Here are my ESSAYS
“What lies behind us, and what lies ahead of us, are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.” - Henry David Thoreau
AUGUST 28, 1963
I was 13 when Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC on August 28, 1963. Being an adolescent, I was probably more concerned that day about the dwindling number of afternoons left at Manchester’s (CT) Globe Hollow Swimming Pool before my first day of ninth grade. But my lack of interest for history in the making can’t be blamed entirely on youthful self-absorption. This was during the time when our black and white console television set broadcast just three channels. The national news was on only from 6:30 to 7:00 PM when my father turned to WTIC-TV in Hartford for the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. If I didn’t happen to be in the living room during that time, I wouldn’t learn what “that’s the way it is” meant for that particular day.
I would more often find out what was happening in the country and the world when I thumbed through the latest edition of Life magazine. That’s where I would have most likely first seen the images of one of the most important American speeches of the twentieth century, but its full significance didn’t occur to me as I turned the pages on a late summer day.
In looking back, it’s understandable that I didn’t fully appreciate the vast societal changes in race relations taking place in 1963. Manchester was an almost entirely white town then; there were only a handful of African American students at Manchester High School during the years I attended there from 1964-1967. The north end of Hartford, only ten miles from my front door, might as well have been on a different planet compared to my life in Manchester. American history was taught mostly as the experiences and accomplishments of white men, so I learned little or nothing about the Middle Passage, the Underground Railroad, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, Strange Fruit, the Tuskegee Institute, Plessey v. Ferguson or Brown v. Board of Education. Without an appreciable awareness of what the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom meant, I probably tossed aside that copy of Life after I finished it without giving it another thought.
Today, of course, I more fully recognize the significance of that August day when an African American minister challenged the injustice that had made the American Dream a nightmare for so many people. Since that day an African American has sat in the Oval Office as President of the United States. Because of this and many other achievements made by African Americans since that long ago August, some say the centuries-old problem of race in America has been solved and further talk on the subject is counterproductive and self-indulgent.
However, not any single speech, no matter how powerful and eloquent, nor any single election, no matter how historical and inspiring, can by themselves fully wash away the stain on the fabric of our society caused by racism. This taint will most likely not have entirely faded away when the children of today’s children read the “I Have a Dream” speech as a part of learning about our country’s history. But perhaps, with the passage of time, school children in some future day will find it more difficult than do today’s children to understand how it was that the color of people’s skin presented such terrible problems for Americans in the past. If that is what the future holds, then August 28, 1963 may be seen as one of the major reasons why that is so.
FROM A THOU TO AN IT
I believe, when it comes to human nature, that there is nothing new under the sun, so I tend to become skeptical when I hear others, and on occasion, myself, say that people were once more thoughtful, more honest, more diligent, more whatever it was they might have been but no longer are. At the same time, our society has undergone many technological and cultural changes, some good, some not so much, since the first years of the baby-boom generation.
One of the most significant changes of the past 15 years or so has been the ever-increasing popularity of the Internet. In 1979, when I was writing a paper for my master’s degree at Connecticut College, I had to drive to the UConn library in Storrs for a book that wasn’t available any closer. I was grateful that the book was about an hour’s drive away and that I was able to get the information I needed in just one afternoon. Now, sitting at my desk in my home, it’s possible to access libraries around the country and get information I need in a matter of minutes. I’m sure for most high school students today, who have never known a time when the Internet did not exist, it doesn’t seem at all remarkable, as it still does to me, that we have access to a universal variety of information and entertainment on a phone, tablet or laptop that we can carry with us anywhere we go. My childhood and adolescence, a time without personal computers, must seem as remote in time to a high school sophomore as the days when candles were the primary source of light in the home.
But for all the ways the Internet has improved our ability to communicate, it has also had an ironic consequence: the tool that connects us to others in ways we couldn’t have imagined just a few decades ago can also be the tool that separates us from others. Blogging, tweeting, emailing, etc., as it exists today, means interacting with each other without the body language, facial expressions and tone of voice that are integral factors in getting to know other people and seeing them as individuals.
When it becomes difficult to see someone else as an individual, the connections that unite us begin to diminish and it becomes more likely we will see that person as being different from who we are. As we communicate more and more with electronic versions of each other rather than with the flesh and blood human beings we actually are, we begin to run the risk of turning another person, as Martin Buber put it, from a Thou to an It.
The chief purpose of propaganda, especially in time of war, is to create an image of the enemy as something other than who we are, in other words, to dehumanize people in order to make it psychologically easier to kill them. With propaganda, this is the intended outcome, and while this is not, of course, the purpose of social media, the effects of how we see each other might be similar. Does our widespread use of social media, with its lack of visual, auditory and tactile cues, cause us to perceive others less as persons like ourselves and more as faceless entities separate from and foreign to us? If so, have we gradually been experiencing a time of fundamental change in the ways we relate to each other as a result?
IN THE SUMMER OF 1957
In the summer of 1957, my mother, sister Jane, and I travelled by train across the country to visit my mother’s parents and her sister’s family in California for six weeks.
I have vivid memories of that experience, beginning with saying good-bye to my father at the train station in Hartford. I remember him kneeling down, holding me tight by the shoulders and looking at me with tears in his eyes. This frightened me and I cried out, “You’re crying.” He tried to assure me he wasn’t, but I was old enough to know he was, and I cried too.
My mother’s family had moved out west around the time my mother and father married in 1948. Aunt Gladys moved first with her husband Robert, a pediatrician and their daughter, Carol Jane. My grandparents joined them soon after, leaving my mom behind with only her Aunt Edith, who lived in Providence, as nearby family. As I grew older, I became aware that my mother really missed her parents and sister a lot. I have wondered from time to time, if she ever had a thought to remain in California with Jane and me. Six weeks is a long time and I understand my father’s tears at the train station, but was he also frightened, as he hugged me close to him, that he might not see his children for a much longer time than one summer?
I’ll never know whatever feelings my mother might have kept to herself at that time, of course, but the trip to California has left me with many vivid memories. I would sometimes go to the sky view dome car and take in the ever-changing vistas during the three days the train rolled across America. One night, probably the last night before arriving at our destination, I slid open the cover on the small window of the upper berth where I slept in our tiny room. Before me, I saw the desert speeding by. There were sharply delineated mountains on the faraway horizon and as I gazed at this scene, a shooting star flashed across the sky. I remember crossing the Mississippi River and thinking that it was a lake. Another time a kid on a bicycle pedaled alongside my window as the train slowly made its way down the middle of a street in a small town somewhere in the Midwest.
Uncle Bob and Aunt Gladys lived in Santa Monica. They owned an attractive ranch house on a quiet suburban street with towering palm trees on either side of the road. Their backyard had a swimming pool where Jane and I spent many afternoons. There was a little hut next to the pool where we could change into our suits and take a shower. The hut had a strange pungent smell that came from the type of wood it was made from. As I type this now, my mind recalls the scent as vividly as if I were actually there again. The backyard had a spectacular view of the San Gabriel Mountains. In the evening, they looked purple. “Purple mountain majesties” is an accurate description.
My grandparents lived in Pasadena in a small apartment building made all the more nondescript by the towering mountain that overlooked it. I’m not sure how close their home was to their Aunt Gladys and Uncle Bob’s home, but I remember going there more than once. My aunt and uncle took us on a number of day trips during our time there. I remember seeing Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm, the Santa Monica pier, Mount Wilson Observatory, and Colorado Boulevard where the Tournament of Roses parade is held on New Year’s Day.
I remember going to see Walt Disney’s Johnny Tremaine, a playground not far from my aunt and uncle’s home, my cousin Carol Jane’s teenage infatuation with Pat Boone and her repeated playing of “Love Letters in the Sand,” a woman in the house next store who would cry every night for her mommy. This sad sound scared me the first time I heard it and I went to my mom and aunt and uncle and told them that the lady next door was in trouble. My aunt and uncle laughed when I said that, so I figured everything was okay when I heard her crying on other nights. It seems strange to me now that they laughed at a neighbor’s pain as they did.
There were lots of tears from all the adults and Carol Jane when we left to return to Connecticut. I became concerned when an older boy, maybe 10 or 11, pointed to a nearby freight car and told me there was a body in it. I recall nothing about the trip back, about seeing my father again, about starting third grade shortly after returning. The last thing I remember from that summer is standing at the station, waiting for the train to bring us back to Connecticut, and looking at that freight car with dread in the pit of my stomach. All these years later, that’s where my memory of the trip to California ends.