Skip to main content

A Wall, Then

Once upon a time, when I was middle-aged and green under the academic boughs, I taught ethics in a midwestern college.  It was in the 1970s--before and after--when the Cold War was not cold.  East Germans had built a big, beautiful wall along their border with West Berlin.

[Historical Note:  East Germany is not the same as Mexico:  there is an ocean of difference between them. A wall, though, is pretty much a wall, anywhere.]

 When our discussions turned to matters of war and peace, cold and hot, sometimes we got bogged down with well-established, life-long political and religious and social convictions, so to loosen up the crystalline points of view, I proposed that instead of a nuclear arsenal large enough to sterilize the whole earth, we build, not a wall, but an arsenal of catapults along both coasts to keep us free from communists coming our way as the dominoes of world domination fell toward us.  I suggested that the catapults be armed with great gobs of green cow shit.  Nothing, I argued, was more discouraging to an ideological invader than being hit, square on, with a great gob of green cow shit.  And . . .  and . . . there was no radioactive fallout!  

It was a compelling argument to students who knew a lot about fences and cow barns and communists coming over the horizon.  It did, at least, provide a big, beautiful gate into the discussion.

That was almost fifty years ago.
I could not hold such a discussion today.
We do not come to the debate
from the same common ground.

Today there are too many people
who do not know bull shit
when it hits them in the face.

A wall, then.



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.  Even when all they wanted to do w
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