Is it just me??
Am I the only one?
Or do some of you out there feel it too?
I'm talking about the feeling I get when I'm sent the emails, one after another, day after day, and sometimes several in the same day. The emails telling me about how proud these people are of our Soldiers and Sailors and Marines who are serving in some faraway hell-hole, laying their lives on the line for our way of life.
I don't think you quite understand yet.
These people feel that if we don't support 100% of what our sometimes clueless leaders do, and where they send these young warriors, then we are lesser Americans, less patriotic than they. They apparently don't understand just how much I really do support our troops, including my own son who just returned from a tour of duty in Iraq a few weeks back.
But then maybe it is I who doesn't understand.
I don't understand the self-righteousness of these people, whose own sons and daughters are too busy going to college or making their first million or simply drinking beer and making babies to be a part of our fighting forces. I don't understand how they can see me as being less patriotic than they are, when it's my own son, my firstborn, flesh of my flesh, who volunteered and filled that spot in our military, so that THEIR son or daughter didn't have to "waste" a year of their life, a year apparently better spent climbing the ladder in corporate America.
Oh, I know very well that my son volunteered to join the military. And I know that my son has made a choice, the same as their son or daughter. But I don't understand why these people can't see this in the same context as the relative commitment of the chicken and the pig in their Egg McMuffin in the morning. Their situation is comparable to the chicken, who is merely involved in bringing you your breakfast, whereas the pig is committed.
So I guess it's all right, then, if these folks look upon my son--and, by extension, me--as the pigs when it comes to supporting our troops...as long as they accept that they deserve to be called the chickens that they are.
I think I've earned the right, through my son's service to our country, to resent the implication of their self-righteous "patriotism" via email...as their own sons and daughters are too busy, too important, or too valuable to corporate America to defend our nation. In my point of view, these people don't have a dog in this fight. They DO have a stake in the outcome of the war in Iraq, but only to the same extent that all Americans do. If they had a son or daughter who'd served, them I might be open to the idea that they have a right to preach patriotism to anyone else.
Now I have friends and relatives who DO have sons and daughters who are serving in the military, and who have served in Iraq. Oddly enough, they are the ones who DON'T feel the need to preach patriotism. NO, I only get those self-righteous emails from the folks whose sons and daughters are too busy to get involved in the military, and who therefore [in MY view] have the LEAST reason to preach patriotism.
Am I out of line to feel this way?
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Friday, April 4, 2008
40 Years Later...Dr. King DID Make A Difference
As I write this, today is the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. In the past 40 years America has come a long way towards a society in which equality is more than just the inspiration for an "I have a dream" speech. But to understand where we are today, we need to know where we've come from.
I was born and grew up in Corydon, Indiana, and the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education and I both came into this world in 1954. I entered first grade in what was then called "the Annex," but which had been the old one-room "colored school" on Summit Street. There weren't many black children in the entire county, but I didn't have a problem with being in the same classroom with them. I don't claim any points for righteousness for that fact; it's just that, up to that point, I hadn't been taught to hate anyone.
But that's not to say that there weren't any prejudices in our little town. The hill on Beechmont Drive in South Corydon, where many of the blacks in the community lived, was more commonly called "Nigger Hill." Even into the late 1970's, when the Indian Creek Convalescent Center was built at the intersection of Harrison Drive and Beechmont Drive, the name lingered; the whispered nickname of the convalescent center was NHNH, or "Nigger Hill Nursing Home." Old habits die hard, I suppose...but at least the words were being whispered, and not shouted as they might have been a couple of decades before.
I remember a story my grandfather told of Brother Hodge, a black minister who had conducted a tent revival at the local fairgrounds. The services had lasted well into the evening, and as Brother Hodge began walking home, he found himself surrounded by a number of white men, some of whom may have meant him some physical harm. "Brother Hodge," one of the whites asked him, "do you believe you're going to heaven when you die?" Brother Hodge, aware of his situation, answered, "Yessir, I do believe I'm goin' to Heaven--but I'm in no hurry!" The laughing crowd, I was told, dispersed as quickly as it had formed.
When I was growing up, there were other blacks in the community who did their part to fight racial stereotypes by simply being part of the fabric of society. They bought homes and cars and trucks, they worked respected and respectable jobs, they didn't get into trouble fighting and drinking and gambling and stealing. They didn't work at being anything but good, honest citizens...and in Corydon, they were generally allowed to do so without being singled out as being "uppity," or as not knowing their "place" in society. They bought groceries at the same two stores as the white folks, and paid the same prices as the white folks. They were simply our friends and our neighbors.
As far as relations with the black students in our school went, they were very much part of the gang. We were in Boy Scouts together, and we camped and swam and hiked and ate and joked around together. We played sports together, and they were our friends. It was the out-of-town blacks, the ones that were rioting and looting in Watts and Detroit and other distant places we knew about only from the nightly news programs, who were the "niggers." Our fellow students, we had discovered, were just like everyone else. It made no difference whether you were black or white, we all still sweated out Mr. Fluhr's algebra tests and Mrs. Elam's English class, and Mrs. Enlow's geography tests and Mr. Windell's chemistry class and Mr. Cato's government class. We were all chasing after the American Dream, and we were all trying to figure out where we fit into a world that we didn't make, but one we'd all surely inherit.
I realize now that it was probably a lot harder for our black classmates to find that spot, in a world where some folks still looked down upon you because of your race. As a kid I was too caught up in my own struggles to be accepted to give much thought to the struggles of anyone else. But I always tried to judge folks by "the content of their character," in Dr. King's words, rather judge them by the color of their skin, because I always got along better with a friendly, helpful person who just happened to be black than I ever did with someone who was consistently a jerk but who happened to be white..
Now, I wasn't any kind of a saint while I was growing up. I was a reflection of the society around me, and I occasionally said hurtful things to my friends...and that included my black friends as well as my white friends. While I'd like to go back and erase all the wrong things I've ever done, I have tried to apologize for any time my ignorance led me to heartlessness. I can't totally undo or unsay the wrongs that I've committed, but I've tried to "go and sin no more," as Jesus Christ admonished those he forgave a couple of thousand years ago.
Perhaps the blacks who grew up in my generation have a radically different point of view than mine. The 1960's and early 1970's weren't easy for any of us, and dealing with the backlash from whites who watched their nightly news and read their newspapers --and who decided that "these niggers are all the same"--couldn't have been easy. I wish now I'd have been less self-absorbed, and more attuned to their struggles. But it's simply not the nature of kids and teenagers to think of the universe as being centered anywhere away from the self, and I was no different. That doesn't absolve me of guilt; it just makes me a typical kid when I was growing up.
Dr. King didn't come to our community and march or preach. But his words were carried by the national media, and there was a ripple effect even in our small town. His admonitions about our Christian duties toward our fellowman left a mark on all but the hardest of hearts, and we began to see the blacks among us were our friends, our neighbors, and our fellow Americans, and just as deserving of a chance at the American Dream as any of us who weren't born black. Our town wasn't alone, and in similar small towns across America the same realization began to occur.
As a nation, we have come a long way. Forty years ago blacks were just beginning to come to the polls to vote, with longtime roadblocks like poll taxes and restrictive voter registration laws keeping them from exercising the right to vote. Today a black candidate is a legitimate contender for the presidency of this nation. It is a direct result of the efforts of people like Dr. King and his dream of equal opportunity. In the 1960's it was hard to imagine a black having the opportunity to attend an esteemed institution such as Harvard; on January 20, 2009 a Harvard graduate who just happens to be black may be taking the oath of the highest office in the land. If that does come to pass, I can imagine that Dr. King may be somewhere smiling, knowing that his dream has come to fruition and that perhaps the discrimination and bias of Dr. King's era will remain buried within the pages of history.
For the sake of the next generation of Americans, I sincerely hope and pray that equal opportunity continues to bear positive fruit within this great nation, and that a return to the discrimination of the past is unthinkable.
I was born and grew up in Corydon, Indiana, and the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education and I both came into this world in 1954. I entered first grade in what was then called "the Annex," but which had been the old one-room "colored school" on Summit Street. There weren't many black children in the entire county, but I didn't have a problem with being in the same classroom with them. I don't claim any points for righteousness for that fact; it's just that, up to that point, I hadn't been taught to hate anyone.
But that's not to say that there weren't any prejudices in our little town. The hill on Beechmont Drive in South Corydon, where many of the blacks in the community lived, was more commonly called "Nigger Hill." Even into the late 1970's, when the Indian Creek Convalescent Center was built at the intersection of Harrison Drive and Beechmont Drive, the name lingered; the whispered nickname of the convalescent center was NHNH, or "Nigger Hill Nursing Home." Old habits die hard, I suppose...but at least the words were being whispered, and not shouted as they might have been a couple of decades before.
I remember a story my grandfather told of Brother Hodge, a black minister who had conducted a tent revival at the local fairgrounds. The services had lasted well into the evening, and as Brother Hodge began walking home, he found himself surrounded by a number of white men, some of whom may have meant him some physical harm. "Brother Hodge," one of the whites asked him, "do you believe you're going to heaven when you die?" Brother Hodge, aware of his situation, answered, "Yessir, I do believe I'm goin' to Heaven--but I'm in no hurry!" The laughing crowd, I was told, dispersed as quickly as it had formed.
When I was growing up, there were other blacks in the community who did their part to fight racial stereotypes by simply being part of the fabric of society. They bought homes and cars and trucks, they worked respected and respectable jobs, they didn't get into trouble fighting and drinking and gambling and stealing. They didn't work at being anything but good, honest citizens...and in Corydon, they were generally allowed to do so without being singled out as being "uppity," or as not knowing their "place" in society. They bought groceries at the same two stores as the white folks, and paid the same prices as the white folks. They were simply our friends and our neighbors.
As far as relations with the black students in our school went, they were very much part of the gang. We were in Boy Scouts together, and we camped and swam and hiked and ate and joked around together. We played sports together, and they were our friends. It was the out-of-town blacks, the ones that were rioting and looting in Watts and Detroit and other distant places we knew about only from the nightly news programs, who were the "niggers." Our fellow students, we had discovered, were just like everyone else. It made no difference whether you were black or white, we all still sweated out Mr. Fluhr's algebra tests and Mrs. Elam's English class, and Mrs. Enlow's geography tests and Mr. Windell's chemistry class and Mr. Cato's government class. We were all chasing after the American Dream, and we were all trying to figure out where we fit into a world that we didn't make, but one we'd all surely inherit.
I realize now that it was probably a lot harder for our black classmates to find that spot, in a world where some folks still looked down upon you because of your race. As a kid I was too caught up in my own struggles to be accepted to give much thought to the struggles of anyone else. But I always tried to judge folks by "the content of their character," in Dr. King's words, rather judge them by the color of their skin, because I always got along better with a friendly, helpful person who just happened to be black than I ever did with someone who was consistently a jerk but who happened to be white..
Now, I wasn't any kind of a saint while I was growing up. I was a reflection of the society around me, and I occasionally said hurtful things to my friends...and that included my black friends as well as my white friends. While I'd like to go back and erase all the wrong things I've ever done, I have tried to apologize for any time my ignorance led me to heartlessness. I can't totally undo or unsay the wrongs that I've committed, but I've tried to "go and sin no more," as Jesus Christ admonished those he forgave a couple of thousand years ago.
Perhaps the blacks who grew up in my generation have a radically different point of view than mine. The 1960's and early 1970's weren't easy for any of us, and dealing with the backlash from whites who watched their nightly news and read their newspapers --and who decided that "these niggers are all the same"--couldn't have been easy. I wish now I'd have been less self-absorbed, and more attuned to their struggles. But it's simply not the nature of kids and teenagers to think of the universe as being centered anywhere away from the self, and I was no different. That doesn't absolve me of guilt; it just makes me a typical kid when I was growing up.
Dr. King didn't come to our community and march or preach. But his words were carried by the national media, and there was a ripple effect even in our small town. His admonitions about our Christian duties toward our fellowman left a mark on all but the hardest of hearts, and we began to see the blacks among us were our friends, our neighbors, and our fellow Americans, and just as deserving of a chance at the American Dream as any of us who weren't born black. Our town wasn't alone, and in similar small towns across America the same realization began to occur.
As a nation, we have come a long way. Forty years ago blacks were just beginning to come to the polls to vote, with longtime roadblocks like poll taxes and restrictive voter registration laws keeping them from exercising the right to vote. Today a black candidate is a legitimate contender for the presidency of this nation. It is a direct result of the efforts of people like Dr. King and his dream of equal opportunity. In the 1960's it was hard to imagine a black having the opportunity to attend an esteemed institution such as Harvard; on January 20, 2009 a Harvard graduate who just happens to be black may be taking the oath of the highest office in the land. If that does come to pass, I can imagine that Dr. King may be somewhere smiling, knowing that his dream has come to fruition and that perhaps the discrimination and bias of Dr. King's era will remain buried within the pages of history.
For the sake of the next generation of Americans, I sincerely hope and pray that equal opportunity continues to bear positive fruit within this great nation, and that a return to the discrimination of the past is unthinkable.
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