The Crab Chronicles

Leaving Our Stories

When I was in 6th grade I won Honorable Mention or something like that in the Social Studies Fair with a poster I made called City of the Future. Basically, I envisioned that everyone would live in apartments on top of shopping malls. Everything would be in the mall that we needed -- doctor's offices, grocery stores, etc. We wouldn't need cars. We could roller skate down the hall to school. 

For a 6th grader who hated doing yard work it seemed like the perfect Utopia. 

Ironically, here I am forty-four years later, and I live in a house where I can use a computer to order gifts and groceries, and I really don't need to go anywhere. I do, of course, still go to the grocery store, the gas station, the doctor, the beauty salon, friends' homes, etc.

I was watching the movie Passengers, and thinking about its' vision of the future, thirty or more years from now. The main characters record their story, of life as the lone surviving passengers. (I won't say more, in case you haven't seen the movie. Excellent movie, BTW.)

My grandchildren and their descendants will not have to wonder what Memaw Dee was like. All they have to do is read my blog, or my book about my daughter's adoption, or my poetry or short stories. I may write another memoir one of these days, too. I like to document my life and share it. 

Why? Where does this impulse come from? 

I don't know, but I have a theory. 

All my life, I have heard my parents talk about my father's parents, who died before I was born. 

I can look in Grandaddy's face and see Dad's face. I can look in the mirror and see Cordelia's high forehead -- and truthfully, I can see shadows of all my grandparents' faces there.

Mom always says I have Cordelia's giggle. 

I also have Grandaddy's impatience -- I am impatient and impulsive. He once got mad and shot a chicken that wouldn't get off his car. I've never shot a chicken but I could see myself doing that, if I was running late for work.

I wish I had more. I wish I had a letter one of them wrote, or a diary. I would love to hear their words, talking about their lives, sharing their ideas and philosophies with me. I would love to hear Grandaddy talk about what it was like to fight Pancho Villa in 1916. I would like to hear about his time as a professional gambler in South Georgia [a brief period, thankfully]. I would love to hear Grandmother Cordelia tell me what my dad was like as a little boy. I'd like to hear her talk about how it felt to have to go back to teaching school in World War II because there was a teacher shortage, and she found herself teaching her own son [my dad] one year. I so wish that I could read their words and imagine their voices talking to me, reaching across the years. 

I have one letter that my grandfather [Bob Hasty, Mom's father] wrote, in the late 1950's, to her. When I read it, I hear his voice. 

That's the power of the written word. 

Every blog I write, I give out little fragments of my heart, or I try to, at least. However, you cannot explain an entire life in a blog, or even a multi-volume autobiography, but you can offer glimpses.

What I long to do is read the words of some of my ancestors, to hear their ideas, their opinions, their thoughts. Sadly, there are no letters or diaries of my great-grandparents or further back. 

I had a membership to Ancestry.com for a while but I canceled it. It's too frustrating. I could spend hours running names through their database and only find stuff like census data, possibly land records, deeds, the occasional newspaper mention. Find a grave is mostly just photos of graves. Occasionally you get more, but it's rare. Even photos are rare. 

That's my great-great grandmother, Charlotte Wood Butler. Her son, Robert Edward Butler, I know a bit about, because my mom and my uncles remembered him. I know nothing about her, except she was well-off financially and lived in North Georgia, or possibly South Carolina.

I have a photo (not scanned in) of my father's grandmother, Annie Lou Lewis Thompson, made when she was a tiny, wizened old lady in the bed. They called her "Little Granny." She was widowed young, and my grandfather had to quit school and go to work to support her and his younger siblings. I wish I could sit down and chat with her, ask her about her life. I'm sure it was very hard.

I'd like to know, for instance, why she named one of her sons "Chillie" and one of her daughters "Nannie."

I have many friends who now have grandchildren. Most of us post on Facebook, write emails, send texts. What will our descendants know about us, though? We live in an age when it's so easy to take photos, to communicate in words, or Skype calls or Facetime calls. We walk around with tiny computers in our pockets. I feel strongly we should leave memoirs and tell our stories, all of us, so future generations will understand us. Doesn't matter if we are rich or famous, or very ordinary. What matter is, we were HERE. We made their parents, or grandparents, etc. 

We should tell our stories. We owe it to them. 

My ancestors lived in an age when paper was not easy to find, and pens and ink were not easy to get, either. Very few pieces of paper survive more than a few decades. It was very hard for them to leave records for us. 

Now, it's very easy.

We need to tell our stories, in our own words, and leave words and pictures, so they can learn, so they can know where they came from, and how we felt, and what we believed in.

In the end, it's the most important thing we can do, I think. Tell our stories. 

A Note to Matt Damon

The allegations against many famous men that they have sexually harassed and in some cases sexually assaulted women, have drawn a variety of responses. I have seen the news articles and been shocked and horrified by the allegations against famous men such as Bill Cosby, Matt Lauer, and Dustin Hoffman. 

However, I have not been surprised.

They are all famous men in positions of power, who used that power to get away with horrible behavior.

I was reading this morning [see People] how Matt Damon made some controversial remarks about the allegations against Hollywood figures Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, and Louis C.K.

Matt:  “I do believe there’s a spectrum of behavior… There’s a difference between patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation, right? Both of those behaviors need to be confronted and eradicated without question, but they shouldn’t be conflated.”

Matt, you are right. There's a big difference between a pat on the butt and assault. However, what you fail to understand is how the pat on the butt opens the door, and it swings wide. A man who thinks it's OK to pat a woman's butt -- especially a powerful man -- may think it's OK to take it a lot further, and therein lies the issue.

In Twitter land, several actresses including Alyssa Milano and Minnie Driver jumped all over Damon. 

 Matt, here's what you don't understand, though, and why you [and 99% of all men in the world] simply cannot understand it: You cannot understand how it feels because you cannot ever have been in our shoes. It's physically impossible. 

I could never understand what it feels like to be black or Asian or Hispanic because I am white. I can greatly sympathize but it's literally physically impossible for me to empathize.

No man [unless he is transgender] can understand how it feels to live in a woman's smaller, weaker body. It's just impossible.

I was subjected to a variety of unwanted attentions from a male supervisor many years ago, when I was a paralegal. The man who harassed me was known as a jokester. He was also well-liked by the other men in the firm. If I had complained about what he did, I would have been told to ignore it, or quit. In the unlikely event he was reprimanded or confronted in any way about my accusations, he would have retaliated against me. I would quite likely have been made so uncomfortable I would have wanted to quit. I saw just that kind of thing happen.

This is the reality women live with EVERY DAY. We are viewed as objects. Rarely ever are men viewed in the same way. 

I was in a restaurant when I was a college student and a drunk guy came up and grabbed me and gave me a long, passionate kiss on the mouth. He was a complete stranger. I had been drinking and I was so startled, I did nothing but leave. I ran for the door as quickly as possible hearing laughter behind me. I went back to my dorm and shook for about an hour, thanking God  friends had been with me. My friends were all drinking too. 

So is it ok that he grabbed me and kissed me without my consent, since we both had been drinking? NO. Had I been a few years older I likely would have slapped him. I was 19, though, and just wanted to get out of there.

For the sake of argument, let's say a man was viewed as simply a sexual object, a collection of body parts. The male reaction will likely not be the same as a female reaction. Why?

Males are dominant in our society. They are almost always bigger and stronger than females.

Males hold the power positions physically, professionally -- in almost every way.

Males STILL run the show, in almost all situations.

I read the Salma Hayek article in the New York Times with great interest and sympathy.  What she had to endure to get the movie Frida made was horrible. Harvey Weinstein put her through hell. He was in the more powerful position and he could do it. 

The mentality that women have been up against since the dawn of time is the "boys will be boys" mentality. We endure or even shrug off horrible behavior because that's how we are conditioned. That attitude is why women have stayed silent for so long. That's why many women in my mother's generation don't understand what all the fuss is about -- unless they have been assaulted. 

I am amazed at the courage of the women who have come forward against powerful men, now, and said NO MORE.

I don't expect men to change overnight. I hope and pray that within perhaps 20-50 years we will see men who have evolved and will treat women with respect, so harassment and assaults will not be so common. 

Matt, I hope and pray none of your daughters ever experiences sexual harassment in any form, from a pat on the butt to outright assault. However, if one of them did, maybe you would understand a tiny bit of the unfairness, shame, and fear that women have endured. Maybe then the notion that men will view YOUR precious little girls as simply sexual objects will outrage you and you will alter your beliefs.  I wouldn't wish that on anyone, but I wish you could imagine for a moment how you would feel in that instance. 

Maybe if all men could imagine how it feels to be a woman, we would see real change.

A Monumental Quandary

I try to avoid political discussions because they almost inevitably lead to hard feelings and resentment, and sometimes they end friendships, much to my sadness. I am fully capable of saying to someone "I don't agree with your point of view, but I respect your right to have a point of view and express it."

I've used the phrase "Let's agree to disagree" many times in the past year.

Unfortunately, certain of my friends have chosen to exit my life because they disagreed with my presidential choice. This makes me quite sad because they should be more mature. If we can't have civil discourse -- and recent violence makes me really wonder about that -- then we are heading into dangerous waters, as a nation.

I asked my brother not long ago what he thought about taking the Confederate flag down in Columbia, South Carolina, where he lives. My brother is a retired Army major who drives a truck, chews tobacco, and works for a company that sells guns and equipment to police departments. You might think there could be no more conservative guy on the planet.

You'd be wrong.

He answered immediately, "If the flag makes black people uncomfortable, then it should come down. Period."

I didn't argue with him. I feel the same. I look at the Confederate flag and see a historic artifact. What if it was the Nazi flag, though? I would shudder in horror because that flag represents a terrible time in history, and horrific crimes against humanity were committed by people committed to that philosophy. I can imagine, therefore, what a black person might feel, looking at the Confederate flag. I sympathize. Those flags should only be in museums.

I am totally in a quandary over the taking down of Confederate monuments, however.

On the one hand, one can make the same argument about the monument as one would about the flag - it represents a very painful time in history. It's a time long gone. As my friend Tom Lee writes in The Politics of Memory and Marble, which discusses the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act of 2017, "The new law prohibits relocation, removal, alteration, or renaming of any "monument located on public property and has been so situated for 40 or more years." 

I am very uncomfortable with a state forcing its citizens to keep monuments that a lot of its citizens find profoundly disturbing.

However, I also think that monuments are about more. They are about history. They are about art.

For me, too, they are personal.

above, the Butler Marble Works, owned by my great-grandfather Robert Edward Butler

As my cousin Steve Butler wrote about the monument above: This Confederate Memorial is located in Forsyth, Georgia (Monroe County) and was contracted by the Butler Marble and Granite Company of Marietta for a cost of $3,000. The seven-foot soldier was cast by the American Bronze Foundry of Chicago. The memorial was unveiled on June 20, 1908.

I never met my great-grandfather. I love the fact that he was part of history, however. His company supplied the marble for monuments that were placed all over the south.

I have passed the one below many times and never knew that Grandaddy's company supplied the marble until Steve did some research. Steve: "Confederate memorial located in Decatur, Georgia, was created by the Butler Marble and Granite Co. in Marietta for a cost of $2,500. It is located in front of the old courthouse and was dedicated on Confederate Memorial Day, April 25, 1908. 2,000 people attended the dedication."

 

There is also a Confederate monument in Abbeville, South Carolina, made of Butler marble. Ironically, my paternal grandmother Cordelia Henderson Thompson was born in Abbeville and her family had lived there for generations before moving to Georgia in 1900.

 

I cannot say that all the Confederate monuments should be removed. I cannot say they should be left alone. The Historian in me is battling with the humanitarian. Perhaps there is a way to compromise. Perhaps the monuments should not be hidden or destroyed, but they should be located in or on the grounds of museums, because they are historical artifacts.

Regardless of where they are, the Confederacy lost the Civil War. No statue or flag will ever change that.

My ancestors fought in that war. I can celebrate the fact that they fought for their beliefs, even if I don't agree with those beliefs.

If I had lived back then I likely would have had the same prejudices they had. If they could have foreseen me and my friendships with people of all races and ethnicities, and foreseen my mixed-race children, they might be horrified.

It's easy to sit here in 2017 and pass judgment on people who lived a long time ago. Just remember, though, the door swings both ways. One day my great-great grandchildren may look back in horror at things I did or said.

Future generations may judge me harshly. I can live with that. I do want to state for the record, though, that I may never know the correct way to feel about Confederate monuments.

 

Broad Street Augusta Georgia, 1946

I found some old photos and an old book manuscript in a box in my garage. Apparently it was a book about the history of the old First National Bank in Augusta where my dad worked, but the manuscript never got published. Really cool to see a folder preserved since 1946, more than 70 years. This photo is my favorite so I scanned it in. This is what Broad Street looked like in 1946. It looks the same today but very different. Lots more trees planted today, plus a statue of James Brown, Augusta's favorite son.. If you're from Augusta or you've ever been there to visit, you should get a kick out of this. I was born in Augusta in 1962 and lived there until we moved to Tennessee in 1971. Still love the town. My Dad grew up there. I still have family there.

Growing Up in the 1930's and 1940's

The world was a very different place in December of 1933 when my mother was born. The Great Depression was in full swing and millions of Americans were out of work -- the unemployment rate was 25%.

Franklin Roosevelt had just taken office a year before, and launched the New Deal.

Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933.

It cost 3 cents to mail a letter in 1933.

A lb. of ground beef was 11 cents.

A new Plymouth was $445.

The 21st Amendment is passed repealing the 18th Amendment ( Repeal of prohibition ) on December 5, 1933.

right, the family before Elva

My grandparents were in a bind, just like most of the other folks in America. My grandfather had been a professional baseball player since 1919, but in 1933 he couldn't find a job playing baseball. He was 37 years old.

On New Year's Eve, 1933, they nonetheless welcomed their third child and only girl, Elva Elizabeth Hasty.

My grandparents brought baby Elva home from the hospital and both her older brothers came down with whooping cough. Papa stayed upstairs and nursed the boys, and Memaw stayed downstairs with baby Elva. They lived in Marietta, on Powder Springs Road.

below, a clipping from 1932 when Papa played with the Birmingham Barons

My grandfather soon found work with companies around Atlanta who wanted him to coach and play baseball on the company teams, and gave him a token job to do the rest of the year, which he hated. He changed jobs so often when Mom was small that she never went to the same school twice until the family moved to Atlanta after World War II.

below, Papa playing on a team in Buford, Georgia - Papa in seated on the right, between the two men in white shirts

My grandmother, who had been raised in a wealthy family, found herself the mother of three small children, trying to manage a household during the Depression, when money was tight. She made aprons and dish towels and oven mitts out of flour sacks, and made clothes. We still have two of the flour sack aprons.

Everyone saved buttons. If a shirt had to be thrown away, the buttons were removed. Mom remembers being put at the table and told to "sort the buttons." When a new dress or shirt was being sewed, the buttons would be re-used.

At one rural school, there was no school lunch program. My grandmother had studied Home Economics at Bessie Tift College and she organized a school lunch program for all the children. Lunch might only be a bowl of soup and a piece of cornbread, but Memaw and the other mothers made sure each child was fed.

In the late 1930's the family left Smyrna and moved to Inman, South Carolina, then to a farm outside of Moore, South Carolina. The pipes were there for water but there was no water in the house - it came from a pump in the yard. There was no electricity in the house. It was during the war and when they built the house they couldn't get the wiring for the house because building materials were needed for the war effort. The family was put on a waiting list and eventually got wiring.

Mom recalls those times without electricity as not being so bad. After dinner, the family would sit around the big pine dining room table with oil lamps on each end of the table, kids doing homework and grownups reading or sewing.

In addition to trying to take care of their own kids, my grandparents often took in relatives.

My grandmother had 11 siblings and Papa had 7 siblings. Oftentimes, nieces and nephews were sent to stay with the family while their parents looked for work or if childcare was a problem. "Visits" lasting several months were not uncommon. Mother grew up with two brothers, but many cousins in and out, all the time. If they ran out of beds, quilts were put on the floor for the children.

Picnics were a source of fun, and long drives in the country. Ice cream was churned by hand, a great treat. Kids read comic books and played cowboys and indians. Mom played dolls and made "mud pies."

Mother remembers on the farm my grandfather would often pick broccoli out of the field and bring it home for Memaw to cook -- and she would throw it in the pressure cooker and reduce it to mush. My grandmother could also use her trusty 410 shotgun to shoot the head off of a chicken, pluck it, and fry it for supper. Everyone also worked very hard canning fruits and vegetables, and in South Carolina harvesting peaches. To this day, my mom and uncle Don love South Carolina peaches.

 

I feel very fortunate that my mother has an incredible memory and often tells me stories of her childhood. She describes people and events vividly and I can hold in my hand a flour sack apron that's over 70 years old, and light the antique oil lamps that my grandparents used. I eat on a table that was made by my great-grandfather more than a hundred years ago. History is a living, vivid, touchable thing, to me.

 

above, Mom and my grandparents, early 1950's

below, my grandparents and their children and grandchildren in March 1970 - Mom has on a red headband and I am wearing a red jacket

 

A 1959 Dinner Party Menu

My mom and I have been cleaning out old photos and papers a lot lately, and Mom came across a piece of paper yesterday that instantly flooded her with memories of being a young newlywed in the late 1950's and trying to entertain. It's hard for millennials, I think, to understand what a different world their grandparents inhabited, and how bound they were by societal customs and rules.

Mom was trying to plan out her menu and get all her ducks in a row here, to celebrate New Year's Day with my dad's family. How do I know it was New Year's? Easy. It's the only time we ever serve blackeyed peas to company, here in the South. You eat blackeyes peas for good luck. You eat greens for money.

The peas were dried and they would have needed to be blanched and soaked to bring them back to edible. No self-respecting Southern cook would have fixed them without hog jowl/fatback. I used to love to eat fatback, as a kid. It's actually making a comeback, only now chefs call it "lardons" because I guess it sounds more elegant than hog jowl or fatback.

Mom and Dad got married in February 1957 and she thinks this dinner was Jan. 1, 1959 and she was already pregnant with my brother Bruce. Mom and Dad were still living in a small apartment, although they built their first small house a few months later. The guests included my grandmother Cordelia, her sister Ceph and husband, their son and his wife, my uncle Bobby and his wife and daughters. A lot of folks.

Mom was still learning to cook. That was a huge undertaking in those days. You couldn't buy convenience foods and takeout foods like you can today. Produce was seasonal. For instance, you could get apples in the fall and strawberries in the spring and early summer, but likely wouldn't find them other times of the year - or if you did find them, they were quite expensive.

Mom remembers that she went over the menu on the phone with Mamaw (her mother) who was an experienced cook and had studied Home Economics at Bessie Tift College.

The menu is ambitious -- beef roast, scalloped potatoes, blackeyed peas, stewed tomatoes, pineapple. I asked Mom about the "pineapple on lettuce" - a very elegant food, for that time. Nobody ate the lettuce and the pineapple was from a can and included a cream cheese topping.

I asked Mom to tell me more about the menu. "Sometimes mother would do the same thing with a canned peach half, or sometimes should put some grated yellow cheese over it. That was a pretty salad. My mother didn't eat tossed salad."

The tomatoes would have been canned, probably at least 16 oz.

On the strawberry shortcake, you could buy a pound cake that was a loaf cake. You couldn't buy Cool Whip. You bought fresh whipping cream and whipped it with a mixer. Strawberries would have been expensive that time of year, or I would have used strawberries that were frozen."

The note at the top "Call Daisy" was a reminder to get the apartment professionally cleaned. Mom has a wealth of Daisy stories and I remember her quite well. (When I read the book The Help I was fascinated and appalled, because although we had Daisy as a maid off and on when I was small, we were never allowed to be rude or disrespectful to her. I never saw my parents treat her with anything but respect and courtesy either.)

I think what fascinated me about this little party menu is that Mom was trying so hard to feed Dad's family a lovely and elegant dinner, with a very limited budget. She could barely cook. Dad wouldn't help her at all. Plus, she was trying to fulfill the role that society said, in 1959, a wife needed to play. Most clothes had to be ironed. Many people didn't own dryers, and clothes had to be line-dried. There were few convenience foods. Housecleaning was a lot of hard scrubbing, not easy at all.

Women's magazines at the time were filled with advice like "keep a small makeup kit near the door so when your husband comes in he sees you with hair combed and fresh lipstick, not looking tired." Didn't matter if you had worked yourself to death all day and were exhausted, you had to keep up appearances and look like you had your s**t together or your husband might stray, was the underlying message there.

[BTW, as long as Dad lived, my mom always had a little mirror, comb, and makeup stashed away in the kitchen, so she could "fix her face" when Dad's car pulled into the driveway.]

Nowadays, young people often hook up and break up, and have children without feeling the need to get married. Is that a better way? Or is it better for women to feel burdened and subservient to their husbands? I don't know. I just feel like life works better when a couple forms a true partnership.

below, photos of the dinner guests from around the same time period

left, my grandmother Cordelia and cousin Frann. Above, Dad's brother Bobby, my grandfather Thompson (who had died in 1957) and Aunt Ceph holding Frann. Thompson and Cordelia babysat for Frann when she was small because my aunt worked.

below, Mom pregnant with Bruce, and her parents, in front of Mom and Dad's first little house in Augusta

Below, Mom and Dad on their wedding day.

 

Risking Death

Tomorrow is Veteran's Day and I wanted to write a little bit about my third great grandfather, John McConnell [1780-1866] because I didn't know much about him until recently and his story is quite amazing.

From Find a Grave:

"John McConnell Jr was the first child of John and Nancy Montgomery McConnell. He was born in the Waxhaw settlement during the Revolutionary War in which his father was fighting. Only 11 days after his birth, his father was captured, imprisoned, and sentenced to be hanged. Then John Jr. contracted black smallpox and it was feared he would die.

However, his mother had survived smallpox years before, and through her nursing he survived. While he was still ill with the disease, his father escaped from the sentenced hanging and from prison and took his small family to the snow covered mountains of South Carolina to escape the British. They stayed in hiding in the mountains for over a year until his father could rejoin Col. William Bratton.

After the Revolutionary War, John Sr. took his family to Georgia, finally settling in Elbert County, Georgia. It was there that John Jr met his wife, Anna Townsend. They married in Elberton in 1800 when John Jr. was 19 and Anna was 15."

 

The sentence that jumps out at me is: "Only 11 days after his birth, his father was captured, imprisoned, and sentenced to be hanged."

My 4th great grandfather was sentenced to be HANGED simply because he wanted to be FREE. He wanted to live in a free country where he could vote for his president and his representatives and not be forced to live under the tyranny of a king or queen. He risked his life to be free.

We keep forgetting about that and it bothers me.

Our ancestors risked EVERYTHING to make this country a haven.

I am also related, on my dad's side, to Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. The Europeans who settled in Virginia in the 17th and 18th centuries are all pretty much related to each other. What awes me about those family connections is simple: like John McConnell, they wanted to be free. If the American Revolution had failed, all of those founding fathers would have been hanged for treason.

Let that sink in for a minute. Would you risk your life to be free? To see your children grow up free?

We take it for granted, this freedom.

I have spent a good bit of time in Russia and Kazakhstan and let me tell you, there's a stress, an unease from being in a country where average citizens don't have a lot of rights. When I went to Kazakhstan in 2007 I saw a man in the airport beaten half to death. I don't know what his crime was but the police didn't hesitate to beat him. I've never seen anything like it and I hope I never see anything like it again.

It made me very happy to be an American. I felt like a 20 lb. weight was lifted off my chest when my plane landed back in America in 2007. I remember thinking thanks be to GOD - my son will grow up in a country where he has rights and he will be free.

So my message to you this Veteran's Day is simple: cherish your freedom. If you have friends or relatives or neighbors who are veterans, thank them for their service. They risk everything to do a thankless job and they deserve respect and thanks.

My brother, now a retired Army major

my dad served in the Army in 1951-52

 

Let's All Calm Down About The 2016 Race for the White House

In all my life I have never seen a more divisive presidential race. I have had to bite my tongue on Facebook and I've tried not to post anything on my wall indicating who I will vote for, but my choice is - as always, it seems - a choice between what I see as the lesser of two evils. I do not embrace the candidate I will vote for because well... the candidate I really liked had to drop out of the race. [No, it wasn't Bernie.]

However, I suspect many people feel the way I do. It's not the end of the world. Everyone needs to calm down. Seriously.

This morning I was watching a story on CBS Sunday Morning on New York Times columnist Maureen O'Dowd and it was amusing, in some instances, when her sister talked about voting for candidates of different parties, in different years. My parents usually voted Republican, but not always. I recalled times when my parents didn't agree on who to vote for, and Dad would get mad and tell Mom not to vote because, he said, his vote would cancel hers out. By that logic, nobody should vote.

I have voted for Democrats and I have voted for Republicans. I try to ignore the party and focus on the candidate, and try to figure out who is the best human being, not who is running the best campaign. That's not always easy to do.

One thing that I have found very helpful this year is this website, Vote411. Every year I vote I find things on the ballot that puzzle me, and I mentally castigate myself for not doing more research. Well, click that link. It's an awesome resource for learning what you need to know before you go to the polls. Thank you, League of Women Voters.

Not everyone wants to thoughtfully research candidates. Lots of people want to simply rely on what they see on political ads, or the daily newspaper, or the nightly news broadcast. WRONG. Every single network - NBC, CBS, CNN, FOX - they ALL have agendas. There is no such thing as journalistic integrity or objectivity. And guess what?! There NEVER WAS. [I'm sorry, Mrs. B, my high school newspaper sponsor, but journalism is as flawed as any other human endeavor, and it always has been.] I read a lot of newspapers from 1922 once, researching a project, and they were awful. Yellow journalism at its finest...

We all have to learn and remember that journalism is totally biased.

I worked for the Knoxville Journal for nearly a year when I was a senior in high school. We had the old-fashioned AP and UPI teletypes and news rolled in 24 hours a day, tons of stories. The managing editor decided which ones to run. News folks pick and choose their stories, based on personal opinions, audience preferences, perhaps other things. If a network is owned by a conglomerate that also owns a food company and some of the food is found to be contaminated, the news network may choose to ignore that story, or downplay it. Another network may run a lengthy piece on it.

This year, however, is different from any previous year because the country is so divided. Hillary supporters passionately hate Trump. Trump supporters passionately hate Hillary. There are couples around the country who are breaking up because one is for Trump and the other is for Clinton. Yes, BREAKING UP. Apparently nobody taught them the fine art of how to disagree amicably.

I am not immune, sadly. I have a friend that won't speak to me right now because we are supporting different candidates. I have Facebook friends who have "un-friended" me and I suspect some of those are because they suspect I do not support their candidate.

So who is going to win on November 9th? I don't know. I won't predict.

Apparently, the polls this year are unreliable. I would have said that long before today - keeping in mind the quote about "lies, damn lies, and statistics" [Will Rogers, I think].

My original premise is simple. This year we are seeing an incredibly dirty mudslinging race. We have nobody but ourselves to blame for that. Don't blame the candidates. They are simply going all out to win, and as recent history has taught us, that means slinging mud. In this day and age of constant photos and videos all over the place, there are no secrets any more, especially for public figures.

Politics shouldn't end relationships or marriages or even friendships, however.

We should be able to laugh at ourselves. We SHOULD.

Who do we listen to when it comes to voting, though? Why, entertainers and actors, of course!

Entertainers all over the place are threatening to leave the USA and/or "move to Canada" if Trump gets elected. I'm not surprised at all that the recent show in Tampa sparked this article: Hundreds Walked Out as Amy Shumer Gets Political. (My personal feeling is that she is not at all funny or talented, and I am amazed anyone would pay anything to watch her, but that's not really based on her politics.)

Comedians being political is nothing new. Anyone remember George Carlin? He was often political. Sometimes it was funny, sometimes not. I usually watched clips of his shows and either laughed and thought "how clever" or I sat there and seethed, thinking he was being utterly unfair. I didn't like everything he had to say, but so what? I've never met another human being I agreed with entirely. Very few people I've ever known were as brilliant and/or funny as Carlin.

I watched a clip of Trump and Hillary speaking at the Al Smith Dinner last week. Good thing they can laugh at themselves, unlike many of the rest of us. Afterwards, they reportedly shook hands and agreed that whoever gets elected, they will need to work together afterwards. I hope they were sincere.

See, here's where I am going to turn really cynical, so brace yourself.

I don't think it matters much who gets elected. Celebrities may flee to Canada. Or not. Marriages may crumble. Or not.

Both candidates this year are very flawed and whoever gets elected, I will sit back and watch with great cynicism, frankly, because they aren't going to be crowned for life.

Whatever they SAID during their campaign will mean little. They can SAY anything during an election. What they say is almost meaningless.

What we all need to calm down and remember is that presidents don't get in office and rule like potentates. The founding fathers set things up so no one branch of government - executive, legislative, or judicial - has too much power. Congress can pass a bill and send it up the road and the president can veto it. Sometimes vetoes get overridden. Presidents can be impeached. Presidents can resign. If we have a president who is one party and the majority in Congress is the other party, little will likely get done.

Kids in school now don't get a thorough knowledge of history or civics, and that's tragic. In order to not go crazy this year, we all need to study history.

I have thought often during this campaign about President Johnson, LBJ. He was a consummate politician. He cursed like a sailor and screwed women in the White House, asking the Secret Service to help him elude his wife. He gave interviews completely in the nude, or sitting on the toilet. Biographers have a field day with him.

As one biographer stated about LBJ: "URINATING in a sink, inviting people into his bathroom, showing off his abdominal scar, exposing his private parts: after a while nothing surprises a biographer of Lyndon Baines Johnson... Sexual conquests also helped to fill the void. He was a competitive womanizer. When people mentioned Kennedy's many affairs, Johnson would bang the table and declare that he had more women by accident than Kennedy ever had on purpose."

However, he was able to marshal bipartisan support and pass important legislation such as the 1964 Civil Rights Bill. He pushed for legislation that was part of the Great Society, which had a huge impact on our country. He started Medicare and Head Start.

"The first piece of Great Society legislation, the Economic Opportunity Act 1964, tried to give people tools to get out of poverty. The bill created a Job Corps similar to the New Deal Civilian Conservation Corps; a domestic peace corps; a system for vocational training; and Head Start, a pre-school program designed to prepare children for success in public school. The bill also funded community action programs and extended loans to small businessmen and farmers.

In 1964, 8 million American adults had not finished 5 years in school; more than 20 million had not finished eight years; and almost a quarter of the nation's population, around 54 million people, hadn't finished high school. In 1965, Congress passed the groundbreaking Elementary and Secondary Education Act which for the first time provided federal funding for education below the college level passed the Higher Education Act, which created a National Teachers Corps and provided financial assistance to students wishing to attend college."

SO... LBJ was a real jerk, a foul-mouthed womanizer, and he escalated Vietnam, but he was not 100% bad. He also did a lot of good.

Therein lies the rub. It's complicated. Politicians can be total jerks, awful, and yet good.

Just like everybody else..

photo by Linda Harris

Happy Columbus Day?

My great great grandfather was a man named CC Phillips, or Christopher Columbus Phillips. I am pretty sure we are not related to the famous explorer Columbus, however. [History now indicates Columbus was not really the discoverer of America but was a racist jerk - read more here...]

No, Grandaddy Phillips was, according to Find A Grave:

"...a pioneer builder of this town and throughout his life held a position of one of the leaders in all community activities. He was a deacon in the Acworth Baptist church and a Christian gentleman. He is survived by his wife, Mrs. Nannie A. Phillips; and four daughters, Mrs. R.E. Butler of Marietta; Miss Alma Phillips, Mrs. M.A. Goodwin and Miss Mildred Phillips, of Acworth."

He was in the Civil War. He was a Private in COMPANY A (ACWORTH INFANTRY), 18TH REGIMENT,GEORGIA VOLUNTEER INFANTRY, ARMY OF NORTHERN VIRGINIA, C.S.A. Mom remembers seeing his uniform and sword, passed down through the family.

I grew up being told the Civil War was "the War Between the States." Southerners have long memories. I was born in 1962, more than 100 years after the War started.

My grandmother [C.C. Phillips' granddaughter Wilma] was joking around with her brother-in-law once when he was examining Grandaddy Phillips' Civil War sword. Harvey was from Boston Massachusetts. He said "Your sword here has a bunch of nicks in it." 

Mamaw replied "Every one of them came from cutting a Yankee head off."

Now whether that was true, who knows. Doubtful. I think she just said it to rile him.

Anyway, back to C.C. Phillips. After the war he became a successful businessman and raised four daughters. His daughter Mildred never married. She wanted to marry, but her father disapproved of the match, so she just never married anyone. Instead, she became a career woman, at a time when that was unusual. Mother described Mildred as "a wild Indian." Mother said "He had every man his four daughters dated or got serious about investigated by a detective. He told Mildred the man ran around and slept with whores and had VD. I think he just said that to keep her from marrying. That was probably not true. Grandaddy was a snob. So Mildred said if she couldn't marry the man she loved she'd never marry at all, and she didn't. She was very smart. She was well-educated, for that time. She worked. One of her jobs was as a detective - don't know for whom. She was undercover. Mother and the sisters would talk about it and purse their mouths and roll their eyes. They didn't know where Mildred worked. She was a tall, broad woman with bright red hair.

Daddy donated blood to her after an accident. Mildred was about to die. They had the same type blood. It was very rare. They joked about it for years - he said she we're related now. You've got my blood." [Of course, they were related by marriage because he was married to Mildred's niece. "Daddy" refers to Bob Hasty, Mom's daddy and my grandfather.]

My grandfather's blood type was so rare that Atlanta hospitals used to call him to come donate when there was an accident. "They got him out of bed at 3 a.m. from time to time, to come to the hospital. He felt he had no choice to go and donate." Mamaw wasn't too crazy about him being pulled out of bed at all hours but he felt it was his duty.

I wrote a short story recently about C.C.'s daughter Beulah Phillips Butler, a fictional story but based loosely on her life. After I finished it I thought to myself, I will never run out of things to write about, because just the family stories are a wealth of material...

 

Two Sides to a Painful Question

When I was a little girl we didn't usually have serious discussions at the dinner table, but as I grew up, we did, sometimes. My father would often explain why he felt a certain way about a political issue, or why he was voting for a particular candidate, or the correct way to view a situation that he felt the media wasn't covering accurately. We would also laugh and tell funny stories or jokes. What I remember well, though, is him patiently explaining things to me and my brother, and my mom sitting there quietly nodding. 

Of course, like all kids, I grew up and rebelled. When Ronald Reagan was elected I voted for him because my father drove to my college and picked me up, took me personally to the polling place so I could vote for the first time, and then after dinner at home drove me all the way back to school. He told me to vote for Reagan. I figured he knew best. In the years that followed I regretted that decision, particularly after I learned that money for college loans had been cut and some of my friends had to drop out of school. I also learned that Reagan refused to acknowledge the AIDS crisis or push for more funding for research. So I don't really agree with folks who say how great he was, because he wasn't, to me. I graduated from college in 1984, the "boom" time, Republicans would say, and I couldn't find a job anywhere.

When I realized that my dad could possibly be wrong sometimes I started researching how to argue with him, and win. We would get into shouting matches, at times. I remember a vigorous debate on the topic of abortion; then and now a very controversial topic. 

What he taught me, in a broader sense, was that there are always many sides to an issue. If you're going to argue, you need to educate yourself about the issues and argue from a place of knowledge, not just be reactionary.

I've watched in horror the riots in Charlotte in the past few days, and the reaction to the shooting in Oklahoma. I am very sympathetic to the black men who were killed, and their families. I am also sympathetic to the police officers.

First, I should explain that although I grew up in the Deep South, I was raised by Republican parents who went out of their way to make sure I was NOT a racist. In the South, Democrats were the party of segregation when my parents were young. Just FYI. My parents rejected the Democratic party for a lot of reasons but that was a biggie. I was never allowed to use the N word, ever. We had black maids but I had to be respectful, and I never saw either of my parents be rude or disrespectful to any black person, ever. When I started first grade in 1968 I went to a private school, the Episcopal Day School, and there was a black child in my class. The next year I went to public school and there were no black children in the entire school. Then we moved to Knoxville when I was 8 and I was exposed to a more diverse population, although there were very few black families in my part of town. We had, as I recall, one Asian family and one Hispanic family in my middle class neighborhood. (Don't laugh, that was pretty diverse for that time and place.) I never really thought about it as a child. They were just kids, to me. Knoxville was not a terribly diverse place in the 1970's but neither was it a horribly racist place either.

I digressed, a bit. Sorry.

What most white Americans are only now slowly starting to comprehend is that black Americans have always dealt with racism and racial profiling, and it didn't magically disappear after the Civil Rights movement took hold. It continues, and it has made their lives far more stressful than any white person can  ever imagine.

We don't know what it's like to be stopped and harassed by police for absolutely no reason. I had a black work friend years ago who lived in a very nice home, and she told me her husband was stopped all the time by police when he drove through his own neighborhood to his own house. He drove a new car, dressed nicely, and had a college degree and a high-paying job and he was STILL harassed.

My friend who told me about that came from a very affluent and well-educated family. Yet, she had grown up knowing that before her birth her own grandfather had been murdered by the KKK, hung from a tree in his own front yard.

So I am highly sympathetic to the fact that the police stop and harass black folks, and Hispanic folks in some areas, and possibly Asian or other minorities in some areas. It happens every day. It SHOULD NOT happen.

However, my curse has always been that I see both sides to every issue.

 

My first cousin's son is a police detective. He is out there every day, in the community. He was a uniformed officer for several years. He puts his life in danger every time he steps outside his home. That is his job.

I'm sure police officers have a very heightened awareness of danger because they face it all the time. I cannot imagine the stress of knowing every time I left my house to go to work that I might be killed or seriously injured - not just as random possibilities but as statistical possibilities.

According to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund: "A total of 1,439 law enforcement officers died in the line of duty during the past 10 years, an average of one death every 61 hours or 144 per year. There were 123 law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty in 2015."

AND - "There have been 15,725 assaults against law enforcement officers in 2014, resulting in 13,824 injuries."

 

Does that risk, give police the right to harass folks who are not white, or to harass ANYONE? No, of course not.

I was a paralegal for many years, and a few years ago I was writing blogs for attorneys. I got an online publication that listed new lawsuits and settlements of lawsuits and I was shocked by how many of those suits involved incidents of police misconduct. It's nothing new.

I think there are solutions to the issues we're facing, as a society, but they are not easy or fast solutions. The problem has been brewing for a long time and it won't be solved quickly or easily.

The problem, however, can be basically boiled down to one word: FEAR

Police fear black folks and black folks fear the police. There is terrible history there.

Are riots and looting the answer? I don't think so. I understand why there are riots and looting. I totally get that. Anger and frustration reach a boiling point. However, riots solve nothing. They accomplish nothing good.They make the police more tense and fearful, as they struggle to control things. Fear breeds fear. Mistrust breeds mistrust.

We have to start and educate our children about Love and Forgiveness. Then we have to be diligent. We have to keep those words in the forefront of their consciousness.They have to be active verbs, not passive new-agey verbs.

We have to talk. Both sides have to be heard and respected.

Both sides have to replace Fear with Love and Forgiveness. What does that process look like? I don't fully know, nor does anybody.

However, we do know that what's happening now - the senseless shootings, the riots, the misunderstandings - those things must be replaced. We have to discard what doesn't work and figure out what does work, and that is going to be a process. In this age of quick fixes and instant gratification, we don't like to do difficult things. We want everything solved in the blink of an eye. That's not going to happen.

I've told my kids I don't care who they love so long as they love a good person. Race is irrelevant. Both my kids are mixed race themselves. They've gone to very diverse schools since they've lived in America. My daughter's boyfriend is black, so obviously she listened.

There's a famous quote that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. We have to educate our children. We have to take that step. We have to replace Fear with Love and Forgiveness, or the cycle of violence and mistrust will never end.

 

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that." -Martin Luther King