Drummed In Your Ear

During the Great Depression of the 1930‘s, my Daddy worked for 50 cents a day. He supplemented his income in the pool hall, as a snooker shooter and numbers runner. By the time I was born in Atlanta, we lived in the Capitol Homes on Butler Street, directly across the from the Georgia Legislature and Governor’s office. I thought the Capitol lawn was a park for us neighborhood kids, because we played there and romped on the old cannons. The statue of Eugene Talmadge pointed a threatening finger across the street at the FDR New Deal Housing Project where I lived. My Daddy referred to FDR as “Rosenfeld,“ despite the housing project and the WWII GI Bill, through which Daddy went to trade school and became an air conditioning repairman and a first-time homeowner. My part of Butler Street was replaced by an Interstate Highway and parking decks for state employees. The Capitol still stands, as does the ominous memorial to Gene Talmadge.

In his final years, my Daddy owned a 1,700 square foot brick ranch house in Cornelia, Ga., as far as he could get from the increasing urbanization of Atlanta. That is not exactly how Daddy explained it; he used the N-word. He set aside 144 square feet of the cement floor basement for his workshop. He built a workbench and pegboard walls to hang tools, always cleaned and oiled when he finished using them. Before he died, he insisted that I take home with me the collection of wrenches, pliers, drills, hammers, saws, screw drivers, and air conditioning specialty tools, names and purposes unknown to me. I protested embarrassed, saying he would use them yet again. Eventually, I inherited them all, along with an amount of pride and pleasure in using them.

Some of my cousins, aunts, and uncles on my Daddy’s side tell me President Obama is a Communist. Or a Socialist, depending on whatever floats to the surface at the shallow end of the gene pool between Hatteras and Hattiesburg. They avoid using the word in their hearts and are unaware that all the Communist and Socialist countries have capitulated to capitalism, unable to resist the powerful lure of profit motive. I try not to get into arguments. They do not understand the way you can tell when President Obama is formulating a new policy initiative, because he gives away the store to his opponents, like when he approved off-shore oil drilling as an opening gambit for a new energy and environmental program. And just like he took the Public Option off the table at the beginning of the Health Care debate. Of course, this does not get Obama any support from the not-so Grand Obstructionist Party. When President Obama talks about bipartisanship, he is only talking about himself. The bipartisanship only exists within Obama, both Democrat and Republican, Liberal and Conservative. Classic middle of the road. Somebody at Harvard should have told him if you are standing in the middle of the road you get run over by traffic from both directions? Still, this does not calm the virulent opposition Obama gets, not so much based on anything he has done but just how some people feel, prejudice pure and simple, passed from generation to generation sociologically and geographically, if not genetically.

Oscar Hammerstein II wrote this South Pacific pearl:

You've got to be taught to hate and fear,
You've got to be taught from year to year,
It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade,
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught before it's too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You've got to be carefully taught!