Santa Claus

In the early 1950s my father lost his last job in the mines. He was in his early 50s and unable to find work. He picked up odd jobs here and there, and that, plus money my mother earned in a factory, kept a roof over our head (we did have a few holes in the walls and windows) and basic food on the table.

Money was hard to come by.

For several Christmases during that time, around the first of December, my daddy would say, “Well, things are really tight this year; if Santa Claus don’t come, we won’t have Christmas.” He said this seriously. I took him seriously. I was ready to get nothing. It was OK. The Methodist Church provided me the songs and festivities, and the religious trappings were emotionally and spiritually stimulating. I can still smell the pine and candle, and can still feel what it was like to put on white robes and sing Christmas songs with the choir.

My parents did not go to church so we did not share these experiences. My parents did like Christmas, though, and we had a tree, decorated with old trimmings that brought tears to my momma’s eyes as she remembered Christmas with her parents and brothers and sisters and with my two older sisters.

But money was always a problem, and Santa Claus was always seen as the answer to the problem.

Every year, sometime around December 23 or 24, my father would go to Household Finance and borrow money. Every year he’d go to a bootlegger and buy a couple of half-pints of whiskey for his own spirits and our entertainment—I’ll leave that to another day. Every year he’d tell my sister to figure out what it was that I wanted (as well as her two kids, Karen and George), take the HFC money, and go buy the Santa presents, or as close as possible, given money constraints.

It never was much, but I still appreciate the idea, even though I understand that my father spent the next year paying back the money he had borrowed, resulting in him and my momma having to scrimp on other things.

Every year Santa Claus came to my house, and to Karen and George’s house. And it was always magical.

So, I never admitted to “not believing” in Santa Claus until I was about 10 years old.

As these memories come to mind, I’m wondering about Santa Claus.

Last Saturday I attached a pillow around my waist (pillow gets smaller each year), donned the famous red suit, hair, beard, boots, belt, hat, glasses and attitude and went to Zahn Financial Services in Golden, Colorado. I have been Santa there every year for the past five years or so. There are a few kids who have shown up each year, so I’ve watched them grow over that time. Each time I dress in that costume and sit by the decorated tree handing out small gifts, I see the magic expressed in the eyes of the young kids, and the very real desire of the nine and ten year olds to bring back the magic.

I wonder if most of us who grew up as I did have spent their lives trying to recreate the magic brought on by Santa Claus.

I wonder how much money Christian zealots have made trying to convince us that they have the keys to this magic.

And I wonder how much money fathers and mothers have borrowed and spent trying to keep the magic alive.

But mainly, at this time of the year, particularly, even as I wonder about these things, I am grateful to my parents, and my sister, for showing me the magic of Santa Claus, and the gift of giving that embodies  the season of Christmas.

Put the Damn Blog Down and Do Something

When I was a young teenager in the 1950s, I spent a lot of time reading. I was, and still am, an introvert. My daddy would frequently worry about me, and would tell me to “put the damn book down and go do something.”

I have found this to be good advice on several counts, not the least of which is that reading is dangerous. For example, I actually have read Ayn Rand’s novels and articles. They “scared the pee wadding” out of me. Now I see that other people have read her as well and have built empires in this country, having been born-again into her religion. I have read the works of her disciples, leaders in the political arena, and see that they are serious and espouse a philosophy that is absolutely foreign to everything I’ve been taught in books and church during the last 68 years about what it means to be human. That is beyond pee-wadding fear.

Also, I have actually read the Bible (Old and New Testaments in several translations) and, having been in similar situations a time or two, can relate to the acid trip John experiences in his “Revelation”.  But I also have read the writings of the prominent leaders of the Catholic, Protestant, and Mormon religions, and can’t relate to these Christians (sic) who have made careers out of the worship and evangelism of hate, self-aggrandizement, money, and power.

I’ve read too much I think.

The second count upon which I think my daddy’s advice was good is that reading leads to writing, which is even more dangerous. Putting one’s words out into the marketplace of words (I would say ideas, but they are in short supply these days) is to invite either disapproval or condemnation. Or worse yet, promises of “I’ll pray for you”.  Or worst, silence.

I may have written too much.

Of course my father also meant that I should be actively out in the world as opposed to what he saw as being passive—sitting in my back yard reading. At the time I thought this was good advice, so I moved out of the back yard and into church, school, and the world. I was still an introvert, but an engaged one.

I’m heading to Kentucky next week to commemorate my 50^th high school reunion. In a month, I’ll be celebrating my 68^th birthday. In honor of these two events, I’ve decided to once again take my daddy’s advice. This introvert is leaving the back yard of my books and blogs and going back out into the world to do something.

I’ll be back when I have done whatever it is that I will have done.

I wish all y’all peace, love, and the presence of good people in your lives who are not out to shoot you for disagreeing with them (or knocking on their doors, or walking in their gated communities).

And the absence of Ayn Rand evangelists and dangerous Christian fanatics disguised as leaders of the faith.

Rich People and Dirty Boots

My daddy used to frequently remark that you could tell the folks who actually had money from those who wanted to have money but weren’t there yet by listening and looking. If they bragged about their money, they didn’t have any. If they had shit on their boots, they probably had a bit of money, but wouldn’t go round bragging about it. As a kid, I found this observation fascinating and wise.

I’ve been reading the Holy Bible and Aristotle’s The Rhetoric this week, thinking about my daddy, and wondering about rich people.

Where and when I grew up, it seems to me the people who had more money than most of us went to some length not to rub our noses in it. For example, the folks who paid for me to go to summer church camp did it without fanfare.  Christmas baskets were put together for the poor and delivered matter-of-factly and neighborly, without explicit or implicit judgments made toward the giver or receiver.

Of course, we all know what Jesus is noted to have said on the subject of money and wealth—"the love of money is the root of all evils"l (1 Timothy 6:10), and “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” (Matthew 19:24) remind us of two passages.

Jesus was a kind and gentle soul. Aristotle was not. On most subjects, Aristotle, most certainly not a Christian (Christianity had not been founded yet), held positions that were about as far away from Jesus’ as could be. However, in The Rhetoric and Poetics of Aristotle, as he talks about what one needs to know about wealthy people in order to persuade them, what he has to say is strong:

Wealthy men are insolent and arrogant; their possession of wealth affects their understanding; they feel as if they had every good thing that exists; wealth becomes a sort of standard of value for everything else, and therefore there is nothing it can’t buy.… Rich men also consider themselves worthy to hold public office; for they consider they already have the things that give them a claim to office. In a word, the type of character produced by wealth is that of a prosperous fool. There is indeed one difference between the type of the newly-enriched and those who have long been rich: the newly-enriched have all the bad qualities mentioned in an exaggerated and worse form—to be newly-enriched means, so to speak, no education in riches. The wrongs they do other are not meant to injure their victims, but spring from insolence or self-indulgence, e.g., those that end in assault or in adultery. (pp.127-28)

The people of means that I remember in Providence, Kentucky, those from “old money” and from “new money” did not fit Aristotle’s description. For that I am thankful.

But I sure as hell see evidence to support his view today in the U.S.

Despite our Western Cultural religious and philosophical traditions and underpinnings, I wonder what happened to us, and why it is that today we have come to worship wealth and wealthy people? Especially when they flaunt their wealth and rub our noses in it.

I hear rich folks bragging about their money and possessions, but despite my best attempts to find it, I ain’t seen no shit on any of their boots yet.

Wonder if today’s world is making Aristotle look like an even more brilliant man.

And making my daddy’s wisdom obsolete.

Raccoons and Conflict Management: A Case Study

It was Two A.M. on a dark morning in suburban Denver. I had been in conflict with a family of five raccoons. In formal conflict management terminology, what we had was a conflict of needs. They needed my plums. I needed them to be gone. I tried reasoning with them: “When you eat my plums, I feel put upon, because they are my plums and you steal them”.

This had not worked. So, on this dark morning, I heard them chirping away with that happy, full-bellied chirp for which they are notorious.

I live next to a large piece of open space, thriving with foxes, coyotes, owls, geese, hawks, exotic water birds passing through, AND RACCOONS. The law is clear. Humans may not kill these residents. We may harass them, however, if they invade our tax-paid pieces of property and irritate us. 

The point needs to be made: I like raccoons. They are intelligent, playful (mostly), industrious, family-values kinds of animals. They are also not aggressive, unless rabid or cornered. I thought.

They also taste good, if cooked by Danny “Stick” and/or Tanya Thomason. Stick has passed away and Tanya lives in Kentucky, so even if I broke the law it would be a waste.

But on this morning I had had enough. I jumped out of bed and crept down the stairs, careful not to wake my cat—he’s a grumpy SOB when awakened—and grabbed my weapon of choice. What I figured was that the sight of me sans pants, shirt, or toupee, holding my trusty Daisy-Red-Ryder-BB gun-with-the-compass-on-the-stock would cause this family sufficient harassment as to cause them to go elsewhere.

With gun and flashlight in hand, I crept onto the deck. Neighbors were all asleep, or light-less anyway. I saw a big raccoon in the tree and shot three shots. At least two offended him enough that he scampered down. Noise of others following suit caused me pause, but I just kept cocking and shooting at large objects in the tree, and bright eyes lit by my flashlight, then at large objects and eyes on the deck.

Then the large objects disappeared. The raccoons were now under the deck.

OK, now what? I had visions of little hand-like claws reaching up through the deck cracks to get at my toes, but brave Kentucky hunter that I am, I stood my ground, quietly, with toes upturned.

Then, at the end of my flashlight’s beam I saw five raccoons. A little chill went up my spine. My deck sets close to the ground. The raccoons were standing on this ground, so what I really saw was five pairs of eyes and five pairs of front paws gripping the edge of the deck. The five had spread out down the short side of the deck, and around the corner onto the long side. Yes, these non-aggressive family-values animals were trying to surround me. They seemed pissed, and poised to take care of this plum-eating-interruptus-fool.

I quickly cocked and shot as fast as I could, expecting the worst, and escaped through the sliding doors back into the safety of my suburban middle class home.

I wonder if my daddy, Stick, Tanya, and my Kentucky hunting friends, and their hounds, are laughing. I know I heard what sounded like laughter from my deck, through the plate glass, as I reached for a shot of bourbon to calm my nerves.

In conflict management theory, conflicts of needs may be resolved when one party’s needs are shown to be more important than the other’s. It was clear to me in this instance who’s needs were greatest.

I don’t like conflict.

50th High School Reunion

In the Spring of 1962, 40 of my friends and I set out from Providence High School to make a place for ourselves in the world. In the Summer of 2012, some of us will gather, as we have gathered every five years since 1962, to celebrate one another, catch up, tell stories, and remember the half a Century that has passed since we left P.H.S. 

I do wonder why people go to their high school reunions. I have friends who have never been to one and vow never to go to one.

I know why I go. It’s a life marker for me. I really don’t think about Billy Wilson, for example, as I go through my normal everyday life, year after year. However, every five years, he, and Dorris Burton, and several other people who I really liked in high school, seldom saw after high school, and who I will never see again because they have passed away, come barreling into my consciousness, full-blown, in 3-D and color, as they were in the Spring of 1962.

Over the years I have watched the folks who did come the reunions grow and develop, and become successful in that world into which we were thrown in 1962. I’ve also watched them suffer the pains of divorce, death of loved ones, and debilitating diseases. Every five years, this group of people gets a snapshot of our friends living their lives.

We knew each other when most of us had outhouses, and we remember those cold, cold winter mornings that taught us about bladder control if nothing else. We remember coal: having to get the clinkers out of the stove in the mornings, take the ashes outside and bring in new buckets.  Many of us had coal miners as fathers. At least one of us had a coal mining mother. Several of us made careers related to coal.

We now share memories of people. All of us remember Mrs. Hooks, and Mr. Lane, and Mrs. Crowe, and Mrs. Rayburn, and Mrs. Dorris. We remember the old gym into which we were packed to watch old black and white movies, hear recitals, attend pep rallies. We remember football, basketball, baseball, and track, at which several members of the class of 1962 excelled.

We remember band teacher Joe Allen, who came to town and became a real-life Music Man, transforming the school and the town, generating excitement and parental involvement on a grand scale.

These are people with whom I spent significant time from about 1950 through 1962. Hell, that’s longer than some marriages last.

I find that I don’t have much in common with most of my classmates anymore. What we do have in common, however, I believe is important: memories of a time shared during those formative years of our lives. I use the reunions to review my current life in light of those memories. It's sort of a present-day reality check using a shared rear view mirror. 

This time we will be reviewing memory snapshots in a rear view mirror that spans half a Century. 

When all is said and done, I go to high school reunions because I like these people. I like who they were and who they have become, and spending a day or so with them every five years makes me feel good.

That is why, in the Summer of 2012, I will drive back to Kentucky, and back in time to 1962 and the twelve years before that, to share stories and memories with people who were there with me “in the olden days”.

Kentucky Poetry: Portrait Exercises

My Eyes 2012

Look into my eyes.

Do not look at the wrinkled skin,

The sagging muscles,

The stained teeth.

Look into my eyes.

Remove the layered curtains.

Can you see the young man in there,

The idealist,

The true believer.

Can you see that glow

That comes from the belief

That time is on his side?

I look into my eyes

From the inside.

I turn thin time layers

One by one, like plastic overlays

On some old biology textbook

I  fan my life out behind me.

Saturday Afternoon, Kentucky 1949

Gooseberries, green with curious veins.

Sweet and tart.

Like childhood scenes.

My grandfather swinging his cane.

Mad with dementia.

He chasing old man demons,

And me.

Me running, unafraid of demons or him,

But aware of the cane.

An old lady sits on a porch, 

Churning butter.

Behind her sets an icebox.

Big chunks of melting ice smelling cold and fresh.

With a hint of cigarette smoke.

Church Sunday Morning, Kentucky 1950

Orange flowers filling ditches.

Sunny and bright,

The weather and me.

Gravel crunches beneath my new shoes.

In my Sunday go to meetin' clothes

I am beautifully alone

For a mile or so.

Fellowship begins in the basement

In the small brick church.

Coffee and cigarettes

Not for me, yet.

Upstairs, organ music gently blends with

The rustle of cloth as people settle.

My Daddy, Uncle Clay and Dinner Buckets

In the mid-1950s, my father and his brother, Uncle Clay, used to sit around in the yard and talk about the world, the old days, politics, and their work in the mines. Both had spent decades working underground, mining a seam of coal that ran from Southern Illinois through Western Kentucky, Southern Indiana, and Southern Ohio.

One of their mining themes had to do with dinner buckets, those aluminum containers that held their drinking water and a tray, that fit into the bucket like a double broiler, that held their lunches. They would look at me and say,  at various times in various contexts, “When your buddy empties his dinner bucket water, you empty yours too, don’t ask questions, just leave the mines. You find out what’s the matter when you get out of the mines.”

They said this with pride, and to them it was a matter of pride. And solidarity.

These were United Mine Workers of America people, for whom John L. Lewis was a small-d deity. Union people who believed strongly in the “rank and file”, not in Capitalism, not in union bosses (except for Lewis of course), not in company bosses. They believe in themselves, united.

My daddy and Uncle Clay were not Socialists. Coal miners are as close to being those U.S. “rugged individualists” that personify Capitalism as you can get. But they did realize that they were not alone; they had responsibilities, obligations, and allegiances to one another, even if they did not particularly like some of those “anothers”.

I wonder if this “us” attitude still exists in the workplace, or anywhere else in this country for that matter. For decades, our churches, priests/preachers, politicians, schools, and media have encouraged “me” generations. I wonder if this is good for folks like my daddy and Uncle Clay.

I’ve been a management professor and consultant for over 30 years and certainly know that companies/corporations are not inherently evil. Business owners, executives, and boards are not inherently evil. However, they all have a natural monetary, social, and psychological stake in their businesses that shape their perceptions and guide their behaviors. In addition, they have industry colleagues with whom to pool resources and perceptions. And they still think of employees as costs.

I also know that employees of these companies/corporations are not inherently evil. Unlike their management colleagues, however, they do not come to the workplace with shared perceptions; they do not have natural monetary, social, and psychological stakes in the businesses in which they find themselves. And they still think of employers as bosses.

I am not a defender of capital-u unions. Labor unions, even the UMWA, have over the years become business organizations themselves, with executives driving them. Members frequently find themselves having to deal with two sets of bosses—company managers and union managers—and two sets of political influences.

I do know, however, that a person like my daddy, one man, not well educated, standing by himself, no matter how good, strong, or God fearing he might be, cannot hold his ground against a billionaire business owner who thinks of him as a cost. Only by joining with his colleagues, whether he likes them or not, does he stand a chance of predictably being able to feed his kids, keep them in school, and stand up for his political convictions, whatever they may be.

So, I wonder how the “we” gets re-ignited as a concept in the workplace and in communities. I wonder how we erode the notion that working together is un-American.

But most of all, I wonder who I trust well enough that when she throws the water out of her dinner bucket, I will throw mine out too and follow her out of the mines?

A Conversation

I vividly remember a night, sometime in the late 1950s, sitting in a school bus, by the window, gazing out at the stars. I had just read some damn thing or other about space and time travel and was trying to project myself—trying to be myself at some distant point in time looking back at myself sitting in the school bus. Trying to imagine that self looking back at myself at that point. Of course I told no one what I was doing. They still had mental asylums back then, you know.

And here I am, sitting at my desk in my middle-class home in my middle-class suburb in Colorado over 50 years later, connecting with that me in that bus on that two-lane highway running from Murray State University to Providence, Kentucky, on that winter’s night.

We are talking about the future and the past. I’m telling him about the things that happened to him after that night, about the things he saw, the things he did, the people he loved, the worlds in which he lived. He’s appreciative of what I have to say.

Then he asks me questions that I don’t want to hear. “So, did I do what I intended to do?”, he asks. “Was I honest?” “Was I caring and loving?” “Who did I become?” He doesn’t know what authentic means yet, but that’s the question he’s asking.

When I think of authenticity, I used to think of  a commitment to something larger than themselves. Not in a subservient way, as the case with most organized religious folk, but in an “egoless” way, more akin to a Zen notion. As I talk to myself through time, it is that ambition I hear from that teenager-that-was-me. At that time I fantasized about living authentically, focused, clear, and uncluttered, looking at the world through larger-than-life and beyond-life-as-I-know-it eyes.  

Compromise is a dirty word these days, yet we humans, in real life, face compromises every day. The only way around it is to literally “get off the grid” emotionally, spiritually, psychologically, and physically. Some people do that. Those of us who choose not to do so are faced with dilemmas and compromise.

As a kid, I did not think in terms of dilemmas. As an old man, my life is a dilemma. To me as an old man,  living authentically means making decisions in the face of dilemmas, acting on them, and taking responsibility for those decisions and actions. And compromise.

I wonder how many people experience this phenomenon of trying to live up to expectations set in our youth. I wonder how many of us forgive ourselves for not having met those lofty goals. 

I am not the person that kid-that-was-me envisioned. I have made a lot of compromises, many of which I regret. I have faced dilemmas and done the wrong things.

But I’m asking that kid in that bus that night to cut me some slack. He is a forgiving kid.

I think. I'm still waiting for an answer.

Learning About Piece Work and Labor: Kentucky, 1963

In the summer of 1963 I worked in my hometown plastics factory, housed in a cinderblock building with a corrugated metal roof, filled with cardboard boxes, machinery, and plastic. It was often 120 degrees. This was my first on-the-job business course, an important one in which I learned about the concepts of “labor” and “piece work.”

I worked as a supply boy to about 15 women. My responsibility was to provide them with bundles of plastic garment bags on which they, using heat machines, sealed the shoulder sections. The ultimate product was the bags which enclose our dry-cleaned clothing.

These women worked piece work, hunched over hot machines in a furnace. I learned very quickly that all plastic was not created equally. The slipperier the plastic, the more shoulders could be sealed. The more shoulders sealed, the more money was to be made. Good plastic was prized. Bad plastic was to be shared, making sure no one women got all of a bad batch. I screwed up only once, and gave a bad batch to only one woman. She stood up, threw the plastic at me, called me a motherf**ker, picked up another batch, sat down, and resumed work. I was not offended. I had screwed up and knew it. So, I picked up the bad batch, threw it into the re-melt barrel and resumed my work.

These were smart, strong women, who needed the meager money they earned from back-straining, finger stressing work eight hours a day. There were no official breaks, so the small bathrooms were always clogged with smoke resulting from the quick unofficial breaks taken.

Here’s what I learned about piece work. It sucks. It does not motivate people to work harder, it causes people to get pissed off, cuss, and throw things. It does not improve productivity, it causes shortcuts to be made, decreasing quality. This has been proven time and again, but I saw it in action.

Most importantly, however, I learned that it is demeaning to the people who work.

Here’s what I learned about “labor”. When the word is used as a broad term to discuss people as opposed to money (labor and capital), it disguises the issues. To think of Edna Dunbar, Castella McDowell, Dean Wood, Nora Belle Holt, Reba Walker and all the women who worked as hard as they could, in lousy conditions, as “labor” makes it easier for the factory bosses to blame them for the companies’ shortcomings. It’s easier for owners to convince themselves to move further and further south, then to Asia and other off-shore locations in search of cheaper “labor” without having to say, “We’re looking for people who will work for nothing in lousy conditions while we continue to make the business mistakes that drive down our profits.”

These jobs were not held by “labor”—they were held by people like my mother, who used her pennies to pay for my coronet lessons as a kid, bought the white shirts I wore in the band, and paid for the food on our table. The factory provided vital jobs in a small town that was struggling to stay alive.

The company moved away in search of cheaper labor.

Since 1963, not much has changed. Laws in the U.S. have been passed that require companies to provide periodic breaks for employees. Laws in the U.S. have been passed that require working conditions to be safe and conducive to work getting done. But we continue to use words like “labor” to talk about how expensive people are—we have to cut “labor costs”—and how restrictive U.S. “labor laws” have become as we continue to look for places outside the U.S. where we can find “cheap labor” in places "friendlier to business".

I wonder how many political leaders and “job creators” had mothers and fathers who worked in sweat shops. I wonder how many job creators are creating sweat shop jobs today.

I wonder if they consider miners, teachers, fire fighters, police officers, factory workers, and other folks who work long hours to support their families and communities as “labor”, or if they, like I in that factory in1963, have had some sort of learning experience. For all our sakes, I wish for them epiphanies.

1968 and 2012: Musings of an Old Man

In the summer of 1968 I had finished a master’s degree, and was commuting from Athens, GA to Clemson, SC to teach a UGA course to teachers in Clemson. During that commute, my first experience of the phenomenon, with no obnoxious talk shows spewing their venom to distract me, I had time to think. I thought about the times in which I lived, and dreamed about the future.

The Vietnam War was one of three very hot issues during that summer of youth and passion.

The U.S. was involved in an unpopular war to which we sent thousands of draftees, reluctant patriots who found courage, fear, drugs, mental and physical disfigurement, and death in the jungles.

People were demonstrating in the streets against this war. The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was engaged. I brought the president of the Athens chapter in to speak to my persuasion class—probably have a file because of that.

Kent State had not yet happened.

Race and racism was the second passionate issue that summer. Dr. Martin Luther King had just been assassinated. The Black Panther Party was in full swing, taking up arms to end what they saw as extreme oppression. Some white preachers in Georgia and South Carolina were preaching the Biblical support for the proposition that black folks were inferior, cast aside by the Old Testament God. Some black preachers in Detroit and Chicago were just beginning to preach the same message, using the same scriptures, against white folks, the ice people, the blue eyed devils.

It was an election year, the third hot issue. The 1968 Democratic National Convention was scheduled for later in the summer. Robert Kennedy had just been assassinated.

My Quaker, Methodist, and UCC friends and other activists were in the streets passionately fighting against injustice.

In the summer of 2012 I am retired, do not commute but am still teaching, and continue to think about the times. Passion is in short supply as the U.S. Tea partiers chant tired, middle-class, white slogans sounding like robots, looking like robots. Occupiers try to find traction with the working class and minorities, but their tires keep slipping.

Racism is as prominent as it was in 1968, but has taken on new forms. Instead of President Obama being called the “n word” in public, as were Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and other leaders, he is called “a socialist” by people who do not understand what the word means, but do know it’s another “n” word. The percentage of unemployment and underemployment in the U.S. is debilitating. For people of color it is embarrassing, to them and us. The number of black people we legally kill each year should be embarrassing, but instead it is seen as a badge of honor by some governors who proudly proclaim themselves as pro-life.

We are now engaged in at least two wars to lesser or greater extents. Unlike Vietnam, people aren’t being drafted to fight these wars. I wonder if that’s why it is easier for us to ignore them. Also unlike Vietnam, these wars were declared “off budget” and “unfunded” by those avid supporters of fiscal responsibility who argued for the wars, and we now struggle to figure out how to pay for them while our economy has crumbled in part because of them.

As in Vietnam, our current troops are finding courage, fear, disfigurement, and drugs. Unlike Vietnam veterans, many of whom died slow deaths connected to the war, these troops are committing suicide at alarming rates. We struggle to figure out why.

And there is an election coming up in the fall.

There are still activists working within and outside the system with unflagging attention to issues of war and social injustice. Some are young activists fighting the good fight, like my Libertarian-with-a-conscience politician friend in Colorado. These people give me hope, and to them, and those in 1968, I humbly say thank you for your service to our country.

But as I sit in the summer of 2012, as wars and injustices continue to multiply, and as many of us whimper about our taxes and sinful women who use contraceptives, I wonder what happened to those changes I dreamed of in the summer of 1968.

Money, Politics, and My Self-Esteem

Sometime in the mid-1950s, I rode around on the trunk lid of Wanda Whitfield’s car in Webster County Kentucky, with my Sousaphone wrapped around my middle, heading for pep rallies for Happy Chandler. In my memory, Chandler, who was Governor of Kentucky and later became Commissioner of Baseball, was the quintessential Kentucky politician, a charismatic, “glad handing”, baby kissing, sort of pudgy, “go to” guy. These pep rallies, plus pep rally organizers like Wanda Whitfield, and probably some smoky backroom deal making, comprised the campaign strategy for politicians, as far as I could tell. Campaign messages were mostly delivered in stump speeches, “town square” debates, and by word of mouth.

I was thinking about that experience as I listened to newscasts the past few weeks telling me that another new fund-raising record will be reached this election year, which made me wonder about money and politics.

Specifically, what I wonder is, who do politicians think I am that they think they it takes that much money to buy me off?

It seems to have become a given fact that those who raise the most money win. Now I know the contest is not about amassing piles of money, then measuring the piles, and the person with the largest pile, or greatest piles, wins. That would make for interesting races though, and would allow us to use metrics and rubrics in assessing the worth of candidates, always a good business school model, and God knows what’s good for business schools is good for America.

Anyway, as far as I can tell, the current formula is to raise as much money as possible in order to buy as many television advertisements, Internet banners, and robocallers as possible. The messages come from two sources, the candidate, and the candidates’ political action committees. The messages embedded in those media are made to be as nasty as possible, without regard for facts or truth—in fact the “big lie”, the more dramatic with the most loaded and scary language, is preferred. These messages are aired as often as funding makes possible to as many people as possible twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. The more money you have, the more you can air. The candidate with the most air time wins.

The theory is that if you bombard your audience with your message, from a variety of media sources, your audience will believe you, no matter what you say. Consequently, the candidate with the most messages bombarded wins, because people will believe the group that they hear from the most, or the most recently.

I wonder who these messages are created for. I get them, so they were created implicitly for me, right? If so, I wonder whether I should be depressed or angry. The picture created of me, the voter, is just about as demeaning as it possibly could be. I, as a voter, am seen as an ignorant follow-the-crowd “mark”, who will believe whatever I’m told if I hear it often enough from my phone, my computer, and my television.

I wonder if that is not a variation of the notion that my vote can be bought. From analysis of elections the past few years, the answer is yes, votes are being bought, with a potential billion dollars in bribes being raised and spent this year.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, but miss the days of Happy Chandler pep rallies and stump speeches, where votes were sometimes bought, but were bought the old fashioned Kentucky way, one half-pint at a time, with hand shakes and eye contact made. Much more honest and much less demeaning to all concerned.

Wisdom and Vanity

When I was in high school, Rice Sutherland, my Methodist Youth Fellowship guru (no they did not have words like that in Providence, Kentucky at that time, but she was my angel, and I thank her), gave me a Revised Standard Version of the Bible with my name embossed on the cover. Her instructions were, when I was troubled or down (we also did not have words like “stressed” or “depressed” back then), I should open the book to random pages, and look for passages that spoke to me. When I found them I should circle them and write a date.

I still have that Bible. I’ve had to have it re-covered (kept my name on it), but I still have it.  There are a lot of circled passages and dates written, all from the early 60s. As I analyze (that’s what old professors do, you know), I find two themes to wonder about. 

First there is “wisdom”. I circled and dated  a lot of passages over several years that dealt with the importance of seeking wisdom. I can remember meditating (sort of) on the notion of wisdom as opposed to knowledge as I wallowed in ennui and angst in the basement of my house on Normal Drive (loved that address) in Bowling Green, Kentucky. The questions—what is wisdom and how do I get some—still rattle around in my consciousness as I wonder about my place in the universe.

The other theme is “vanity”. Ah, vanity, thy name is (what was that, again?). All is vanity. I still believe this is important. I can criticize the Catholic Church for taking Jesus’ teachings and turning them on their head to create a super structure that would make the Pharisees  of Jesus’ time blush. But to do so is vanity. I can criticize a man who got caught with his pants down and created a church in which it is valuable to have multiple wives, in the U.S. , in the 19^th Century.  But to do so is vanity. I can poke fun at all manner of frivolity and foolishness, but when it all boils down, to do so is to feed my vanity.

I write blogs. Vanity, thy name is me.

I criticize the Catholic Church, yet am smitten by the Latin Mass, and the ne’er do well Jesuits. I criticize Baptists and Methodists, yet understand the good that they do to people in need (and love the fried chicken dinners them Methodists cook). I criticize the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Hindus, yet know that I’ve been in this world before in some form or other and will be here again in some form or other after I’ve left Lakewood, Colorado and am cremated and rolled into joints and smoked by my closest friends.

The ultimate in vanity is for a human being like me to believe that I can know the nature of my creator. The ultimate in vanity (times infinity) is for a human being like me to try to persuade a human being like you to believe that I am right and you are wrong and my god’s greater than your god, and therefore it is right for me to make fun of you and yours.

But as I study those old circled passages, I wonder if the ultimate in vanity, period, would be for me to decry Sharia Law while taking up arms to enforce my particular version of Christian Law.

While wisdom hides in the corner.

 

Memorial Days Past and Present

MEMORIAL DAY 1957

White sky, shimmering as it salutes the day of commemoration.

Decoration Day, 1957

Begins at the court house in Dixon

With Taps and an echo.

Old men and young men,

Proud men and broken men,

Sit with their families and friends,

Sweltering in the early morning heat.

They gather in thankfulness,

Or sorrow,

Or both.

Memories of the Great War are carried with pride.

Memories of the Not So Great War are carefully tucked away,

In secret pains that no bottle can erase.

But they try.

I long to see a maple tree leaf turn inside out.

I pray for a storm as sweat drips into my eyes.

Carefully, my lips meet the mouthpiece

And I begin to play Taps.

MEMORIAL DAY 2012

An old man sits alone,

Eight thousand feet above sea level.

Appreciating white-framed peaks

Seen through pine tree filters.

Crisp breezes temper the sun’s heat.

Sixty-eight years of memories

Spread out against the rocks.

Good memories and painful ones,

Examined with white gloved care.

High country silence,

Accompanied by an occasional Mountain Jay,

Frame his celebration of peace,

His celebration of solitude,

His celebration of his life so far.