Memorial Day -- Part II

As you enjoy your holiday activities this Memorial Day weekend, please take time to remember those who died in defense of our liberties. I joined the U. S. Marine Corps during my senior year in high school on what was called a delay basis. I arrived at Parris Island, South Carolina, for basic training on August 1, 1958. In many ways I was fortunate in that there wasn't a war for me to fight at that time. And nobody started one during the three years of my military service. But many were lost in war before I arrived, and many would be lost after I was discharged. So I ask you to remember them today, not as a publicity stunt or a photo-op, but as a sincere prayer for those young men and women who never got the chance to fulfil their dreams, to grow old, to live a full life as I've done.

It's difficult to talk of politics in these times, as our leaders have no sense of shame and no connection, however tenuous, to reality. On the worst day of life loss in Iraq, we can easily be told that the situation is improving. On a day when a normal man would be completely embarrassed by his past actions, our president can voice support that this man keep his job as our top law enforcement officer. In a period when science offers us an opportunity to cure some of the most insidious diseases, our president ensures that stem-cell research is thwarted. And the world is about 6,000 years old!

Send your prayers wherever you send them, but remember our fallen troops of all our wars, both necessary and misguided. I'm just so sad and angry that I can hardly write without falling into polemic. Enjoy this holiday, but remember.

Memorial Day - Part I

It pains me to know that we're going to have so many more young men and women to remember this Memorial Day than last. And it pains me to know that George W. Bush will be participating in nothing more than a photo-op as he puts a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldiers. Bush doesn't honor our fallen military when he shows up on Memorial Day -- he dishonors them. "Cut and Run" was his modus operandi during the Vietnam War, and his political murder of so many thousands since we invaded Iraq is unconscionable. George W. Bush is not only a coward, he's a war criminal. Jimmy Carter was right when he described Bush's foreign policy as the worst in history. And to compare Carter's administration, as bad as it was, to today's Republican gang of thugs is vile. God Bless our men and women who serve, even if their "leader" is a dim-wit.

Springtime in Minnesota

Since I lived in Southern California from January 1987 to June 2006, I simply wasn't used to Spring. There are no seasons to speak of in SoCal, unless you count Fire Season and Rainy Season. So, I wasn't ready when everything here turned green, another thing sparse in SoCal, greenery. I went to bed one night here in Minnesota, and everything was brown. When I awakened the next morning, everything had turned green. Spring had announced itself boldy and beautifully. Since then there have even been frosts in parts of the state, but the green proclaims intself loudly, and I'm enjoying a real Spring, however long it lasts.

Thoughtfulness and Civility

Because of my degenerative spinal condition, the screws in my spine, and the probable nerve damage done during my surgery, I can't lift anything heavier than 5 pounds. The constant pain I feel actually gets worse when I lift almost anything. And I walk with a cane.

So, I just returned from buying two 1-Liter Diet Cokes and two 1-Liter Aquafina waters at the Shell Service Station near our condo. One of the clerks, after I asked if there were any 2-liter sodas available, walked back to the cooler, and pointed out the largest they carried, 1-Liters, which happened all to be on the bottom shelf. When I told him I couldn't bend down that far, he retrieved the 2 Cokes for me and also carried them up to the cash register. I carried the two bottles of water. This clerk had been solicitious from the time I hobbled into the store on my aluminum cane.

As I approached the counter to pay, after I picked up a king-size Kit-Kat bar, there was a young, Nordic looking lad, as there are nearly everywhere here in Minnesota, standing at the counter getting ready to pay for his gasoline. He moved back to let me go first, but I said I was in no hurry. So he paid his bill and walked out the door. Then I paid my bill, and the clerk put the four 1-liter bottles in a paper bag. As I started to try to pick them up, the young Nordic man walked back in the door and asked me if he could carry the sack for me. Wow! I accepted as graciously as I could, thanked him, opened the trunk for him to deposit the sack, thanked him again, and got into my car. He walked to his green Chevy truck and got in. And we drove away, both of us, without a doubt, better for the experience

What a nice evening!

The Way We Were

I'm not a nostalgia buff. Really! But the world was, in many ways, a better place when I was growing up than it is now. At the very least, the war I was born into had a real purpose: to save civilization

But there were other aspects of life, too, that were better. Even as a kid of 10 or 11, I could get on a city bus alone, or with a friend, ride to downtown Birmingham, Alabama, go to a movie at the majestic Alabama Theater, eat at The Krystal or Krispy Kreme, or both, visit the magic shop, just spend the day in fun, and arrive home safely.

I'm sure there were people dangerous to children then, as always, but I just don't remember hearing much about it growing up. Was it not reported to the authorities? Were there not newspaper articles about it? Of course, my family had no conversations about such things. We didn't talk about much of anything important, though my grandfather gave me wonderful life lessons that I still remember, but probably applied too little in my life.

Schools, too, weren't the cesspools so many of them have become. You went to school, you obeyed the teacher, and you did your lessons. If you didn't to these things, you found yourself in the Principal's office, and maybe later facing an even sterner parent or grandparent. Being a drop-out was a sign of cataclysmic failure in the eyes of most kids back then. I'm glad it was. I didn't think about quitting school until I was a senior in high school. But school certainly wasn't a place to be a smart-ass or a trouble-maker, not unless you wanted to find yourself in juvenile hall. School was quiet enough to learn, and I'm thankful for that. And I'm grateful for the teachers who gave me a good foundation and didn't put up with any crap from me.

People were definitely more polite back then. There wasn't the rampant anger I've seen grow over the last several decades. There was civility, an accepted standard of civility which has been lost. People today are often rude, sometimes angry, and occasionally downright dangerous simply because they've not been taught any manners, any restraint, any ability to postpone gratification, and any concerns for the rights and welfare of others. They want what they want, and they want it RIGHT NOW.

We might, too, have had one student in school whom we labelled a "bully," but we didn't have gangs of worthless punks who terrorized us. And usually even the "bully" eventually got his ass kicked by somebody. There was, on top of this, a decidedly lower pregnancy rate among teens in the post-War forties and the fifties. I don't think that was such a bad thing, though my guess is that I came into this world unplanned in that way. I'll allow this one exception.

No, I'm not some old fogey who looks back on the "good old days." Hell, these are the "good old days." These are the days we're living now, looking forward to a few more. And today I'm at least not unhappy about being here.

Mothers' Day

My mother died on June 1, 1987, in Florida. She was in a hospital at the time, and when I talked to her the phone from Los Angeles not long before her death, she told me that she didn't want to go home. That is still the saddest statement I've ever heard a human being utter. And she didn't go home. She just died.

My memories of my mother are mixed, to say the least. I don't think I ever saw her truly happy. Oh sure, she laughed and appeared to outsiders to be living a normal life. But she was never truly happy. I was born in 1940; my mother was 19 years old at the time. By the time she was 26, she was divorced. The two of us lived with her parents, and early in our stay, my grandmother made a concerted effort to take legal custody of me. In fact, my mother was on the way to sign the papers when she changed her mind at the last minute

My mother and grandmother never got along. What I remember from my childhood are terrible screaming matches and my grandmother making every attempt to supplant my mother in my eyes. There are periods in my memory when my mother isn't even there, though I'm not sure why. My grandmother doesn't disappear when I think back. I still wonder what happened.

My mother worked at several low paying jobs until she was hired as a timekeeper at Tennesee Coal and Iron Company, later U. S. Steel, the largest employer in our city. It was a job that would allow her to be indepedent; however, she remarried in the spring of 1954, to a man to whom she was married when she died. Oh, she didn't stay married to him for 33 years because it was a match made in heaven. She had another son in 1956, then a daughter in 1958. Staying busy raising them probably allowed her to remain relatively sane for more years than she would have. And she was a good mother to them.

Although my mother and step-father were married for over three decades, I remember driving her away, pulling a U-haul on at least two occasions after she had ugly fights with my step-father. Of course, we headed back to my grandparents' house. I don't know which was worse. My grandmother was totally self-centered and manipulative, and my step-father was one of the most horrible men I've ever met, more self-cented and manipulative than my grandmother. He also had a girfriend outside his marriage during their entire married life. And he married my mother only after his son had picked her from several girlfriends to be a step-mother. He was a rat, to say the least.

When my mother had options to make decisions that would've benefited me, she simply didn't do it. When I was in grade school, I was doing so well academically that they wanted to double-promote me on at least two occasions. My mother wouldn't allow it. And when I got the opportunity to attend a private school in another state through the largesse of my grandfather, my mother wouldn't allow that either because she said it wouldn't be fair to my step-brother. And my mother never comforted me because she didn't know how.

My children have often told me how wonderful a grandmother she was to them, and I'm so happy that's true. We lived near her for twelve years before her death, and my children loved going to her house and talking endlessly and eating her wonderful cooking. I'm very happy that they had a grandmother such as she. I often wish I'd had a mother like that. I know that some of it is my fault. When I became an adult, I should've acted like an adult and embraced her for what she was. But I didn't. And we never truly connected. I'm so sorry for that.

She died by choice, not suicide, on June 1, 1987, nearly 20 years ago, as she couldn't spend one more minute in that horrible atmosphere with that horrible man. How I wish I had one more opportunity to wish her a Happy Mothers' Day.

Fortunate Son

For those of you not old enough to remember, the title of this piece is taken from a song sang loudly and angrily during the Vietnam War. It refers to young men whose fathers were lawmakers themselves, which spared the sons the opportunity to get killed in the muck of Vietnam. The rest of us had no such protection, though some, like the coward Dick Cheney, managed to get, I think, 5 student deferrals. He said he had other priorities. I'm sure the 50,000 plus listed on the Vietnam Wall had other priorities, too. Not one of the architects (which falsely implies an actual structure) of this senseless war in Iraq served his or her country.

Republicans are good about that, about asking someone else to do the fighting and dying. George W. Bush hid behind an Air National Guard commission, which his influential father had arranged. Cheney, of course, simply hid, as he continues to do. Karl Rove avoided military service, as did Paul Wolfowitz. This is nothing new, I know. But when are the American people going to stop allowing their sons and daughters to be sent to slaughter without demanding the same sacrifices of our leaders and their children? It isn't patriotism to swallow the propaganda of selfish, short-sighted, power-hungry, moral dwarfs. In fact, it's patriotism to question constantly, to challenge the official pronouncements of such men, if they can be called such, as Bush, Cheney, Rove and Wolfowitz.

And it would be nice if our fellow citizens who work in the Fourth Estate gave us a little help for a change instead of parroting the latest White House press release. The media helped get us into the quicksand; they should help get us out.