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.