Racial tensions NOT

As I write today, after weeks and months of viewing the world in its most horrendous state, I am compelled to write about this topic. As I sit safely imprisoned in my little paradise and even more sequestered in my crowded home office while just above my head is my 17-year-old son playing X-box with his friend who stayed over last night after a grueling day of BMX riding. 

 I’m recalling a complex, but yet in many ways, a simpler time.  I grew up in the ’60s; we moved to Florida in 1962 from a farm in Wisconsin.  My dad had had enough of the snow and shoveling cow manure and milking cows.  Because of our mining background on the limestone quarry we ran on the farm property, he bought a little sand mine in Melbourne. Everyone in Wisconsin thought dad was out of his mind buying a sand mine in Florida where it is nothing but sand except for deep down coral rock. He was always shrewd and made it work selling sand in Florida. 

My first dose of culture shock was in southern Illinois just before crossing into “the South.” We stopped for gas and a much needed potty break. I encountered at the restrooms a delineation clearly on the doors beyond the” men’s and “women’s (this was way before we had to worry about gender equality, how far we have come, lol)  “colored’s only” and “whites only.”  I was confused as a 9-year-old why this was. We didn’t have any black people in rural Wisconsin. We only saw them from the highway when we would visit Uncle Virgil and my cousins in Beloit, which was a bit more cosmopolitan if you could call a town of 5000 more cosmopolitan.  Now, if I remember right, Illinois was in the Union, not the Confederacy. Still, I guess the lines get blurred in southern Illinois because evidently, segregation was not limited to the bigots in the south as generally thought and taught. Even in rural white Wisconsin, we had labels for everyone.  Blacks were matter-of-factly referred to as Negros or a slang version of that. Swedes and Pollacks usually had “big dumb” as an adjective added to their cultural origin. And of course, the Wops, chinks, Japs and Heebs, Swiss cheese heads (that be our family), and Krauts pretty much rounded it out.  In today’s sensitive political correctness, rounded out the nicknames for heritages mostly used in an All in The Family-Archie Bunker sort of way. There were also religious divides, mainly of Protestants and Catholics. We didn’t have any Muslims around and didn’t even know that religion existed and a few Jews that mostly ran the shops in Monroe the nearby “city” of 3000.

My mom and dad (although my dad was sort of the Archie Bunker type) had as best friends a Catholic couple( we were not), a couple of farms over who would love to go to the local hot spot on Monroe called “Turner Hall” where they would dance away the night together to swing music, Bill Haley and the Comets, Elvis and endless Polkas and Shotishe’s.   As I said in earlier posts, music is a great equalizer.  One episode in my early days in Florida might serve as a lesson for the looting race-baiting bigotry of this day.  My dad was hauling in dirt to fill in a house slab in a new public housing project (another failed attempt to lift people with stuff. What they needed was a chance. They already had a good strong family based on going to church every Sunday, even if it meant Momma was gripping you by the ears and dragging you there), and he brought me along. I was playing amongst the dump truck loads of sand when a little black kid my age came up by himself, and we began to play together. Before we knew it, he and I became “commandos,” found some big roots in the dirt that we quickly fashioned into machine guns and proceeded to “attack” the tank (the bulldozer my dad was running) from behind the mounds of sand. We played for hours and had a ball. My dad even joined in the fun and feinted a successful hit from the marauding commandos and slow the machine to a grinding halt only to move on and start the game all over again.

After some time, the young boy’s mother came over and told him, “you aren’t supposed to be playing with white boys” and marched him home. Looking back on that episode, I have come to one conclusion that If we let the 10-year old’s run this country, I’ll bet we would get along a whole lot better. Then the “adults” that have to step in with everything from the “Great Society” to a misguided sense of entitlement formed by the “entitled” for things that happened way before our time just like my newly minted little black kid friend and me. Neither of us had a clue about the past injustices until our “adult” elders reminded us of it and split us from the human race into separate herds like farm animals.

Another experience I had later in life was in the Jaycees.  Our chapter had had a public service project called “Tot land,” a playground to be constructed in the “projects.” Our chapter could never get a project chairman to take the project mainly because we were a 99% white chapter, and NO ONE wanted to go in there.  Now the Jaycees worldwide built parks and ball fields and were even instrumental in upgrading the postal system and started what was later to become the Orlando International Airport, among many other things.   I was new, I had a bunch of construction equipment and recruited an army of volunteers (an army of me and three other guys) and donated playground equipment from the city with a cheery “good luck boys ain’t nobody been able to build anything in there that didn’t get tore up by the teenage bullies.”  So off we went. We started clearing out the old abandoned junk, and the dump trucks started to roll. At first, the parents and other adults just looked out from their windows and sometimes sneered and sometimes just watched. Pretty soon, the little kids came out and started helping, and then parents came out with shovels and rakes, and the gals brought out some food and drinks, and a miracle happened. A bunch of ragtag white guys and a small group of black people started putting aside all the b.s. and started working together. One moment I’ll never forget was when we had a frontend loader on-site, and after spreading the sand, we told all the little kids that if they help us spread the sand, we would give them all a ride in the 5-yard bucket of the loader. There were about a dozen of them that suddenly appeared and began moving sand with their hands. Tonka Toys and plastic shovels and the job was done before we knew it. They were now ready for their hard-fought reward (of course nowadays there have to be insurance waivers, OSHA inspections and some city bureaucrat telling us what to do).  We let them hop in the bucket and proceeded to give them a ride around the neighborhood like a small parade with their parents cheering as we drove down the street, The bucket looked like a bowl of Cocoa Puffs with all these little kids riding in there, but boy was that fun for all big and small!

Unfortunately, this story doesn’t have a lasting happy ending.  Late in the afternoon, one of my fellow Jaycees and I was putting the last of the playground equipment together, bolting little spring-mounted animals to the in-ground bases, and the little kids were helping us.  A few older teenage bullies showed up and started to harass the little kids, and they ran away. Mike  (who by the way was a bit of an old school Ohio farm boy redneck) and I were putting on the final touches with a large crescent wrench and a pipe wrench. After they ran the kids off, they came over to us and belligerently basically said, “what are you whiteys think you’re doing in our territory” and started to knock over one of the toys.  We held back and just kept on working, thinking that maybe these assholes would just move on.  They came closer to us and made gestures like they were going to kick over the piece that we were working on and have a good laugh and said: “hey whitey watchu think you’re doing.” Mike and I looked at each other, and I blurted out, “I got your whitey right here why don’t you just leave this place and these kids alone.” Mike and I  raised our wrenches and made them think we meant business, even though we didn’t know if we could take a quartet of thug teenagers. They blinked and went away. We finished up and came back a couple of days later to finish the rest of the park and were welcomed to a site totally destroyed.  We gave up as others had and went on to another project. 

Well, goodwill was enjoyed for a brief moment in time, then the “adults” came in with prejudices of the past, destroying yet another chance of redemption.  I guess that’s why Jesus said bring me the little children and have the faith of a child. For God’s sake, let the ten-year old’s run the world.  Then again, maybe we have to start younger with social media and technology poisoning their innocent young minds. And as Forest Gump would say, “And That’s all I got say about that.”

FORGIVENESS:  A while back, a tragic news story told of the horrible murder of a young Amish kid by a ruthless killer.  Instead of anger and revenge, there was only grief and forgiveness. The killer went to jail.  

The Amish could teach us pious pundits and “religious” people a lot about forgiveness and prayer for redemption for the sinners; that one cop murdering this man and the other cops who were on the job for only for three days and acted out of cowardice and fear of the senior cop causing the undeserved death of a fellow brother of God’s creation.  May we, for just one moment, get off our pious soapbox and find the last time we directly intervened for justice.  Instead of staying in our cozy homes, yelling at the TV while people die.  This should be less about the deification of a simple, and yes flawed as we all are, man and more of redemption, repentance (that includes, cops,  looters and anarchists doing the evil ones work). You Christians, as I am, think this through and pray for the peace of Jesus and His love to pull us back from the brink. Satan has an opening here. Just yesterday morning, I read where Militias are rising in a little town in Idaho at first to exercise their second amendment and Godly right to defend their families and livelihood as implied threats of Antifa anarchists sneaking into this quiet little town, in white Mercedes vans. We all know what the next step is, and that’s more hatred fired like a scattergun killing innocent and evil alike. Prejudice has existed since Biblical times and before, with tribe against tribe, Gentile against Jew.

In a recent post from one of my followers from the Philippines, their post talks about farmers, and the tillers of the land were/are looked upon as “less than.”  I grew up on a farm if we had a little cow manure on our jeans because we didn’t have time to clean up thoroughly after the morning chores, all the city kids on the bus would make fun of us.  All you crybabies today, don’t tell me, I don’t understand prejudice and injustice just because I’m white.  All this is more about economics and prejudice against hard work than old battles that the adults want to re-fight from long ago.

Maybe, that way, all the intellectual trust fund babies look down upon someone in the trades who works with the technology AND their hands. I have a self-bought and paid for a degree from the University of Florida with a degree in accounting and sat for and passed the CPA exam, and I can run a dozer better than most.  Don’t tell me about how hard it is to get an education. I worked to get there and worked to get through there, learned from the professors that I respected and tolerated the “turd” classes of bloviators. I received A’s and B’s in the good classes and “C’s” in the turd classes.  I was there to learn what I needed to learn to be a productive part of the world, not to impress some accepted status quo. I passed the CPA exam and only had to go back one time to pass one part. My classmates were working for big 8 firms and still hadn’t passed it after I did. 

The lesson here is if you want to learn, be it through the school of hard knocks or the University of Florida; YOU WILL LEARN if you have an open mind and work hard and smart.  I guess this is turning into a rant, but with what I see in the pandemic farce and the stalking horse of racism, I have to get this off my chest.

I was a child of the ’60s, and 70’s I think I know a thing or two about the injustices of prejudice and wars fought to enrich the elite through nation-building with the blood of patriotic American men and women and can have little respect for “protestors” who manage to find time during working and school hours to carry their professionally made and distributed signs while the rest of us are working our ass off and VOTING to change things.

There I’m finally done, and maybe I pissed off many of my followers.  Through my depression, the country I love is going up in flames and cowardice. I can’t even worship in peace with others; leaves me in that all too familiar place these days of withdrawing to my albeit beautiful home (although she is starting to look pretty old and decrepit like me) to continually search for answers from God and thanking Him daily for my provision and Jesus for my protection as I am on the front lines of spiritual warfare and it scares me to the core. Am I having another seizure (thanks to I think proper meds I haven’t had one since October 2019), or is it another attack from the evil one? (I don’t think I’m in crazy town yet).

Evil is real. Just look at what’s happening on our streets. There is a song from the ’80s that I featured in a Christian Music show I produced in 1986 by Jakata that’s called “Hell is on the Run.”  I hope that is true now because it sure looks like Good Is On the Run, and it’s taking a beating If there was ever a time, Jesus, its time.