Sailing To Oblivium: August 18, 2017

A boy I knew years ago and I gave wrong directions once to a black family asking the way to Memphis. We sent them in the opposite direction. I still worry about it.

There were three of us waiting in a parking lot on the main highway through our town for a fourth rider. The owner of our car, I’ll call him Joe, was giving us all a ride back to the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville after a weekend visit home.

Joe was one of the biggest jerks I’ve ever known, but he had a car and would give us rides home and back if we paid for the gas. As we stood there, a car stopped with an African-American family inside. The man politely asked for directions to Memphis, Tennessee.

He was headed in the wrong direction, headed, in fact, for Dallas, Texas.

Before anyone could speak, Joe blurted out, “You’re headed right, just keep going for 150 miles or so and you’ll be right there." Then man thanked him and drove off toward Texas.

I say “we” gave them wrong directions, for I stood silent, making me just as guilty as Joe. I have thought of that incident maybe hundreds of times over the years, including on lonely nights sitting in a tower, or on a bunker guarding a Navy base against attack by a known enemy.

The ghastly sin of bigotry and racism is also a known enemy, and I have, on occasion, failed my country and my fellow human beings by falling under its spell through silence or apathy. Maybe there are others that feel that way too.

Oh, I have rationalized about the incident. Had I interfered, I would have been left on the side of the road without a ride back to resume classes the next day.

Interference may have led to a physical confrontation.

There was a third person who would have sided, no doubt, with Joe and it would have been a question of whom to believe.

The highway was clearly marked and I’m sure the family realized the deception before long.

It’s all bull of course. I was a coward and a bigot. My only hope is that the incident may have helped form my later belief system. Maybe Joe himself changed. On the other hand, maybe Joe was among the Neo-Nazis, KKK members, white supremacists, and hatemongers that the President of the United States of America has seen fit recently to defend. Who knows?

Maybe the incident served some distant purpose. I’ve thought about it while driving home late at night through the Arkansas Delta through swarms of insects as thick as fog. Often, I had just been the only white face at a meeting held in a small rural church building for the purpose of planning how to get a water system funded for one of the poorest communities in our state. Maybe the Galilean would give me a little credit for that, and for speaking out from time to time against hate. Who knows? By doing so, I've alienated some folks I had regarded as friends. Who cares?

As I say, maybe Joe changed. Sometimes education and responsibility lead us to change our hateful ways for the better. I’m not optimistic, though, after this past week, about the healing effects of education and responsibility. They sure haven’t had that effect on our president. We can only weep as we remember Zion. 

A holocaust survivor and target

of the Charlottesville marchers.

      

Sailing To Oblivium: August 17, 2017

As with many things, Sainted Mother said it best. She told me, “Son, a man is known by the company he keeps.” She was also known to remark, from time to time, that “Sorry is as sorry does.”

That was far, far better than some recent remarks I’ve heard lately such as, “There were some fine people in that crowd” (in Charlottesville, Virginia). Mother certainly wouldn’t have had it that way. She had no time for Nazis, and she would have had no time for anyone marching alongside one.

The KKK she found more interesting than anything. There weren’t any Jewish folk or African-Americans living in the rural, South Arkansas area in which she lived as a child. With no jews or people of color to terrorize or lynch, the local Klan pretty much confined itself to bullying white teenaged boys who became unruly.

Anyway, I’ve never forgotten her advice. I always ran with a decent crowd and still limit my associations to folks who are higher on the educational scale than I. And if I happen to go somewhere “fine,” I make sure it deserves that sobriquet.

Let’s say I attended a church. What could be considered finer in the eyes of many Americans? Then, suppose instead of passing around love and grace, let’s say the folks there began passing around rattlesnakes? Would I symbolically march alongside them?

Not no, but hell no!

It happened to me, metaphorically at least, when I was in high school. I was trying to impress this girl, see, so I attended church with her on Sunday. It wasn’t any rural snake-handling place either. It happened to be the largest and most sophisticated Baptist church in the city.

Imagine my surprise, when, instead of pointing out the grandeur of the Galilean’s Sermon on the Mount, the pastor began to demonize, in the most explicit manner, people of the Catholic faith. Yes, it was the year John F. Kennedy ran for president. I learned, from that pastor—in the most tragically ironic way imaginable—that, up until then, every person who had ever assassinated a U.S. president had been a Catholic.

I’m not sure that was true, but when the basis for a sermon is hatred and bigotry, a little mendacity is a minor side-note.

Our city was in the migratory path of literally thousands of Italian immigrants. Shysters had lured them to the United States with the promise of fortunes to be made farming in the State of Mississippi. When, upon arriving, they learned that the intent was simply to replace African-American sharecroppers with Italian-American sharecroppers, those immigrants left. More than a few settled in my home town. I had many Catholic acquaintances and some Catholic friends. They all seemed like nice folks to me, and they were.

I started searching for a new girlfriend the next week after seeing the kind of crowd with which my “ex” associated. It was a tough decision, for she was smart, popular, and mighty cute.

Now, I watch the news and hear, over and over again, the shouts of “The Jews will not replace us,” “you will not replace us,” "the KKK," and “blood and soil,” (a Nazi rallying cry).

There may have been some “fine” people who started the march in Charlottesville, but there were no decent people in the crowd the moment after those shouts began.

For you see: sorry is as sorry does.

Sailing To Oblivium: August 16, 2017

It’s one of those days when a person ought to try to get his mind off current events. Unhinged minds are swarming about like hornets. Their buzzing dominates the news and clogs the very air we breathe. It’s like trying to respire nuggets of pure filth.

It brings me once again to the lines of Matthew Arnold:

“I, on men's impious uproar hurl'd,

Think often, as I hear them rave,

That peace has left the upper world

And now keeps only in the grave.”

Gosh I hope not. Arnold found peace and hope in Kensington Gardens. I’ve turned to watching and listening to Yeol Eum perform Mozart’sPiano Symphony Number 21. It gives me a few minutes peace. Moreover, it gives me hope.

If there are young people like Yeol Eum amongst us, and there is beautiful music waiting to be played and heard, can it drown out the insanity about us? Gosh, I hope so.

What was so startling about the last few days is the number of people whom I had considered normal, rational friends who have aligned themselves with, well, the scum of the earth: the KKK, the Aryan National, American Nazis, and assorted hatemongers. Where it will all end I don’t know. Those groups are quite adroit at passing their anger and hatred to others, and they now have a new friend who just happens to be the most powerful man on the face of the earth.

It’s more than a little unsettling.

What we are seeing may be what happens when people quit reading poetry and listening to Mozart. Perhaps we should all go to a public place of quiet reflection as Arnold did and seek hope as he expressed it:

Calm soul of all things! make it mine

To feel, amid the city's jar,

That there abides a peace of thine,

Man did not make, and cannot mar.

Meanwhile, send a bigot a link to Mozart.

It can’t hurt.

Sailing To Oblivium: August 15, 2017

The TV announcers seem surprised. What rocks have they been hiding under? Those chickens have been headed our way for a long time.

One wonders when a pundit, in earching for the origins of Charlottesville, VA, will remember SCOTUS Chief Justice Roberts’ famous cop-out in Shelby County v. Holder. As the Court gutted voting rights, he claimed “…while any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions.” (Emphasis mine) That is to say, “Hey, racism is over now. We don’t need no stinkin’ voting rights legislation anymore.”

Or, will a reporter finally remind us that Ronald Reagan first announced his presidential candidacy in Philadelphia, MS, the town where the three civil rights workers: Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney were slain by white supremacists in 1964.

The message was plain, “Hey y’all, I’m with you on this race thing. Let’s make America white again.”

 The chickens coming home now have been wandering around long before Donald Trump announced his campaign. One only had to be there when America elected Barack Obama president. The thought of a person of color in the white house shook the foundations of white society with enough strength to awaken Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. It did awaken Jim Crow like nuclear tests awakened the monsters of the 1950s’ Sci-Fi movies. Bigotry was fashionable again in the bars, coffee shops, hunting clubs, and hair salons of the South. Like all cancers, it soon spread over all of America’s body.

People you thought were reasonable and sane began joking and frolicking: photoshopping watermelon patches on the White House lawn, wearing blackface outfits to parties, calling the gracious First Lady of our country a gorilla, or resurrecting stale old racist jokes from the 1950s.

The chickens began to strut and peck. We ignored them, perhaps because we were busy, perhaps because we were verifiably Caucasian, or perhaps because we thought America was too strong to be lured into the cesspool of racism, bigotry, and prejudice again. Maybe, after all, we did think the jokes and jibes were a little bit funny. What’s the harm if it doesn’t affect us? Warum ärgern? Es ist nichts.

When situations arose that required complex analysis, we discarded the complexity and chose sides. Violence drew lines that won’t be erased for decades. It was righteous food for the flocks, and it drew them like moths to a flame.

Other chickens, like the fundamentalist religion crowd, joined in dragging new targets. The flocks grew. Fox “news” found an audience and prospered, throwing enough grain on the ground to entice even the previously sane into the mix. Old breeds infiltrated: the KKK, the Aryan Nation, even the Neo-Nazis. Nobody seemed to notice who their flock-mates were.

It was a happy group, pecking and strutting the day away until the Sean Hannity show came on so he could throw them their daily grain. The chickens were happy and content.

Now they are coming home to roost and some wonder why. I just wonder how come it took them so long.

But maybe, just maybe, Charlottesville will provide a Joseph Welch moment for America. Click here for the video of how he handled the Donald Trump of his day.

Mr., we could use a man like
Joseph N. Welch again.

Sailing To Oblivium: July 2, 2017

They were there, had we only looked: bigotry, prejudice, and racism, the monsters of our psyche, writhing and slobbering like a den of 1950s science fiction monsters.

They were not dead, as we had hoped and dreamed. They were not even moribund. They were simply submerged, like Godzilla, or a giant spider, just waiting to be freed by a shock of super-seismic proportions. What would it take to release them upon an unsuspecting public?

It would take nothing more than the election of a president of the United States born of a white mother and African father, the very model of a modern African-American.

That’s all it took. The “monsters from the id,” as they called them in the 1956 film, The Forbidden Planet, took control of the minds of otherwise decent people. Things changed overnight. Old friends began to greet you with, “How do you like our n****r president?” Hatemongers on the internet devised the acronym “SOS” to describe the elected leader of the United States of America. Photoshopped images of watermelon patches on the White House lawn appeared on social media. The man’s family members drew descriptions as “gorillas” or worse. Sentiments and language that had been shoved to the bottom of our cultural sea and buried were fashionable again. Hate groups flourished and became more emboldened, as did hate media. A sense of shame settled over us.

Campaigning against candidates of the Democratic Party in our state became simple. All one had to do was request it from East Coast PACs and they would deliver boatloads of brochures, simple ones with just a photo of their opponent facing a photo of President Obama. The stated message would be, “he/she is with him.” The hidden message would be “the n****rs are coming for your women and he/she is going to help them.” Mike Huckabee gloated publicly that the election of Barack Obama had handed the American South over completely to the Republican Party.

It worked like magic, even among citizens of our state who are alive today, or whose family member is alive today, because of the President Obama’s efforts toward universal health care. The illogic of that could make a well-person nauseated.

Our state will suffer for decades, not because one politcal party is all bad or all good. The fact remains that bad politicians will be elected, and good ones defeated, because of the lingering effects of racism. Shame on us for that.

Now don’t get me wrong. I strongly support the rights of Americans to vote for the candidates of their choice. I spent four years of my life under an oath to protect such rights. My only wish is that we would all vote for candidates on the basis of the principles of good government, as we see it, and not the principles of the KKK.

Meanwhile, can’t we work toward eliminating the monster born of bigotry and racism? Unchallenged, it will destroy us as a unified nation as surely as a giant lizard could destroy a city. The Galilean’s admonition for us to “love one another” might be that best hope for us. As they used to say in the aforementioned films of the 1950s: “It just might work!”

It becomes more obvious every day that such healing will not come from the highest offices of government. It must begin at the citizen level.

I’ll try. That’s what I think on July 2, 2017.

And let the people say, "Never again."

Reconciliation: 12

Vice-President Al Gore was lambasted most unmercifully in the press for things he didn’t say, but he can take credit for voicing one polarizing term: “An Inconvenient Truth.”

That happens to us at times, adding to the divisive condition that permeates America. We read or see things that simply don’t fit our preconceptions. After a fact-check proves they are indeed true, we have the choice of ignoring them or altering our thinking. Therein lies the rub.

This morning, I came across such a truth. I had suspected it, but hadn’t realized its full impact. It is a piece from the British news source The Guardian. It outlines growing evidence that home-grown terrorism may be, under the category of “an inconvenient truth” a growing and frightening threat to the American way of life. It is called, “They Hate the USA.” It concerns extremist groups that hate our government to the point of plotting violence against it. It outlines some scary facts.

I, for one, was shocked by the following:

“According to data from the Anti-Defamation League, at least 45 police officers have been killed by domestic extremists since 2001. Of these, 10 were killed by leftwing extremists, 34 by rightwing extremists, and one by homegrown Islamist extremists.

Note the qualifiers “domestic and homegrown.” We must not expand this beyond the given facts. Still though, it should cause us to think, and to be very afraid, particularly when we see the growing audacity of groups such as the Klu Klux Klan.

Can we all agree that we should spend time talking and thinking, rather than hating?

Let us remain on guard.