Tag Archives: melting pot

The conscience of an American

Birmingham_fire_hoses_1963When I was 14, my friends and I were playing at Richard’s tenement apartment in the South Bronx, and Richard’s Mom asked quietly if I would leave and get my friends to go as well.

I must have looked puzzled when I said I would because Richard’s Mom said in a whisper, “You can come back later but don’t bring Stevie.”

Stevie was black.  He was one of my friends.

It was my first encounter with racism.

This is how an individual conscience awakens to bigotry.

In the neighborhood, among us kids, we were from lower middle class families, nobody had gone past High School, not the parents, nor the kids, we were a mixed lot of Irish, Italian, Jewish, Black and Puerto Rican boys mostly.

We played stickball, sewer to sewer, hand ball, swung from the hanging ladders off the fire ‘scapes at street level, ran up and down alleys, through basements and court yards.

We were friends with unnoticed differences, who talked trash, had fist fights, but got along.

Senator Patrick Moynihan might have considered us a species of his “melting pot” but we were hardly homogenous.  We celebrated our differences while remaining companionable.

There’s a lyric in the musical, South Pacific, that “You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear.”  We neither did hate nor fear. Continue reading

Resolution – to be honest and fair

wethepoeple

What ever happened to honesty and fairness as bedrock principles in American politics?

Many citizens no longer expect either.

It’s always been a challenge to gauge what’s true and fair but we have been in a politically toxic environment perhaps ever since we declared “the war on terror.”

Our public leaders encourage us, in response to matters off shore and here at home, to focus on individual risk and fear, and to encourage reprisal and violence.

Our worst leaders do it by being entirely dishonest and unfair.

We have one blustering presidential candidate, so nativistic, he wants a very tall thick impregnable wall across the length of our southern border with Mexico. What’s scary is so many don’t think this is a joke. Nor does anyone think it’s incredible to believe this candidate will get a border nation-state, Mexico, to pay for his wall.

We have another saber rattling candidate who wants to carpet bomb a mid-east nation and apparently believes that won’t encourage “terrorists” to come here and do the same to us.

There are those who want every citizen to buy a gun. My neighbors were shooting their guns after dark while I wrote this – “practicing,” I suppose, to defend against a home invasion or the unlikely event that ISIS might attack at or near Lovettsville’s Town Council.

The worst aspect of this dystopic demagoguery, so misleading in concept and execution, is that these “leaders” are indifferent to the devastating effect on the nation’s character, on how we may continue to make the historical claim that we are the land of the free and the home of the brave. Continue reading