Laughter, Politics, War and Race

LAUGHTER: Monday morning I had brunch with my Red Hat Society sisters before we went to the multiplex movie theater near-by. I hadn’t been to an I-Hop in over a decade so I was looking forward to it. Where else can you get an enormous sugar high before noon and we should do it more often. We were being old, honest women opening up about our changing bodies and our sense of humors were operating on all their cylinders. Yup, I had a great time. After the movie we stopped for ice cream at one of those places where you build your own sundae and pay for it by the pound. I was relieved that my sundae wasn’t the heaviest one in the group. It was a pig-out-day, and I paid the piper with a pair of tighter pants. Next time I’ll remember to wear an elastic-waisted model.

POLITICS: The movie we saw was The Woman in Gold. What a good film! It was based on the true story of an elderly Jewish refugee who fought the Austrian government in the courts to recover artwork she believed---and eventually proved---belonged to her family. The Woman in Gold was valued at 135 million dollars and it was considered to be the crown jewel in the Austrian art world and they didn’t want to let it go. Sounds boring, doesn’t it, but it’s not by any means. There’s a lot of flashbacks to when Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany and the topic was kept from getting too dark by the interplay between the main characters, octogenarian (Helen Mirren) and her young lawyer (Ryan Reynolds) which was often laugh-out-loud funny. If you like story-lines that are ripped from the pages of the history books, don’t miss this movie.  

WAR: The next day I went to a lecture titled Mr. Lincoln’s War given by a Fulbright Scholar and history professor from a near-by college. He was born and raised in Texas, still had a southern drawl and he had a gift for making history relevant to modern times. He was also great at interjecting humor into his presentation and that kept it from being dry and boring. As I sat listening to him describe the ‘Velvet Glove’ approach to war as opposed to the ‘Iron Fist’ approach I finally got it---got why people join Civil War Round Tables. When he talked about how the Confiscation Acts helped to humanize the slaves that had been confiscated when found doing work for the Confederate military, I was fascinated. He made you want to hear more. Especially when he touched on how the war fed into West Michigan (where I live) becoming---at one point in history---the most segregated state in the union. 

When the lecture was over a woman came up to the microphone and she asked any women in the audience having ancestors who served in Civil War to come up front to see her. I did, along with seven or eight others. We were invited to join the Daughters of the Civil War. I asked what they do at their monthly meetings and she talked about their projects around the community. When she calls with more information, I just might give the group a try. If nothing else, she offered to take me to my ancestor’s grave at the Veteran’s Home. Her group actually plants flowers on his plot! 

RACE: Honestly, it gets increasingly hard to keep a blog and not write about current events. It feels weird sometimes to be writing about milk toast when the media is serving up chili pepper pie. However, I probably won’t shock anyone if I write about growing up in a white bread community where the only black people I ever saw were the bathroom attendants in the department stores downtown. It might, however, surprise people to know that here it is sixty years later and the only black people I see day-to-day are on TV. I thought about all this a few weeks ago when there was a panel discussion on a local news segment on how businessmen here in West Michigan are concerned about the lack of diversity in the community. Headhunters, they said, are having a hard time recruiting specialists, scientists, doctors, chemists, engineers, etc., to move here to work in our growing medical research facilities and their supporting industries. Surprise, surprise people of color want to live in a more diverse environment. The recruiters, it should be noted, are recruiting from all over the world. It seems we’re not producing enough professionals here in the States to fill our growing needs.... 

….And yet too many politicians want to bleed the schools dry, demoralize teachers by chipping away at their benefits and not invest in higher education. Does that make sense, especially in places where there’s so much civil unrest, due in no small part, to the fact that industrial bases have disappeared drying up all the middle class jobs? When I hear fans of FOX TV pundits parrot: "Baltimore is all the President’s fault” I can’t help wondering how it feels to live in such a simple-minded world where everything is Obama's fault, where history has no relevance to current events, and where white America never, ever has to accept an iota of blame for any chaos that goes on around the world. Please don't misconstrue that to mean I'm giving a free pass to those creating the violence and destruction in Baltimore. I'm not giving a pass to anyone; what's going down there is wrong, plain and simple. I'm just saying it's far more complicated than a catchy, baseless bullet point from FOX pundits and tweets from the likes of Donald Trump. We didn't blame Bush for the 1992 LA riots after the beating of Rodney King and to blame Obama, now, for Baltimore's disenfranchised is race baiting in its most insidious form. And it bugs me, can you tell?

Note: I'll go back to serving up milk toast in my weekend post. Maybe sweet, savory milk toast with a clown face gracing the top. ©