Immigrantion--Arizona On The Firing Line

I’m not sure I’d want to live on the Arizona border. On one side you’ve got the vast sucking vacuum coming from employers in the United States desperate to hire illegal immigrants to harvest their crops or work their meat packing plants.
It’s an ideal labor source. They can be paid less than minimum wage, they have no legal rights, if they make any sort of fuss they can be packed back to Mexico. Some form of slavery has been necessary to maintain every advanced society since ancient Egypt. Illegals are ours.
In the mid-1800s, a flood of induced immigration from southern and eastern Europe kept our factory wages at a dollar a day, year after year after year. Now the Latino immigrants provide us with cheap food and meat.
That’s almost as much suction drawing immigrants in as you have from a Black Hole in space. Then there’s the pressure on the Mexican side of the border coming from people to whom American peonage looks like riches beyond belief.
Arizona, Texas, New Mexico and California are caught smack dab in the middle. They didn’t create either pressure source, but the consequences of both pass across Arizona desert by the hundreds and thousands nearly every day.
(Growing up in Michigan, amidst some of the richest vegetable growing muck land in the world, I was always aware that migrant Mexicans came and went with each harvest season. Things have changed today—that irreplaceable muck is now covered over with houses and parking lots. No one harvests celery or veggies any more.
(Fewer and fewer migrants come; more and more stay. Now whole communities—and whole neighborhoods in cities—are Hispanic. They vote; they demonstrate—and they vote instinctively in favor of the migrants they once were.
(They have no love for the majority white/black communities around them and very little concern for what the concerns of those communities might be. Emotion and ancestral memory of crossing the deserts and rivers of the American frontier guide them.)
So Arizona enacted a law like those in nearly every other nation on earth. A police officer in that state can walk up to anyone and ask to see identification to prove he or she has a legal right to be in the United States.
You would think they had been granted the right to strip search them in the public square. Hundreds of thousands of people are expected to demonstrate against Arizona’s new law tomorrow. There was a time when objection to such a police power might have been justified.
After all, many of the native born white Americans who settled our frontiers had excellent reason not to be identified as they walked the streets of Dodge City or Yuma. Outstanding warrants or bankruptcy service in Ohio, New Jersey or Alabama were best forgotten.
Hopefully that’s not true of quite so many Americans today. I, for one, would have no problem showing an officer my picture I.D. at any point. I carry it with me almost always anyway. Frankly I’m a bit suspicious of the motives of those who protest.
It seems to me to be eminently reasonable to ask people who look like they might come from Mexico, Haiti, Central America or the Caribbean to show some valid American identification. (Since that designation can cover nearly all colors, including my own, I would expect to be asked from time to time myself.) It’s a first step to getting our borders back under control.
No one has come up with a better idea. I understand the emotion of those who protest—just as I would understand the emotion of a man who fled to Texas one step ahead of Illinois law—but sometimes you just have to pull a weaving driver over and test for alcohol—for the safety of all. For the safety of all, it may be necessary to check the validity of someone’s—or my--presence on the street. I’m content to share my identity with you or anyone else.
Sorry, the days of Doc Holiday and Jesse James are over. These champions of the fabled American right to total privacy are gone. We’re none-the-worse for it.

Schools--Are Our Kids REALLY Worth It?

The other day I was subbing in a nice, safe suburban school. When I could let my eyes wander from keeping things from flying through the air or people from slipping in or out of the door, I looked up at a sign I’ve seen on many classroom walls.”
“Our kids,” it says, “are worth whatever it takes”. A lovely sentiment. Repeated over and over in classroom after classroom. Whatever it takes—our kids are worth it. The question crossed my mind—Is there any truth to that sign?
(No! I’m not talking about budgetary woes or millage shortfalls. I’m talking about the emotional and intellectual exertion, the sheer mental effort it takes to get kids to understand, question, learn and grow. Are we putting THAT into them?)
Do we really care? Are “our kids” worth the effort it would take to make serious, growing student s out of them? Let’s ask what would be really “worth it”.
Are our kids worth HOLDING ACCOUNTABLE? Are they worth going through all the hassle and complaining involved in telling them that they have work due tomorrow—and it MUST be done? Are they worth telling them there will be no retests?
Are they worth letting them fall flat on their faces if they have spent sixteen years refusing to listen or respond? Are they worth letting them flunk if they do not do the work? Are our kids really worth that much—or would we really prefer to go on shielding them from reality until it is too late to escape it?
Are our kids worth DISCIPLINING? Sometimes discipline has to be downright unpleasant to be effective. It may even have to hurt. Losing a job, smashing up a marriage or getting arrested can be seriously hurtful. Discipline that might prevent such experiences can in no way hurt more.
The Bible, interestingly enough, doesn’t say, “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” It says something much stronger and more thought provoking: “He that spares the rod HATES his son; he that loves his son punishes him when necessary.” [Proverbs 13:24]
Ask yourself, what’s more loving, more caring. Letting the kid careen into flunking and failure, or getting his attention by making him hurt—and preventing the disaster?
Are our kids worth allowing them to reap CONSEQUENCES of really bad choices and actions. Some day you won’t be able to shield the kid from things that really happen. There’ll be no more retests or forgetting about it. Better a few consequences should land on them now than when they are legal adults with real responsibilities.
Are our kids worth INSISTING THAT THEY DO THEIR SCHOOLWORK and not keep sloughing it off? (it is a horrible pain to go through all the excuses, whining and bellowing that kids can throw in the path of a determined parent or teacher.)
That would be really caring enough—showing that the kids are “worth whatever it takes”. You’d have to give the teacher some tools to work with—including punitive ones. I’m sure this is definitely not what the “educator” who composed the sign had in mind. He or she was going for something far more saccharin and feel-good at the moment.
But fear is, after all, one of the impelling reasons people come to work on time and turn their projects in on time as adults. Fear keeps our speed down to fairly reasonable limits. Fear of the sergeant keeps the raw recruits jogging with their backpacks on. (It eventually keeps them alive when live ammunition is flying around.)
It’s sometimes necessary in the home and at school. It is—as any employer or military leader will tell you—a necessary component of leadership and of getting positive results.
Believe it or not, making certain you are at least a little bit feared is a necessary part of showing that your kids are really “worth whatever it takes”. It shows you care enough to go to the trouble to make sure they succeed. That’s real caring.
Just don’t expect to be thanked—now.

Obama and NASA

Obama has slashed the space program budget. This will offend people of my age who remember the Glory Days when we beat the Russians to the moon (“Rah, rah, rah—go team”) as well as those who profess a love of knowledge for its own sake.
Neither are adequate reasons for maintaining the space program in its present form. Were I in Obama’s place, I would probably have cut NASA way back too. Years ago I began looking at the space program through the eyes of historical precedent. I didn’t like what I saw.
Compare NASA today to the court of Henry the Navigator in the 1400s. Henry knew there was land (planets) out there; he knew there was MONEY to be made from those lands. He invested on a century long program of exploration that eventually paid off in billions if not trillions.
We can’t say that about NASA or any aspect of the space program today. (Yes, to paraphrase “Cabaret”, “Money, money, money is what makes exploration go around”.) Columbus was sent to make money. When he didn’t find it, they tossed him in jail.
Cortes found it—and began a long chain of successful exploration that brought back vast fortunes in gold, silver, spices, tobacco, sugar, furs, cotton, coffee, bananas, diamonds, rare metals and oil. To merit serious funding, the space program has to pay for itself the same way.
NASA has to begin working on four things, right here on earth, before we buy it any new, big toys. ONE) Ships with bigger payloads. Right now over 90% of the space on our space rockets is wasted on fuel. The payload (cargo) is limited to a few hundred pounds.
It’s going to be hard to build mining and living stations on other planets transporting materials in such tiny increments. We won’t be able to bring the goodies back in large enough amounts to pay for the huge number of flights needed.
We’ve got to get past gravity. Fantastic? No more so than taking building blocks of the universe that we cannot even see and creating atomic energy. We don’t even understand electricity, but it seems to make my computer and my refrigerator work just fine. In the 1940s, we had to build an atomic bomb; today we have to get past gravity. Improbable—but we did it then.
TWO) We have to start working on locating stuff we need. We have to make plans (and equipment) for how exploratory teams are going to look for it once we get to this stuff on other planets. How are we going to get it on the ships? How are we going to get it onto the planet?
If our spectrometers locate an unknown substance on Mars even now (like sugar, oil or potatoes in the new world), we have to be figuring out possible uses of it even at this stage. No one in Henry’s court could have told you what they were going to find in Montezuma’s back yard.
THREE) We’ve got to work on speed. Admittedly, the entire “age of exploration” took place in times when it took weeks and months to cross from one land mass to another. But the industrial age, which eventually produced a slave-free modern society, didn’t really get rolling until we could cross oceans in a few days.
Just like atomic energy and gravity, we have to get past the speed of light. Trickier, no doubt. Not an immediate need—but our imaginations are already nibbling at it. We’ll certainly never get to the age of Kirk and Spock without doing so. We should work on it, beginning now.
FOUR) We have to come up with “shields” of some sort to protect our ships and space stations. Space is full of nasty little projectiles that hurtle about at dangerous speeds and smash into things. Our atmosphere mostly protects us from them. Ships in space don’t have protective atmosphere.
Scientists tell us that our current space station has just been lucky so far. A fleet of ships that travel regularly from one planet to another will probably need more than luck. When we put people and equipment up there we will need to protect them from meteorites, asteroids and who knows what all else may be whizzing about.
Tell NASA, stay home and worry about basic things like these. When you’re on your way to solving them, we can talk about big budgets and voyages of exploration. We should still dream of “boldly going where no one has gone before”, we just aren’t ready yet.

Black/White Distrust II

Over the past decade I’ve had the interesting experience of substitute teaching in over 50 different buildings, ranging from inner city to completely rural, from less than 10% black to better than 90%. It has been an education.
I cannot say that I have particularly enjoyed my time in schools that were mostly black. Interestingly, the district wouldn’t let me sign up for the blackest schools. “They don’t want you, and you don’t want to be there.”
When I took an assignment in a middle school that was only about 90% black, a black teacher’s aide who seems to have pitied me warned, “You are an older white male. When you walk around here, you have a target on your back. Don’t forget it.”
She was so right. In that school—and only in that school—I had my briefcase rifled. Some days I had to break up two fights before the bell even rang. There were non-stop accusations that I was racist—try telling a black student that he has to do the same assignment anyone else has to do. He is almost certain to try to back you off with that charge.
I came up at a time when whites were being forcefully re-educated about using the term “black” rather than “Negro”. (W.E.B. DuBois had forced us to switch from “black” to “Negro” fifty years before—it gets confusing.) One day an angry young student vituperatively corrected me again, “We are called ‘African-Americans’!” she snapped at me.
I asked her what in the world THAT term meant—pointing out that I have a French neighbor who was born in Africa and is now an American. John Kerry’s wife qualifies—she is Portuguese, born in Africa, now a naturalized American. I admit my frustration resulting from accusation after accusation of being “prejudiced” or “bigoted” came to the fore.
My oldest friend, I went on, is married to a lovely French woman born in Africa, now American. I’ve known Dutchmen and Englishmen who qualified. I could have pointed out that my two lily-white sons could qualify—descendent as they are from a Swede who was born in Africa in 1635. For good measure, he was probably a slave trader.
The young lady marched to the principal’s office and declared me racist. The principal, a black man who had grown up in the neighborhood and even gotten himself expelled from that very school—and who knew me quite well—took her to his computer and showed her the history of “black” nomenclature. Then he sent her on her way.
Then there’s the line, “I ain’t your slave!” (I was citing a school rule.) Or, “You’re only telling me to be quiet because I’m black!” (No, because you are the loudest most disruptive fellow in the room—he had to grace to shut up.)
Walk into a largely white school at 7;00am. There will be smiles, occasional greetings. If they know you, they will call you by name and even ask how you are. Walk into a black school. They will studiously avoid looking at you. If accidentally they do meet your eye, you will see raw animosity. Eventually you feel like an idiot for smiling yourself. I definitely felt like I was a prison guard coming on duty—with the need to watch my back constantly.
The hostility is rooted in the absolute certainty that I am not there to do any of them any good. They trust no white person. It has to come from things their families inculcate in them—rather than any experiences they have yet had in their young lives.
And, if I’m in my right mind, I’d better no trust any of them. One time I left my reading glasses on the desk as I walked to the door to excuse the class. They were deliberately broken when I got back to the desk. (The school eventually replaced them—but they dragged their feet for months and, shortly after, dropped me from their list of available subs. I don’t miss it.)
Mendela showed us the way. After 27 years in prison, he dropped his own animosity and proclaimed everyone, black and white, to be a South African. If we can’t do that here—and make it stick—we are in for a long, rough future.

Black/White Distrust I

We are talking about black/white distrust. About why it is so much easier to befriend an African or Caribbean black person—about why I instinctively distrust even Barack Obama and his wife—just because he is an American born black man. I am certain that if we ever met, the feeling would be entirely mutual. Because of who and what we are.
I’ve seen the insides of a hurting white person more than once in my life—whether it was pain from death, betrayal, loss of a job, loss of a hope or dream. Only once have I been permitted to look beyond the grinning face of a black human being and observe the real person.
Let’s call him J.J. He was about my age, in his late twenties. I had grown up in a reasonably tony area of Grand Rapids; he had grown up in the bowels of segregated Washington, D.C. He would look at his very dark skin and reminisce, “I was so black even the niggers discriminated against me. When I talked college, my counselors advised trade school.”
He made it through college (and, later, law school). He served four years in the army. His colonel was a southerner who hadn’t adapted to Truman’s integration of the military a decade before—but because of his sheer competence he advanced J.J. to captain in less than four years.
(He just didn’t let J.J. actively command troops.) By the time I knew him, he was a Special Assistant to the President of the United States. I’ve known few men I respected more. We met while we were both working for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
In the fall of 1967, a year before the 1968 election, LBJ and his advisors took a look at the explosive political situation (rife with civil rights riots all over the nation) and realized he wasn’t going to get re-elected without a lot of help from angry white voters.
So he began to dial back the activities of agencies like the EEOC. He placed a very wealthy black man from “Strivers’ Row” in Harlem as Chairman of the EEOC and had him bring in a lot of his white Harvard buddies to help run the agency—more circumspectly.
The new white guys didn’t know diddly squat. Someone had to break them in. The agency chief gave J.J. the job of taking these clueless white folk on a intimate tour of the Washington ghetto. So he took them out and showed them.
I was the person who sat with him after he returned from these tours and unwound. All the humiliation, pent up memories, frustration in the man poured out as I listened and watched.
Some of it was funny. He would walk past a couple of kids, reach down inside a bag they were carrying—and show the burglary tool to the newbie. Or he would walk up to a group of young black men standing on a corner, start a conversation and bring the white man into it.
At the next corner where there was a group of young men, he would turn to him and say, “Now you do it.” Easier, far easier, for that man to empty the Pacific Ocean with a teaspoon. But no humiliation of his clueless white charge could quite measure up to his own.
He told me how, at a White House reception with all manner of hors d’oeuvres on display, conspicuous at one side of the table would be a platter of fried chicken for him and any other blacks present. He learned to live with it.
I mistook our relationship for actual friendship. One weekend I was throwing a party—I casually invited him to bring his wife and come. He looked at me. “A lot of invitations I can’t turn down—but yours I can. I’m sorry; I’ve been the nigger at too many parties.” Ouch. How stupid of me. But some mistakes you simply cannot take back.
We went on working together. We covered each other’s back in an increasingly treacherous environment—but nothing was ever quite the same between us. I had foolishly presumed. My education in racial distrust was continuing.
But he had let me—wittingly or no—see into his real self. I had seen at least some of his insides. I never forgot that—I never stopped respecting him.
But we could never have been friends.
More next time.

Michigan's Hiroshima--Black/White Distrust

I wrote yesterday about the chasm of distrust between whites and blacks in Detroit, in Washington and in most of the nation. I was telling the story of an experience I had in the 1960s when I tried to organize a community to keep it from being destroyed.
The immediate cause for this destruction was a white apartment management that had so much contempt for black Americans that they felt no need to continue to maintain apartment buildings blacks moved into. I was fighting to force them to.
I had come to rely on a wise old black preacher who was seated next to me when the door to our community meeting burst open and some drunken, angry white men advanced on me with clubs and ax handles, cursing me as a “dirty, commy, nigger loving Jew.”
The danger was real and serious. I didn’t know yet just how serious. Something happens to me when things get nasty—in a traffic situation or on the streets. It isn’t courage; I don’t know what it is. My insides go cold and I feel nothing. Time slows so much that it nearly stops.
But, I thought, I am not alone. I looked over at my “steering committee”, nearly all black. They were frozen in place, fear all over their faces. The old black pastor stood up suddenly, looked at the drunken deputy sheriff and pointed at me.
“If I had known,” he shouted, “what sort of a person this man was, I would NEVER have had anything to do with him.” It dawned on me that I was utterly alone. My black “allies”—even though they out-numbered the white bullies by a substantial number, and were mostly young and strong—were going to sit on their hands and watch me get pounded.
My eyes went back to the advancing drunk. He was half-way down the aisle, coming toward me, right where a cross aisle went from right to left across the auditorium. Somehow I felt moved to ask, “What are you so afraid of?”
His bully boy followers hawed and hooted. Him? Afraid? He’s not afraid of nothin’! The sheriff, however, came to a full stop. He turned to his left, ran down the cross aisle and out a side door. His bully boys stopped, looked confused, then turned and followed him out.
I felt the meeting had gone its full length. I dismissed them and they left (I would hope sheepishly). One of the younger, husky black men came up close to me and said, “We thought they were going to kill you.”
Well, duh, thanks for all your help—verbal and otherwise.
The next morning as I was going up the steps to my office one of the attendee’s slipped up side of me. He asked me to understand, “You’re a white man; you have options. You can live anywhere. We’re black—we don’t have options—so we couldn’t help you.”
I looked at him, “I thought that was the whole point of what we were doing. Helping keep the places you could live maintained and decent.” He gave me no answer. I took his brown arm, held it next to my white arm and said, “I guess we were born with our uniforms on.”
I moved out of the complex a few weeks later. Some of the black steering committee helped me load a U-Haul truck. I appreciated the help—but I do suspect they were just happy to be rid of me. I never saw any of them again.
Over the next years, the scales fell from my eyes. I made no further efforts to assist in areas where I would find myself alone and without backing. I expressed no surprise when a charming black hostess invited me to dinner and then went into a tirade about how all whites should be killed (I tend not to accept invitations to any more black homes—we smile and chat in public venues).
I learned in a hard and dangerous way that I am not trusted on their side of the fence (imaginary fence or real) and I learned the sad reality that I cannot trust them. Many of the million folk who have fled Detroit learned the same hard, unhappy lesson.
If somehow, someway, somebody doesn’t trust somebody, we’re going to have a lot more dead cities like Detroit—and it won’t be all the auto companies’ fault. God help us.
More later.

Michigan's Hiroshima--Distrust in Detroit

Last time I wrote about the desolation we still call Detroit. I referred everyone to the blog posted by Jeremy Korzeniewski on “autoblog”. It showed appalling pictures of what has become of vast tracts of the city of Detroit: falling down ruins, streets with no buildings left standing, something that looks a lot like Hiroshima after the big blast.
I conceded his point that the factories and auto industry that made Detroit a powerhouse have declined and even gone away. But I also pointed out that Detroit is a city known for its racial hatreds. Riots, military blockades and open hostility have marked its 20th Century history.
This history—and its ongoing aftermath—has made salvaging what’s left of Detroit much more difficult. It would be hard, indeed, to talk a middle class (both white and black) into coming back into a city so manifestly without services and unsafe.
They have fled—and taken their ability to pay the taxes necessary to maintain services and create new ones with them. What’s left cannot support itself. Detroit’s big problem right now is money—there isn’t any. Nada. Let’s look at some of the reasons for this.
The big companies (big tax payers) are limping badly. The age of the automobile and truck has made it possible to move businesses out into suburbs, abandoning the inner city. The sheer distrust and hatred that exists between black and white segments of the population.
That last one made me look at myself in the mirror of reality. I must confess that, way down deep inside, I find it hard to trust Barack Obama and his wife. (NOT because I think he was born in Africa, is a socialist or a Muslim, for crying out loud!!!)
My distrust is based solely on the fact that he is an American born black man. (I’ve known and been at ease with several AFRICAN and CARIBBEAN blacks—they somehow don’t carry with them the innate paranoia I’ve seen in too many American blacks. And also, American blacks do not trust me—it is often wise not to trust a man who will not trust you.)
Let me tell you a story. In the 1960s, I was blue eyed soul. I worked for blacks, I fought for blacks, I marched for blacks. They accepted me and I was permitted to call them “nigger” (as they called me) in the intimacy of friendship. I was too naïve to sense the distrust.
Washington, D.C. was just being integrated. One year they suddenly “integrated” a section of my all-white apartment complex. That meant they moved a group of black people in (did not screen them as they did whites—so some prostitutes set up business in that section) and stopped maintaining those areas.
I wanted the same standards maintained for black tenants that had always been there for white tenants--and the same maintenance. I met some of the black tenants, professionals like myself, and found we all agreed.
Working for the White House, I had access they lacked. I brought to bear upon the management of that complex the Americans for Democratic Action (a power in those years), the law firm of Nolan and Porter (the most influential in Washington then) and the “Washington Post”.
Then I located a white liberal pastor who had long worked to integrate the neighborhood and knew it well. I helped him call a community meeting. Hundreds came. Foolishly I turned the meeting over to him. He drew round after round of applause and, just when the iron was hot, he failed to strike. To use salesmen’s parlance, he didn’t ask for the sale.
He had no one sign anything, join anything or do anything. He just sent them all home with a promise of another meeting in a few days. I was horrified. I left with a very bad feeling. This would not be good.
But the next week I created a steering committee and we met several times. One man there proved to be a tower of strength, knowledge and wisdom. He was an elderly black preacher—who could fill me in on more neighborhood details than I had ever dreamt of.
I leaned on him. When the next meeting came, I had him sit right up next to me. Only fifty or sixty people showed up. Even the white preacher wasn’t there. But my friend was. I called us to order—when suddenly the door flew open.
In marched a drunken, retired white deputy sheriff with a club in his hands. Behind him were four or five more white bully boys. They advanced toward me, breathing threatening and slaughter. I have probably never felt more like an endangered species.
Let’s continue next time.