I hearken back to hallowed antiquity (or the 2012 election season, anyway), about six months after meeting a fellow corpsman I had the honor to serve with and the wonderful privilege of becoming good friends with, a Mr. Smith. He was a young black man from Chicago, struck with curiosity about this “crazy white guy from New Orleans”, and the two of us were regularly referred to as “Ebony and Ivory.” This was for several reasons, not the least of which being how often we hung out away from the Med-Surg/Post-Op ward of Walter Reed (“The President’s Hospital” in the D.C. Metro area) we worked on.
Why do I mention this? Because Smith and I had a very distinctive quality, one that we’ve both acknowledged (as we did at the time) in the time elapsed since that it defined our friendship. This quality was the ability for both of us to literally discuss anything (and I do mean anything) and even if we disagreed (as we did about 25-33% of the time) we would calmly explain the rationale behind our different opinions, hear the other person’s thoughts in their entirety, and then if we remained as staunch in our disagreement as we were at the outset, we simply agreed to disagree and move on.
Why am I going on about this? Because, again, we discussed everything. Nothing was forbidden. And we often discussed politics due not only to our being stationed in the D.C. area but also because I didn’t shy away from acknowledging (to my friends, anyway) that I was considering an eventual run for the U.S. House of Representatives. Smith and I always had immense respect for one another, so much so that even though I was the enlisted team leader of our shift of four (corpsmen and medics) I would not only defer things like assignments and other daily decisions to Smith as the Assistant team lead but regularly insisted that if he wanted the top spot he could not only have it but would likely have outperformed me. Smith refused every time.
“With your walk and your beliefs, your willingness to reach across the aisle to other parties and other people’s communities, you’d better be ready.”
“Wait I minute,” I said, stopping down the hall. “My ‘walk?’”
“Uh, yeah DeViney,” he said, visibly frustrated. “You can’t have swag and not get it noticed. You walk like an old-school brother, and you wanna help people in the inner city, and you’re not shy about reaching across communities and parties? You better get ready!”
We would go to bars and sit and have a plethora of strong drink, to include Long Islands, shots of Rumple Minze and the occasional Jägerbomb (to stave off fatigue). And we would delve deep into sociopolitical topics and, because of our mutual level of comfort, oftentimes we discussed racial issues at length. We also taught each other a lot, as you’d be amazed at just how much a disagreement, followed by a genuine desire to understand one another, with educated follow-ups (we’d continue discussions after having both sought further knowledge) can reveal not only about one another but about “the system” in general. Mr. Smith learned that Richard Nixon not only supported, fought and voted for every single piece of civil rights legislation ever to exist during his time in Congress and then as Vice President and President went to great lengths and succeeded in being of great net benefit to the black community at large. For my part, I took a great deal of interest in names like W.E.B. Du Bois (I read “The Souls of Black Folk” long before having it as assigned reading at Penn State after my Naval career), Hosea Williams and U.S. Representative Shirley Chisholm (D-NY), names he mentioned to augment what I already knew about the Civil Rights Movement.
Our mutual respect was only enhanced and strengthened when we both took an interest in the opinions and source material(s) of the other person. In turn, our discussions continued to become deeper, oftentimes lasting hours during our time off duty. They resulted in some of the best times and the richest dialogue either of us had ever experienced on a multitude of issues, we both later acknowledged.
A couple of running themes we would both engage in discussing at work were things like violence and the mainstream acceptance and seeming embrace of what we thought was prostitution.
“In high school, sure, people would fight, handle their business, whatever, but nobody was coming back with a knife or a gun to kill that person at a later date,” I observed.
“Yeah,” Smith began. “And they weren’t trying to fight each other every time they saw each other from then on. When it was over, it was over. This crap, man…”
“…exactly,” I said with a sigh. The latest of shootings, long forgotten four years later, had us both perplexed and puzzled. “It wasn’t always this way. In 2002, 2003 at the end of my time in high school?”
“Hell no,” he said. “And there weren’t any ho’s back in the day getting’ famous with a damned sex tape! I mean, yeah that was happening around then but I mean, that changed between the 90’s and now. It’s like everybody’s lost their damned minds!”
“I know!” I exclaimed. “And the fact that these harlots, male or female, get rewarded for this? This used to be the domain of pornography, sure …”
“…but it stayed there!” Smith said, growing animated to match my own exasperation. “There wasn’t some mainstream career and everybody forgiving it and buying your clothes and you getting a tv deal, I mean…”
“…yeah, this s**t is just nuts. Absolute, g*******d Disneyland!”
Something had changed over the last fifteen to twenty years, we both agreed, and not for the better. And whatever it was, and wherever we’ve ended up, however we’ve come to a place in time where the killing of unarmed people by police, the ambush of cops responding to distress calls, the deliberate instigation of racial conflict by billionaires on opposite sides of the proverbial fence where there previously was no overt conflict and certainly no bloodshed…if this is the “new normal”, then we need to take a very long, hard and difficult look in the mirror and ask ourselves, as a people, what it is that we truly value the most. If money is the answer to all woes, then people like Heath Ledger and Whitney Houston would still be alive. Unfortunately there’s no legislation to be written, no judge’s decision forthcoming and no magic vaccine coming that will eradicate hatred. And overt instances of discrimination like forcing white students to go around and not use the main gate at UC-Berkeley and telling grade school kids that “to be born white is to be born racist” is, yes, offensive to people like me and my family, where my parents raised me with love in my heart and they embraced my black friends just as they did my white friends and my gay friends were treated just as equally well. But it’s more than causing hurt in people like myself who are not part of the problem (who speak out and lend support to civil rights movements not behaving destructively): they’re fueling hatred in that small echelon of white society, where hidden away (I don’t know them nor do I know where they burrow) white supremacists (white nationalist is a better label) are using what happened at Berkeley this month and what school children in the Northeast are being taught to add fuel to the fire and say, “You see? Our survival as a race is threatened!” It will not have the desired effect, unless said effect is further hatred and violence.
My call to all communities is, yes, as cheesy as it may sound, to listen and seek to learn. And before you become angry with something someone allegedly said, find out if their message is really as broad as they want you to believe it is, or if someone like George Soros is helping paid stooges start riots at Trump rallies and instigate conflict(s) with local police departments.
I hate to say it, but wealthy individuals with agendas are manipulating civil rights and political organizations that often started out with noble intentions but, via the allure of the Almighty Dollar, fell prey to the lethal hypnosis of Nationalism and its corresponding drumbeat of Hate.
And I’m not just talking to the New Black Panther Party or just to the Ku Klux Klan or any other group inciting and/or playing off hatred and disharmony. As a caveat, to those who would say the Black Panthers are not a hate group, I would say they did not start out that way. Rather, they began as self-defense for blacks in areas where they could get no reliable (if any) police protection and simply registering to vote (much less going to vote) could be a matter of life and death in many areas of the country. Today, however, the neo element of the party, the re-formed (not reform) group has stood outside of polling places (like they did in Philadelphia during the 2012 election) with nightsticks, screaming unfortunate phrases like, “Death to all white babies!” And I care not whether the godless freaks at Berkeley or some Ivy League sanitarium consider that racism. It is racism if it is based on discrimination or the treatment/mistreatment of others based on their melanin count, their ethnicity, their geographical origin, et cetera.
With that, I turn my gaze towards the abominable KKK, the neo-Nazis and all other followers of Adolf Hitler, George Lincoln Rockwell, et al, and now it’s your turn: I, my wife, my immediate DeViney family, my in-laws, the white friends I grew up with, made in high school and college and associated with in the Navy in both D.C. and California, all the way to today, back in my hometown of New Orleans…we are absolutely sick to [expletive deleted] death of a select few of our ethnicity, the outspoken jerks among us, making things worse in race relations. And yes, I’m looking at you, David Duke, and I’m looking at you, Donald J. Trump.
No, I’m not trying to place the two of them together, because Trump likely didn’t know who David Duke was when he endorsed him, meanwhile I and a lot of other self-respecting Louisiana white folks have tried very hard to forget we knew his name. Several European countries had enough of him and England (at the very least) said not to come back and I don’t particularly blame them. The KKK may very well have started immediately following the American Civil War not, as it turns out, to terrorize the black man but to instill fear and drive out the “carpetbaggers” who came to the South to profit off of the already-struggling land owners in desperate need of cash, and other Southerners in similarly-dire straits. That noble vein, however, quickly disappeared and the KKK indeed became a group of intolerance and hatred. Please, Dr. Duke, you’re not fooling anyway so don’t go away angry just…go away.
“Tolerance” does not mean swallowing everything hook, line and sinker and/or embracing everything groups unlike your own say. No, rather it means “to put up with.”
We were not far away from such an intellectually and socially gilded era not so long ago, but then the Super PACs came and the Koch’s and the Ayers and Soros spent hundreds of millions in ads in every format and scientific research (pick a college) has proven that never-ending repetition does sink in and after awhile even news programming has increased anxiety and caused disharmony and ethnic stratification.
Enough! The U.S. Congress has hovered between 12-13.5% approval for years now, with the media wallowing in the marsh of their own creation as purveyors of filth and of the ethno-racial conflict they’ve knowingly fomented and have the perpetual 4-5% approval rating they fully deserve.
What does that tell you? I hope it tells you to get your news from a wire service or from outlets that offer very little opinion next to their reporting, such as Reuters. Or, find a truly unbiased source that allows those with opinions of all colors and stripes to be expressed. Like, oh, I dunno…oh, yes, ModState LLC. Yeah, we did an interview with a self-proclaimed “white civil rights leader” (he was no foaming madman, he merely expressed irritation at Africans and Asians being able to be proud of their heritage but not being able to do so if you have European heritage) followed by three separate editorial postings in support of Black Lives Matter and expressing empathy with the overall plight of Black Americans.
I hope it tells you, deep down, that we (the American people) aren’t going to let them win.
For my part, as an American of largely Franco-British (France & England, with some Irish, German and Israeli) origins, I want to be allowed to acknowledge and take pride in the positive elements of my heritage and discard the rest (of my own volition). Further, I want to continue to reach across the aisle(s) and reach out to other communities, as my friend Smith acknowledged I did.
Once, we both showed up to a Navy physical readiness test and an enlisted leader we both know asked how work was on our ward. I replied, “Oh, well, Petty Officer, about as good as always.” She then laughed and said, “I like that. You answered the question without directly responding to it. You should be a politician.”
Smith then chuckled and said with a grin, “He is.”
