A Child In A Burning City

I was driven into Washington D.C., smoke filling the skies, days after the murder of Martin Luther King.

My father missed the turnoff. We intended to go around the city. We were driving from NYC to Raleigh, NC — or the other way around. I don’t remember that.

But I do remember the smoke, the tension in the air. I remember feeling confused, that something was terribly wrong. We were in the nation’s capitol. There was smoke and fire and people fighting.

I was eleven, but politically aware. I was a bit slow learning to read (the look-say method didn’t work for me, and over a summer my sister taught me to read using phonics), but once I started reading, I couldn’t stop. I read the New York Times every day. Call me Poindexter.

A year or so earlier, I had read a paperback that was hanging around, Black Like Me, a book about a white journalist who disguised himself as a black man and went South — to understand firsthand what it’s like. I barely knew any black people but I knew about racism. Second hand, from a book. Until this moment.

I wasn’t afraid, but I’m pretty sure my family was nervous. My nose was pressed up against the closed car window. I wanted to see, to understand, to take it in. My dad just wanted to get us the hell out of there in one piece.

I don’t know how long I looked, but I was an obedient kid, and when they yelled at me to get away from the window, I’m sure I did instantly. However long I looked, it was enough. I got the feel for the event, the madness, the loss of control.

I simply could not believe that two people could actually get into a fist fight, outside of TV. Unless I’m having a false memory, I saw a black man and a white man by the roadside exchange blows.

You Have To Be Carefully Taught

Outside of my reading, I don’t think I got any clear messages about race or racism in my house. My guess is that my siblings were pretty liberal and my dad was not. The reality turned out to be a bit more ambiguous.

When I grew up, I realized that my dad sometimes talked like a racist — at minimum, he thought blacks were going too fast, that they were too impatient to get their rights. But in real life, he was kind to black people and to anyone who seemed to need help. I do know that my dad helped a black man who he barely knew to polish his resume and try to help him get a job.

My dad himself had a hard time keeping jobs, so it doesn’t surprise me that he’d help anyone who found himself in a similar predicament.

In any case, I wasn’t really taught to be a racist or to not be one. And, as the Rogers and Hammerstein musical notes, you have to be carefully taught — to hate.

My First Racial Experience

In elementary school, I was held up at knife point by a black student. He wanted my lunch money. I gave it to him. He didn’t hurt me and I pushed past him, to get away.

I was afraid, but not very. I don’t know why. I certainly wasn’t brave. Far from it. But most of all, I was hurt. I couldn’t get it out of my head. That boy didn’t like me. Why didn’t he like me? What had I ever done to him?

It never occurred to me that he might have had a rough life, might be mistreated because of his race. Yes, I knew he was black and that we were in the South and that blacks were discriminated against, especially in the South. But I simply didn’t think of that. To me, he was just another student. I was shy. I didn’t make many friends. So, I didn’t expect him to necessarily like me. But it seemed like he hated me.

Why?

I didn’t report the incident. I didn’t hate or fear the boy. I just wanted him to not hate me. I was hurt.

Now, I know that some of my friends from that time were gay — secretly because people weren’t openly gay in those days. I feel certain, had I known at the time, I wouldn’t have hated or feared or condemned those friends. Although anything to do with sex was pretty mysterious and worrisome for me at that age. Gays wouldn’t have made me any more uncomfortable than girls.

I simply didn’t see all those issues. I was young and insecure and lonely and didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I was trying to learn to live, not judging other people.

What’s the Point?

I think I instinctively knew even back then that people are simply people. Those variations of skin color or sex or whatever are pretty damn superficial.

Yet, as an adult, I see adults being stupid and foolish and afraid and angry at other people who are JUST PEOPLE. It’s like everyone’s looking for someone to hate — trans people, brown immigrants, and the usual religious hatreds, and nationalist hatreds, and so much more.

It’s effing ridiculous. And it’s killing us.

Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?

Rodney King, the famous “motorist” (although safe driving was clearly not his thing) who was brutally beaten, and who’s abuse sparked riots in California and everywhere — he asked the question: Why can’t we all just get along?

Why indeed.

It seems to me that we’ve been taught bad things. That Rogers and Hammerstein got it right. We are born into a world where the opinion makers have bad values.

There was nothing special about me as a boy. Children get along with each other, with everyone, until they are taught differently. We’ve got to stop teaching them differently. The children have the wisdom and the adults are foolish.

Think about it. We fetishize war. We have several holidays in America related to militarism and only one focusing on peace — Martin Luther King Day. And even MLK day isn’t focused on peace — we use it as a day of service.

In reality, MLK focused on civil rights, on ending the war in Vietnam, on helping poor people. He embraced the unrealized ideals written in the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights. He embodied good values — and, in true American fashion, he was murdered by an angry white man.

We have too many people who are angry, who are animated by hate, who embrace violence and excuse war. We have too many people who forget that we are a nation of immigrants. We have people who put razor wire in the rivers, hoping to kill men, women and children who are yearning to be free.

Those people think they are stopping an enemy. But they are as foolish as they are cruel. They aren’t killing strangers — they are killing themselves, crushing their potential as human beings, dooming their children to a planet of viciousness and death.

The ideas are in their heads. We won’t persuade them to see things differently. Instead, WE will live better, demonstrate better, embody and embrace better values.

There is an irony in this. Just as our society embraces war and violence, many in our country claim to embrace Christianity. But they dishonor their religion and re-crucify Jesus daily by hating each other and hating their enemies.

WE, including unbelievers, will embody better values, those preached by Jesus and by people from nearly every place on the planet and by nearly every religion and respectable ideology.

When you counter attack people who are cruel and violent and foolish, they double-down and they strike back. But if you simply be good, and ignore their bullcrap (and they crave attention), and live with others in peace and harmony, live playfully and compassionately…well, their hatred will not be rewarded and they will begin to drift away from their obsessive cruelty.

Now, admittedly, it’s a bit more complex than that. But this is the essence of peaceful revolution.

A Movement and A Strategy

We have capitalism which rewards greed and abuses life and Earth. Under this system, the latter two have no value and are simply tools to generate a profit. That’s one of the reasons our species is willfully destroying itself and destroying the natural systems which sustain us.

We also have dictatorships and businesses (which are private mini-dictatorships) and they are all top-down hierarchies ruled by self-centered fools who live in bubbles.

But the planet is one place, with no lines between people. The lines are imaginary, an affront to Nature and an affront to humanity.

Only love is real.

As I never stop telling people, we have the start of a movement called The Saners. We are determined to prevent climate collapse, and establish a humane civilization. We are tired of the insanity, the cruelty, a world where it’s too expensive to help people, but there’s always enough money to abuse and to kill.

We won’t cooperate and we won’t remain silent. And we won’t participate in such nonsense. Each of us gets a short period to live, and we aren’t going to be idiots. We are going to LIVE. To express ourselves artistically (because everyone is an artist), to care for each other and enjoy each other’s company, to explore nature and satisfy our natural curiosity.

We don’t want more stuff. We want more LIFE. And life is something to be shared, not hoarded.

Learn about the movement at WeAreSaners.org and consider signing up for the email list at WeAreSaners.org/join. This is what you’ve been waiting for.

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