to Carnage and Chaos and Mayhem
A QUIET CONSERVATIVE ICONOCLAST STICKS UP FOR CALM COMMON-SENSE WHEN
ALL AROUND HER SPOUT BOMBAST
I find myself in Jane’s presence once or twice a month, to pay a bill
and exchange points of view along with the transfer of cash. She’s as
stout and comely as she is German and female, and her political
inclinations stem from her gut reactions to the world rather than from
historical, social, or broader sorts of empirical, or theoretical,
analysis. Our conversation the other day exemplified the falseness and
self-importance of the present Presidential contest and the way in
which the real issues of our lives disappear in an obsessive children’s
game of keeping up with the campaigns of various big boys, very few of
whom indeed consider addressing average folks’ needs a primary duty.
“Honey, I voted for George Bush because I was fed up with a cheatin’
President.” Most likely, her third husband, James, who is finally “a
man I can trust not to screw around on me,” and a staunch Christian
conservative, played a part in turning their bipartisan marriage toward
the GOP camp in 2000. She has a history of resentment against boys who
break the rules. Her father “ran off with his secretary,” both her
first two husbands and a succession of boyfriends interspersed among
them “were cheaters, every one.”
“In other words,” I laughed at one point a couple of years ago,
“George Bush may be an idiot, a puppet, and a lazy toad, but at least
he seems faithful to his wife!”
Her pursed-lip scowl couldn’t hold back her own laughter, and she
acknowledged, after a time, quite simply, “Exactly!!”
Dick Cheney and Ralph Nader and George Bush and John Kerry and the
rest of their ilk are not like the people in my life, people like Jane:
family money and privilege have had no bearing on their existence; nor,
unfortunately, do they network with each other in a way that manifests
the social power that would otherwise allow them to put our so-called
‘leaders’ in their rightful places, which is to say to work alongside
of us, instead of to continue to exercise a regent’s dominion over us
for the social class they represent.
Because the people with whom I interact come to know what I think and
feel, and generally to respect what I think and feel, they bring me
their stories. They open to me like flowers to the bee, so that I
might pollinate their wisdom with my words. The information and
experience they have to offer seem to me of much vaster importance---by
some factor of ten or more---than the burning issues of ‘gay marriage’
and ten commandment display. Nonetheless, of course, their
inclinations and observations rarely appear outside the pages of these
or similarly iconoclastic and shoestring operations. In such an
instance of connection as Jane offered me, the Presidential race of
2004 seems at best a battle important only because we have so long
ignored more fundamentally important matters, and now we must hope for
a miracle.
When Jane and I spoke a few days ago, in fact, she averred that “I
prob’ly won’t vote at all this time; what’s the difference?” I
suggested that, although I understood her point of view, I had already
spoken to God about my intention to break my 1977 vow, never to vote
for another Democratic Presidential candidate, and that I would vote
for John Kerry. She shook her head as if she understood my decision
too, but customers were few the other afternoon, and she needed to
unburden herself of a different story, one that had been building up
for a long time and that had found a crystally clear expression a few
hours before. Part of what I do is listen; if asked, I’ll offer
counsel, but mainly I just listen, ask a few questions if a yarn
spinner leaves out something critical, otherwise stand in thrall of the
gifts we can offer each other when we speak and hear.
* * *
“Pretty much my whole life, things have gotten worse. My daddy”---he
may be a cheater, but he’s still her father---”still don’t get it.
It’s just harder to make ends meet now, let alone put something away
for retirement. He’s always on James and me.” One aspect of the
times’ being more difficult, as well as our being American obviously,
is the ever-present threat of violence. “When I was single,” a long
stretch between husband two and her current true-heart, “I carried a
gun. I knew I could take care of myself without it, but I couldn’t
watch out for the babies”---her two boys---”while I was stickin’ up for
myself.” She put her fierce willingness to fight, if need be, simply.
“I mean, you might kill me, but I’m gonna fight you first.”
She has taken down burglar bars and plexiglass wherever she’s worked,
which has as often as not been “the bad side of town,” but she is not
bragging nor tempting fate when she notes that “I’ve never been
robbed---I know it could happen any time, and people say, ‘Jane,
why’n’t ya carry a gun, and I just tell ‘em I ain’t interested.” She
respects people, she finds what is worth nurturing in everyone with
whom I’ve seen her, she wears her heart on her sleeve, she believes
people are more important than corporate rules, and she doesn’t expect
fate to deliver her into the hands of some random evildoer when she
consciously lives to bring out what’s best in folks. Tuesday morning,
she wondered if she would have an opportunity to test her perspectives
and her negotiating and people-handling skills simultaneously.
“This fella came through the door,” in the warehouse and industrial
district where she works, “and lemme tell ya he looked rough.” ‘Henry’
stank of sweat also, and too little sleep, that ugly combination of
fear and the caffeine which is the only buzz a lot of poor people can
stomach or afford when the enforced ‘fast’ of a brief starvation starts
bleeding the fat and toxins from a body. His clothes were a
dishevelled mess, and his eyes locked onto hers with a relentless
insistence. Her level look to me is calm as she explains. “And you
know me, I as’t him, ‘Hello, Sir, may I help you?’” like a storage
business airline steward; “you know, just like I’m talkin’ to you now,”
albeit with an inner ‘gulp!’ and maybe some semblance of prayer.
And his tale tumbled out like an unleashed holding pond, in big gushes
of story, and emotion, and “please help me! Please!!” This fellow,
who supposedly looked ten years my fifty-odd senior, but couldn’t “have
been a day past forty, the way he called me ma’am with his hat in his
hands,” had managed a bus ticket from Anniston, Alabama, arguably the
most fetid cesspool of cancerous and mutagenic filth in existence.
Despite seven decades of a military industrial complex’s succoring
succubus, Anniston can’t even employ hard working and intelligent folks
like ‘Henry,’ who want badly, desperately, to work.
Thus, our wanderer had set out, spending on the bus ticket here his
last dollar, save half a dozen singles that represented a few cups of
hyper-sweetened coffee, only to discover that his cousin’s suggestion
that “Cleveland ain’t far from Atlanta” didn’t mean walking distance,
unless a boy fancied a seventy mile trek. Jane continued her
interlocution, and I continued to ponder this prototypical sorrow of
the present period. ‘Henry’s “kin works in a paint store up there and
said he could definitely work part time,” but the car this other old
boy was going to use to fetch cousin-from-Anniston ‘Henry’ “broke down
the day before he got here.”
‘Henry’ had pulled weeds from along a curb outside, and he lay them
down on the counter when he ambled in, all false bravado and badly
hidden fear. “’I can work,’” he promised Jane. He wanted to clean,
paint, hammer, cut, pull, move around, or retrieve “’anything, anything
you got,’ he says, ‘whatever you wanna pay me,’ just so’s he’d have
some work.” Ever the practical negotiator, Jane cut quickly to the
quick of the matter. “So how much are we talkin’ about here?”
Our estimable ‘Henry,’ intrepidly in pursuit of something viable in
his life and willing to do almost anything to find himself in a better
spot, needed “nine dollars and change to get hisself up to Cleveland.”
As fate arranged the matter, “I had thirteen dollars on me,” and she
was starting a diet that cut out her midday meal, “so I didn’t need it
for anything, you know?”
Jane assured me that “I wouldn’t do that generally,” because she’d
quickly go broke, as many hard-times tales as she encounters on any
given day. In this instance, however, she just handed over
everything, “even my change!” and wished her new acquaintance well. He
broke down, tears tracking the caked grime on his face as visibly as if
he were wearing mascara. “He held my hand,” Jane told me, “and
wouldn’t let go for the longest time,” just thanking her and thanking
God and promising he’d pay her back, offering to work for a day in
return, crazy stuff. “Course I told him not to worry about it.” Her
eyes are dry and sober, but I notice the redness there and see now the
swollen cheeks of recent sobs.
In his avalanche of gratitude, ‘Henry’ spoke of another clerk, for
another “Industrial Blvd.” storefront, a younger woman, more carefully
coiffed and outfitted than my buddy Jane. “He told me, ‘I don’t know
what I’d’a done if someone else’d treated me like that.’” He had ended
up in this area as a result of proximity to Greyhound, and after a day
in which he had money for neither food nor comfort, and during which
polite requests for “a little help” had come up short of anything more
than coffee and candy, he followed his footsteps “til he saw something
needed attention,” Jane suggests he told her. “This place down the
street’s got really bad debris built up on their roof and all, from
trees and all,” she explains, nor was their lawn even approaching an
approximation of a groomed condition.
“The poor man!” Jane blurts automatically, thinking about what had
happened. “I mean, he’s trying to take care of hisself, but there’s
just nothin’ for him to do, no work nowheres.” He went in to this
less-than-pristine property’s office with the idea foremost in his mind
that he would solve their health, safety, and aesthetic problems for
whatever price they would pay: “’No questions as’t,’ is what he said he
told her, just like he told me.”
“You know how some people are, though,” she continues. We both nod.
“Well, she was just a little freaked out”---Jane loves to use
contemporary terminology, saying such phrases with a relish of
emphasis---”and she told ‘im they’d just had the gutters cleaned,” and
that their lawn service had just been to visit the previous day. And
‘Henry’ seemingly couldn’t take the insult
added to what he undoubtedly considered an already almost unbearably
injurious situation. “’All I want to know is what in hell you’re so
afraid of. You got trees growin’ out your gutters and your property’s
a jungle; why lie to me?!’” Jane recounts his conveying.
“Whoa!!!” I couldn’t hold back; I love listening, but this was some
pretty tough gumption for a fellow, literally with his hat in his hand,
without the merest shred of a social network on which to fall back in
the event of a meltdown. It’s the sort of thing I don’t believe I
could do, so I tend to admire it in others. “Yeah,” Jane grins and
keeps going. She loves to talk more than I like to listen, or James is
a lot more garrulous conjugally than he’s ever been with me, and she’s
making up for lost time every time she bends my ear.
Whatever the underlying basis of our interaction, ‘Henry’ had stood up
for himself and asked for honesty in return. That’s what he got. “She
told him she didn’t want him on the property anymore and to leave
immediately.” Guardian angels, the grace of God, random serendipity in
the form of an increasingly rare common decency, who knows what makes
this a tale for a Sunday sermon instead of another case on the police
blotter? Jane sent ‘Henry’ on his way and still believes she’s better
off without a gun, as well as thinking she spent thirteen dollars and
change well in spite of receiving nothing tangible in return.
* * *
God knows, a situation such as this is truly as common as mold today,
and most folks find unravelling the skein of a story like this
approximately as pleasant as the scent of mildew or the scamper of
rats’ nails in the attic just above the bed. Focusing blame, or hope,
on George Bush, John Kerry, or any other incarnation of leadership that
Fox News or the New York Times peddles, seems ever so much safer and
easier than actually imagining that something we do, moment by moment
and day by day, might actually be inestimably more effective than
voting, or any other vicarious expression of social and political
responsibility. To contemplate connections like these---that Jane made
on an arbitrary ad-hoc basis with ‘Henry’---as essential to survival is
enough of a fright to send many falsely-labelled “middle-class
Americans” scurrying for the real estate classifieds, praying that they
might finally find a ‘gated community’ that they can afford.
But when my friend Joyce Marie Griggs heralds that “the time has come
to take a stand,” or when “Able-Mable” Thomas enthralls a crowd with a
ringing, “cause that’s what time it is!!” or when a peace-advocate says
“not in my name will this government shed another drop of blood,” these
diverse articulations of grassroots leadership all call for us to find
a way actually to relate to each other, regularly and collegially
enough actually to take command of lives that we have entrusted to
others due to a combination of fear and laziness and general
discomfort. What would such a “Take Back Our Lives” project look like?
Where would it start?
These questions present an apt way to end this screed. As always,
good answers depend absolutely on inquiries of the quality requisite to
elicit decent responses. Let’s start by insisting that our stories,
our conversations, are more important than the fraud of electoral
politics. If we stand for ourselves, if we find a way to work
together, truly the movement sally will prove irrefutable, that “the
people, united, will never be defeated.”
When ‘Henry’ wondered why Jane’s counterpart down the road had lied to
him, he might have turned to every citizen of this nation, with a very
few exceptions, to ask an even more critical question. “Why are you
lying to yourself?” he could pose to any of us. And I’ll inquire, in
his stead, to close, “Why do we find self-deception safer than constant
flirtation with self-immolation?” If we don’t stop, sooner or later we
will certainly burn.
As always, dear readers, whatever else I might advance, of this I am
certain. “THAT’S MY STORY, AND I’M STICKING TO IT!!”
This article was written by JIMBO