Feelings

 Today I awoke with the news pundits expressing the total annihilation of the political party that my family supported for, oh, two generations. The third one back was from Illinois, and the local wisdom back then was to support the political party in office, or likely to be in office, due to job patronage considerations. Politische Partei nicht Mann. Oh, and not all of my family. Some now embrace nihilism for odd reasons. Anyhow …

 I’m in a strained position. I still earn some money on small jobs for organizations I love and for work I enjoy. My continued success is important. It keeps me doing paying work in urban planning which I love and for which I get paid instead of doing farm work which I abhor and for which I don’t get paid. I need to understand all viewpoints.

 My first reaction on reading this morning’s news was to begin imagining how I would feel when I heard the boxcar’s scraping metal doors opening. and a voice yelling, “Raus raus und anstellen.” Oops, sorry, “Out, out and line up.”

 Then I started thinking. While the dreadful direction in which our country is headed primarily rests upon the shoulders of one political party, I’ve landed in “a plague on both your houses” paradigm. If our country doesn’t get back nearer the center, we are doomed.

 For the left, it prevailed somewhat in the last election. Despite the usage of the worst choice of a political slogan in my lifetime, i.e. “defund the police,” it managed victories. How many millions voted for the other party because of that one statement is beyond imagining. Sadly, they are keeping it up.

 Now, for a political minefield. Whether we “progressives” wish to admit it or not, such an issue as that involving transgender persons frightens some people. Wait wait. Educated people such as you and I understand that it is a biological phenomenon and should be treated as such. We reason that as taxpayers, do we prefer acceptance and understanding, or are we willing to face the costs of mental care? That was the choice upon which the U.S. Military based its decision. That decision finally came out well, by the way.

 On the other hand, we must try to understand that for some of our brothers and sisters, the prospect of having a young daughter enter a restroom where the sex of others within it is flexible is not a prospect easily accommodated from an emotional viewpoint for many. Cursing and reviling them for their feelings is not productive.

Now that I’ve read all the hate mail, one recurring theme is, “You think you are so [insert adjective of choice] smart, and you think you are never wrong.”

Allow me to disabuse you of that notion. Back when the long-time minority political party of our state became the majority party, they first elected some of what I considered the worst miscreants imaginable to office. My soothing thought was, “Once they are in power and realize the complexity and potential good of government, they will elect better people.”

There. I was dead-assed wrong. Enjoy your gloat.

 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 took 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 attracted 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.”

 It worked like magic, even among citizens of our state who are alive today because of the Barack Obama’s efforts toward universal health care. The illogic of that could make a healthy person nauseated. Our state will suffer for decades.

 Now don’t get me wrong. I strongly support the rights of Americans to vote for the candidates of their choice. 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 4, 2017.

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.

The End My Friend

Random thoughts on politics and the mess we’re in:

– I’m no expert on politics, and I try to stay non-partisan, but it’s beginning to look to me as though Mike Bloomberg is the only person with a “D” beside his name, (or Bernie Sanders for that matter), who has the faintest clue as to what it will take to change the administration of the U.S. in November.

– Since we’d best not buy any food that was processed in China and sent back to us, we checked our freezer yesterday for results from previous sale purchase and gardening efforts. We’ll probably be good until the Coronavirus gets us or wears itself out by some miracle. I don’t think we can last until a new administration to reconstruct our guardian federal agencies.

– Been reading about an America in which corporate America owned the supreme court, congress, and the presidency. The poor were only tolerated for cheap labor. Voting was a farce. Government refused to help the poor but allocated billions to assist corporations in making higher profits.

– The administration refused to help small farmers but awarded obscene contracts to corporations doing government work.

– The federal government participated in assaulting organized labor.

– Wrong. It was in the so-called “Robber Baron” era. Things went to hell in 1927.

Maybe Woody Guthrie said it best.