Colored

I don't remember how old I was when I first noticed the signs. But they were everywhere: if not "Colored," then "White Only." I spent most of my youth and young adulthood in Birmingham, Alabama, once described as the most segregated city in the country. Hyperbole perhaps, but if so, only slightly.
Years later in Southern California, it was hard for my students to believe what everyday life was like where I grew up. They were incredulous when I explained that a co-worker and I couldn't sit down in a restaurant and have a cup of coffee and conversation because he was black and I was white. The least that would've happened was that we would've been asked to leave. I don't need to describe the worst.

My co-worker at the United States Postal Service, Charles, told me that his father had had to sit down and have "the talk" with him, "the talk" that would help him avoid the wrath of the redneck. There were things black folk couldn't do, places they couldn't go. I myself remember that only on the last day of the Alabama State Fair, Saturday, were black families allowed to enjoy what whites been enjoying all week. As hard as it is to be a decent father under any circumstances, imagine what it would be like to have to tell your children that they aren't as good as children of a lighter skin color.

I remember going to the movies many times as a youngster, admission one thin dime. The black patrons sat only in the balcony if they got in at all, and I never saw a black person at the refreshment counter or in the bathroom. It was "normal," just as it was "normal" to see all the black people crowded into the rear of a city bus even if the front seats were unoccupied.

Thank God Charles and I lived long enough to see all this change. We lived long enough to share a meal in the restaurant of our choosing in Birmingham, Alabama. We lived long enough to attend together a Stokely Carmichael speech on the campus of an all-black college in Birmingham, Alabama. We lived long enough to see all those ugly, dispiriting signs come down. But Charles is gone now, and I haven't lived long enough to see the hatred disappear that put those signs up in the first place.

George W. Bush Should Go to Hell

When I was a kid there was something called a Cold War going on. As a result, we used to have regular air-raid drills at our schools. This meant going to the floor, squatting, wrapping arms around legs, and putting heads down on knees to protect our pretty little faces. Never mind that if an atomic bomb had actually exploded, we might as well have been kissing our asses goodbye.

The politics of fear is nothing new. It's been around since somebody decided he should be in charge of somebody else. During the Cold War, our leadership was able to convince us that the Soviets had so many nuclear weapons that we just had to keep pace, bomb by bomb, until we could've destroyed a hundred worlds over. And it was all one lie after another, just as the justifications for our current war are all just lies.

The Vietnam War was also based on a lie, the lie that one of our naval vessels had been attacked by the Communists in the Gulf of Tonkin. And off we went for over a decade of killing and the loss of over 55,000 Americans. The lies fed to the public during the Vietnam War were even more egregious than the lie that got us into it; it's a list too long for this brief commentary.

Finally, the lie that got us into Iraq was simply another example of political fear-mongering: Iraq had weapons of mass destruction; better to attack Iraq now than to awaken to a mushroom cloud, a lie quite similar to the one used all those years ago to fuel the Cold War. And it's probably the lie that will be used in the future as an excuse to murder people of color around the world and to keep our local body bag industry afloat. But are the body bags even made in America anymore?

Semper Fi

More years ago than I'd like to admit, this is who I was. It's a silly pose I struck, but what I had just learned during 13 strenuous weeks of boot camp wasn't silly at all. Although I joined during peacetime, our training was a preparation for war.
I joined the United States Marine Corps when I was a senior in high school. I arrived at Marine Corps Recruit Depot, Parris Island, South Carolina, just after midnight on August 1, 1958, on a Greyhound bus filled with young men who were nervous or in complete denial.
When I joined the military, the Commander-in-Chief was neither a coward nor a moron. My Commander-in-Chief had led the largest military invasion in world history on June 6, 1944, D-Day. And as President of the United States, he didn't plunge us into war; he removed us from one. He truly knew the ramifications of sending young men into combat.
I ache for my young Marine brothers today because their civilian leadership, if it can be called leadership, is probably the worst in the history of our great nation. And our current civilian leadership has the audacity to denigrate the accomplishments of those men and women who have had the courage to serve when the bullets were flying, in Vietnam, in the Persian Gulf, in Afghanistan, in Iraq. Our current civilian leadership is without courage, without shame, without conscience, without souls.

California Dreamin'

My first trip to California was in 1949. I was a kid from Alabama who had never been anywhere but Panama City, Florida, the Redneck Riviera. I spent most of that summer in Fontana, California, about 50 miles east of Los Angeles, and I never recovered. Southern California entered my bloodstream like an invisible parasite, settled in, and waited.

Later, I was to spend almost 20 years in Los Angeles, entering the Golden State through a double rainbow arching over Indio, California, then never living more than a mile or so from Sunset Boulevard. Though born and mostly raised in Alabama, I spent more years of my life within walking distance of the Sunset Strip that at any other place on this green earth.

Even in 1949, California was excess compared to Alabama. During this visit, I saw for the first time all day movies and cartoons on Saturdays. The children around me seemed happier than those I knew back home; at least they seemed to be having more fun. Excess! What a concept! I embraced it without knowing exactly what it was, and I've never looked back.

I yearned for California for years and years thereafter until I finally arrived for what I thought would be forever. However, I realize now that it wasn't so much excess that attracted me. In fact, I probably mislabeled what I felt in the moisture starved air of the Los Angeles Basin. It wasn't so much excess as it was total freedom, the freedom to be left alone, the freedom to be whomever I wanted to be with little or no interference.

And that's what I miss today as I look out over the Minnesota snowpack, the sun glaring off the frozen white canopy that covers the cold ground around me. I miss the freedom.