1 Boring Old Man

It’s almost impossible to imagine this last year – history just feels strange when you’re living it. All my conscious life, I wondered what it would feel like to have "lived through" the Great Depression like my parents, or World War II. I kind of think living through history is lost on the young. Being in Civil Rights marches where tear gas was being hurled, living in Memphis when King got shot, being escorted out of Ruleville Mississippi by shotgun toting guys that followed us to the County Line – those things didn’t feel like history at the time. And going to the 1972 Munich Olympics and sitting on a knoll above the practice track where we could see the Terrorists on the balcony of the dorms didn’t feel like history either. Those things feel like history now, but then – it was just life.

I wonder what it means, where it’s headed. I think it was easier when it was just life. And then I listen to things like this:

The Arkansas Republican Party sure seems to have an interesting line-up of Senate candidates. Check out these statement from retired Army officer Curtis Reynolds. "When I joined the military I took an oath to defend the Constitution against enemies foreign and domestic," Reynolds said. "I never thought it would be domestic, but in today’s world I do believe we have enemies here. It’s time for people to stand up. It’s time for us to speak out." He added: "We need someone to stand up to Barack Obama and his policies. We must protect our culture, our Christian identity."

or from Senator Jim DeMint [R-SC]:

"If we’re able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him."

Those dreadful days in Memphis when we could hear snipers from our front porch and the tanks on the street; or that equally disturbing week in Munich with masked Arab Terrorists across the roadway; those things seemed like they should’ve brought some closure to the racism of the past. But we still have Arab Terrorists, and the same kind of racism fuels the quotes above. So, I find myself wondering what history is really about. I guess it’s naive to think it’s about closure, or resolution. I guess it’s just previous versions of the same conflicts human beings haveh when they live together [or not].

But what I really started to write about was this comment by the candidate from Arkansas: "We must protect our culture, our Christian identity." What exactly is this man talking about? I cannot make any sense out of it unless I reframe it in some way – like "America is for White Christians only." And what does "We need someone to stand up to Barack Obama and his policies" mean? Is he opposed to the Stimulus package as a way of staving off another Depression? Does he oppose doing something about our health care crisis? Is he proposing leaving the collapsing financial sector to just collapse? What is he talking about? Again, I can only understand what he’s saying by rewriting it, "America is for White Christians only. And Obama isn’t White." I guess that’s what "I never thought it would be domestic, but in today’s world I do believe we have enemies here" means – that some "we" have "enemies here" and Obama is one of them. It sounds like Joe McCarthy talking about Communists and the John Birchers talking about the "Red Menace." It’s not too far from Adolph Hitler talking about the Jews or Osama Bin Laden talking about infidels [or whatever he calls non Moslems]. I don’t have any idea about how it’s going to play out, but the 2010 election looks like it is going to be a referendum about hatred. I hope we’ve had enough recent history with that to vote it down…