Morning Thoughts: January 15, 2018

I’ve always appreciated the rewards that come from hard work, honesty, and dedication more than those from accidental benefits. Take American citizenship for example. I did nothing to deserve it. I did, though, appreciate it enough to serve the country when asked to. Four years of your life pays back a tiny bit for all the benefits from undeserved luck. Or so it seems to me.

It can rankle to watch those I call “members of the lucky sperm club” prance around in their $5,000 suits or designer outfits, many having never served their country at all, enjoying their privilege while raining insults on the least of those among us. Many of them have never worked a day or sacrificed a moment to gain their position in our world. Good fortune: it favors individuals as well as countries.

Let me tell you about a woman I know. She wasn’t born in America. She hails from a city on the Baja Peninsula of Mexico. She came to this country on a visitor’s visa. She met a man from Texas and married him. They became neighbors of ours at the farm we own in rural Arkansas. We are proud to call her and her husband our friends.

He grew up living with his family, and three others, on one-fourth of the enclosed rear of a flatbed truck, traveling from harvest to harvest across the heartland of America, far from the gilded towers of Manhattan.

We were honored by helping her prepare "Green Card" papers that had to be delivered to Memphis early one morning. It was our further privilege to sponsor her. At the time, her husband worked until midnight each day, so we set our alarm and met them at the remote house of a woman who put the finishing touches on the paperwork for us to sign. Then, off they went toward Tennessee, with neither sleep nor rest.

The next evening, they came to our house, all smiles, with a small gift of thanks. Later, I was lucky enough to attend the ceremony in which she became an American citizen.

They’ve had their ups and downs since, but they have survived and raised two wonderful children, one of which is now almost halfway through a college education. Along the way, for a few years, they cared for four abandoned children, keeping them out of the foster care system until their parents took them back.

On special occasions, she treats us to the best tamales this side of Mexico City. He helps me keep some of our antique farm equipment running. When she’s not cooking, tending house, or working, she knits head coverings to donate to kids undergoing cancer treatment at St. Jude’s hospital in Memphis. We exchange gifts at Christmas and smiles and waves much more often.

Don’t ask us, if you would, whether we would choose her and her family, or the Trumps, as friends and neighbors.

Morning Thoughts: January 14,

At the risk of belaboring the point, I think there is something else that bothers me about using intemperate language toward other countries.

My father’s family immigrated to the United States in the late 1800s. They came despite the fact that our country had recently suffered over 600,000 deaths in a fight over whether to allow the enslavement of one race of humans by another. Immigrants evidently saw promise in the new land instead of a tragic and incoherent history.

My father attended a one-room school in rural Arkansas. His grandfather barely spoke English and still owned a pair of wooden shoes he had brought over from Germany. His father had been subjected, as a youth, to indentured servitude. Ties to the old country were strong.

Daddy would have been five or six when America entered the First World War. His schoolmates echoed the opinions of many important members of our government toward the country of our ancestry. I’m not sure they whether they called it a “shithole” country or not. But the children called my father a “Dirty Hun,” despite the fact that one of his uncles wore our county’s uniform.

Later, as the second of the world wars initiated by our ancestral country and its allies raged, America was fairly certain of who our friends and enemies were. But history is fluid and its meanderings unpredictable. The enemies of today may be the friends of tomorrow. Hatred is a weak anchor with which to moor our ship of values. Americans should have realized that by now.

Some have. Some haven’t. Many of our mothers and fathers, coming out of America’s greatest economic depression, watched, in horror, the results of a nation’s people slowly allowing themselves to be led and governed by men who loathed and abominated minorities. The resulting millions of dead cry out to us from the pits of history, pleading for us not to repeat the mistake.

Will we? My reading of history tells me that the seeds of World War Two didn’t instantly produce full-grown plants from a once-dead land. They sprouted first as an identification of scapegoats on which to blame current problems. They flourished as minorities suffered demonization and good people watched in silence. They grew limbs and leaves as minorities lost the right to human decency and their friends and neighbors went about their business.

Then the orators took over. Intemperate language became acceptable, even lauded. Hatred became the norm. War became the solution of choice. Isolation of the educated and ghettoization of the powerless went unchecked. Eventually, the ovens appeared, next, the smoke columns.

Maybe the crops of that war all germinated the day a young boy called a classmate a “dirty Jew.”

Maybe the fruits of those crops blossomed the day the Fuhrer denounced an entire race as vermin.

Maybe those crops fed the troops who invaded country, after country, that the Fuhrer had denounced in intemperate terms.

Too often, our mouth is the gateway to our heart. Let us hope that one person’s mouth is not the gateway to our nation’s heart.

It is ironic that I was visiting some of the finest people on the planet when I heard about the obscene words uttered about countries less fortunate than ours. I was, in fact, with leaders of our state’s cities. They serve those from a great diversity of areas. All are doing monumental jobs of facing increasingly complex problems, jobs aggravated by members of society who no longer view racial harmony and love of humankind as a way to address those problems.

As with our cities, the founders of the countries of our planet were not all motivated by a desire to seek a new life and a willingness to oust native cultures that stood in their way. Some are peopled now by descendants of humans transported to their countries in chains, their bodies shackled together head to foot in spaces barely 18 inches high. Those lucky enough to survive the sea journey faced a life of misery and spirit-killing slave labor.

We express wonder that some of their descendants don’t see hard work and enthusiasm as keys to happiness.

The volunteer immigrants sought land rich in resources and relatively free from Nature’s resistance. The flourished as much from natural conditions as they did from personal initiative.

We acknowledge their hard work.

At the same time, we should always bear in mind that “the rain falls on the just and the unjust.”

As with our sister countries, the cities of our state have faced a great variety of historical and natural forces. Some cities, once located in pockets of poverty, despair, and backwardness, have found the changes of times generous and bountiful. They flourish, not so much from the actions of former residents, but from the almost accidental turns of fortune.

Other cites watched as the socio-economic dynamics of the world rolled over them like a hurricane of destruction and ill-will. Again, because of nothing their former populations did or did not do, they struggle like “boats against the current,” most often being “borne back into the past.”

I thought about this all the way as I was driving home yesterday.

I thought about times I have been in the luckier parts of our state and have heard otherwise good and decent people describe, to my face, the area of our state from which I come. They use the same terms that the president, of this great and fortunate country of ours, uses to describe those countries occupied by the less-blessed of our brothers and sisters.

I thought of the summer nights I have spent sweating in the Arkansas Delta, meeting in a rural church, windows open and mosquitoes so thick we could scarcely see one another. I remembered how, many times, I was the only white face in a room full of folks in desperate need of potable drinking water for their families, or some other basic need of life.

I thought of cities in our state that once provided goods and services for a population thriving on an agricultural or manufacturing economy, but are now deserted wastelands since those employers mechanized or moved to enjoy near-slave labor in those countries we now call “shit holes.”

I thought of a friend from El Salvador, who fled a country of devastated by natural disasters as well as from gang warfare that results, in part, from the desires of people in our country to purchase illegal drugs. He performs a job once done by three people and is a model of what our country needs to face the future. He has never written a piece, or spoken to a crowd, urging Americans to hate or distrust one another. This, in my book, makes him a better citizen than Franklin Graham, the commentators on Fox “news,” or politicians who use hate and distrust as election vehicles.

The Galilean urged us to love one another and respect other cultures, even the Samaritans of his day. We could use people who would live by his counsel to run our country.

I thought about the young child on the porch of a shack in our state’s forgotten rural areas, a child siting cold and hungry waiting for his mother to finish “earning” enough for a hit of crystal meth. Yeah. He’s living in a “shit hole.” But he’s our son. What will we say, or think, when he's old enough to get his first gun?

I remembered a piece I had read earlier in the day. An opinion writer said our president simply said aloud what many Americans were inwardly thinking. I hoped it wasn’t true, but I started to tear up. For a moment, I felt the Galilean join me.

           

Morning Thoughts: January 11, 2018

When I was just a young boy, I grew up "out in the country." What I wanted then, was to grow up and have a place in a big city like Lucy and Ricky Ricardo had. Almost made it. The road to my dream got a little bumpy, though, when I married a farmer's daughter.

Now we have what we call "a farm," which is really just a 125-acre patch of pastures and forest. We do have a high-rise condo unit in Little Rock, a not-so-big city but a nice one. We recently bought another house in a small town: Lonoke, AR in which to care for my mother-in-law. That's another nice city. Now we, like the hero (heroine?) in our favorite movie says, "We don't know where we are until we hear someone call our name."

Let's face it. I like cities. I don't mind farms, grew up around them, but I love cities.

That's why I keep working some. See, I get to work for the cities of Arkansas and that is both a treat and an honor.

So, I'm in Fort Smith, Arkansas today, it's another nice city, the one from where Mattie and Rooster took off to find her daddy's murderer.

I'll get to spend time with exceptionally fine people, swap war stories, and learn things. Go ahead and envy me. I'll understand.

Morning Thoughts: January 10, 2018

I was lucky. I paid off what I thought was a massive student loan debt pretty quick after I graduated in 1966. It was $180.00. That would be, maybe, $1,400.00 today, but it seemed like a lot to me then. Despite being transferred to 1A Draft Status, I managed to land a job in San Francisco and paid the debt before I was called up to serve.

Lately, a lot of dots have been connected in my head. How are college debts, statistical “think-speech,” the words of the Galilean, and photos of immigrant parents being torn from the arms of their children related? In my aged mind, they are.

First, in my early career, I dealt a lot with cities that were seeking help through the community development block grant program issued to the state from the federal government. The funds existed to help cities with eligible programs, one of which was to provide aid, comfort, and relief to families who met a defined standard of living on low or moderate family incomes. Yes, the ones the Galilean called “the least of those among us.” Back in those distant times, there were those in government who wanted to see the country guided by Christian standards.

Yeah. It was a long time ago.

For those who worked within the program, our job was to care for the health, welfare, and safety of the American people, a disarmingly simple charge. It guides, or let me say should guide, every aspect of my profession. Right.

In a move that still burns my cheeks with shame, we developed jargon that allowed us to speak in terms less understandable by the very public we were supposed to serve. It also promoted the de-humanization of our efforts. The community development block grant program was no longer a source of relief and succor. It was “The CDBG Program,” a source of free money. The recipients were no longer those who suffered, longed for safety, and mourned for being poor in spirit, or more precisely, just poor. They were “LMI families (LMIFs),” who provided a statistical gateway to federal funds.

Some even vulgarized the term to "LMIs." I agree. I don't think the Galilean would have used that term.

My thesis today is that the very term “low and moderate-income families” (or individuals) is no longer operative in America. We have demonized the non-rich to the point where gradations of that richness must be simplified.

I propose that the term be simplified to “not wealthy families.” Now we can more accurately classify families who don’t meet income levels as “NWF.” The others could be called, oh, I don’t know, maybe “those in control.”

NWFs and TICs. Isn't that much simpler?

NWF children will encounter a monetary “fine” for seeking a college education. They already do. Now called “student loans,” in the future they will be placed under the NWF Monetary Education Reparation Demand Enforcement program. The same type assessment could apply to immigrant families who want to apply for citizenship by paying a fine for the crime of overstaying.

NWF members who fail to meet health standards would be assigned to a Diseased Adult and Children Health Assemblage Unit.

And so on. Sometimes I don’t think things are as complicated as we tend to make them.

Hmmm

Growing Up Southern: January 9, 2018

Was thinking about how much fun a teenager like me used to have on fifty cents. Four bits. Two quarters. Half a dollar. Fiddy cents. Half a Shekel. Oh marvelous coin! To some, still a symbol of America’s greatness.

It brings to mind the great day of my youth when the latest Elvis Presley single would come to the music store in our town. Sainted Mother and I would have been saving for weeks. The news would spread that He had just issued a ditty called Don’t Be Cruel, and we would head to town. For the one coin you could get a 45-rpm version, the kind with the big hole in the middle. We would be in “tall cotton” for a week or more.

You could take a girl to the best movie in town for two quarters. Of course, that didn’t include Cokes, popcorn, or Bon-Bons if she had a sweet tooth. A boy needed two more “halvers” for that.

Later, fifty cents would buy you two gallons of gas, or a whole evening of “dragging Main,” or hanging out at the “Wagon Wheel.”

For the wicked, the same amount or so would buy you three or four packages of cigarettes so you could look cool in front of the other kids. Oh, and the coins were great for flipping. (Quarters just never measured up). And you could even clasp one in your eye and pretend to be a German prince.

Some kids would spend months banging on the edges of a coin with a spoon, They said you could make a ring of one if you did it long enough. I never saw a completed one, though. Attention spans had already started to wither. These days, they give kids expensive drugs to help them concentrate. A fifty-cent piece and a spoon would work just fine, every bit as well as molasses and a feather.

They quit making them—fifty-cent pieces— somewhere along the line. Why? I don’t know. I always found them useful and it felt reassuring to carry one in your pocket. Their disappearance, as I remember it, coincided with the decision to quit making quarters out of silver. As far as I was concerned, both decisions amounted to “currency-debasement” and ushered in a whole era of instability in our lives.

Now, the only memory of this most wondrous coin resides in the name of a music rapper who calls himself “50 Cent.”

I still keep a couple around though, to remind me of those days that we use as an example of when America was great. I like the coin better than the symbol. If you think about it:

Fifty cents was less than a woman earned for filling a man’s dollar-an-hour job back then.

If you weren’t white, fifty cents only bought you a balcony seat at the movies, assuming the theater had a balcony.

Some families ate on little more than fifty cents a week.

There were kids my age who had never held a fifty-cent piece in their hand.

Oh, but if you found a buddy who also had a fifty-cent piece, you could buy (or get someone to buy for you) a six-pack of beer.

Hey, let’s do make America great again.

Morning Thoughts: January 8, 2018

It’s raining this morning. I stood in it for a few moments feeling the sun rise. It’s not a spring rain by any stretch. It’s still chilly outside. But it was soft, and welcoming, a pleasant friend after the bone-chilling days and nights we have had. It made me remember a girl I once knew whose hair would make an almost audible sound while springing into curls from a sudden shower, and I smiled.

Then it made me remember sitting next to a young wife with long straight hair, on the porch of our first home, drinking wine, and watching puddles form in the street, and I counted the years.

It’s important to notice and appreciate moments and places, no matter when or where. Life has a tendency to change those for us, laughing with glee at our puny plans. We adapt to the new plans, or they will watch us wither.

Once, I thought I had it made. I had worked my way though college and was living in one of America’s most exciting cities at one of its most exciting times. I had lots of friends, good and true ones, I thought. I earned enough to do as I pleased. Blessings, not rain, poured on me.

A year later I was sitting on a bunker in the middle of the night, feeling the monsoon slowly soaking every square inch of my body. Those friends? They couldn’t force themselves to abide one who participated in an evil and unjust war. I couldn’t really blame them, but I had made my choices and they had made theirs. They still sat in warm circles playing music and … whatever. I sat cold, wet, and friendless, alone on the other side of the world from anyone who still did love me. So much for planning our lives.

It all turned out fine. But I stood outside at daybreak today, while the rain talked to me about it all. I had read a piece in Sunday’s paper about the best and most exciting places in the world to visit this year. We won’t be seeing any of them. Once again, we have made our choices. There are more fulfilling things than having, or even pretending to have, fun, in life. Life can narrow your field of vision, and one fares better after accepting it.

There will be soft rains, though. There will be days when a person in your care suddenly remembers something you thought had died in their memory long ago. There will be, if we’re lucky, the first sight of a young corn plant peaking from the soaked earth. There will be the warming sight of a small herd of deer drifting into our pasture at sundown because they know it is a safe place. There will be the feel of a soft hand clutching yours in the night, the first sound of the geese in late winter, the smell of freshly plowed earth in the spring, and the first taste of food grown by your own hands. And there will be songs to learn and books to read. None of these things require a tour of Tuscany. We will tend those in our care and be observant to life. Isn't that enough?

I hear people say, “I’ll be happy once I move to (wherever)." I worry that many will only face disappointment. Then I hear my late father-in-law, on the bitterest day of the year, saying “It’ll be spring before you know it,” and I think to myself, “He was almost always happy, I think.”

In addition to our lives, I worry that all Americans face some dreadfully unforeseen changes soon. I may be wrong, but signs alarm me. We have a powerful coalition that seems bent on changing the most basic character of our lands, our country, and our society. Why? I don’t know. I’m not even sure those in the coalition know, or would agree upon the motivation.

It goes beyond political differences. It appears, in all respects, to be a coalition based on hate, greed, the illogical, and a strong dose of nihilism, much of that resulting from a religion that abhors the concept of a “social gospel,” and favors either a gospel of greed or an apocalypse based on mythological prophecy.

That will bring change to us all. Those who end up with everything will be faced with having to see if “all is enough.” Those who end up with nothing will, for the first time in their lives, be forced to understand that decisions bear consequences. Those who find themselves on the wrong side of history will simply lie.

I will be hysterically happy if I’m wrong. But, as for me and my family, we’ll just live once more to see our earth, “… breeding lilacs out of a dead land.”

Or maybe just corn.