Skip to main content

A Marriage of Convenience


Born in Tacoma
at the tail end of the Great Depression,
"when", as a Norwegian poet said,
"milk was thin and unemployment thick",
schoolbook stories about the Civil War
and slavery and segregation were almost foreign.

 There were no Black kids in school.  
Racism was real, as I came to recognize later,
but it was talk, not tangible.  

 Later, when I moved to California,
racism came to mean more than
the religious bigotry we practiced, 
and I became one of those white idealists
committed to what I did not understand.
Moving to southside Chicago 
was a way to trade ideals for experience.  

 Still, White Civil War attitudes 
were something strange.  

 The Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan, and
Segregation, have since become ordinary fare.
In our own time, the underlying attitudes 
of racist White America have married symbols
from the American Revolution, 
and declared themselves to be a Tea Party.

 Their language is the language of the Old South,
of revolution, of Civil War, of Christian White religion,
and of an antagonism toward the government
that will not allow them to do as they wish.

 What they wish is hateful.  
It isn't grand:  it is hateful.  

 Most of America has twice elected a Black President.
Most of America is not just White:
it is White and Black and Brown,
and it is not just Baptist zealotry or Catholic obedience.
It is not even just Christian, or Judeo-Christian,
or even Semitic and European and Anglo-Saxon.

 We are trying mightily to heave ourselves
toward something better than what we have been,
having, all the time, to beat off old States Rights arguments,
old colonial arrogance toward Africa and Asia 
and the original Americas, to become a whole nation.

 There is a powerful nation trying to be born here,
more than two hundred years after our first revolution,
a century and a half after we first refused to divide ourselves.

 We don't need closets full of automatic weapons
to fight off our own government.
We need to fight off our own old ideas and history.

 What we are losing--if we are losing anything--
is not an ideal, but a foolish White, Christian racism; 
a male monarchy and possession of pretty women.






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more