MisterCairo
I'll Lock Up
- Messages
- 7,005
- Location
- Gads Hill, Ontario
I just like the cars,...
I agree with Zombie_61 (!!!) about the way our parents and relatives were and why they were that way. They all had twenty difficult years that my generation never had, if you ignore Vietnam, which wasn't much like WWII (unless you went there). I have no idea who Loeb and Hollenbeck were. I also grew up in a blue collar neighborhood. My father never attended high school and struggled with reading. I graduated from college, the first in my family to do so. Only a couple of my relatives did but none I saw regularly.
I have no memory of any student smoking around school when I was in junior high or high school but I'm sure some did. But since so many people smoked, it probably wouldn't have made any impression on me. The usual joke is that you learn to smoke from the janitor down in the boiler room, which was probably never true. But I did work on a tobacco farm one summer and I can tell you that the tar they talk about is literally tar. It is black and a little gummy and comes off on your hands when you handle the plant. But everyone knew that cigarettes were unhealthy. They were being called coffin nails and cancer sticks before I was born. There was even a popular country & western song in the 1950s about smoking.
"Tell St. Peter at the Golden Gate that you hate to make him wait, but you just gotta have another cigarette!"
Someone once told me that old people make poor role models. They are impatient and bitter about everything. I think he may have had a point.
Someone once told me that old people make poor role models. They are impatient and bitter about everything. I think he may have had a point.
Someone once told me that old people make poor role models. They are impatient and bitter about everything. I think he may have had a point.
Remember the "Cyclamate scare" of the mid-to-late 1970's? The trumped-up fears were bogus because you had to consume more cyclamates than you normally would in a course of five lifetimes to make the artificial sweetener a true carcinogenic threat.
My feelings about the period, I will freely admit, are motivated to a great extent by the fact that had I been born in 1913 instead of 1963, I could have easily been listed in Red Channels myself, right there on page 109 between Paul McGrath and Burgess Meredith.
Painful lesson in life to realize at age nine that your own dear sweet grandmother is full of crap... but I digress.
Certainly was true as far as my maternal grandmother and her sister. They were the most bigoted individuals that a kid should ever have to deal with. Had I ever used the N- word in my house, either my mother or father would have washed out my mouth with soap. My dear, sweet grandmother and her sister threw it around without thinking. But they were, in their defense, equal opportunity bigots. Anyone who was not Irish Catholic was, to one degree or the other, the child of a lesser God. (And there were quite a few of their own Irish Catholic tribe- they'd dismiss that sort as "shanty Irish"- who were never good enough for them, to be fair.) But of course, anyone who dared to criticize the Catholic Church was an intolerant bigot.
And there were elements of contradiction and inconsistency in all of it as well. Grandmother was a big supporter of FDR and the New Deal (although she never quite trusted Eleanor)... but she also regarded Father Charles Coughlin as somewhat of a hero as well. (To her credit, my mom did her utmost to distance herself from the racism and anti-Semitism. I was taught that all were entitled to equality before the law, and that I would do well to emulate Jewish kids who "studied hard in school and will end up making something good with their lives." Grandmother's wet blanket on all of this was that some of those Jewish kids ended up studying too hard and went mad, like Leopold and Loeb. Painful lesson in life to realize at age nine that your own dear sweet grandmother is full of crap... but I digress.
To be quite honest, the best thing that could ever actually did happen, and provided a needed reality check to their bigotry (tribalism, really): my grandmother's brother was murdered during a street robbery gone bad in 1977 by a black man in Newark in 1977. Now, you'd think that kind of an experience would entrench a bigot even more... but not so. They had to travel to the hospital in Newark from Chicago, and they saw a side of decent, caring, law abiding African Americans at a time when they were most vulnerable. Every kindness, courtesy and favor that could be shown to another person in that unfortunate circumstance was shown to those two old ladies, and on numerous occasions. When they returned home, all the two of them could do was go on about how well they were treated, the kindnesses shown them, how gracious everyone was, etc. Perhaps they felt guilty for misjudging an entire race and were trying to compensate: I have no idea. They were not quite ready to be the poster kids for National Brotherhood Week, mind you. But I never heard the N- word out of their mouths after that.
Two things, Leopold and Loeb is one absolutely insane story. And that they might (might) have gotten away with it all but for a quirky hinge on a pair of eyeglasses is crazy. And it bugs me to this day that Leopold had a life after prison, more so than his victim.
And, two, I often think that my dad and mom's, for the time, open attitude toward different races, religions, even homosexuality had to do with the fact that they both grew up dirt poor but in mixed neighborhoods so they saw that people of all backgrounds are pretty similar away from the surface / cultural differences. When you're kids and you're all running around in near rags, worried about the next meal - the gender, color, culture of the kids in the group seemed like a small difference. My dad had a very diverse set of friends - fifty years before that word became trendy - but they would kid each other hard about their difference in a way that would offend many today - but they were all friends for life.
I asked my grandmother how it was for her during the times of
the depression.
She told me that it was all the same for everyone in the neighborhood.
She added that it was mostly the rich folks that got hit the
hardest when they lost most of everything.
I think being rich would be divine! But I don't think Jesus wanted us to be wealthy, contrary to what is sometimes preached. I think there is still a strong belief, stronger in some places than others, that the social order was divinely ordered, which is not to say it was heavenly for everyone. The most important thing was that people know their place in the hierarchy and to never get too big for their britches.
Ultimately, that vaguely feudal system goes back a thousand years and was not based on heavenly favoritism but rather on decidedly earthly royal favoritism. In this country, that is how just a few well-placed individuals wound up with large estates. They were simply given title to vast amounts of land. It happened in New France, New Spain and in the American Colonies. I suspect some property around North American is still held by descendants of colonial land grants.
The Gent who was responsible for maintaining and repairing the computer equipment at my last place of employment told me a story one day that I found interesting. One of his neighbors, and good friend, worked for Bill Gates. Yes, that Bill Gates. He not only worked for him, but was part of Mr. Gates' "inner circle" of close and valued associates, i.e. people Mr. Gates believed he could trust. Now, this neighbor/friend didn't plan for this to happen, and readily admitted that he was no better at his job than many other people in his occupation, but Mr. Gates took a liking to him and deliberately placed him in a position within the organization for which he would be ridiculously well compensated. Not long after this happened said neighbor/friend began exhibiting symptoms of severe depression with no apparent cause, and eventually found himself being examined by a psychologist. During his therapy sessions he learned two things. The first was that the depression was actually a manifestation of guilt. The second was that this happens to most people who suddenly find themselves being paid large amounts of money but doing so little to actually earn it--they feel guilty about being paid so much for doing so little while so many people are struggling to make ends meet--and that it happens so often that the "experts" had to create a name for this syndrome. His neighbor/friend was able to recover with some help, but a lot of these people don't recognize or admit they have a problem, hence the self-medication with their poison of choice.I worked as a butler for one year in Beverly Hills. I put the question to someone who had been around. Why did these folks all have the lavish swimming pools, tennis courts and several expensive cars? Some didn’t know a thing about tennis but had to have a court or a yacht. He told me basically that these folks were not born rich. When they became successful, they lavish themselves with many material things they never had before. A reminder that they had made it and were successful. Sadly, some did not know how to cope with the change. Using medications with fatal results...
A recently deceased friend (diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer in September, dead in January) had himself lost a brother to cancer a couple three or four years earlier. My friend did what he reasonably could to accommodate his brother's desires during the final months of his life. This turned into his passing many an hour at the tribal casino, which had me wondering just what motivated the dying fellow. Hit it big and be dead in a matter of weeks anyway? But then, he had the gambling bug, and I don't. There's apparently something in it that's all but entirely lost on me.