Warnings

Might start a novel. Here’s an idea. I would call it “The Death Call of Easy.” An asteroid is about to hit the U.S. It’s not like the Yucatan monster 66 million years back, the one that got the dinosaurs. This one is small and is going to hit in the middle of Death Valley. All Americans have to do is stay away until after it hits. The news outlet said so, quoting the scientists.

Here is my draft opening: “A sea of red hats flowed over the thin line of guards, smothering their feeble protests into the scorching sand. The crowd rushed into the fiery void. The heat turned the sweat on the faces beneath the hats into steam and a layer of fog waved over the red flood like a death shroud covering a corpse.”

Or, maybe … “It was a dark and stormy night. The government had warned the inhabitants of The Villages to seek shelter, but a crowd had gathered at the lake shore, where the fake sailboats danced merrily in the wind like the opening act of a dark vaudeville show.”

Or, maybe I'll go do something else to pass the Quarantime.


                                     

Urban Planning

Been reading the MIT book Critical Thinking by Jonathan Haber. In light of a possible new assignment, I'v become interested in so-called "Venn Diagrams." On top of it all, I've often felt compelled to develop a unified theory of urban planning, my chosen profession.

Now you have to understand, my profession attracts a great deal of silliness.

Have a problem with affordability? Simple, just eliminate parking requirements.

Need affordable housing? Build tiny homes. It will wear you out explaining to the gurus that a 200-square-foot tiny home in San Jose, California would sell for maybe a half million dollars, more in "The City." (That's what they like to call San Francisco.)

Want to bring economic windfalls to your city? Require every home to have a front porch, and, by the way, prohibit the most popular type home in the suburban market, the so-called "snout house." It serves the dual purpose of announcing to neighbors and the driving public that its owner can afford two or more vehicles while providing a widely appreciated place for "Happy Hour" traffic watching.

Planners hate them.
Joe Six-Pack loves them.

Get the picture? Well rest easy. I've developed a simple theory to explain where we are in America in terms of urban planning. It is very clear and illustrative. Here you are.

Fighting the Blues

Another day of tumultuous news. It makes it hard to stay positive. I work on it by thinking back to my parents’ generation. Can you imagine living through The Great Depression, the “dust bowl" catastrophe, and the collapse of social order in one lifetime? Just imagine the relief upon emerging alive. Then imagine seeing a faint glimmer of hope just as the radio announces the bombing of Pearl Harbor?

Oh, it may have been a “great generation.” I won’t argue that point. I think all generations have some greatness in them, along with their share of shortcomings. I know that many think the so-called “Baby Boomers” had theirs. I point out to you, though, that many of them went, when their country asked, to an immoral war during a time that had its share of tumultuousness. More than 50,000 of them never returned alive. All provided their service under criminally poor leadership, a service for which their country has never forgiven them.

We all press on, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “boats against the current, borne ceaselessly into the past.” Today the dreadful past has created a gaping hell hole that draws us toward the bigotry, hatred, and racial injustice from which we had thought we were escaping. We had hoped against hope that past racism lay dormant, but like a 1950s subterranean movie monster, we awoke it by electing a man of color as president.

Now, bigotry is creeping over us like a blob landed on Earth from an unfriendly planet. In its worst form, we find that it is a political tool—a highly effective political tool. “I hate the same people that you do,” has replaced "We're all in this together," and “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

Will we survive? It seems up for grabs as some at the highest echelons of power seem, for some indeterminable reason, to be using all the power at their disposal to prevent it.

For hope, I look back, as I say, to the generation before mine. Their country survived, although not as intact for some of its citizens as for others. And when I think of how hard the struggle for survival was for my parents, I can only marvel at how much more difficult it would have been for them had they not been white.

Would today have been different had more Americans voted out of hope rather than out of media-induced dislike? I don't know. As Ernest Hemingway said, "Isn't it pretty to think so?"

Sadness On The Land

Back to Gettysburg. The news of recent days distracted me. Finally, I decided that it seemed appropriate to return to a previous crisis in which 85,000 men fought to save the Union and dissolve slavery and 75,000 men fought to save slavery and dissolve the Union. It started when elements of Heth’s Division stumbled into Union Forces north of the city of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania and ended when Robert E. Lee withdrew his defeated army and retreated to Virginia. More than 7,000 soldiers and one civilian, a woman named Jennie Wade would lie dead. The Union would survive and the bigotry and inhumanity that ignited would end.

They thought. We thought.

I once worked with a great-grandson of Thomas G. Clark who marched into Gettysburg on July 1, 1863 with his two sons Jonathan and Albert as members of the 42^nd Mississippi Regiment under BG Joe Davis, a nephew of Jefferson. He shared transcripts of letters now in the Confederate Museum at Oxford, TN.  Captain Clark had written to his wife on June 13^th: “Try to keep in good spirits for I intent to come home this summer or fall to stay for I think that the Boys have had experience enough now to git along without me and it is my duty to pay some attention to my family at home and in fact I think that I am gitting to old and have become unhealthy and I think that in justice to myself and family at home it it is my duty to quit this army at least for a while.” [Grammar transcribed as written.]

Thomas and his son Jonathon would die on July 1, when General Heth’s division ran into that of General Buford. Many of Davis's men would die in an abandoned railroad cut when he lost control of the division after an initial victory. It's likely this included the father and son. No one knows where they are buried.

Albert would die on July 3 as part of the left flank making the assault on Cemetery Ridge. A few of the men in that sad and battered regiment would make it to Emmetsburg Road and maybe 50 would cross it. The Virginian descendants of the Pickett’s fresh division would cruelly blame those on the far left for the failure of the insanely ordered assault. History can be as deceitful as the present.

A granddaughter would later write of the widow and mother of the Clark men: “When the news of this awful disaster reached home, Grandmother Clark prayed and shouted all night, and she often told us in speaking of those days that we didn’t know what sorrow was.”

Renown author Zora Neale Hurston would have one of her characters in “Their Eyes Were Watching God” express the war differently: “But it was a long time after dat befo’ de Big Surrender at Richmond. Den de big bell ring in Atlanta and all de men in gray uniforms had to go to Moultrie, and bury their swords in the ground to show they was never to fight about slavery no mo’. So den we knowed we was free.”

Free? As we have found over the last days, not quite yet.

Day One: The Railroad Cut

Orphans in a Storm

 Sometimes there just isn’t anything you can say about a situation. In fact, I have come to realize that for some situations, it’s just better to say nothing. Saying something you had to think up that might fit the moment just sounds like a self-serving plea for absolution. I found that out years ago.

Two days after James Earl Ray murdered Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4, 1968, the I – Corps area of the then Republic of South Vietnam was tense, almost as tense as it was the previous January during the Tet Offensive. Bars were closed and all access to alcohol stopped. American military bases were on “lockdown,” and nobody was saying much, not much at all in our compound just outside Da Nang. Events halfway around the world had our little universe on the brink of explosion.

That morning, they chose me—perhaps because I was a little older than most in the Naval Security detachment—and another sailor because he was an unofficial leader among what everyone called “the brothers” back then, to guard the far back gate of our compound. We knew one another as shipmates, nothing more. We were just two wary souls thrown together in the face of a storm we neither chose nor caused. They told us that no one was to leave, and no one was to enter.

I strained my brain for the six hours while we stood the watch for something to say. Nothing came. So we did our duty and stopped anyone from leaving and joining some fracas or other. I stopped the white sailors and he stopped the black sailors. Had any of them refused, I have no idea what would have happened. We, of course, would have been fully authorized to fire upon them. To this day, I don’t know what would have happened. We stood our watch and turned the post over to our reliefs. It was dark by then and tensions had cooled. We nodded to one another and parted. I was sent up to a mountain compound shortly thereafter and I don’t think we ever saw one another again.

I’m not African American, so I cannot even imagine what it would be like to be in constant strife with the authority around me. I cannot image what it would be like always to stand guilty whether innocent or not. I cannot imagine what it would be like to be viewed as a lesser form of citizen. I have endured curt glares and some caustic comments, but only because of some service ribbons given to me “by a thankful nation.” Those looks and comments mostly came from fellow servicemen, so I had to overlook them.

I’ve never been a police officer. Those I have known personally have been honorable people. I have no idea how it would feel to drive the mean streets of a city on the midwatch, with suspicious eyes staring from every windshield and every bedroom, not knowing which car seat contained a loaded pistol. I do know that I’ve been alone during those same dark hours with the safety of my comrades in my hands, so scared I would have shot my own mother had she burst out of the jungle and ran toward me.

So I’ll pass no judgement on the community of police officers. Neither will I condemn those who riot. I have no idea what I would do if my genetic improbabilities had developed differently. I’d probably be rioting, but who knows?

I’ve witnessed and watched, though, and I’ve lived a long time. I feel entitled to make some observations, not judgments mind you, just observations.

Sadly, there is a percentage of Americans who simply don’t like people of color. It may be from ignorance, lack of communion, radical nurture, tribalism, a penchant for homogeneity, shortsightedness, fear, racial prejudice, bigotry, xenophobia, or some social disorder. We used to call it all those things. We’ve now collapsed them, and linguistically elevated them to the simple “racism.” Wars on nouns are always dicey, but this one sets a particularly high bar.

Now I don’t know what the percentage of those to whom I referred is. I suspect it’s around 30 percent of white Americans, larger in the South. It's not enough to determine elections if the righteous and pure of heart wish it otherwise. I do know something about white Americans of righteous bearing. It is good to have them on your side, or at least in tacit support of one’s fundamental rights as a human being. That tacit support can be a strong ally. Ask the American Freedom Fighters of the 1960s. I also know that it is subject to being added to or taken from, sometimes becoming a welcome ally, at others a missing friend. Ask Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, both affected by the margins. Increasingly, it seems to me, those increments determine our elections.

I'm not talking only about those who sit out elections. I'm also talking about those who may base a vote on the fact that a freeway was blocked by protesters while they tried to get their sick child to a hospital. Unfocused retribution falls on the just and the unjust.

Adroit politicians and those whose primary purpose is to win first and be right later, will avoid actions that effect the tacit support that can determine revolutions as well as elections. I know that elections increasingly turn on small increments of support.

I also know that Donald Trump is an expert at manipulating the support and moving the flexible fringe toward his side.

He needs no help whatsoever.