school. I believe in standing up for those I love. And Mark was a voracious reader, an able thinker, and committed to growth in a way that very few people are. If that’s being a moron, count me in!
Mark interacting on his walk, MLK Day, 2017.
In what was probably the best of many articles written about Mark here in America and even in Europe, Anna Heyward in The New Yorker, found my son to be an intriguing figure—not someone to be mocked or characterized in a reductive manner.
Better, Ms. Heyward, doing what journalists should do, looked deeper than what was obvious to get at some of the motives for Mark’s walk—these were not due to a lack of intelligence (as your hack of a writer found), but, a walk taken for reasons that even I haven’t been able to fully ascertain, even after watching each one of his videos beginning a year after he began and watching all 100 of them. My notes on the walk and what I observed the second time through is about 65,000 words worth. Like Heyward, I was trying to find some of the foundational reasons why a young man who owned a house and had a job that many would envy, would take to crossing the country, as pilgrims before him had.
From The New Yorker:
Since November 9th (2016), many Americans have been searching for ways to incorporate political activism into their everyday lives, to get out of the echo chambers that keep them among only like-minded people. Baumer was an eccentric model for both, someone for whom activism was both a life style and a form of self-expression. He walked through tiny highway-side towns and filmed himself interacting with locals, and often spoke on his feeds about how surprisingly good the people he encountered were.
In returning to the site and finding the second post by this same writer after Mark was killed, I was stunned and then angry. What she wrote was so beyond the pale that it is hard for me restrain how I really feel about her, without expressing it in most direct and visceral way. How do you gloat about another human being killed, referring to him as “pavement putty”? I’m going to refrain from expressing how I really feel about someone who hides behind a moniker—it’s probably best, writing the hateful drivel that she produces. It’s also what Mark would have told me to do, as in, “hey dad, just let it go. It doesn’t matter. Some people you just can’t reach.”
I miss Mark. His compassion and his genuineness as a human is rare in a country where many people simply want to throw rocks at one another, or worse.
Mark’s walk was many things. A sort of personal vision quest, the physical embodiment of his writing and poetry, a performance, and the actions of a committed activist seeking to bring greater attention to the issue of climate change. Mark was also offering us a critique of our country, a nation that long before he began walking, had lost its way and no longer was attuned to its soul, if arguably, it ever had one.
There was always a narrative present (if you cared to see it or looked just below the surface, like Heyward did) where Mark’s walk countered everything around him. The juxtaposition of being human and walking as we were built to do was interspersed with cars—hunks of metal and powerful machines with lethal capabilities.
Mark was none of the vile things that your writer tried to portray him as—anyone that knew anything about my son knows that he was a kind, loving, and sweet young man, in addition to being an award-winning poet, a committed activist, and a devoted family member, as well as a compassionate friend to so many. I was touched by this man’s assessment of Mark, a guy named Rich Roll, who got what Mark was trying to do (start listening at 01:50). He totally saw the “performance art” aspect of his zaniness that comes across clearly in these videos (and on his blog).
Where your writer (who must have your approval and your okay to write this filth) saw a hippie moron, not worthy of even feeling sorry after he was killed, many others saw a physically and psychically strong human being. A courageous one. Some of your commenters thought it was “easy” to walk barefoot. I’d like to see them spend an hour walking around town barefoot, let alone 100 days. This is characteristic of your tribe, though. People without any evidence of toughness and resilience, but regularly talking shit.
My wife and I have had our lives altered forever. But we’re both demonstrably resilient people. Instead of allowing pain and sadness to swallow us, we’ve launched a foundation in Mark’s name and memory to carry on his legacy and support the things he cared about, as well as funding important community projects that raise awareness about the environment, promote social justice, as well as involving under-served populations directly in renewing their communities. These were the issues and causes that fueled Mark’s passions and were part of his philosophy of life—love, kindness, and working towards building a better world.
Mark with his mom (who he loved) in 2013, in front of his place of work, Rockefeller Library/Brown University.
But you and your writer obviously missed that and only saw what your ideological blinders allowed you to see.
I wish you’d take those two posts down from your site—that would be the right and compassionate thing to do. But I won’t hold my breath waiting for you to do the right thing.
In grief and loss,
-Jim Baumer
If you want to counter hate and hopelessness and honor the spirit of what Mark was doing when he was killed, think about making a contribution to the Mark Baumer Sustainability Fund. Our mission is focused on tangible steps towards creating a more just and humane world, one that counters division and hate.