Category Archives: History

Whitey Will Pay

Posted on July 3, 2020 by | 7 comments

Jack wrote this in April, 2006:

Hi blogsters:

Hope you’re all giving yourselves plenty of challenges, making lots of decisions that lead to growth experiences.

Things have gone quiet around here, owl-wise, though the hawks still soar overhead days.  And the coyotes still howl on the mesas.

Just finished a short trip to western New Mexico on an old-new trail of the Lost Adams Diggings.  Rough trip in some ways, because it brought to mind memories of a lot of other trips into that country with men now dead.

But it was physically a reminder of how old this vehicle’s becoming.

Climbing and unclimbing mesas, digging and scraping samples from streambeds, toting them back out to work them down into concentrates for closer examination, all just become the tap on the shoulder gravity gives a man insisting he slow down.

The trip didn’t answer a lot of questions, but it created enough to cause me to know more trips in there will be required.

Ahh.  Adventure!

Meanwhile, back here in the village, the rich old man up the hill behind me evidently has an enemy.   Someone decapitated a rabbit just before Easter and left it on his porch.

Might be because he’s rich and cantankerous, or because he’s said to be miserly and difficult to collect from if a person’s only a mere workman.  Or it might be because he’s all the above, which a number of old villagers are, but also he has the distinction of being an Anglo.

The accident of birth that gives a person ancestors who spoke English and had pinkish skin is a difficult sin for the majority of New Mexicans to forgive.

The Hispanics, who hold all the power, speak the same language as the Conquistadors, Cortez and Coronado, but see themselves as having been robbed of their conquests and rendered downtrodden by white-skinned invaders from the East.

The Native Americans generally just know someone conquered them, but because we’re all born innocent of memory,  have evidently forgotten who did the conquering.

For a while I occasionally used to drive around in a borrowed truck with “WHITEY WILL PAY” bumper-stickered on the tinted glass back window.  As a whitish sort of fellow, I found my feelers a little ruffled with all the thumbs-ups and raised-fist salutes I got from Hispanic and Native American types.

I generally don’t feel I’ve done anything negative to Hispanics, nor Native Americans.  My conscience is clear.

I had a distant kinsman mountain-man who wandered into Santa Fe around 1805, and was held captive for 20-odd years by the Spaniard government (ancestors to the folks who are here today), but I don’t hold it against them.

Let bygones be bygones, I say.

Fact is, old James Purcell’s problems ain’t mine.  I was lucky enough to be allowed to find problems of my own.

His didn’t happen to me.

Same as when Onate cut the foots off all the adult males of the tribe of rebellious Acomas in 1600 something-or-other, which makes Acomas do a lot of whining and complaining today, it wasn’t me did it, and it wasn’t people alive today it happened to.

You don’t hear me complaining about not having the same rights and advantages of Native Americans, no free health care, never having to have a steady job my entire life, being born into a wealth of land I pay no taxes on.

You won’t hear me complaining I can’t open a casino.

And you won’t hear me complain because my distant pore old mountain-man kinsman, James Purcell, got thrown in the hoosegow just because he came to town.  Didn’t do nuthun but be an English speaking man with white skin.

I was born naked.  Those aren’t my troubles.

Jack

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Posted in 2000's, Adventure, History, Human Behavior, Mexico, Native Americans, New Mexico

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The Yin Yang Conspiracy 

Posted on June 26, 2020 by | Leave a comment

Jack wrote this in March, 2006:
In 1970, the University of Texas was squared off against itself.  The frats, the student government, the sororities, the administration, the ROTC department, and the cops on the one side, and us on the other.

The Vets against the Vietnam War, the Wobblies (IWW), the Panthers, the Young Socialistist Alliance (Trotskyite), the RYM2 (Revolutionary Youth Movement faction of the Students for a Democratic Society), Weathermen (the other, more interesting side of the SDS), and hundreds of other splinter groups were taking a fair beating, though we had the numbers.

I was in the middle of all that, writing for the alternative newspaper, the RAG, and trying to get an education dovetailed with sex, drugs and Rock and Roll with helping organize an occasional riot, march or rally thrown in for good measure.

That’s when we invented the Yin Yang Conspiracy.  An ad hoc political party.  We ran a longhair named Jeff Jones for student body president, and we threw the bastards out, lock stock and fraternity pin.  Lordee we thought we’d done something fierce, beating the system that way.  Hot diggedy damn.

Anyway, this blog entry is in memory of that microscopic triumph among people who had in common only that they opposed the War. 

The Yin Yang Conspiracy.  A tiny piece of winning the Vietnam War by bringing the troops home.  Winning the easy way.  Coming out in the open, looking those cops, those stay-at-home flag-waving patriots in the eye through their riot masks, and saying, “Enough is enough!”

We learned a lot.  Surveillance, provocateurs, intimidations probably weren’t so pervasive in those days.  No yes-man Congress had passed a Patriot Act, so we still had some rights and protections under the US Constitution.   It would be a tougher gig today.

But, if that was now we’d be doing it again.  We’d be working in both, subtle and overt ways to bring those boys home.

Trying to get them out of there before too many more get all shot up and crippled up and be completely forgotten by the patriots who are waving flags back home.

Jack

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Posted in 1970's, Adventure, America, Government, History, Human Behavior, Police, Politics, Texas

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Lion in Winter and Anthony Hopkins

Posted on August 9, 2018 by | 22 comments

Hi readers.   Thanks for coming by.

I was watching one of the half-dozen movies I consider the best of the 20th Century [and this one, thus far] for the 20th time a few days ago.   Kate Hepburn as Eleanor of Aquitaine  and wossname, Peter O’Toole or someone as Henry II.    Loving every minute of it, but I was finding the guy who played Richard 1 fairly distracting.

I went back half dozen times to watch him speak, his facial features and the way he mouthed words.    Something damned familiar about him.   Out of place.

So finally I ran the credits and discovered the reason.    This was Hannibal the Cannibal from Silence of the Lamb, and various other not-too-bad movies I’d watched without recognizing it was Richard 1 I was seeing.

Well now, that was fun.   Here was young Richard before he went off crusading, becoming Lionheart, getting himself held hostage in France, Being away while his idiot brother, John, made himself the darker piece of the Robin Hood legend.

Yeah, there it all was, old Richard the Cannibal and Lackland John, a Magna Carta  looming out there a few decades away.

But that would be what?   1215 or so and those would be years with a lot of history packed inside them   Lion in Winter would be nearer 1167, 68, and all those brothers and their parents squabbling with enough venom to satisfy most purposes over who would be the heir to the throne.

Great movie.    I was trying last night to remember what the several other movies are I considered the best every…   Jeanne helped me remember a few which I’ve mostly forgotten now.     But one was The Rainmaker, with Kate Hepburn and Burt Lancaster.

Another was Doctor Strangelove, with Peter Sellers and one heck of a cast.

I’ve tried to persuade Jeanne to watch most of my favorites sometime during the almost-20 years we’ve known one another, so maybe she can add the ones I’m forgetting.

But if she can’t, you’d gift yourself a couple of hours of pleasure if you call up your library page and put Lion in Winter on hold.    Likely as not they still have a copy somewhere in their system.

Gracias,

Old Jules

 

 

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Posted in Adventure, History, Movies

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The presidents and their ladies

Posted on March 27, 2018 by | 2 comments

There’s been a temptation on the part of the opposition for the last couple of decades to make as much hay as possible when it’s discovered the US president has a mistress, or had one.  This hasn’t always been so.   Presidents of the past venerated by those finger-pointers and accusers have frequently had their affairs during a time when such matters were left for gossip columnists and rumor mongers.

Lucy Page Mercer Rutherfurd was one of two women believed to have been FDR’s mistresses. Lucy has the distinction, though, of being the only certainty. Eleanor found her letters to FDR. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_Mercer_Rutherfurd

Then there was Ike.   Commander of Allied Forces in Europe during the invasion, and Republican president after Truman.

All those years Ike was in office I never knew anyone to criticize him about that particular issue.    If they hated him at all [and the rabid right wingers certainly did] they didn’t bring his private sex life into the conversation.

Then of course there was LBJ and his shenanigans too numerous to bother mentioning except one.

As far as I know Ford, Carter, Reagan and both Bush presidencies were either adultery-free, or discrete enough to keep it out of the public eye.    As was Obama.  Goes to prove some presidents have the good sense to either keep their peckers zipped up safely inside their pants, or go the extra mile to keep it out of the headlines.

And there’s no point even discussing Bill Clinton….. that one’s the record Trump is trying to beat with Stormy Daniels.

Maybe it’s time, really time for a woman president so we can put all this sexual scandal to rest.

Old Jules

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Posted in 1940's, 1950's, 1960's, 1970's, 1990's, 2018, America, Current Issues, Government, History, patriotism, Politics

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Which US war had most bald-faced liars?

Posted on March 25, 2018 by | 9 comments

Empire of Japan finalizes surrender aboard the USS Missouri September 3, 1945. By Army Signal Corps – Naval Historical Center Photo # USA C-2719. Photograph from the Army Signal Corps Collection in the U.S. National Archives., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2684817

WWI had an Armistice Day… it celebrated the end of that particular horror.     WWII had VE [Victory in Europe] Day, and VJ [Victory over Japan] Days.   Celebrations to the end of two more horrors.   Then there was Korean Armistice Day, which nobody ever heard of, much less celebrated.   And, of course, there’s Veterans Day, just acknowledging all us veterans no matter when we were in the military.

The trouble with having undeclared wars and losing them is that nobody knows why they’re there in the first place, what it takes to win it, or how to know when it ends.    Maybe for Vietnam we should celebrate the day the last helicopter with people hanging off it lifted from the US Embassy in Saigon.

The last helicopter leaving the roof of the US Embassy in Saigon April 29, 1975. By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31234270

But now there’s this:

Honoring Vietnam Veterans Day, March 29, 2018

US landing craft 1945, Iwo Jima

Ever noticed [assuming you’re old enough] you never heard a WWI vet bragging about whatever it was he did during his time in the service?    Most I ever encountered never spoke of it at all.

And WWII veterans are pleased to tell you they spent the war burying bodies in the Solomon Islands, or in a Japanese POW camp, surrendered without firing a shot, or as a postal clerk in North Africa.   It’s always been surprising to me just how few guys actually were on the front lines ducking bullets [or saying they were during the decades afterward].

Same with Korean War veterans.     Nobody ever wants to tell you he was on a ridge with a bunch of other cold, hungry, scared GIs gunning down swaths of Chinese with a quad .50 machine gun.    In fact, Korean War vets hardly say anything at all.

That’s the reason I’ve wondered many times why the same is not and has never been true of Vietnam vets.     I’ve seen file clerks, supply clerks, mechanics,  and one particular logistics officer all claim to have been heroes, laying ambushes in the jungle.    More recently I even ran across a guy who was in Korea at the same time I was when there were few incursions and firefights on the DMZ a decade after the ceasefire.     Even knowing I was THERE the silly bastard began laying BS about how he and his unit were setting up ambushes on the DMZ… he was in the 8th Cavalry, which was on the DMZ…..   But nothing else he said held any water.    Maybe he was jealous of all those finance clerks in DaNang who’ve now become jungle fighters by hindsight.

vietnam era veteran

They’ve even got these ‘Vietnam Era’ caps so we can all get into the act. Yeah, I’m one of them Vietnam era vets….. spent my tour in Asia crawling through the jungle trying to get a dose of clap for my country. If I ware one of these I’d be what they used to call, “All hat and no cows”, same as all those REMFs on patrol.

But I’ve digressed.   My real question is this:   What was it about the Vietnam War that brought out the lies and the brags?    Why were WWII file clerks never tempted to pretend they were heroes, but the Vietnam War file clerks bought themselves ball caps proclaiming themselves brothers to the finance clerks, the supply clerks, and all the other rear echelon folks who discovered later they’d been combat vets.  Hell hundreds happily tell one another they’ve been troubled with PTSD.     Not more than two hours ago I was talking to one who was in personnel administration who is actually drawing a service-connected disability for PTSD.    A personnel admin clerk.

Vietnam never had an Iwo Jima.    No Guadalcanal or Midway.   No Bataan Death March.     When US troops landed on Guadalcanal August, 1942, they’d never seen any movies about jungle warfare.    Surprise!    They had no idea what they were in for.

Maybe that’s the distinguishing factor.    Maybe it was all those WWII movies, John Wayne pulling the pins out of grenades with his teeth.   Frank Sinatra drooling over Gina Lollobrigida between firefights in Burma.   Robert Mitchum outsmarting the Japanese while protecting a nun [Deborah Kerr].    Maybe that was the missing factor, the systemic flaw in the Vietnam War that caused all those non-combatants to spend all the remaining decades of their lives trying to correct it.

After all, shooting water buffalo out the door of a helicopter with a machine gun is a story that can be embellished with a lot more vigor than stories about typing a company morning report at the motor pool.

Don’t get me wrong.  Not all Vietnam veterans are lying.    If a guy tells you he was a Navy engineer, and upon questioning tells you he ‘poured concrete for the Navy’, he’s telling you the truth.    If he tells you he repaired field telephones, he’s telling you the truth.

And there’s always that one-out-of-ten, or one-out-of-twenty, who actually did serve in the jungle and participated in all that stuff you’ve seen in the same movies the file clerks with the Vietnam veteran caps got their stories from.

So how can you tell if a Vietnam veteran is lying to you?   Well one of the ways is to listen to his claim.     If he says he was a medic in a VD clinic he’s probably telling you the truth.

But if the US is going to carry on endless presidential wars without having to re-institute the draft they’re going to have to keep glorifying their warriors.  And  a person who spent a tour in Asia greasing and changing the oil on jeeps in Saigon loves being called a warrior.   Loves the feel when he pulls a straight face and announces, “Yeah, I fought in Vietnam.”

Old Jules

 

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Posted in 1970's, 1990's, 2018, America, History, Military, patriotism, Senior Citizens, US Army, Veterans, WW II

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The waxing and waning of generational blame

Posted on March 23, 2018 by | 7 comments

Ashes to ashes2Hi readers     Thanks for coming by.

I don’t believe I ever doubted anytime during my 74 times around the sun that my parents and their generation experienced far more difficulties on average in life than did my own generation.    I’d go a step further and conjecture that in general all previous generations to mine tended to be more challenging to the folks living in them than my own as a genre experienced.

To me this doesn’t seem a subject of controversy .   More than likely the great majority of people who traveled that piece of time with me would agree.

But unless I’m mistaken, we’ve come to a place in history where convictions of that sort among the young no longer exist.    Everything I see of young people suggests to me they believe their generation actually doesn’t have it as ‘good’ as their parents or their grandparents.     As measured in almost everything they value.

In some ways I believe they are right.   The baby-boomers beginning during WWII in the United States were blessed with an affluence beyond anything that’s gone before in the entire history of mankind.   We lived in a time when the pantheon of individual choices ranged from entrepreneur, to beatnik, to hippy, to hitch-hiker to corporate climber.    Or any combination of those and countless others.

It wasn’t our fault.    We lived in a world in transition, born into a bubble of expectations and hope that allowed us a confidence we had no reason to doubt, but no business believing.     And because of that, while many of us merely submerged ourselves in numb mediocrity, a substantial piece of the whole went out and lived our lives in ways that left no doubt that life could be lived.

So what happened to convert the confidence and enthusiasm, the trust, of the 1950s, 1960s, and to some extent, the 1970s, to the slough of despond and hopelessness  that emerged among the youngsters in the 1990s and 2000s?

I don’t believe, despite their perceptions, that younger people have it more difficult than my generation.   In fact, in many ways they appear to have it sufficiently easier to qualify as appalling.    True, there aren’t a lot of manufacturing, skilled labor, whatever-middle-class-hell jobs were around back before everything went to the 3rd World.     And it isn’t clear how the current population of mediocrity will provide for themselves so’s to accumulate tons of appliances, entertainment, transportation, bass boats, clothing and cosmetic surgery.

But is that really a quality of life issue?    Isn’t it, rather, a challenge of personal values and priorities?

I’ll confess, reading posts of young people on FaceBook hasn’t given me much sympathy for them, hasn’t inspired much hope they’ll make the world a better place during their time here.     But then, when it comes down to it, neither did mine own generation.

Sure, a lot of people I knew were moderately-to-wildly successful at accumulating wealth.   A lot of them surpassed themselves in various ways far greater than anyone would have expected of them when we were kids.   And many of them handed everything to their kids with a silver spoon, spoiled them beyond recognition.    Indulged in precisely the same mindset as my generation’s parents who went through WWII and the great depression, determined that their children would have it easier than they, themselves had it.

But my generation had it so damned easy, making it even easier on those that followed might qualify as a crime in a better world.   Might qualify as condemning our progeny to expectations that bear almost no relationship to anything related to happiness, fulfillment, or genuine satisfaction.

This isn’t the first generation in the history of man where many have been reduced to the moral and economic equivalent of flipping burgers to earn a living.    The simple fact is, the affluence derived from a minimum wage 21st Century job would have been coveted by so many of our ancestors so far back we’d lose count trying to identify them.

“We’ is a terrible word.    It pretends there’s some group of individuals who share some accomplishment, some responsibility, some abstraction.    Something that happened on our watch.

And the fact is, there isn’t any such we.      I’ve lived a life of 74 years and I didn’t have a damned thing to do with anything that happened during my time on this planet.   Not a single damned thing.

And I honestly can’t say I’ve been in personal contact with anyone who did.    The people who made things happen, who drove the events of my lifetime might as well have existed in comic books, movies, television shows and epic poems.   Because I sure as hell never encountered one.

Jeese, what a life.    What a ride this has been.   What a phony, sexy, drug-induced hallucination.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2018, Animals, History, Human Behavior, Senior Citizens

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‘Squirrelly’ Armijo Survives his own Funeral

Posted on March 23, 2018 by | Leave a comment

I was searching around trying to find blogs about my challenges working up to leaving the ranch in Texas [back before fate and health took a possession of the steering wheel and gas pedal]. I wanted to reflect on the urgency and intensity I was pursuing in those days before the bottom fell out of my life and I had to find a different reason to stay alive than returning to all I love in New Mexico.

But as I’ve done so often, I find I’ve digressed, am digressing a moment. I came across this post and even though it’s been told before, I had to read it again.

And now you can read it again, too, if you’ve been here a while. Or for the first time if you haven’t. Old Jules

So Far From Heaven

A legendary man in the Quemado/Reserve area nicknamed ‘Squirrelly’ Armijo had a good working claim down near Queen’s Head in the Gallos near Apache Creek in the 1940s  through the 1960s. Maybe that’s where he came across a skeleton, and probably just figured he might as well take it home, so he put it in his truck.
Driving up those winding mountain roads he lost control of the truck and rolled it. Squirrelly was thrown clear and the truck caught fire. He must have been out of his head, maybe with a concussion, because he evidently wandered into the mountains in a daze.

The police arrived and found the burned out truck with a skeleton inside and assumed because the truck belonged to him the remains were Squirrelly’s. He was pronounced dead, an expensive funeral held, and he was buried.

Twelve days later Squirrelly wandered out of the woods several miles away…

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Posted in 2018, History, Human Behavior, New Mexico, NM, Outdoors

Huron Indian Cemetery, downtown Kansas City

Posted on March 20, 2018 by | 2 comments

I’ll readily confess my lack of enthusiasm when Jeanne, miles off in Missouri during one of our motor adventures of exploration, suggested we head in to Kansas City.    We’d had an interesting time, visited a 19th century school-church-cemetery, and Watkins Wool Mill museum.   We’d pulled into the urban hell surrounding the Jesse James Museum and farm, noted the $8 plus change fee for entry, and retreated as befits citizens who donealready seen and heard the endless yarns of the James-Younger gang.

But, there’s a nice book store, Prospero’s, we could visit if we wished, I figured.   And a Vietnamese restaurant I hungered for during the weeks I was across the street in the KU Hospital for the Not-Necessarily-Sane a few months ago as a consequence of a condition appropriately labelled, Guillam Beret Syndrome or something of that nature.

But Jeanne had cemeteries in mind.   Particularly the Huron Indian Cemetery sitting on prime development soil occupying an acre or so between the KC Police HQ and the KC Library.

 

Helena Conley – Floating Voice – Wyandotte National Burying Ground
“Cursed be the villain that molest their grave”
Eliza Burton Conley – departed this life May 28, 1946 – Attorney at Law – Only woman ever
admitted to the United States Supreme Court
http://www.kansastravel.org/kansascitykansas/huronindiancemetery.htm

Turns out there are somewhere between 700 and 1000 graves in that acre of ground.    It’s been fought over by two branches of the tribe, one wishing to sell for development, or for a casino, the other wanting to hold it sacred as a burial ground.    Salivating developers spent nearly a century hoping if it were vandalized enough, if enough stones were lost, broken, stolen, they could build their offices, bars, porn shops, or fast food joints where those 1000 bodies lie.

200 here, 500 over there, 700 that way, the acre is Grand Central Station of the dead. http://www.kansastravel.org/kansascitykansas/huronindiancemetery.htm

In service to their country
The William E. Connelley Survey of 1895-1896 indicates a large grave in
this area. By tradition, Union dead were buried in this part of the Huron Indian
Cemetery following the Battle of Westport, October 21-23, 1864. http://www.kansastravel.org/kansascitykansas/huronindiancemetery.htm

http://www.kansastrave
History of Wyandot
l.org/kansascitykansas/huronindiancemetery.htm

We didn’t go to Prospero’s, but we did have some great Vietnamese.    And we found a place I plan to return to sometime and sprinkle some tobacco around that acre of dead folks, just in case it matters.

But hell, that’s just me.

Old Jules

map

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Posted in 2018, History, ks

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I won’t tolerate rude behavior

Posted on February 7, 2018 by | 17 comments

Israeli soldier and a couple of Palestinian children in the ‘occupied territories’.

Hi readers.   Thanks for coming by for a read.

How in the world did we human beings come to be such violent animals?

It’s tempting to conjecture it was after we became ‘civilized’, but that can’t be it.   A person would have to search deeply and far to find aboriginals who aren’t as savage as the Israeli soldier pictured above.    People anywhere no matter what their level of weaponry, cultural sophistication, religious convictions, when they discover someone has something they want, become savages.

And what they want doesn’t have to be, as in the case of the Israelis, land to steal from the people who own it.    Virtually anything of current value will do, and almost any quantity.    Or, failing that, when it comes to killing the ambiguous and abstract can serve as well.

I suppose we’re fond of telling ourselves that unlike our savage ancestors, our own killing and stealing is necessary, patriotic if it’s done by soldiery.   Or if it’s done because of some threat we can contrive the people we wish to kill or rob pose to our tribe.    From down in the streets in drive-by shootings all the way up through the braided channels of finance, race, ethnicity, language and tribe in the undercurrent of our lives.

Our males, young and old, abdicate their moral and ethical choices to politicians they wouldn’t trust to sell them a used automobile.   Politicians who tell them who to kill, who the enemy is.

We hate it when someone kills for reasons we can’t pin to a category that allows revenge by genre.     Some insane fanatic with no ethnic, religious, or philosophical axe to grind slips into a theater, school, mall and starts shooting, sets off a bomb, kills all those people without giving us a target for our reciprocal hatred.

And we aren’t comfortable enough to even talk about the fact so many of those lone killers are veterans, or otherwise somehow connected to the military, were trained by the military to kill.    Maybe because that gets entirely too close to the core of something nobody cares to think about.    School kids in the US aren’t who we trained them to kill, though the training sufficed anyway.

In one of the big movies of the last century a Texas Ranger named Woodrow Call takes the gun away from a bad person we didn’t like and proceeds to beat the bad guy almost to death.     After he’s pulled of the bleeding wreck by several men and a horse, he comments, “He was rude.   I don’t tolerate rude behavior.”  And the audience giggles with satisfaction.

What a puzzlement.     Where the hell did we get so violent?

Old Jules

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Posted in 2018, America, History, Spirituality

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Making America Great Again – Circa 2050

Posted on February 1, 2018 by | 17 comments

duck and cover

I’ve wondered at times what it was about the 1950s and 1960s that allowed those two decades to dominate the nostalgia market during almost all the late 20th Century. In a lot of ways it just doesn’t make sense.

Sure, we had a better music, rhythm and blues, wailing ballads of quality country ad western, and all that new frontier of rock and roll at its birth. Songs we knew well enough to sing along, or alone as we rode down those roads before super-highways on used tires.

Old cars with personality, greasy hair, dandruff, acne and bad teeth. Parents and grandparents who went through the Great Depression and worked hard to assure we wouldn’t experience those kinds of difficult times.

Mostly at the time it was in the world around us and I don’t recall being all that happy about all the other crap that came with it. Constant brink of war sf a sort that it’s better not to remember. Knowing when you turned 18 you’d have the draft hanging over your head. And a lot of bullying everywhere you turned.

If you worked doing farm work the farmers and ranchers who hired you felt a moral obligation to shout and verbally abuse the workers anytime they got within earshot. Construction jobs? You’ve never seen bullying and abuse that could compete with a construction foreman. It was there on the school playgrounds, on the streets, anywhere people happened to be.

And mostly nobody much said a word. It just went with being alive.

Our little farm was just across the railroad tracks on the ‘Mexican’ side of town. When I was in the first and second grade I walked home from school the same way several ‘Mexican’ kids walked. I was smaller than them, anglo, and outnumbered. They started just by yelling insults, but gradually it worked up they’d chase me with sticks or throwing rocks at me.

There came a day I was running home just in front of them, arrived with my mother on the front porch. They gathered on the dirt road in front of the house, still shouting and throwing rocks.

“Get out of here you little Mescin bastards!” She ran down off the porch waving the broom. “I’ll twist your heads off and shove them up your butts!” She never got close to catching them, but they were off.

Then she came back where I was waiting on the porch and smacked me upside the head with the broom so hard it broke the handle. Grabbed me by the collar and proceeded to beat my backside with the handle fragment. “If I ever see you running away from a fight again you’d better not set foot in this house!”

When my step-dad got home she told him, and it was off to the back porch with his belt. But at least he followed that up a bit later by teaching me to fight.

I don’t know what these kids today are going to have to feel nostalgia about. Maybe some of them will have similar memories or they’ll just remember all the computer games and hum rap music to themselves and smile.

But you can almost bet when they reach 50 or so they’ll be rallying around the flag and trying to elect candidates who promise to make America great again. The way it is today.

Old Jules

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Posted in 1950's, 1960's, America, Current Issues, History, Human Behavior, Senior Citizens, Youth

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