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.