Being old sucks. I hate the pain and sometimes confused mind. But what I rally despise is being out of touch with many things that have apparently passed me by. So I once again take to keyboard to share some of the things I believe.
The Statue of Liberty has a poem that begins “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses wearing to breathe free.”
My Irish grandmother came to these shores, arriving in Philadelphia, and wound up marrying a man who was one of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. After the Spanish-American war, the couple produced three kids. One was my mother, another my Aunt and a third who passed away at the age of 12 or so after the First World War when there was a world-wide pandemic. My Grandfather never made it back from that war, dying in the French combat trenches, about a month before the war would end. Left to make some sort of living, she cooked for Orthodox Jews on Saturdays, and cleaned houses and took in laundry. My aunt, the oldest, dressed up like a woman (she was 13) and became a telephone operator. My six year old mother began working Vaudeville as “Baby Peggy,” who sung and danced and mostly tried to look cute. She then learned typing and shorthand spending her career as a legal secretary.
I don’t know too much about my father’s side other than I’m a fifth-generation American. They were all working class people, landing in New York and doing blue collar work delivering beer to bars, and getting into the building trades. They came from a German background.
In other words, I am a product of American Labor.
So I believe that all immigrants should be given a chance to make something of themselves and help their families. But there is a huge difference between my ancestors and today’s immigrants. The culture at their time demanded that they learn to speak, read and write English. I don’t like having to put bi-lingual language on products. The print is too small and my old eyes frequently can’t read the packing.
I also think that people speaking in another language in public is impolite, and it is often in places where I’m the customer and being ignored.
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I’m peeved that I can’t send certain things to school for lunch with my kids. I am especially angry about peanut butter. I, and most of my friends grew up on PB&J. As lunch, it is cheap, filling and tastes great. Combine it with a carton of milk and it’s great.
But a very few children have allergies to peanuts. So what many want is being denied for the sake of a few. It’s political correctness taken to an extreme.
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Speaking of political correctness, I’m an American. I might be German-Irish, but I have no need to identify like that. Native Americans were called Indians. I don’t know how this came about.
Speaking of that, I grew up describing African Americans as either Negros or Colored People. After a decade of these people identifying themselves as “Black,” they are now insisting on being called African Americans. Over a lifetime it’s confusing. Though I was raised to never use the “N” word. And I watched “Amos and Andy” on TV every afternoon until my father sat me down and explained stereotypes to me.
Anyhow, I think that while people try to do what’s right, when they are met with anger for using a term that people object to, a discussion about what was said can do more than anger and screaming.
I recently got into an argument with a childhood friend who is African American. He continued to attack me for my opinion about history. I have repeatedly told him I will never understand his experience. I stated what I saw as factual history and his view was the opposite. We went from a discussion of what we believed into constant bickering and it got so ugly, I had to unfriend him – something I deeply regret but can’t figure out how to remove the unfriend command on Facebook.
But the intolerance to viewpoints that don’t match your own is causing great harm to us as a people.
For the record, I spent many years living at a farm for boys that was about 40 percent black. I never heard one racist remark. I attended a high school that was about 80 percent white and our senior year class officers. When a reporter once asked me why, I told her that the white officers we had for three years did virtually nothing and it was time for a change. I thought my best friend in high school was a black man who was a co-manager for the track team. The next year I learned he was married and had a pregnant teen wife after he killed himself driving a Corvette when working at a hotel. Obviously I didn’t know very much about what I thought was our relationship.
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I can’t stand helicopter parents. I came home from school, changed into my play clothes and went out with everyone else in the neighborhood to play, usually baseball without any supervision. We settled our own disagreements. We didn’t have portable phones. We knew when it was time to come home when it got dark. We walked or rode our bikes to school or took a school bus. After the first day of school, when our parents took us to the bus stop, we were on our own. We went to the stop as a group. We also took public transportation unescorted. I sometimes went into New York with a friend. Sometimes my mom didn’t even know. Yet I was safe.
But if we got into some real trouble, the whole neighborhood would be calling home. When I was in second grade, we lived at a lake. My buddy Bruce and I decided to walk home on the thin ice. The thunder of ice cracking was heard all over the lake and mothers started calling my mother and kept their eyes on us as we walked home. There was hell to pay for both of us when we finally reached the dock at my house.
A call from the teacher had better be about schoolwork. And a call from the principal equalled “Wait till your father gets home!” Which was a month’s grounding and/or a very red butt.
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When Personal Computers came out, I was scared of them. I didn’t know how to operate one. I bought a Mac when I was interested in getting a computer simply because it worked. Working with DOS and Windows was nearly impossible. I had no clue what the Internet was but eventually I learned. In college, I got a Mac with some great software that would permit tons of apps like PhotoShop, Illustrator, Quark and Avid. Since then, all of them have become obsolete. It is incompatible with my present Mac because of a different type of chip.
Why the hell can’t you use software once worth thousands of dollars today? Because the computer industry wants you to replace software.
The advent of smart phones is also a problem. I can send pix, text and actually make calls with my old flip phone. But I found myself staying for a couple of months in a campground without internet. Now, I have hundreds of books, shopping with Amazon for anything but fresh and frozen food. I am able to listen to songs dating back to the depression, I have television and movies, news sites, the ability to take notes, have a compass, do banking, get a taxi, get a date, text with friends and more. I used to wear a watch. But it’s built into the phone and almost all of these apps can now be put on a watch.
Guess what? I haven’t seen most of my friends in years, and at night, the girlfriend and I sit next to each other not talking while on our phones and Kindles.
I yearn for the days when there was a phone mounted to the wall and am becoming convinced that I could live without cell phones. But I’m just too addicted.
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As I get older, I don’t drive anymore and my phone is my lifeline to the world. Though I must admit that Uber and mass transit is far cheaper than car payments, insurance, fuel and maintenance.
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Once upon a time, I wore a tee shirt bragging “Yea though I walk through the valley of death, I shall fear no evil, ‘cause I’m the meanest S.O.B. in the valley.”
These days the tees I wear say ‘I’ve been through hell, but I’m still standing.’
But now I’m thinking of buying a shirt that says ‘life sucks and then you die.’
Or perhaps, “If I knew what was going to happen, I never would have come out of the womb.”
So anyhow, dear reader, “live long and prosper.”
