AND IN THE BEGINNING….
Hello my friends. It’s been a while. I had said I would try to write and post on “Politics Mondays, but honestly, lately, I’ve had a difficult time even talking to people about anything or watching any kind of news programming, especially anything political. I’ve I have written two exceptionally long pieces that need significant editing in which I just tried to say everything I wanted to say all at once. Then I figured it out-I need to break it up into pieces! Once I get those edited, I’ll post them another day-not such a long wait for those, I promise! In the meantime, get comfortable, get a cup of coffee or glass of wine-I’m going to tell you a story.
There is just SO MUCH going on in just the one month that we have had this bizarre and brutal administration injustice Washington DC creating such chaos not just in DC but all over the country. It’s been hard to keep up with all of the havoc this second Trump administration has been wreaking on every single aspect of our lives. And I get it, a lot of times, it’s hard to see how any of this stuff has anything to do with us on a normal, daily level. It is all happening so fast-as the self proclaimed anarchist Steve Bannon has bragged that he would “flood the (whatever)” in order to make sure no one can keep up with the damage being done that they can divert attention from some of the most serious and dangerous policies getting passed while we were looking elsewhere and distracted. I know my head spins when I try to figure things out!
So, I’m going to start with some personal observations and experiences and try to post some conversations between the various awful misfortunes the people elected to help us choose to slop all over us. What they are doing in DC and the policies they are putting in place, and the f-ing dangerous clowns they have put into positions of leadership really DOES matter- and we will need some plans for what we need to do as a community before those misfortunes hit us in our most personal and spiritual selves.
First, because I am not convinced that most people (people I know, anyway) are not as feverishly obsessed with politics as I am, so I’ll start by sharing a couple of items that will help explain my foundational beliefs and how I see things. I may give a little space for the “other guys” if I must. We’ll see.
My first “political” experience came when I was six years old. That was on November 22, 1963. That, of course, was the day President Kennedy was killed. To be honest, I didn’t really understand all of it, and my brother and I were just a little miffed that Saturday morning cartoons-the only time Children’s programming was on tv!-were interrupted by the “booooring” funeral of JFK. With no other distractions, or anything else to watch, I watched bits and pieces of the dark and sad funeral procession. I was touched to see little John John give the salute to the casket, and recognized that the little girl, Caroline had a coat that looked like mine, and she was the same age as me! And now her daddy was dead. How sad she must be! At that moment, I made a connection to that little girl, I just KNEW that if we were to meet, we would be great friends. And for years I continued to try to figure out why such a horrible thing would happen. It would be something I explored until long after my childish naïveté had faded.
Not long after that, there was an excitement that was buzzing around that suburban neighborhood, something about “the President” but I was six years old, I didn’t pay much attention to what the grown ups were talking about. But after dinner that evening, my folks bundled my brother and me into the car and drove to the airport. On the way, our parents talked to each other about what we were going to do, and I got the sense that my mother considered this a frivolous activity, but my dad insisted that there might never be another time for us to ever get to see the President of the United States so closely, and that it would be an important memory. It was history.
When we got to the airport, we walked straight to a place where there were what seemed a lot of excited people waiting, anticipating. Then the doors were opened, and the group of us walked quickly out onto the tarmac. forming a loosely cohesive bunch behind a rope barrier.
For what seemed like hours, we stood and waited; I was bored and tired and couldn’t see anything but the backsides of the grownups bunched up in front of me, conversations among the adults floating over my brother and me, who whined and sat, then stood, then sat again, ready to go home. Then, there began a quiet buzzing beginning at the door we had used to exit the building. The buzz grew a little bit at a time, gaining volume and excitement, and beginning to impact me as well. My father quickly picked me up and put me onto his shoulders, the klieg lights nearly blinding me. The sound of the many cameras clicking and alerted me that there was a group of people approaching the airplane on the other side of the rope, walking crisply toward the airplane. I wasn’t sure where I should be looking; actually it didn’t matter much, since the only things I could see of the group were the tops of several men’s heads; the viewing audience ahead of me successfully masked the group we had come to see. But then, as if the mask had been pulled off, there was another head, almost directly in front of me at that point, a full head above the others. He looked like a meerkat soldier standing up in the middle of his troop and surveying the terrain for threats or food.
“That’s the President! That’s LBJ!” The crowd clapped and yelled approvingly.
The President? That’s not what Presidents are supposed to look like! This guy was OLD and he had a big nose and big ears and wrinkles and didn’t smile. Not at all like the handsome young President that died. I was unimpressed.
The following summer, my neighbor had a baby boy that I simply fell in love with. A baby! Babies, I would learn, would also become a part of the woman who would come to be and remain a core part of my soul to this day. I had been playing with him outside of their house one afternoon while he was in his little baby chair. I LOVED that little boy, and his mom, too; when she asked me if I could wait there and “babysit” him while she went to hang laundry on the line in the backyard, I was honored. When she returned, she paid me 16 cents for my efforts, and I was very excited to have “earned” real money for a job! Into my piggy bank for a “rainy day”.
My mother asked me later what I thought I’d like to do with the money I earned from “babysitting”. I had no idea. The only money I had ever spent at that time was to put a penny into a gumball machine at the grocery store, but it didn’t seem a very interesting way to spend such an important sum. Then I heard somebody talking about Mrs. Kennedy, and my ears instantly perked up. She was raising money so she could build a library, the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Presidential Library, and was asking for donations from the public in order to pay for it. That was it! Mrs. Kennedy needed me! I wrote a letter to Mrs. Kennedy, taped the dime, nickel, and penny to the bottom of it, and asked my mom to send it in the mail. I was sure Mrs. Kennedy and Caroline would see and appreciate my major contribution and be happy.
(As it turned out, I received a letter from Mrs. Kennedy thanking me for my “donation”, a letter I was obviously very excited to get, and also, someone at the Dayton Daily News wrote a tiny blurb about it in the newspaper. Pretty heady stuff for a six-year-old! I’ve kept both for over 50 years. I saw them recently, showed them to my family, and now have no idea where they are. SMH)
My understanding of the world continued to develop through my Catholic school days- 12 years of Catholic school and, to my parents’ chagrin, I’m sure, I left those institutions with less religion and a lot more politics. In 1968, I was a TERRIBLE representative of Hubert Humphrey in a mock election, but I didn’t know much about him or what I did know I didn’t like (except that he was from Minnesota, which is where I was born). In that election, my friend Shawn gave a dramatic portrayal of Bobby Kennedy; (MY President’s brother!) his portrayal and what Shawn taught us all about what Bobby stood for was awesome. So much so, I think I voted for him rather than for Mr. Humphrey!
Aside from that moment of politics in middle school, what I learned from my mostly progressive teachers at Corpus Christi Elementary and Julienne/Chaminade-Julienne High School was about living lives of generosity, love, and service. What I learned is that those ideas-the ones that Jesus preached about- were the ones that I took to heart and applied to my idealistic political awareness. Decades later, it still defines how I try to live my life. Yeah, ok, so I don’t go to church anymore, but when I am asked or have to fill out a form I still answer “Catholic” when asked.
On May 4, 1970, when I was 13 years old, I came home from school, came through the back door, and found my mother sitting at the kitchen table, the newspaper spread out in front of her, her head in her hands, weeping. My mother was (and still is) a very capable, strong woman, and not one to cry over “little things”, so I knew instantly that something was terribly wrong.
“They’re killing them. They’re shooting our children”. What she was seeing on the front page of the newspaper was soldiers, guns out and pointing, and students running for their lives. It was the Ohio National Guard turning their guns on students at Kent State University, murdering 4 and injuring ten more. What had been a weekend of protests on campus, some anger fused with indignation over the illegal and secret invasion of the country of Cambodia in an expansion of the increasingly unpopular Viet Nam war.
The shooting itself was scary and awful; the reaction from my mother was perplexing. We had seen the pictures and videos from the war on the news, of course, but while I knew about it in a very abstract sense, the war had not touched anyone I knew in any real way. That day, I determined to find out what those students at Kent State knew that I needed to know. I cut that article out of the newspaper, put it into a scrapbook, studied the war, talked about it whenever the opportunity arose, filled the scrapbook with more articles, and began a real love/hate relationship with our government and politics.
By the time I was 17, about to enter my last year of high school, and just as I was beginning to feel like I had reached an understanding of the world and my place in it, everything changed. My father had accepted a new job working for the City of Akron, Ohio 400 hundred miles northeast of my hometown of Dayton, and we had to move. It was devastating. I was angry, sad, frightened, and very alone in this world. It felt ironic that it was on August 10, 1974, the last dinner we had in our hometown was with friends while we watched President Nixon resign from the presidency. Of course he did.
The one potentially bright light in the sea of darkness in my brain was that our new address was only about 35 minutes away from Kent State University. I was determined to make my own new path, address, and life and attend the school that was a symbol for the feeling of rebellion that had been planted over the many years of my childhood but that had grown so large I was pretty sure I might explode if I didn’t find an outlet for it.
So I went to Kent State, and met people of every political stripe-Communists, labor unions, Veterans, Musicians, Artists, and curious Freshmen. My politics became clear to me, and although I have grown and continued to learn, it’s a quote from “My President” JFK that gives the best summation of what I believe, and that I think speaks for progressive liberals in general, despite rush Limbaugh’s assessment that “today’s liberals are not like JFK was a liberal”. I call that bullsh*t.
“If by a ‘Liberal’ they mean someone who looks AHEAD and not BEHIND, someone who WELCOMES new ideas without RIGID reactions, someone who CARES about the welfare of the PEOPLE- their HEALTH, their HOUSING, their SCHOOLS, their JOBS, their CIVIL LIBERTIES, someone who BELIEVES we can break through the STALEMATE and SUSPICIONS that grip us in our policies abroad. If that is what they mean by a ‘LIBERAL’, then I’m PROUD TO SAY I’M A LIBERAL”.
NEXT TIME: Another quote:
“The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all.” JFK
(So what happens when half the country is ignorant?)
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