1 Boring Old Man

That was newscaster Paul Harvey’s line. Well, even though I’ve said it before here, I want to tell the rest of the story about my last post [again]. Sometime after 9/11, my high school class [Class of 60, Best in Dixie] sent out an email list and people began to reconnect in anticipation of our 45th reunion. In retrospect, it was a strange time to be graduating from high school, 1960. It was still General Eisenhower in the White House. There had been some sit-ins at the 5&10 stores downtown, but the Civil Rights Movement hadn’t really coalesced, at least not in Chattanooga Tennessee. The world was only as complicated as Rock and Roll, hot rods, a few Beatnicks, and the constant specter of thermonuclear destruction of the planet could make it. John Kennedy was a name we were barely learning. None of us had ever heard of Viet Nam.

So, in late 2002 when this email list came out, a lot of us who had left for college and never looked back began to chatter. There was a huge history between 1960 and 2003 – huge. Well, a retired Navy guy began to send around those emails with the wavy flags and get tough anti-arab talk. One classmate complained [a former pilot who had had a change of heart and become an anti-nuclear activist]. A few emails went back and forth, then an idiot [me] suggested we have a debate about whether we should go to war with Iraq or not. One fool [me] opined that we had no case for war. Error! Error! I got blasted for months. I didn’t keep the responses but some weren’t pretty. It was kind of chilly at the 45th reunion except for the like-minded.

I get the emails from the class [50th reunion coming up]. But I didn’t get the one posted below, only the one another classmate wrote in protest. The lady that coordinates the emails [sensibly] didn’t send it to me [she’s still beautiful, inside and out]. Someone else forwarded it. But as much as I hate that kind of rhetoric, I’m glad I got it. I had asked yesterday what they were afraid of, and this letter seemed to address the answer.

I also worry about the pent-up rage expressed in town hall meetings. I now believe it’s more than the republicans’ hand-picked teams of agitators who just try to disrupt anything that might reflect well on the democrats. The republicans have stumbled upon a substrate of fear, expressed as rage. They exploit it to the hilt trying to precipitate Obama’s “Waterloo.” Tell me Charles Grassley can’t read and understand a House bill that contains nothing about “death squads!” Yet there he is, a cornerman to Sarah Palin. I don’t know what to do about it, or how to counter it.

Obama – bless his heart – has so far tried to “nice” his way among the brambles and briar thickets, forever trying for bipartisanship, gamely, doggedly trying to take the high road in spite of the boatloads of calumny and ridicule and vicious personal attack he gets.

I want him to be willing to finally stand up and face it head on. I keep hearing the words of FDR, running for reelection in 1936:

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me, and I welcome their hatred.

What a guy. No wonder they elected him four times. I hope Obama can stand up like FDR when he has to.