The March of Time

The last time I blogged for A View from a Blond it was pretty close to the election when it looked like Hillary Clinton would be our first female president.  I was optimistic, but scared.  It seemed then that this country was more divided now than when I was five when the Vietnam War was something you heard about every day.   You saw young soldiers bloody on TV in a war zone– not fake blood – not something staged but the real thing brought to you in living color. 

You also saw demonstrators marching against the war– who also got bloody in the streets – red fluid hemorrhaging out of real people trying to express their outrage at a system they felt was unfair.   There were two sides - the Hawks – the people who were pro-war and the Doves – those that wanted peace.  Their tug of war seemed impossible to reconcile.

The people who were caught in the middle – the young people who went to war and came back shattered or not at all were the ones that sacrificed the most.  In the end, we lost Vietnam and frankly never should have been there.  From 1961 to 1975, over 58,000 soldiers were killed.  Just to put that in perspective –in the Iraq War/Afghanistan Wars from 2001 to 2014 – we’d lost over 7,000 soldiers (Stats via Wikipedia).  For families that have lost a father, son, brother, cousin, sister, mother, wife – these numbers just compound the pain of losing someone you love and the only solace is that there are families out there who have felt that pain on a personal level.  Sure we can say the obligatory “Thank you for the ultimate sacrifice,” but without experiencing that pain first hand it just seems hollow.  How a wife or husband or a parent copes with the loss of their loved one – those things can’t be measured in a debate on whether to increase or decrease spending on a military action.  Yet the people who declare war –rarely see combat first hand.  Launching those first salvos can have repercussions that last decades if not centuries and the innocent always get hurt in the crossfire.  

The weekend after the election – my family and I went to Sweetwater Creek State Park which includes the ruins of the New Manchester Manufacturing Company that was a cotton mill which ran during the Civil War.  The ruins were both sad and exceptional in capturing a time gone by when factories were powered by rushing water.   During General William T. Sherman’s siege of Atlanta, the factory was burned in July 1864 as a way to cripple and punish the South for the indolence of secession.   That part seemed pretty cut and dried to me – the South had its ass handed to them because it wanted to preserve slavery.  It got what it deserved.  I learned that the factory at that point was being run by mostly women and children who were just trying to earn a living to keep a roof over their heads while their fathers, brothers and husbands fought out of a misguided sense of loyalty for a cause that benefitted the white aristocracy.  The mill workers were poor, did not own slaves and many were actually Union sympathizers. 

General Sherman deemed them traitors because the cloth was going to the Confederacy and had the factory burned.  He told his generals to forcibly relocate the 500 women and children at both the Manchester and Roswell Mills to Indiana.   These poor souls had just a few minutes to pack what they could carry, were put on carriages or made to “march” to Marietta where trains would take them to Nashville, then Louisville and finally Indiana.  Unfortunately, Sherman’s sense that they would find work in the Northern cities was extremely misguided.  The cities were overrun with refugees and many of the women and children died of hunger and exposure.  Few of the women came back to Atlanta or found out the fates of their husbands, sons, fathers or brothers.   It was a classic guilt by region – they were Southerners and they brought on their own destruction.  Never mind that they did not own slaves and once they were sent up North, there were not enough resources to help them in the “refugee camps.”  Their peril was fueled by Sherman’s “March to the Sea” in which he burned and pillaged along the way from Atlanta to Savannah.  

It’s easy to demonize people based on where they live because that makes having to face the more complicated issue of why they feel the way they do more daunting.  Dismiss them all as imbeciles, terrorists or racists and you save yourself the time of looking at a complicated issue that is multi-faceted.  That in spite of where they live whether it’s the American South or the Middle East– they might actually have a completely different point of view than what is the assumed outlook for that region – i.e. – maybe they are not racists or terrorists.    

Politics like war is never that completely cut and dried.  It would be too easy to cast one side as the ultimate villain and one side as the ultimate hero – there are shades of gray on both sides (Christian Grey not withstanding).   This is where we are now with politics in America.   Eight years ago, we inaugurated at new president – a black man who was young, had a beautiful wife and two amazing little girls.  It seemed like anything was possible and that this man with the kind smile would pull us out of a very bad recession and give people universal healthcare.  His predecessor had served eight years, but the first four were contested with hanging chads, an appeal to the Supreme Court who declared him the winner of the delegates of Florida after weeks of uncertainty.  There was a peaceful transfer of power even if for many like me – it did not turn out in our favor.  He was re-elected with a more decisive margin in 2004.   But for eight years, the disappointment of the year 2000 still stung.  Then 2008 brought not only a Democrat but a black man as President and it seemed that American had finally arrived as the land of opportunity and anything was possible.   The dream of Martin Luther King, Jr. had finally come true.

Watching President Obama take the oath that day – I could hear the

echoes of the “I Have a Dream” speech by Dr. King which was part of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August 1963.   For a shining moment – the dream had been realized and many white liberals like me wanted to think that racism had finally been concurred.   Sadly, the election did not always bring out the best in America and racial tensions continued to swell throughout President Obama’s eight years even when he again won a decisive victory in 2012.

The reality of a white majority was fading and states like Georgia now have counties like DeKalb that are minority majorities.   The difficult conversations about race between black and white America have been stifled by political correctness.  Rather than have an open discussion about frustrations about this shift in culture -  many were driven underground where groups of people who could feed their own prejudice and anger fueled the divide.     

Inequities in urban areas were also not being openly discussed and tensions would boil over when yet another unarmed black man was killed at the hands of a white officer or a person on a neighborhood watch.  There would be more marches by Black Americans that would be peaceful or marred by violence by people who just wanted to detract from the central message of inclusiveness and their frustration with a system that seemed rigged no matter who was president. 

So here we are eight years after a black man took the oath to a man who is a billionaire and has no experience governing.  A man who has made racist and sexist comments and freely admits grabbing women by the genitalia to assert his power over them.   He won but not just on the strength of the angry white guy vote (although that was a huge factor) but by white women that didn’t want to vote for a woman – either because they didn’t trust her or just frankly didn’t want to see a woman as president.    Sadly women not supporting each other has been a reality since the fight for suffrage and the Equal Rights Amendment. 

Which brings me to the marches that are happening all around our nation

the day after the inauguration and why I’m marching.   I’ve done plenty of Pride Parades, walked in the MLK parade with my church and supported other groups financially that wanted to protest the social ills that I thought needed correcting.  I’m upset at the prospect of a Trump Presidency and his use of Twitter as a bully-pulpit.   I worry for the women like me who are in the workplace and face the real possibility of discrimination, sexual assault or harassment (all of which I have experienced).  I fear for American Muslims, for race relations, the LBGTQ community, the arts, education, the environment – the list sadly keeps going on.   My presence at the Atlanta march is a testament to the fact that I don't agree with the new administration and I'm exercising my right to peacefully demonstrate with others who share the same viewpoint.  I also hope that those people who I know that support Trump can respect my right to march and might actually ask me about my experience.

Sometimes a post in Pantsuit Nation on Facebook just doesn’t have the power that standing around with thousands of like-minded people can.  If anything good can come out of a Trump presidency is that it’s getting more people engaged in a process that includes marches, going to local council meetings, calling your representatives and letting your voice be heard in person.   It’s getting young people to take a more active role in their government.  

The last time in my lifetime that the country felt this divided was over Vietnam and 100 years prior to that it was the Civil War - a war that to date has had more deaths and causalities then all the rest of our wars from the 1770’s to the 2010’s put together.  Over 750,000 people died in that war – 2% of the American population.  To put that in today’s context – that would be over 6,000,000 people.   That war left the entire country physically and mentally devastated.   The Union managed to stay together but the price of human lives and suffering was a scar that took decades to heal.  

So as the fissures that feel like they have divided the foundation of our country keep growing - keep in mind that we’re all Americans and that our finest hours have happened when adversity has stricken but served only bring us closer together.  December 7^th brought our parents and grandparents into World War II to stop Japan and Germany from their tyranny.  D-Day brought rejoicing.  The Kennedy Assassination shook people on both sides of the isle and made everyone examine their own mortality.  9/11 had people like me crying in the streets, but were comforted by strangers who didn’t ask if I was a liberal or conservative – just someone who needed compassion and a hug because we were all hurting.

In doing my research for a documentary on the Civil War, I ran across a

passage from Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs in which he talks about Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Courthouse. General Lee was the proud Southern General who was literally fighting to his last man and realized that the end was near -he could not sacrifice anymore souls for such a lost cause.  Grant showed up in a working uniform which contrasted with Lee's formal one.  They started to talk to one another – not as enemies but as human beings.  “We soon fell into a conversation about old army times…Our conversation grew so pleasant that I almost forgot the object of our meeting.”  Grant was very respectful of Lee who was actually Lincoln’s first choice to lead the Union Armies.  You got the feeling that if they had not been on opposite sides of the war they might have been friends.  Grant even offered Lee’s starving army access to his rations.  He did not gloat in his victory but gave him a dignified exit because now they were once again Americans.   It was the very definition of compassion.

It’s vital at this point in our democracy that we try reach across the divide which now feels like the Grand Canyon to talk to people whose viewpoint is not necessarily our own – to listen to what we have in common like how much a baby's laughter makes us smile, bringing up our children in the digital age, dealing with aging parents and not what separates us.  The next four years are going to be a challenge – no matter who was going to be president.  The challenge now is to march forward together and do our level best not to fall apart. 

1968 - Frightened at Five - Film at 11

I was walking with my daughter taking our morning constitutional on a brisk fall morning.  The leaves were starting to turn and the sky was a calm blue.  I tried to keep my mind focused on the positive – the beauty around me and how blessed I am to have my sweet children and a loving husband.  But for some reason I felt panicked.   I felt lost even though I knew exactly where I was.  I started to think about the election and the twinges of panic started to build – that helpless feeling I used to get in my parent’s living room when I was five waiting for dinner and seeing very disturbing images from Vietnam on the evening news with Walter Cronkite. 

 

At five, I wondered how adults could watch such a show – a show at that young age that I knew was real and not pretend.  The newscasters would talk about the war and good kind men like Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy Jr. would try to make the world a better place.  I liked both those men – they were dads and with big families like mine.   But sitting in the living room holding my Barbies, the world which should have seemed ordered became very unpredictable. 

I would see and hear terrible stories about the IRA (Irish Republican Army) who creating acts of terror in the name of my culture and religion and innocent people were being killed in the crossfire.  I was afraid that somehow because I was in this country and those things were happening in Northern Ireland that people would think my family was part of those acts just because we were Irish and Catholic.  I would imagine it’s the same terror an American Muslim child feels when something bad happens in the name of Islam either in this country or other places. They feel that they will be blamed because they share that same religion but like me would never raise a hand to hurt another human being but the stigma of being part of group that was actively trying to bring down the status quo in a very violent way is there.

I was afraid that my older brothers would be drafted into a hell hole that would not allow them to leave alive or if they survived they would not be the same people that I loved.  My mother threatened to send them to Canada if they were drafted which put my father who was a veteran of World War II in a bind because in his heart of hearts he knew that he could not send his sons over there.  Luckily, the war ended before they were old enough to be drafted. 

As adults we seem to forget that current events can leave its mark on our children and the terror that I felt in 1968 when the world seemed so upside-down is probably the same that our kids feel now with an election that is filled with frightening predictions no matter who is elected, a year of mass shootings, talk of deportations, race riots and the threat of armed insurrections after election day. 

 

For instance, I remember my older sister Kathy was having a slumber party the night that Bobby Kennedy was shot.   My child-like mind loved that the girls were going to play games and my younger sister Sharon and I got to have M&Ms in Dixie cups in our room just like the teenage girls.  Then the news came through and I distinctly remember seeing a brick wall and police sirens and red lights.  My mother was crying because another Kennedy had been shot and it brought back the memories of November 1963 which was also the year I was born.  The next morning the girls in the slumber party awoke to the news that Bobby Kennedy had died at 4:44 am.  

The day before my 5^th birthday on April 4, 1968 – Martin Luther King was shot and killed.  Ironically Robert Kennedy was the voice of reason in Indianapolis when he had the terrible job of announcing the passing of MLK to a crowd that was not aware that he had been shot.   His words were pure eloquence and helped keep that town from rioting when so many cities were plunged into chaos in those days after the assassination – here are some excerpts from that speech:

“For those of you who are black and are tempted to fill with -- be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, and he was killed by a white man.
 

But we have to make an effort in the United States. We have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond, or go beyond these rather difficult times.

My favorite poem, my -- my favorite poet was Aeschylus. And he once wrote:

Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.

 

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.

We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times. We've had difficult times in the past, but we -- and we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; and it's not the end of disorder.

But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land.

And let's dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.”

1968 saw too many good people cut down their prime – not just the Kings and

the Kennedys but fathers in Vietnam who would not live to see their child’s next birthday.  1968 was the most expensive year in the Vietnam war with the US spending $77.4 billion ($527 billion by today’s standards) on the war. The year also became the deadliest of the Vietnam War for America and its allies with 27,915 South Vietnamese (ARVN) soldiers killed and the Americans suffering 16,592 killed compared to around two hundred thousand of the communist forces killed.  Compare that to 4,486 U.S. soldiers who died in Iraq and 2,345 U.S. soldiers who died in Afghanistan during our current conflicts.

 

As adults I think we assume that our children don’t pick-up on the world around them outside of their school, after-school activities and latest shows on the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon.  We try to protect them from the bad things that go on outside, but they do pick-up on what is going on- with all the wall-to-wall coverage and the inevitable election they are seeing our anxiety no matter which side of the isle you sit on.  I knew my parents were upset about the things with the war, gun violence and race relations.   It was tough trying to reconcile why anyone would think sending young men to the dangerous jungles of a foreign land to fight people we didn’t need to have a fight with. The sights of Vietnam from the news are still locked in my memory and the terror of those images as a five year old is stored and accessibly managed from the safe distance of 48 years hence and the assurance of my parents that everything would be okay even when they had no idea if it would be.  But that’s what American’s do – we pull it together and get it done when we need to and many times we’re there for each other – that’s our baseline.   

Our country has endured a Revolutionary War and the redux in the War of 1812,  the Civil War, WWI, WWII, the Korean War, the McCarthy Hearings, Civil Rights, Vietnam War, Watergate, Dessert Storm, Hanging Chads, 9/11, the War on Terror and any number of mass shootings – and somehow we managed to work together and get through it.  I remember crying in the aftermath of 9/11 outside a building and having a stranger give me a hug- I didn’t even have to say why – it was just understood.   Yet here we are 15 years later and the vision of American could not be more far apart between the Trump and Hillary supporters.

Just as much as I want to put on my game face and tell my kids that it will all be okay – I’m not entirely convinced it will be.  I remember people worried that the election of a black man would cause racists go to nuts and there would be carnage in the streets – but there wasn’t. 

A co-worker of mine at the time told her husband to get their boys from school  because now that there was a man of color in the White House the black kids wouldn’t listen to their white teachers and there would be gang fights everywhere in the suburbs.  Of course that didn’t happen (although race relations has been dealt several set-backs over the last few years.)

The transfer of power during the election of 2000 was a perfect example of how our democracy works.  It didn’t work out in my political favor but there were not riots or calls for an armed overthrow of the government.

But even as I despair about the divisions here in the US, I see hope in an unlikely place like Vietnam.  It’s now an international tourist destination – beautiful and a foodie haven.  Recently Anthony Bourdain went there and not only visited some wonderful restaurants but showed how US Vietnam vets where making peace and getting closure.  John McCain - a man  who was captured and a prisoner for five years in Hanoi - was instrumental in getting relations normalized between the US.  In fact the Vietnamese people in their 20’s and 30’s have never even known war – that’s how far that country has come.  When I saw that on CNN – I cried because if a country that lost so much over 40 years ago can move on – so can we.

 

So considering all we’ve been through America – are we up to the task of this election?  Can we look past diatribes and demagoguery to make a rational choice for president?   Are the next four years going to be nothing but each party blocking the progress of the other?  Will our children be able to sleep knowing that the adults have it under control? These questions have been keeping me up at night and there are no easy answers – I wish there were.   My optimism has dimmed but maybe we’ll rise above the pettiness of this election and forge a new path and show the world we’re better than what they’ve been seeing on CNN and FOX .  That’s my prayer and the thing I’d tell that frightened five-year old both now and back in 1968. 

The Little House in Miami

“The house is closed.  Your keys are now mementos,” was the text that I received from my brother Steve after the family home had sold last week.   I stood there in my office and let out a small gasp.   I knew the closing was supposed to be that Friday or Monday in Miami depending the last minute details from the buyers.   Still, the idea of never going into the house which we had owned since 1958 seemed at bit surreal.   My arrival at the house on 90^th court did not happen until 1963, so my sister Kathy and brothers Bill and Steve had some extra time to make it their own before they had to deal with a new baby.  Sharon was born in 1964 which then made the family complete. 

I had not been home since my father died in 2002 when I went down for the funeral.  Being in the house and not seeing him sit in his recliner also seemed to be surreal although ironically that’s where he passed away.   Max and I had moved to Georgia in 1998 and had been down periodically, but Mom and Dad came up so often it didn’t seem necessary to go down there to see them.   A few years ago when Mom could not live alone anymore she moved up to Tallahassee so the house had been vacant since then.  My mother still had to pay the taxes and run the AC so that her South Florida home would not be overrun with mold which the moist tropical weather can do in just a few weeks.  

The words of the text were still stinging.  Fighting back tears was a losing battle so I quickly ducked into the bathroom so none of my co-workers could see me.  The house I grew up in was no longer ours - I could never go home again.  I had to work late that night so I didn’t get home until after 10:00 p.m.  I told Max the house was sold and he could see it affected me.   He hugged me and said it was a very good house.  I told him I wanted the new family to laugh and love as much as we did. 

The next morning I cuddled with my husband, put my head on his chest and started to cry.  A large chapter of my life was now most definitely closed and could never be reopened-and now it belonged to someone else.  So much had happened in the Cody house.  I knew how rare it was that one family could own a house that was not a farm or an estate in England for over 56 years - in the South Florida suburbs that is just unheard of.  

Gazing out of the second floor window of my own house, I thought about when I was a little girl.  I would look out my bedroom window during the Christmas season and I felt especially safe seeing the holiday lights.  I guess as a kid, I reasoned that nothing bad could happen as long as my window was framed in multiple colors of red, green, blue and orange.  When I put the Christmas lights up at our house, I make a special effort to have lights frame our bedroom window so I can look outside and feel that all is right with the world.  Our ranch house did not have a fire place (we lived in Miami, which is not a place known for cold weather hence the lack of a hearth) - so my parents would tell us that they would stay up and let Santa in.  

On Christmas morning, the Cody kids would descend on the presents that were in five different piles that all had the same number of presents.   We got to open two before church and then the rest after services and going out to breakfast.   Since Miami never really got cold in the winter, we’d run around in Miami Dolphin Jerseys with shorts and go to our friend’s houses to see what sort of  holiday haul they got.   Yeah, back then, you could just walk down the street and hang with your friends - there was no cell phones, Facebooking or Tweeting.   You could also smell the different holiday feasts being cooked as you walked on the sidewalk from house to house.  

Our backyard had a swing set that my sister Sharon and I would play on since we were close in age - just 16 months apart.   Unlike Georgia, the terrain in Miami is pretty flat so our backyard was fenced in but connected to four other houses in the back and to the side.  You could cut between the yards to go directly across to Southwest Sr. High which was literally a stone’s throw from my house.  If the jalousie windows were open, you could hear the marching band practicing for football season.   The backyard also kept a little plastic kiddie pool which Sharon and I splashed in as little three and four year old girlie bears.  It was an idyllic little house on a little lot in a simple middle class neighborhood - it was home.  

It was the place I learned to walk, talk and  have my hair done by my big sister Kathy.  It was the place where we did Easter egg hunts year after year even after we had grown up and gotten our own homes and apartments nearby.  It was a place where you could walk for hours on Halloween and come back with a pillow case full of candy.  It was the place where my family discussed around the dinner table what was going on the Vietnam War and my sister’s need to demonstrate against it, the assassinations of the Kennedys, why Nixon was a crook, the first gay rights demonstrations with Anita Bryant, the Dolphin’s perfect season, etc.  It was a place where you could eat politically incorrect food like a sausage noodle casserole, ham & corn pudding and bacon and swiss cheese quiche (which my dad and brothers devoured easily because they didn’t care whether people thought they were real men).  It was the place were I got my two front baby teeth knocked out riding a bike in the street and where I hit my head on the water heater and sliced my forehead open both of which resulted in panicked runs to South Miami Hospital (luckily, my being a genuinely clumsy kid did not warrant a visit from DFACS).  It was where Max and my dad bonded over cooking and our refrigerator made chirping sounds like a bird - that went on for years which Max found charming. 

As I look out my own living room window writing this, the leaves are beginning to change  because it’s autumn - something I never got to experience in Miami.  We’ve lived in this house for 10 years and it’s bigger than that petite house in Miami.  Each of my kids has their own rooms and the bathrooms are a pretty good size.  It’s two stories which is not something you saw a lot of in Miami in the late 1950’s to 1970’s.  We get snow here from time to time and are not any better prepared then the folks in South Florida were when it snowed in 1977 as Snowmaggeon this year so painfully pointed out.   I’m not sure we’ll live here for 56 years, but I hope that my kids have the sort of happy memories I had in that little house that managed to shelter two parents and five kids who could not have been more different.  Maybe the proximity in that house helped us learn the fine art of having to get along.  The beauty of having a big family in a little space is that it’s always noisy and sulking quietly in your room is impossible because once one sibling pisses you off something else happens and you form a temporary alliance for pay back.  

As I texted back to my brother Steve - he reminded me that I still have the

memories and I reminded him I still had the canisters of home movies in which I transfer every year for the family to look at for the holidays.  Maybe this year I can find footage that is strictly about the house - that little house that held a family together through for almost six decades of Easter Egg hunts, Halloweens, Christmas mornings, Thanksgivings, five weddings, 14 grandkids and a funeral.  Maybe my brothers and sisters will remember how close we were physically and emotionally - even though we live in different states.   And maybe my kids and I will watch TV together in the master bedroom because watching TV in your parents room while sitting on their bed is the best thing ever and we’ll have bacon and swiss cheese quiche for brunch.  Yeah, Max was right - it was a very good house.