Memories Are Strange Things

If you are sure that you are right, you are probably wrong

(This is by me, the Radical Individualist, but was initially published in Liberty Magazine)

Memories are strange things

I have memories from when I was young.  Youth is both an age and a way of seeing things. Youth is a time of seeing things as clearly being either good and bad, right and wrong. Nuance is not a thing. I look back; times have changed, and so has my perspective.

I remember being a grade school student, growing up in the afterglow of the end of WWII. The USA was the hero. So many of my teachers were ex-soldiers or had otherwise served the war effort.  And all of the adults had direct memories of approximately ten years of the worst depression ever, followed by approximately five years of the worst war ever. As a newly minted child, I grew up in that after glow, that time when we had truly gone, nearly over night, from the worst of times to the best of times.

But I was a child.  I could sense this, but it was beyond my comprehension.  Television was brand new, but as a child I didn’t know that. I remember a friend saying ‘Let’s watch TV” and the term “TV” was so new, I didn’t know what he meant by it. I remember the westerns and war shows and movies on television. They were all the same show.  There were good guys and bad guys, and you knew going in that the good guys would be threatened by the bad guys but by the end of the show, the good guys would win. I see now, it was appropriate for the time. War movies were an abstract form of entertainment for a young child who knew nothing of it.  For the adults, it was continual affirmation that what they had been through was worth it. Westerns were hugely popular, always depicting an untamed West that needed taming. The Westerns were really just repackaged war movies.  Exactly the same themes. Either way, we faced down that adversary, and won.  I remember watching ‘High Noon’, and not getting it.  The adults got it.

Yes, I remember that all was right with the world, while knowing very little of the world.  I remember a time, I was perhaps fourteen years old, when only my mother and I were at home, and the TV was on.  Mom had turned it on, and some sort of news show was playing.  Kids don’t watch news. But this  show intrigued me.  I tried to understand but it made no sense.  Apparently, there was some issue with a kid going to school.  Big wig politicians were pontificating about it while they showed video of a kid being barred from entering school.  I could relate to a kid going to school because I went to school, but what did big wigs have to do with it?  I asked Mom what it was all about.  She said, “They won’t let the child attend that school because she’s Negro.”  I was perplexed.  “Why not? “ I asked. “I don’t KNOW why not!” She was pissed like I rarely saw her pissed, but I still didn’t understand. I wish now that she would have explained the facts of life to me about it, but she was too frustrated, and perhaps felt I was too young to understand. 

I was fifteen when Kenedy was assassinated. I didn’t believe my classmate when he first told me.  We don’t have assassinations.  The only assassination I knew of was Lincoln, and that was over a century ago. Instant video didn’t exist as it does today, and few people had a camera, much less a movie camara, even when the president was driving by. So, there is only one video of the assassination, and it was months before we saw it. I was young enough that I didn’t fully comprehend the ramifications. Presidents exist in a far-off land and do things that make the country greater, but which have little to do with me.

When I was seventeen, I can remember thinking that, yes, there were some frayed edges around governmental authority, but that it mostly worked well, and you could leave our leaders to their own devices. Vietnam was a country that few had heard of, at least few young people had. Kennedy had sent ‘military advisors’ there to help in some civil war, or something. Then the new president, LBJ, ramped things up.  The rest, as they say, is history. I ended up being 1A, a very significant term at the time.  It meant I was eligible to be drafted into the army.  I had been called up for my physical and was ‘this close’ to going to Vietnam.  And I no longer thought of politicians as insignificant to my life.

But I didn’t end up going to Vietnam.  New president.  Richard Nixon.  People love to hate him today, although most know him only as the mythological ogre that they have been taught to hate in school.  But he is one of the most significant presidents America has ever had. 

Yes, I’m biased.  The man shut down the war before I got sent to Vietnam.  He ran on a promise to end the war, and trounced Hubert Humphrey, LBJ’s vp, who was one of the main reasons for the Vietnam fiasco. By then, I was a bit older, a bit wiser. I was glad to not go to Vietnam, but I also knew that our opponents in the war were The Soviet Union and China, and that they were brutal dictatorships.  (Remember High Noon?) In spite of the promise to end the Vietnam war if elected, Nixon did not immediately do it. He expanded the war into neighboring Cambodia. I was conflicted.  I wanted it to all end, but Cambodia was ruled by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. They were so ruthless, they made Mao Zedong look like a sissy. They inspired the movie “The Killing Fields”, depicting the wholesale slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Should Nixon have just let it happen, and gotten the hell out of there as promised?  Ultimately, he did.  And so, I didn’t have to go. But without USA support, South Vietnam collapsed (There was a North and a South Vietnam.  You knew that, didn’t you?) There was a flood of Vietnamese to, of all places, the USA after the war ended. I thought at the time, and still do; why are there refugees AFTER the war? The answer, which the media would not cover, was that there was a persecution of Vietnamese who had allied with the USA during the war.  Many didn’t make it out alive. Our history books today seem to represent the Vietnamese war as something in which the USA was entirely wrong and imperialistic.  But on the other side of that war were the sickest, deadliest mass murderers who have ever existed on this planet.  The history books seem to not mention that. But I’m not sorry I didn’t go.  Thank you, Nixon.

Nixon also created the EPA.  And promoted the endangered species act. Environmentalism was in its infancy. The pollution was palpable, far worse than today. Somebody had to do something.  Nixon did it.

Nixon also normalized relations with China. It was 1971, and I was twenty-three. I had just taken a teaching job, my first real professional job. Neither I nor anyone, even Nixon, anticipated what normalizing relations would portend. There was exactly zero trade with China. Our former enemy, Japan was our major supplier of electronics.  The upstart Japanese company, Sony, had realized the implications of the new American invention, the transistor, and was leading the way in transistorized electronics. Japan was, in fact, one of our major suppliers of everything. Backing up a few years, to just after WWII, I remember when I was a kid and tore into a metal animated toy dog.  I’ve always been curious about what’s inside things and how they work. It turns out that the formed metal dog’s body was made from a used Maxwell House coffee can.  Yes, coffee cans were metal then. In the span of little more than ten years, Japan had gone from the destitution after the war to economic success; from making toy dogs from old coffee cans to leading the world in the manufacture of electronics.  Shortly thereafter, Toyota and Honda would revolutionize automobile manufacturing, and invade the American market.

But I was talking about China, remember?  Nixon normalized relations with China, in an attempt to drive a wedge between communist China and communist Soviet Union.  Largely, it worked. “Made in China” is a pretty normal tag to see on almost anything you buy.  It used to most generally be “Made in Japan”. Nixon only wanted to drive a wedge between China and the Soviet Union. I doubt that he anticipated China becoming an economic powerhouse, largely controlling world markets, including our own. For better or worse, if Nixon had not taken the initiative in normalizing relations with China, who knows what the world would look like today?

And I came to realize that, for better AND worse, those dried up politicians in a far-off city make a huge difference in our lives. And I realized that things are not all that black and white. Japan, one of the worst enemies we ever had is now an important ally. China, which was our ally in WWII, and subjugated by Japan, is now an adversary. Yet, we continue trade, continue complaining about their actions; but otherwise, it’s business as usual.  At least for now…

But not only have the times changed, I have changed. I don’t so easily categorize people and organizations as good guys and bad guys.  It was never that simple; it was just that my outlook was simple.

I see that cops are people.  That means there’s good ones and bad ones.  I know from personal knowledge that there are cops who hassle minorities needlessly.  Yet, at the same time, I know that far more cops are shot to death, than shoot to death.  I see a media that refuses to be even-handed.  The media have an agenda, and facts are secondary.  I know that Michael Brown of Ferguson, MO was shot to death in self defense by a cop that Brown very likely would have killed, if he got the chance.  I know that because the incident is well-documented, observed by multiple black witnesses who, to a person, testify that the officer fired in self-defense.  I also know this because Attorney General Eric Holder’s own investigative report tells me this.  It exonerates the cop. Yet, Holder publicly fanned the flames of hated of cops, as did the president at that time. For more than a year, media buffoons went around chanting “Hands up, don’t shoot”.  That is based on pure myth.

I know that the coroner’s report makes NO finding that Geroge Floyd was choked or suffocated. Yet, the media tells us he was.  Nobody does their own homework anymore.  Whatever the media tells us is taken as gospel. Have you read the coroner’s report on Floyd?  It’s right there online, easy to find.  Did you read Eric Holder’s report on the Michael Brown death?  Didn’t think so.  It, too, is easy to find.

I said a moment ago, that with age comes the realization that little is black and white.  I might make an exception for the media.  They pretty much always push their agenda, rather than report facts. But let’s get back to some of those grey areas. When I was younger, I presumed that if a person was found guilty, then they WERE guilty.  Sure, there is the occasional unfortunate exception of an innocent person being convicted.  I now see how wrong I was. When blacks complain about being hassled by cops, I’m not quite so sure that they are wrong.  Then again, the cops that get shot are disproportionately shot by black people.  I’d be a fool to think that there’s a one-way street, here. The TV crime shows show the bad guy getting caught just before the end of the hour.  All nice and tidy.  We know he’s guilty, the cops catch him, all’s right with the world.  Reality is not so neat and clean.

I see that courts are largely just mills, grinding up citizens in the name of justice. Courts are there for the lawyers, not for the public, not for the citizens.  If you don’t have money, you don’t get justice.  If you do have money, and influence, you can buy your own ‘justice’. Unless you are a big wig in the wrong party. Then the judge will rule against you, and there’s not much you can do, except change parties.  Do I sound jaded?  Remember, I didn’t start out this way. I have simply observed. I am simply reporting.

It's been a long strange trip.  It’s not over.  It’s not getting better. It’s not all bad, to be sure, but still, it’s not getting better. Our memory of history is not a measure of reality, but of myth.  Good guys and bad guys.  Nobody wants to equivocate.  Equivocating is hard, and very unsatisfying.  Better to pick a side, and be a cheerleader.  Better to pick a bad guy to see as an immediate threat, than to face the unknown with uncertainty. Civilizations throughout time have picked random persons to demonize and eliminate.  It’s very satisfying that way. You really feel like you’re accomplishing something. Germany was going to erase its problems by erasing Jews.  The people of Salem would erase their inner sense of sin and iniquity by hanging the witches which they found all over the place, among themselves. I’m sure it made them feel much better.

What makes you feel better?  What simple-minded horseshit belief do you have, that makes you feel better?  Is it about the cops?  Those black people?  Those white people?  Those rich people? Those capitalists?  Those socialists? Who have you oversimplified and objectified?  Does it make you feel better?  Is feeling better all that matters?  Is there something inside yourself that says, “I know it’s not this simple.” Is there something inside yourself that recognizes that it’s the stuff of childhood, to see easy black and white answers? Ignorance is bliss.  Adulthood is tough. But it’s time.  Be an adult.

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