THE COMING STORM

    What kind of America will emerge from this tragic decision she has made? Damned if I know. I know one thing. It won't be based on educating the masses for critical thinking. One can obtain a preview of that from our little state just west of the Mississippi River.

    We have enjoyed (?) a two-year head start. We've already started dismantling the public school system. Oh, it won't be completely destroyed. It will stand ready to educate that segment of society Orwell called, in 1984, the Proles. They will receive just enough education to perform the necessary common labor work and be able to find their way to the pubs.

    Real education will rely on private schools partially funded with public tax dollars. They will teach everything from nuclear physics to proof that the Universe is 6,000 years old and resulted from simple thoughts over a six-day period.

    Not much room will exist for literature, history, philosophy, or art.

    Our marriage didn't produce offspring, just one miscarriage and a normal amount of effort. I, therefore. will enjoy a tragic gift of curiosity. I can simply observe since we have no children or grandchildren to make us mourn. I'm far enough down the list, just after teachers and librarians, that Death will likely beat them to me. I won't see it all, but maybe a portion. For example:

    Hitler came into power in January 1933.

    The first state-supported book burning took place in May 1933.

    I may live to see those.

    No children or grandchildren, but may I please mourn for those of my dear friends who don't deserve what's coming?

My Redacted LIfe: Chapter Ten (Cont._2)

As I went about my business in 1971, the country and the world began to change. Some changes affected me. Some didn’t. Some would later.

I approached, but hadn’t quite reached, the average income in the United States of $10,600 per year. By the year 2018, that would equal about $65,700 per year. The “sailor home from the sea” was making progress.

Had I been paying attention, I would have noticed that a young upstart named Fred Smith, with ties to Little Rock, had developed a wild dream of starting a business offering overnight delivery of packages first by air, then by ground. “Crazy,” the leaders of Little Rock said. “Hmm,” the leaders of Memphis said. “That would sure be something,” those of us said who had been using the Greyhound Bus system for that purpose.

Up in Northwest Arkansas, things were quiet. The architect Edward Durrell Stone, a native, had once described, Fayetteville, the key city, as a “hotbed of tranquility.” Aside from occasional rowdy football games, it still was. But not far from Fayetteville, an obscure retailer had gone public with his company in 1970. Its initial stock price was $16.50 per share. Had one purchased 100 shares at that price then, by 2018 stock splits would have created 204,800 shares worth more than $17 million, with annual dividends reaching around $400,000.

The Ozarks would never be the same.

Ah well. Back at the apartment, I was going to work every day in an exciting, vibrant city in a respected, by most, profession and was moving up the ladder of success with amazing speed. I was making new friends in the neo-hippie community called Riverside Drive. An old college classmate named Cooper Burley introduced me around, and I was considered a close-enough neighbor to be deemed socially acceptable, particularly if I provided an occasional jug of wine and abided by the stricture that the street was a closed community and society at large had no reason whatsoever to even know of its existence.

Cooper had eased out from under his legal problems through a combination of luck, confusion, and family connections, mostly those of the young girl he had once quartered and whose parents saved the couple with understanding that she would not cross the Arkansas River Bridge into Little Rock without parental supervision.

The Vietnam war dragged on, even though 60 percent of Americans had turned against it. Returning vets were, as I did, joining a group calling itself “Vietnam Veterans Against the War.” The stage was set for disruption. None of it bothered me, though. I had laid down “my sword and shield,” for a gentler life, a life that would be nothing but a fast ride to success.

Beneath this peaceful surface though, swam a political creature, spawned in 1971 and destined to grow to city-destroying proportions with an insatiable appetite for destruction. In that fateful year, the U.S. Supreme Court of the United States upheld, in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education 402 U.S the concept of using school busing to speed up the racial integration of public schools in the United States.

Rarely, in American history, had an event so created the epitome of the earlier mentioned “Miles Law,” or, where you stand depends on where you sit. No attempt will be made herein to broach the social implications or equitable justification of the case. Those discussions still divide Americans.

Suffice it to say that the ruling, and its aftermath, would have one of the greatest impacts on urban development patterns this county has ever seen.

Morning Thoughts: November 10, 2017

It’s funny how my mind works, or doesn’t as some would say. Far from a linear process, it more closely resembles a blackbird’s, that is to say that a current interest is easily abandoned when some other shiny object flies by.

Thus, it was almost by accident that, while searching for peace of mind early one morning, I came across a recording of Vladimir Horowitz playing Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, Op. 30 by Sergei Rachmaninoff. I haven’t fully re-established contact with terra firma yet.

I can’t find the exact date at which this marvelous musician began to play and study the piano. Biographers simply say that his mother started him at “an early age.” It must have been very early as, at the age of 16, he performed the Rachmaninoff work upon graduating from the Kiev Conservatory.

Flash back with me to a segment on NPR in which a top tier musician commented during an interview that they are starting children as early as age three on a musical education. This steered me to a road trip a friend and I took a while back through the Arkansas Delta. He is highly educated and studied something akin to urban economics as an undergraduate.

We talked briefly about the economic concept of “location quotient” which is a way of quantifying how concentrated a particular industry, cluster, occupation, or demographic group is in a region as compared to the nation.

Hmm. Did you just see those blackbirds flying off?

What occupation might rate a high location quotient in the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta? “Music?” you say. Why I suppose that’s so. Think of Robert Johnson, Big Bill Broonzy, B.B. King, Levon Helm, Johnny Cash, and many others.

Then, another shiny thought flew by. How many musical prodigies may be scattered through this largely forgotten part of our country waiting for a parent, friend, or teacher, to start them on the road to music? Is there a Horowitz, or a Scott Joplin, waiting behind one of those closed doors, waiting for someone to offer the key to greatness? Perhaps there is a Rachmaninoff. A Beethoven? There must be.

If you believe as I do, in the immortal words of Plato that “Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything,” you must be distressed as I was at that moment. Distressed? Why? It’s only that some of the richest and most powerful people in America are bent not on ennobling, but on dismantling our public school system and replacing it with some ill-defined market-based affair.

And what will the new system teach the very most capable of those young minds waiting for nurture and guidance? One can only wonder, but …

You can bet your sweet ass it won’t be music.

Growing Up Southern: August 19, 2017

Two women in my life represent the main reasons I hate to see powerful forces setting about to destroy our public school systems.

One was named Mildred Trulock. She taught me English and other wonderful things in the 7^th grade. She died early from cancer at age 59.

The other was named Doris Morgan. She taught me English in the 11^th grade and journalism in the 12^th. She lived into old age before succumbing to Alzheimer’s.

Both put up with my foolishness. Somewhere along the line they instilled in me a need to read and learn. I’m sure they found me far from a good student, but they minimized my nonsense, often using a word that I have rarely, if ever, heard anyone other than a teacher use: “provoke,” as in, “don’t provoke me further.”

And I’m sure I did. For some reason, Mrs. Trulock ignored it and turned me toward reading Charles Dickens. When she caught me reading someone else, say Hemingway, she would observe, “Well there are some elements of his writing that you’re not emotionally prepared for yet, but I suppose it’s okay.”

Mrs. Morgan set a high standard, expecting my fellow students and me to read and discuss such classics as Moby Dick and Heart of Darkness. Later, she taught me not to use sarcasm in serious reporting. She singlehandedly got Overton Anderson and me into the National Honor Society. I can imagine that, at least on my part, that, took some high-level filibustering.

I never told Mrs. Trulock how much she mattered in my life, but I expect she knew. I’m proud to say that, before Mrs. Morgan took sick, I began writing short stories. Sometime in the early 1990s, I packed up several and mailed them to her with a note saying her efforts hadn’t gone completely in vain.

Gosh almighty! A week later, she tracked me down by phone and complimented the daylights out of me. That meant more to me than a Pulitzer might have. Well, almost.

She had even passed the stories around to the other women in the retirement home with all the pride of a mother whose son had just made the honor role for the first time.

Of all things, she laughed and said, “I had to explain to some of them what a ‘stump-broke cow’ is.” See, she grew up on a ranch in Montana and was quite the cowgirl when she was young. She knew things some of her peers didn’t, probably some things I’ve never known.

I say this all in support of public school teachers. I have friends and acquaintances who received superb educations at private or religious schools, but I only have the experience of public ones. I think they, and their teachers, are national treasures. I only wish that the billionaires trying to privatize them would redirect their vast fortunes toward bolstering our existing schools instead.

I know those were different times during which these wonderful women touched my lives. School populations were more homogenous. Life was slower. A good part of education was devoted to building character as opposed to certifying kids for jobs or post-secondary endeavors. Children didn’t have to make the terrible choices they must make today, including whether to join a gang or try drugs. I’ll be the first to admit, though, that sneaking away down to the ravine to smoke a Camel was a perennial temptation.

We took tests in those days to see if we were learning anything, not to determine our future roles in life. A Mildred Trulock or Doris Morgan would have time to apply a little molding to young minds. Life was calmer. Students provoked their teachers back in the day. They didn’t beat or stab them.

Were times that much better? I don’t know. Old-age gilds and glitterizes the past. Times certainly weren’t better for my African-American brothers and sisters. They weren’t allowed to attend school with us.

All I know is that attending a public school did me no personal harm. Hell, that’s where I met Penny Perdue, who, I’m proud to say, still calls me her friend. As the ladies Trulock and Morgan would want me to say, “Be still my beating heart.”

Just remembering.