Congenial-speak #45

Generational Warfare

Ostensibly I am the offspring of a flower child, the pollen extracted from the pollination. My biological mother was a “hippie.” One story I am told explains how she, and the man she eventually married (not my father) lived on a commune in 1969. She was left in the fall of 1964 bearing me. She was left to deliver me, and then hold me, to decide what to do with me. I was delivered and unceremoniously cut (circumcised) into a world that did not handle interracial couplings with ease, much less the results of them. My conclusion from stories is that the deciding factor to put me up for adoption hinged on the kind of life I'd have.

I was born in 1965. After two weeks in limbo, in a St. Paul facility where babies and children connected (like an umbilicus) to the Children's Home Society are kept, I was adopted by a couple from the “Silent” generation. However they were every bit (possibly more) progressive and idealistic than that generation who, in 1967, went by thumb and VW bus to San Francisco with—or without—flowers in their hair. Those people comprised the counter-culture, the tiny section of “boomers” (1946-64) that gravitated to the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco presumably to engage in sex and drugs, deplete thrift stores and Salvation Army counters and generally disrupt or ignore the establishment. (Can you blame them? The establishment was forcing them to fight an immoral war whose motives were highly questionable.)

The couple who became my parents in 1965 had, in their respective youths, supported Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace for president in 1948. They were clean. There was no heavy drugs or sex, and in most cases they were smarter and more focused. They also rejected the establishment (or parts of it) but worked for change in a very methodical and organized way. My parents listened to Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. They fought for the little guy. My mom was a child during the Great Depression. In the Bronx, although her father was self-employed, she was aware of the struggles of the thousands of unemployed workers. She was tempered by that atmosphere and interests later as a teen towards being outspoken and having a true moral compass. My folks weren't blue-collar. They did not act white-collar either. They saw injustices in the world with a hyper-sensitive eye. My parents aligned themselves with those boomers in the DFL (Democratic Farmer-Labor) who moved to end the Vietnam War. They worked with those who submitted resolutions, who caucused and wrote letters to the president, not the ones who levitated the pentagon or laid down in front of troop trains. Howie Kaibel, who I refer to many times in my book Ten Years and Change: A Liberal Boyhood in Minnesota, was barely 20 when he began working with my mom at the DFL headquarters on Hennepin Avenue. He, as I imagine many in the McCarthy anti-war movement, was the idealistic age of my biological mother. I have no idea how politically active she ever was, but I did later learn she was as liberal as my mom. My biological father, the black part of me, worked in 1972 for McGovern, a little less progressive than my mom (adopted). She spent that spring and summer working for Democratic candidate Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman to be nominated by a major party.

It is worth thinking through once in a great while, the legacy, what those flower children (both passed on) left in their wake, their one-time affair time capsule. It worked out for the best, of course, it was the right decision. Being put up for adoption was, I surmise, a combination of situational factors and the social climate of the time. My mother's (biological) father was a bigot, as I've been told. My father's parents were strict southern religious types. They would not have embraced a child born out of wedlock and certainly not one from and interracial coupling. I'd have grown up very differently, to say the least. My parents are both professionals; dad a professor and mom a social worker. My biological mother was a professional too. She taught ESL in Egypt, Japan, and Saudi Arabia. My father played football for the NFL. I'm told that it was only a job to him, a stepping stone it sounded like, a way to connect. I first met my biological mother when I was 19. I knew her for 30 years. One visit to her home in the mountains in Colorado I met one of her friends. Their talk centered around wild parties from the 60s, probably from the time of the commune. Copious wine led to somewhat less copious pot. Her friend was an addict. Cocaine I think. At one point my biological mother asked if I wanted some pot. It took a minute to wrap my head around the concept of my mother offering me pot. I'd done it a few times in college. I accepted, if only for the surreal circumstance in which I suddenly found myself, high in the mountains, sequestered from the radar of any authority figure, not even my possible mother. The weird thing is, now that I think about it, my mom at home surely would never offer me pot like I was in Colorado (mostly because she and her peers, even though it was the beat generation, did not do it). I was 20 or 22 and she'd likely ultimately say nothing if I chose to indulge that one time. I still, though, out of some childish sense of parental authority, because the suburban environment I grew up in was so far off that grid, that “drugs as a casualty” mentality the boomers have, if I wanted the pot I would have felt a need to hide it from her. So I took a few hits, inhaled, and reveled in the irony of my situation, the shadow of dissonance that crept into those that the mountain rocks cast. My biological mother's friend was trying to kick her habit, to get clean. It was not going well. She was a mess. Her son, a bit younger than me, at one point said someone needs to be the parent. I could see his mother was unable to do her job. My biological mother, to my knowledge, never went down that road. My half-sisters, her daughters by the man she married, turned out alright. They struggled with issues common to most teens but it worked out in the end.

My folks always gave us choices, my natural born sister and I. Becoming a Bar Mitzvah, for example, as a Reform Jew, was totally up to me. Some Jews I know whose parents were from the “Silent” generation, or even the boomers, had that rite thrust upon them. In one case the kid rebelled, got into drugs and, from the little I knew, the experience only added anger to his life. I think that unbridled idealism was lost on me in the generation gap. The mother that might have, under different circumstances, raised me was of that hippie movement, one of the 300,000 (0 .15 % of a '67 US population) of young Americans who left home in the echos of Bob Dylan. They rejected protocol and went, in 1967's summers case, to San Francisco. It lasted all of five months, from the Monterey Pop Festival (June 16) to the Death of the Hippie (October 6) which they enacted in a mock funeral. That WAS the dawning of the age of Aquarius. It was a renaissance that happened at the Haight. That generation, my biological parents' generation, for better or worse, forever changed how future (and past) generations look at the world. It changed how they approach life, what they put into the air and into their bodies. They were the ones who burned their draft cards, went to Canada, or stayed and spoke out against the war when it reached boiling point with the Tet Offensive January 30, 1968. That was a turning point. It was the year of Robert Kennedy's Unwinnable War speech, the year of assassinations and concessions (by defense secretary McNamara) that no amount of bombing would stop north Vietnam.

I celebrated my third birthday February 1, 1968. I was a well-balanced (rode a bike the following year) clean-cut, crew-cut kid from the suburbs. My folks were true players of politics by the numbers. More in the Tom Hayden sense, Abbey Hoffman—not so much. Hippies spawned Yippies, of which Hoffman was a founder. As I write in my book, Ten Years and Change: A Liberal Boyhood in Minnesota, I was raised by and influenced by people who “gave democracy it's day in court.” I quoted New York congressman Allard Lowenstein who, along with Curtis Gans, organized the movement to “Dump Johnson” in 1966. Most of the people that I knew as a kid, the names that are indelible to me, those in an encapsulated roll-a-dex that brought a relished smirk to the faces of those I interviewed, were of my parents' generation. They were the ones safe inside the amphitheater in Chicago, not the Yippies and dead hippies being subjected to Gestapo tactics as “The whole world was watching.” Those young men and women were blue-collar, simply exercising their First Amendment right. Tom Hayden and the older Renee Davis were, according to Chicago's police, the brains behind the peaceful demonstration. They were the “Intellectuals” without whom the single permit to demonstrate in Grant Park during the '68 DNC would have been secured. For the Minnesota McCarthy delegation many, including my dad, were in the convention venue, in some cases unaware of the violence going on outside. Alpha Smaby, US Representative (1965-'69), was a member of the GI generation, or “the greatest generation.” I referred to her book Political Upheaval quite often. In the early 80s she interviewed both my folks and many of the names I'd come to know, then and now. She was the one who saw the “sickness” in the Democratic Party that year in Chicago. The anti-war movement knew no generation. We had the flower children being drafted to fight it; we had their counterparts, parents or grandparents trying to end it.

The GI generation (1901-24) were teenagers during the Great Depression. They went willfully (in most cases) to fight WWII which was a morally right and legal war. The Silent generation (1925-42) were too young to see action in WWII but missed out on the “summer of love.” They were, obviously depending on when they chose to procreate and/or adopt, the elders of those wide-eyed idealists who left home in 1967 as the song “She's Leaving Home” on Sgt. Peppers suggests. They were in search of a life outside the box. They were the boomer generation (1943-64), the hippies who became Yippies and activists. They begrudgingly fought JFK, LBJ, and Nixon's war. To be truly accurate, Vietnam (or the conflict that evolved into the war) was bred on Harry Truman's watch. My dad was of the Silent generation. His war opportunity was Korea. The Cold War began in 1945. The mentality, for the next four decades, indulged the constant containment and paranoid fear of Communism. With the 1952 election of General Eisenhower a hard Republican stance on Communism was expected. For my book's reading, the Vietnam War lasted 19 years, four months, five weeks and a day, to be exact. Historians differ. Winners and losers differ. The contention of dates is a matter of truth versus hubris, of competing for the most honorable mentions (how Nixon had hoped) in history books. When President Eisenhower committed US resources for “military advisement” to President Diem in 1955 the conflict began its proliferation to a war, a full-scale war at which 10 years later a pressured and paranoid President Johnson could take offensive action.

My dad missed fighting in WWII. I missed fighting in Vietnam. I was the generation next (1965-79), or X, succeeding the boomers. The Vietnam War was long, for its day. Many historians, for simplification, for comparison to the 16-year quagmire continuing in Afghanistan, discount the history of foreign rule (part of the problem) and call Vietnam a 10-year war, 1965-75. As far as a war against a war, this is (as my book reads) more accurate. So it is not inconceivable that a war could overlap, call on the next generation. Parents, boomers and their predecessors, feared their children would grow up a get sent to an illegal war. I write that the parents of my peers “did not see the bleak possibility that, under the current administration, the conflict in Southeast Asia could last long enough to draft their sons.” As for me, after the head injury in 1971 my serving in any capacity in the military was off the table (Blog post 5-29-17). The war wrapped up in the tenth year of our lives. Two of my friends from the old neighborhood went into the military. One, I think, was involved in the Lebanon attack. There was no major war though for generation X. Evidently, war skips a generation sometimes. Korea is possibly the most forgotten war ever fought. A “police action” it was called, although it became a concerted effort to beat the Communists north back to China. Even then, as Richard Nixon in his role as Eisenhower's vice president mapped it out on TV, the successive fall of Southeast Asian islands was predicted. Perhaps it is forgotten because it is what led to Vietnam. It was the beginning of the Ho Chi Minh trail, what led us to haphazardly discover the roof of the US embassy in Saigon 30 years later. When my dad took his physical for that war he passed, classified 1A. In 1951 he went to college and got a deferment. As I write in my book I thought he was made hyper-sensitive to violence, human oppression, and social injustice by witnessing the early stages of the Holocaust as a child in Germany. He grew up seeing, feeling, many of the Nuremberg laws enacted against Jews, followed by “Kristallnacht” in November, 1938. They remained in his subconscious, much the way older veterans of Vietnam carry mindful and\or physical scars from their experience. I think that if my dad had been drafted as a ground soldier in Korea those childhood scars would have been triggered. He'd definitely have been a candidate for “operational exhaustion,” that term applied to the mentally damaged soldier that was in WWI simply “shell shock.” I have a difficult time seeing my dad as a ground soldier.

In a story that did not make it into Ten Years and Change: A Liberal Boyhood in Minnesota I talk to a man who was a teammate of my biological father. He played with him briefly (1965-67) on the Minnesota Gopher football team. My father was drafted—to play professionally. His teammate graduated from the U of M and went to work for Honeywell, the largest supplier to the military at the time. He was a dyed-in-the-wool hawk who had no problem assembling WMDs. I asked him whether my father would have shared his views, been able to justify dropping bombs indiscriminately from 30,000 feet. He said yes, that my father would (which I much later, through my half-brother—his son—found to be far from the truth) have had the same politics. Because he was black, and the teammate was white, my father may have not had the same opportunities when he got out of college (if he even got there in the first place.) I have learned that he was a draft pick from the South, and went to the U of M mostly due to his athletic prowess. Take that out of the story and you have an intelligent black man in the South in 1965. I got the sense that my biological father always wanted to make a living with his mind. The athletic ability just opened many doors for him and, I surmise, kept him out of a war. I was a, according to my parents (adopted), fairly athletic, adroit, kid before a head injury severely affected my fine motor coordination and balance. I probably would have made, like my biological father, a fine foot soldier.

That flowery tune in and drop out summer was a drop in time, a teaspoon in the ocean of history, a modicum of minutia in the annals altered altercations. Wars and people, generations, usually have a link, a chain of causation. At times they miss a link, they miss a son (or now a daughter). They are altered by life, by social climate. They are dependent upon socioeconomic factors or by adoptions. They are victims of history and those who continue to react to theirs. I think about all these factors now on the 50^th birthday of the “hippie” generation, the summer of love, and the paradigm shift that it invoked. I was born of this generation. I consider the bends in mine and my parents' (adopted and biological) histories that made me who I am as well as who I might have been. I look quickly, as the 49^th posthumous celebration of the brief birth of the hippie expires in 17 days.

Congenial Poetic Interlude #6

Future Perfect

When I was young I wished

that I'd had a clue,

I wished I'd known things

my future could do,

when I was small and timid

minding my world's head

inane and oblivious

to a future I'd dread

And if I'd known the seeds,

those sown in rooted grass

from ground soaked sorrow

and war continued to exist

and my world marched

it protested and demonstrated

it taught and sat in after

resolute opinions were not heard

If I were aware then of

the terrors, the reversals

of history I know now

I'd have held on to it tighter

I'd have weighted it heavier

I'd have seen it brighter

my presence in the world

to slow down tomorrow

Congenial-speak #44

Pause in Case of Berries

My roots were, to some extent, those Chinese Lantern plants I mention on page nine. My mom grew, dried, and sold them to raise funds for the WILPF (womens international league for peace and freedom). I find these as my earliest memory of the politics that nurtured me in the house on Richfield's Aldrich Avenue. The plants were the story-board for many things. They retold fuzzy browned blankets and white hassocks. They drooped before stray cats and torn panda bears. They were my first inconceivable lesson in applied politics. My mom baked English toffee bars for the “WIL” sales. I remember seeing the great rectangular Hershey bar melting into a sprawling sheet of golden brown toffee.

My book, Ten Years and Change: A Liberal Boyhood in Minnesota, is a memoir of me, my youngest days, and family dynamics of the years 1965 to 1975. To be sure, “liberal” is void of any of the bleeding heart connotations one may assign to it. It is liberal in the equal paradigm. It is not an ideology. The environment that first impressed me in 1965, as I entered the Amram's house as a biracial adopted child, was liberally measured. It was dove and not hawk. It was women can assume any task, not those for which society stereotypes them. It was one in which violent toys were generally discouraged—definitely not encouraged—but accepted as the youthful indiscretion toys for liberal growth that they were if one indulged his peers. An example of this light liberal latitude is explained on page 64.

They were “jack-o-lantern” plants to whomever was concerned. Droopy, sad, mourning a better day in silhouetted contrast, the plants were an irony. The cracked diamond-shaped casings had ripe berries perched inside. It fit somehow. In a way they were a metaphor for the war, for people coming out of whatever fed impediments to their judgment, their sense of morality and justice. The name jack-o-lantern is fortuitous. It has a share in the Vietnam War's story. Each presidential election cycle has an “October surprise,” an unpredictable or surreptitiously construed event in the last month of the cycle that either helps or hinders the election. I shuffled leaves that night as I solicited my costume and orange UNICEF box door to door. In 1968 President Johnson chose October 31 to announce that he was ending the bombing of North Vietnam that had begun three years and eight months earlier. America thought, they hoped, that peace was at hand. It was a tactical move. It was a teasing of America, an easement of a peoples' bereavement.. It was party politics storied to have been done as the last best chance to put Vice President Hubert Humphrey in the White House.

My book retells a simpler time before text messages instantly communicated half-baked thoughts of a president to the world. Words were slow and could be filtered and spun, censored, edited for the most free speech. I balance the war with windows into a world, a view (of crows that flew like sentrys, page 44) from a young witness of nurturing partiality. I paraphrase. I memorialize. The “evenings of séance” on which my friends and I channeled the longevity of summers comprise my memories of Aldrich Avenues. On nearby panes of neighbors' windows I saw “codes.” They were the flickers of TV, of the CBS evening news wrapping up. Cronkite had dutifully imparted another day of war to a progressively less trusting America. For my generation, the Xs born in progression, the events in Southeast Asia, its history, its footnotes, its epilogue destroyed trust in government. For the boomers who were given the fight or flight options, the resisters and activists, government was never again seen the same.

In Ten Years and Change: A Liberal Boyhood in Minnesota, from marinades in the metaphorical resonance of the lantern plants to watching my mom nominate Shirley Chisholm at the 1972 DNC, I entwine the anti-war movement's painfully slow and frustrating progress with steps I took toward a safer, more peaceful world. I list the facts, the clandestine amnesties considered behind pentagon walls most high schools never taught. I show how one family stepped up in small suburban Richfield, MN to bring the opposition of a war to the national spotlight. I show how my dad's delegation to the 1968 DNC was affected by a consequential family commitment. All my lines, my sediments from those times, all the roots from the sidelines and growing partiality swim entwined in the jack-o-lantern stems.

prosaic interlude #11

A Caustic Review

Sound sounded canned, reverberating off walls, landing clumsily on my ears. I can only imagine what the band was hearing. At roughly 9:30 (half-hour tardy) Larry Mullen, Jr. walked down a run-way and set the beat for “Sunday, Bloody Sunday.” That felt right, strained beats bouncing to and fro. The Edge came next, riffing the opening chords effortlessly. I thought of the other times I'd seen this band, where they had sounded so much better, where the acoustical design of the venue did their phenomenal music justice. It was the Zoo TV tour, March 30, 1992 at Target Center. Bono and the band pushed through, though, insistent to break the sound barrier. Two songs off War and The Unforgettable Fire put them at an apt segue to begin the tour's namesake; The Joshua Tree. Fire's “Pride” bled into “Where the Streets Have no Name” with resounding influences of the slain civil rights leader. Forty-nine years later the street still have no name collectively. They are mostly white and along the way, within those four decades, they have become more unidentifiable with the Rodney Kings et ad nausea.

There were the brief snippets of rock theater I expect at a U2 concert. At one point Bono corralled the entire stadium to lift their cell phones, to light the place like stars. It was a moment, it was a spectacle indeed. Gone was any overt politics. Reference to Trump was limited to a clip from a 50s Western about a huckster trying to build a wall. His name, fortuitously, was Trump. Was it a second set or an encore? Maybe the latter, as it consisted of fewer songs than what had proceeded their exit. (These are not like a Springsteen show. U2 played 20 songs.) Included in the “encore” was Achtung Baby's “Light my Way” which incorporated an homage to the women in politics. It called for the continued struggle for women to achieve total equality in every aspect of life. A back screen featured pioneering women (Gloria Steinem) and current models and ceiling scratchers (Hillary Clinton). That was the big political theme for the night. During the playing of Joshua Tree “Mothers of the Disappeared” also buoyed the theme. I am always intrigued by the way people from other nations see our country now. I am inspired by the hopefulness and resilience Bono sees in America, almost like Trump is not doing something every day to either create a world war or reverse all the rights that years of marching, protesting, and standing strong have won. It is curious to me that an Irish band, a famine struck people who lived with English occupation for centuries, a nation whose immigrants came by the hundreds (something Bono acknowledged) can see America with such passion, an almost envious sounding sentiment.

The billion dollar stadium was built for Ziggy, it was built for the Vikings, not bands with any kind of poignant message or masterful music. I thought I was the only one, but the review of it in the STRIB confirmed US Bank Stadium was no sound garden. It also blasted the lack of signage with which I agree. It is colossal and going against the current before a concert would easily take 30 minutes to walk its perimeter. The concert ended and, as people turned to file out, I (Springsteen fan) really thought they were coming back. It floored me how fast the stadium cleared out. It was efficient and people who assisted us (guest services) were friendly, competent, and knew the stadium like a dashboard GPS. That is contrary to what the STRIB review wrote they heard from concert goers.

First Impessions Transcend Time

In 1987, when Joshua Tree came out, people went to the tour not having heard the songs a million times. They went not knowing the exact order of the record. I went to see U2 last night much because they seem to come to Minnesota so rarely. I am a fan, and they are one of the few acts that I'd pay 200$ to see. (A review stated that fans complained that 52$ was over-priced for the 1997 metrodome concert.) I did not go to Springsteen's River tour because of the rehash. I did not go because I can play the River in its entirety whenever I please. It is a double album and most of the show would be just that album. Last night I heard songs from at least five other albums. In general, I don't think these type of tours work. I couldn't put my finger on it last night as I was watching a rote rendition of the album, complete with page break (Bono announced side 2). This morning it dawned on me, it lacks spontaneity. The audience knows exactly what to expect, although here the tree album was somewhat cleverly book-ended with old and new songs, the seeds that grew the tree that spawned everything succeeding it, a musical pro and epilogue. Bono and the lads worked it. They dodged the tameless sound ricocheting around US Bank. Their story-telling, Bono's timing and political restraint, his flamboyance and charisma made it work. It was still spontaneity, in spite of the refining factor, their purpose in being there. They worked it, perhaps, like Americans might.

Congenial-speak #43

Meddles in Unknown Origins

Yes, I am naturalized citizen of the United States of America. Yes, I know that I'm a naturalized citizen of the United States of America. I take that honor, that responsibility, that serendipitous meddling for better or worse, depending on factors of race, gender, and ability. As an adopted person of some color I know my family's (the ones who adopted me, ethnic background quite well, even though I have nothing to do with it. I have my own blanks to fill. Although if one traced every generation back centuries they may discover that one's biological lineage made a barely traceable intersection with their adopted family's lineage (although in my case I very much doubt it). My dad came from Germany. My mom descends from Russian and Polish Jews. Biologically my mother's ancestors were Swedes, Irish, English. The little I know about my father says that he had some Creole heritage, but it is a safe bet that someone in the chain of causation came from Africa. But strange things happen, fate creates the melts of the most diverse pots. Who can say what and invading army brought, for example, who beds with whom, or what refugee seeks refuge in the loins of another. World politics does divide, segregate, infiltrate, integrate, and still make strange bedfellows.

Archaic cotton-pickin' origins

The melt began long before 1620. Actually today marks 452 years. Spanish admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés claimed St. Augustine in 1565. He negotiated with Culusa natives. He offered them gold in exchange for supplies needed to survive. Also in the deal were the missionaries. Natives were eased into the Roman Catholic religion Menéndez practiced. By 1566 he had watchtowers at Cape Canaveral and Biscayne Bay. The goal was to convert all the natives to Catholicism, and all ships coming to Florida were instructed to carry priests. Menéndez died in 1574 and the plan stagnated. Jamestown began it attempt as a colony in 1607. There had been an attempt at a Roanoke Colony in 1585 by Queen Elizabeth I. It was on an island that is today Dare County, NC. It was lost, to history, and largely due to the Spanish-Anglo War.

All the president's men check their DNA at the door of the Oval, where the fate of 800,000 victims of a Catholic limbo system are decided. The current sham, the charlatan, the embarrassment in the Oval and all his bigoted cronies represent the ugliest “Americans.” They will likely look back to the pilgrims or PURITANS and off their starch white cuff imply that the operative word is pure. They begin their self-indulgent journey through history with trinkets being traded for Manhattan after the Indians shared corn with the puritans. They haggled while the puritans picked their teeth with the long end of a wish-bone. If there is one bit of history Trump knows I bet it is the Jacksonian theory of Manifest Destiny. Was it divine intervention that made expansion of the Americas “Justified and inevitable?” Give the indigenous people religion, teach them, make them believe in the same god so we are all on the same page. Ah, that's how it was—justified. Andrew Jackson was a good man, with a trail of tears to his infamy. He—if he had not died 20 years prior—could have avoided the Civil War. You can be sure of it, just as sure as Jefferson Bolreguard Sessions III cheered troopers at Edmund Petus Bridge.

All the president's men need to realize the parameters surrounding their origins, what, in the end, they are entitled to and why. The indigenous people of North America have had a stormy relationship with their—let's call them guests over the past two and a half centuries. For 9 years (1754-63) the British and French fought. British American colonies aligned with Indians to defeat the French and New France. Conflicts, incidents, wars, many with the Indians ultimately working to assist the colonists' in their severance from British rule, happened through the decades. Facilitated by ideologies like Manifest Destiny, in 1830 Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act. Its aim was to negotiate with Southern tribes for their removal from federal territory. In exchange they got their land west of the Mississippi. It was ALL their land to begin with. They were politely cojoled into sharing it. They were hustled by pitchmen like Trump.

Built from the outside

America was built by immigrants, refugees, outside help, many of whom faced division from the word go. Plantations were built, fields were cleared, cotton was chopped by people who, as sure as DJT is a racist, did not come here willingly or legally. Now the thousands who entered a deal with an Obama government only 6 years ago face expulsion from the only homeland most ever knew. The DACA or deferred action for childhood arrivals program will be rescinded in 6 months. These kids are not the bad apples. To get in the program they had to prove their record to be free of the most minor misdemeanor. These adults now, in many cases, are vital to the US economy. Their abrupt mass exodus would irrevocably damage the GDP standing of the US. The sore applicants, from whom top level jobs are claimed to have been taken, most likely will NOT be filled anytime soon following their departure. Why should they suffer the slings and arrows of their parents' misfortune, outrageous or otherwise? Who knows under what circumstances (or gun) the parents came to this country. Perhaps, like the Israelite did not have time to watch bread leaven, they did not have time to wait for documents. I was likely in an era before tweets or fax machines. Bottom line: It's dirty pool. It's going back on the word of the US government (doesn't our money say in God we trust). Yes, that is the gold standard on which all trust in government is predicated. That term that folks use when they ask for something back that they have given, ask for a word or deed. Besides casting a negative stereotype on a minority group in America, a group that has entitlement to be the majority, is just stupid sounding. It made really no sense to me, until now.

Free Assoc. #1

There's No I in Respect

And then there are the times I think about past moments, hours for weeks when I waited for a change. I was at a long table, a two-seated wooden rot. It had a peeling top in a yellow and black speckled pattern. In front of me were my mess kit and stainless steel drinking cup. My troop had dispersed hours ago, gone to their various activities and responsibilities, their duties in the camp. It was evening, and I anticipated taps ending the day being morosely drawn from the lungs of the young bugler.

I was a tenderfoot. I was fourteen-years-old at my first scout experience away from home. The patrol I was in was vicious, tortuous to me, far beyond the agreed upon hazing rituals of pubescent boys As the odd man in many ways I was abused, and no elder heard my cries. So I remember sitting as such, at the completion of the nightly mess, avoiding going back through the forested greens to our patrol's camp-site. I prolonged walking, rising and letting my wooden crutch stab the earth. I survived by not being me, by not allowing them to see what I lacked in balance, how I could not begin to compete with their agility.

The lake we swam in, where we washed ourselves, was a half-mile through the woods. The path was an obstacle course, ribbed with tree roots and eroded forest floor. It was full of moss-covered stumps that hid poison ivy leaves of three I was told to let be. I was lazy I guess. Swimming with the other scouts did not apeal to me. Walking a half-mile to bathe with those I saw as adversaries was not worth the effort. As I write this I realize an irony. That set distance was how far I had walked nearly daily in previous summers. When I was six, seven, eight I walked to the general store down a county road. I walked as therapy with my dad. The main difference was that I was walking to be received by people who'd applaud me, acknowledge my effort, and usually give me a treat (“Being the Greatest” from my book Finding me—and Them: Stories of Assimilation). An older scout, one who didn't know me well enough to be cruel, in some leadership role, asked me routinely to go to the lake. I always said no. By the end of the week I began to smell, which probably only added to my obstructions to assimilate well. I had a high susceptibility to poison ivy, and I leaned on that like a crutch.

“People get it walking down there and spread it in the lake. No, I'll stay here in the clear.”

“Well, you have to wash. You're beginning to smell,” an older scout whispered.

It was all so uninspiring. It was probably the first summer camp experience that was conducive to a learned introversion. Each evening after the meal I sat in our “mess hall,” on the long warped wooden bench. It went on for at least 40 feet of adjoining tables. Unless I was assigned KP (a task in the kitchen I hated, but appreciated the inclusion) I sat and watched the scouts disperse. They gathered their plastic soap boxes and towels. They came back from their respective camp sites and headed for the path to the lake. I sat waiting for them to return, listening to the loons, imagining the sunset on the lake. I looked down the path and pictured myself walking to the lake, reveling with my fellow scouts, seeing the amber traces of sunset peeking through the trees as we approached the lake.

“Are you sure we can't get you to go to the lake? I'm happy to walk with you. I'll go as slow as you want.”

“No thanks. I'll pass.”

One of the higher ranking scouts, an actual adult, gave a hesitated look to the guy who was still clearing the table.

“Well then, Mike, you leave us no choice. Go get your soap and towel. I'll even go to your site and get them if you want.”

“Fine, get them. I'm not walking down to the lake,” I said stubbornly.

“Oh, that's not what we have in mind.”

He looked back at me as he walked away, smiling just enough to make me feel safe, that I was not about to be put in humiliation's way. I thought nothing of it and listened to the faint sounds of the other scouts frolicking in the lake. In moments I'd be wishing I had made the half-mile walk. In a few minutes the star (two below eagle) came back with my necessities with a more disturbing smile on his face.

“You have to bathe. You refuse to go to the lake.”

He looked around whiffing of apprehension, like he knew what he was about to do could have legal implications someday, although in 1979, far north, he was safe. I was walked to the far end of the main camp area, where a water pump pierced the earth. Two older scouts wore rain-ponchos. I didn't wear much of anything. The days at camp had been hot and I thought of the better times for this, when I probably would have wanted to wear few clothes anyway, when the warmth of the sun would caress me—not the cold stares of older boys who, for all I knew, were closeted gays. It was a humiliation, although deep down, if any part of it was at all excusable, I had brought it on myself. I was the “special” tenderfoot, now with goose-flesh. The recalcitrant introverting kid with a crutch was getting the hosing he'd inadvertently requested. As they soaped me I sat precariously on a log. I heard the slopping of water ans suds lose itself in the solitude that prevails where north winds blow. Encroaching, as if calibrated, came incrementally louder the voices of the other scouts.

“Are we about done here? I really don't want to be seen like this,” I pleaded.

“Just hold on, we're all boys here. You shower in gym don't you?”

The water was cold and it wasn't my body's finest hour. That was the problem, we were all boys, each as hairless as the next. If there had been some girls I would not have minded so much. It was too late. The troop entered the camp and saw me shivering on the log with my legs crossed. No one really cared and went to their respective sites. Sounds from zippers of tents broke through the woods. Flashlights found faces in trees. My bath was completed and I sulked away up the trail to my dreaded patrol. None of them did or said anything to harass me, possibly figuring I'd been through enough. I'd shown my character (and a bit more). Could it be they respected me for my show, my refusal to walk to the lake and then take the consequences like a man with a boy's genitalia? The experience sunk in as I lay in the tent listening to taps. I was far from being “one of the guys” but my conviction and resulting humiliation may have earned me some respect.

Congenial-speak #42

A Vast Deference

of Seminal Vessels

When I first became aware of the increasingly likely fate of 800,000 DACA recipients I thought of how heartless it was. I also thought of how counter-productive and ignorant of history it was. Severing these young people from the only home they've ever known simply (let's cut the shit) because they are not “Americans”, white with ancestors who came were on the Mayflower, is blind to one UN-recusable fact: Trump, Sessions, Pence, and the rest of the peanut gallery ARE NOT AMERICANS. Unless one of them has a drop of Native American blood in them, they are technically in the same boat as the 800,000. (Ben Carson's ancestors may have arrived here on a different ship.)

Who knows what circumstances surrounded theses DACA kids' parents initial lack of documentation. Who knows what guns they were under when they came to America in haste, possibly at the dead of night. Are they supposed to be celebrate, banned from procreation, lest their progeny inherits their misfortune? The DREAM Act was a bipartisan bill sponsored by senators Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Orin Hatch (R-UT) in 2001. Its intended purpose was to provide a pathway to citizenship for immigrants. Its failure to become law spawned DACA. In 2012 President Obama introduced the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Yes, technically it is a loophole which allows the offspring of aliens to call America home, to work here, to reap its ballyhooed opportunity. The recipients entered the country as minors, and provides them the chance to work and educate themselves without fear of deportation. Many are CEOs, captains of industry, immigrants who have but one strike against them; they are the children of those illegals, those rapists a drug dealers Trump wants a wall built to impede. The DACAs may carry a faded mark decades old, from generations now in their 3^rd incarnation.

Sending back, to lands they never knew, 800,000 DACAs would be a losing situation for all involved. It would have a negative effect for them obviously, but also the American economy when they suddenly leave schools, or the workforce. How about the various countries' acceptance of these numbers of “refugees?” And I expect that any lingering support for Trump, save for his “red-meat-I-could-kill-a-guy-on-the-street” demographic, would disappear very fast. Like most things coming out of this circus tent on PA Avenue, the idea, the proposal, the idle threat by a small-thumbing tweeter, is barely baked and impulsive.

Why is this imbalanced an allowed to operate in government at all? From day one of his term he has done nothing but display his lack of respect and fitness for the job. With myriad conflicts of interest, violations in emoluments rulings, gross negligence of a constitution he swore to uphold and protect, he is not banished fro the White House. I don't get that. He did NOT get there fairly. If anything the 2016 election is a “do over.” John Lewis said it from the start. Trump is a bogus POTUS, or BOPUS. That was your first clue.