The Ripple Effects

Reporters show up at tragedies like what happened in Newton on Friday like maggots at a gravesite, some people will tell you, and because there are basically no rules for something like this, inevitably someone will step over some boundary of taste and/or ethics. And yet who else do we turn to in order to satisfy our insatiable curiosity to know: What happened? How many? How? And for God's sake, why?

Reporters are the people get the unenviable job of knocking on doors to ask grieving families to part with that picture you saw this morning of that sweet six-year-old--because you want to see that, don't you? And not out of purient curiosity, but because you are grieving, too, and you need a face to attach to your grief. Reporters see the bundled bodies, the bloodstains. They see mothers and fathers collapse, screaming, or faint from shock. The see hardened police officers crying like babies. When they feeling like crying themselves, or going home to hug and comfort their own kids, they are on deadline, calling every name in an old high school yearbook, searching for some clue, some person who can help us all make sense of what has happened. They walk toward that stuff, not away, and take pictures and notes and get the story out as best they can, however imperfectly that may be. There may be some sick souls among the media who groove out on horror, just as there are sick souls everywhere, but in all my years of reporting I didn't meet anyone who really fit that description.

You cannot ask a parent for a picture of their sweet six-year-old, and then ask for sympathy because the act of making that request was deeply traumatic for you, too, and it left a scar on your own soul. Your pain is nothing compared to the pain of the people who are at the horrifying center of this tragedy. In fact, for a member of the media to even raise this topic would be a violation of good taste, not to mention human decency. But as a former member of the media, I can.

What Southerners Don't Say

Interesting story in The Atlantic  entitled "In Southern Towns, 'Segregation Academies' Are Here to Stay." It presents a more nuanced view than what the title suggests--it does note that these "segregation academies" usually have some black and Asian students--but even so it only scrapes the surface of racial complexities in the South. Here's an example: 

Minniefield [a long-time black resident of Indianola, Miss.] does not believe the schools in Indianola will ever truly integrate.  "It has not been achieved and it will likely never be achieved,'"he said. "It's because of the mental resistance of Caucasians against integrating with blacks. ... Until the white race can see their former slaves as equals, it will not happen."

Steve Rosenthal, the [town's white] mayor, takes a different view. He argues that many white families have no problem sending their children to school with black students, but choose Indianola Academy because the public schools are inferior. His two children, both in their 20s, graduated from the academy, where he believes they received a strong education. "I would not have had a problem sending them to public schools had the quality been what I wanted," he said, adding a few minutes later, "If there's mistrust, it's the black community toward the whites."

And then there is what is not being said:

• This is no longer just about race; it's about economic class, and growing wealth inequality.
• On the other hand, race is often a proxy for economic class, especially in the rural South.
• Middle-class black families are as averse as white families to having their kids hang out with ghetto kids from the 'hood, and sometimes even more so. But for the most part, this is a conversation that takes place only amongst other middle-class black families.
• White Southerners these days--with a few diehard exceptions of the kind that can be found on the fringes anywhere--really have no problem with their kids going to school with black kids...as long as those black kids hold the same middle-class aspirational values as they do. These white Southerners of today get understandably huffy when they are portrayed as thick-necked bigots straight out of "In the Heat of the Night," circa 1964, because it's not true.
• On the other hand, these same white Southerners are tone deaf and completely blind to the generational dividends they have inherited as a direct result of decades of Jim Crow: real estate values, social capital, family wealth, educational status. They simply do not want to see and will do anything to avoid admitting that history did not start in 1965.

And that's the name of that tune.

Ere the Winter Storms Begin

I keep seeing these little featurettes on "how to survive your family at Thanksgiving," the assumption being that everybody has a family full of jerks. In fact, there's one such article on Salon right now, entitled "A Holiday Guide to Arguing With Your Right-Wing Relatives." Then there are the articles which presuppose that Thanksgiving dinner has to be a six-course gourmet stunner requiring all-night cooking marathons and exhausting repeat trips to the grocery. There must be millions of people for whom Thanksgiving is this way, but I feel sorry for them. They've missed the boat on the best holiday of the year.

When I was a kid, Thanksgiving meant the Tennessee cousins were coming to Georgia (or we were going to the cousins'). Either way, it was heaven for me: I was the youngest in the extended clan, and there is no such thing as a kid who does not like to hang around older siblings and cousins, in order to get a preview of coming attractions (dating; high school; acne; college). Aunt Ruby and Uncle CC and the four cousins would always promise to arrive at 2 and get there at 4, bringing pound cake and a gallon jar of ambrosia and dressing, several side dishes and at least three kinds of pie, which would be added to the three kinds my mother had already made. My mother would also make the turkey, and no force on earth could stop her from also making collard greens, which she loved but which are not everybody's favorite smell. (One year my cousin Butch came in the door and announced, "Aunt Ruth, something has died on your stove.") There was no such thing as menu planning; in fact, there was no such thing as recipes, because this was just the kind of food every Southern cook knew how to make. The china didn't match, the serving dishes were a motley collection of Tupperware and whatever was handy, and the kids always wound up with the salad forks because there weren't enough of the big ones to go around. The table was a card table attached to the dining table extension, covered by an old bed sheet or mismatched table linens. Nobody cared.

But the food was only half the attraction, if that. Mostly, it was just the talk. My family was not a bunch of joke-tellers; as somebody once observed, Southerners do not tell funny stories; they tell stories funny. (For that very reason, these are hard to reproduce--you really had to be there--but there was the time my cousin Butch was asked to assess the structural soundness of a building his church owned, and found during his inspection a massive bee's nest in the rafters and a nursing mother in an out-of-the-way classroom, and returned to the next deacons' meeting to report, "My brothers, I come to you from a land of milk and honey.") Before any of this, however, there would be church--a Thanksgiving morning pancake breakfast (probably designed to get the kids out of the kitchen), followed by a worship service at which we sang, "Come, ye thankful people, come/ raise the song of harvest home/All is safely gathered in/ 'Ere the winter storms begin."

It was the faint chill of those last three words that always struck me--a dark background for a brilliant present, a reminder that winter would come, and death would overtake us, and we would not always be together. And indeed those things have happened. But somehow it's okay; those memories exist for me in some kind of Eternal Now, protected from time and decay and death. Come to think of it, that Eternal Now is all I really have right now, today. It's all I've ever had, or needed.

Born Fighting

The Scotch-Irish, the dominant ethnic group that settled the inland South starting about 250 years ago, were not pleasant people. They were from the border area between England and Scotland (or, in some cases, from Ulster)--dirt poor craftsmen, tenant farmers and horse thieves. They tended to be quarrelsome, clannish, quick to violence and dead set against top-down authority in any form. I can say this because these are my people--a fact I'm proud of, overall--and I bring it up because I think you have to go all the way back to explain why folks in the South--and Georgia in particular--have their shorts in such a knot over something called Agenda 21.

If you look up Agenda 21 on the United Nations website, you will find a long and rather boring document adopted by that body back in 1997 as a follow-up to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, one of the first global meetings called to address issues such as climate change, development and environmental damage in Third World countries. But according to the far right-wing/Tea Party folks, as described in an an article yesterday in Salon, Agenda 21 is a "UN conspiracy to deny private property rights, which Obama will help accomplish through a mind-control technique known as Delphi." Part of the government's agenda is a plan to move all suburbanites to the city, the conspiracy theorists believe, according to a presentation made at the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta last month and attended by several members of the state legislature. (And this, boys and girls, is not the weirdest/dumbest thing that body has ever done, by a long shot.)

What explains the readiness with which so white folks in the Deep South believe that the government is out to confiscate their property, brainwash their kids, relocate them to slums and force them to toil as peons? There are lots of immediate reasons, but the mind-set that provides such fertile soil for these things in any era is one which never accepted any government to begin with. Today's Tea Partier, the school busing protester of the 1970s, the 1960s era John Bircher, the 1950s segregationist, those guys giving the Rebel yell at Chickamauga--a good many of them trace their roots all the way back to those scurvy-looking immigrants David Hackett Fisher described in Albion's Seed as people who had the gall to "[demand] to be treated with respect even when dressed in rags." At its best, this kind of stubborn pride gave us folks like Davy Crockett; it was the force behind the Populist Movement, and it's given us a disproportionate number of genius-level military leaders over the last two centuries. The flip side is this: a nasty mean-spiritedness that sees everybody outside a small network of kin and like-minded neighbors as one vast conspiracy out to take what's theirs.   

SonofaBITCH

So I am sitting at my computer at about 10 a.m. and I have just figured out my way through a particular problem I was having in an op-ed piece I was hoping to pitch somewhere, when the phone rings.

"Mom!" says the frantic 11-year-old on the other end. "I need khaki pants! Hurry! They're loading the buses!"

It turns out that her class is going on a field trip, which I actually had known about; what I hadn't know was that a requirement for going on said field trip was khaki pants. The 11-year-old knew this, but it had slid off her ADHD brain pan before she could convey this to me. Apparently this information was also contained in the form letter that had come home a week earlier, the one I had scanned quickly, noting only the part where it said "$5.00" and then the part where it said "Parent's signature." Public schools these days send home a bewildering blizzard of paperwork, and you have to go through it fast to have any hope of making it to be before midnight, so I go through these things fast. Too fast, as it turned out. Sonofabitch.

So I go upstairs and root through this child's closet, which is a horror, and finally I pull out a very wrinkled pair of lightweight khaki capris with ketchup stains on one leg. It is approximately 45 degrees outside--not exactly capri weather. But this is the only khaki there is, so it will have to do. I race down the hall and turn on the iron and try to make it look halfway presentable, ketchup stain and all, and the whole time I am muttering nasty things about stupid rules that say kids have to look color-coordinated when they venture off campus, even though there is no school uniform policy and it's not like I send my kid off to school every day looking like a pole dancer, for God's sake. Then I race down the stairs and manage to find my car keys and squeal out the driveway and down the road toward school--remembering, too late, the goddamn speed camera they've just installed on one stretch, which means I am going to get another $40 greeting from the city in the mail in a few days just because I was probably going 42 miles an hour in a 30-mph zone, which is one mile over the 11-mile-per-hour wiggle room that everybody knows the cops use but which puts me in the same company as a meth addict screaming down the road at 80. And you can't complain about that, because then all the priss pots in the world will come out from under the kitchen sink where they live and say "If you don't want a ticket, you shouldn't speed" in their best I-told-you-so voice. Sonofabitch.

So I manage to slow down to a somewhat more stately pace and pull into the school parking lot right behind the big yellow bus that is sitting out front, and as I pull up to the front door with khaki pants in hand, my child comes out of the school and runs toward the car and says, "It's okay, Mom, she said I can go dressed the way I am." Sonofabitch.