It Happened: Selma, East Tennessee, Antigua and Atlanta

The president of the Oak Ridge Unitarian Universalist Church, ORUUC, gave one of the April 2015 sermons. He had just come back from Selma, Alabama and the March 2015 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. Tens of thousands were in Selma for that 50th Anniversarty, with people packed so tightly “you couldn’t fall to the ground.” The national UU magazine shows dense crowds crossing the iconic Edmund Pettus bridge. One phrase heard that Sunday morning at ORUUC went “All those others—we weren’t like them.” “We” were in the minority.

I have been in Antigua, an island country in the Caribbean, several times for steelpan festivals and activities. There I too am in the minority. I am the one with the accent. I am not like most others there—but in ways of little significance.

“Moods of Pan” is a steelpan festival in Antigua the end of each November. One has to take care not to sunburn 🙂 . I have seen modern legends of steel such as the steel orchestra Exodus there in 2007. I have met deities of the worldwide pan firmament such as Len “Boogsie” Sharp, also 2007. I even still have a quiz show prize, a Citizen wrist watch, from Moods of Pan 2005. I flabbergasted the emcees when an obvious outlander knew enough to answer pan questions. I  simply ran up to the mic at the stage with no hesitation.

One year at Moods of Pan, the Five Alive Competition was about to begin, one evening at St. John’s Cultural Center. Five Alive is of Antiguan origin and requires groups of five musicians to play pan for five minutes of prescribed pieces—usually with everything having genuinely comedic touches. Web sites state it has spread to other islands’ festivals. Google “five alive competition moods of pan festival”.

I saw many obvious pieces of trash around the Cultural Center grounds that evening. I decided to pick up the trash, hopefully before the competition started. There was a fair amount, and I saw no one doing that. I came up with a a good deal and disposed of it. I don’t remember anyone thanking or complimenting me, and I don’t remember feeling a need for thanks or complements. We were all there “In Pan”, it could use doing, and I did it. Till this morning in Oak Ridge, Tennessee in 2015 I had forgotten about it all.

Again, in Antiguan events like this I am the minority. I am the one with an accent.

I remember also that before the Five Alive competition a young lady passed by, grinned, and pleasantly asked “Doug, remember me?” I didn’t. She was referring to some visit of mine to Saint John’s pan events in the early 2000s, and, she called me by name. I didn’t remember hers. I ducked, I fumbled some reply. It was all funny. The evening and Five Alive went on.

“It happened” ….

Closer to East Tennessee home: I played pan in three parades, two of them through downtown Atlanta. One was in Gatlinburg, TN in front of thirty thousand people. I played double guitar pan in both Atlanta parades and double tenor pan in Gatlinburg. I find interesting observations to make about those in the parades and those watching the parades.

The first Atlanta parade was the 2008 Memorial Day Atlanta Caribbean Fest Parade, the second was the 2009 Chik Fil A Bowl Parade in December of that year, and the Gatlinburg parade was Fourth of July 1996. Both Atlanta parades were through the heart of the city. For wry amusement I mention that Chik Fil A Bowl in 2009 was the last UTK football game for the ill-fated Lane Kiffin. Remember that game … 🙂 ?

In the 2008 Atlanta parade the steel band played on a float—well, on a large, sightly decorated trailer pulled by an F350— maybe eight by twenty or twenty-five full of huge audio equipment and full of people, at least twenty people or even two dozen. I was the one light—that is, white—colored person on the float. I monitored chat on the float and in the crowds on the sidewalks, out of curiosity as to what might pass. I never heard any hushed or not so hushed comments like “Look at the freakishness” or “Look at the whitey” on colors.

I don’t remember the mix on the sidewalks. Which, in fact, is interesting.

The 2009 Atlanta parade occurred on a damp gray winter afternoon, with the same trailer. We had I believe four light/white color folk, including my old colleague Karen of UTK InterVols steelband days in the 80s. This parade also I heard nothing about colors, on the float or in the crowds.

“It happened.”

In Gatlinburg the ratios on the float—yes, that parade had a decorated, sponsored float —were unlike other parades, maybe two to one or fifty-fifty, but again I remember no chat regarding colors, on the float or in the watching crowds.

And, yes, I’ve been across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, but it was a “UU Tour of the Civil Rights South”, by bus, years ago. We saw in Selma what must’ve been “The Brickyard”. We met, I believe it was, the mayor of Selma, a “black woman”. Can one say she “was”, that one “is”, black? That I “am white”? I have known and seen many people who had skin pigmented dark brown or creamy white. I have seen few people coal black or albino white. Can we say there is a Black Experience? Or a White Experience? Of a sorts yes. Can we not say there are things universal beyond Black? Or White? Yes.

“Upcoming!”

“POTENTIAL POSTS’ STARTS!”

Likely for the (hopefully near) future. In progress, on WordPress; not elsewhere.

“Vessel Is Half Full”: Noble Savage (Dryden, Rousseau, et al), “The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit” (Melvin Konner), “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature” (Steven Pinker), “Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage” (LeBlanc & Register), “The Third Chimpanzee” (Jared Diamond), E. O. Wilson, …, Inspired by a recent social media post to the effect “Children at birth are empty vessels, devoid of even character. Be careful how you fill them.”

“Take Off Yer Hat When Ya Mention Sex Here. It’s a Reverint Subject.”

— Mauldin, Bill, WWII infantryman/cartoonist, “Up Front”, Bantam, (c) 1945, p. 152, cartoon with “Willie and Joe”, caption. (Three grizzled dogfaces in dugout with skinny young “sojer” freshly shaved, bespectacled, and with helmet on).

— Also, Leonard, George, “The End of Sex” in “Esquire” December 1982; described as a requiem for the sexual revolution–interesting concept; we had to think that possibility up? Interesting concept as to content as well as ways of human thinking.

— As well, “Quest 80” and “Quest 81” magazines: Sex is less casual than it is deep, personal, dark.

— The starts of something here.

“The Rhinoceros Whisperer” Mammals cats to rhino[e]s to homo sapiens.

(F’instance 🙂 ):

• My cats, Domdaniel and Tip, who will approach, not just in the morning, head-butting or otherwise acting excited, and extend a hand–excuse me, paw–toes spread in excitement, then touch some part of me. Tip (14 lbs.) has a bad habit of lightly snagging my skin in the process. Or, stretching while greeting, they will extend the paw & leg, wait, then touch me or even “shake hands”: Domdaniel (7 lbs.) curls his paw and claws around my finger that’s on the bottom of his shank, and hold for ten or fifteen seconds as I stroke some part of his paw. He then lets go and I follow up with a stroke on the side of his head (where, BTW, a cat has scent glands). One more item: Tip loves to flop on his side next to the food dish that has kibbles, reach in with his paw, scoop out a pawful, drop it on the floor, then chomp away on the floor. I have some cell pix of his reaching in. He also just drags the food and water dishes around–I warned one house and cat sitter about dishes moving between visits–for I can’t discern what reason.
•                “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself”–Walt Whitman (Father of American Poetry)
•                “It is a sign of intelligence to keep two contradictory ideas in one’s brain without going insane”–attributed to F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Yep, as the modern infantry soldier doesn’t quite say, “Upcoming!” Some will get the reference.

DARFUR’S FIELDS

DARFUR’S FIELDS

After John McCrae

In Darfur’s fields the janjaweed grow

Between the bodies blow by blow

hacked to limb and torso,

While beneath the sky

The vultures, roughly muzzling, ply

The choppers’ kills and feed below.

Blue-hat troops, where did you go?

We are the kids, the moms, the dads who days ago

Dug wells, taught school, beseeched crops “Don’t die”

In Darfur’s fields.

Rape, control us, new millennium of foes.

At your guns from human hearts we throw

The recurring human tale; a dreadful fate draws nigh

If we break faith with those who die

In worldwide lands though weeds grow

In Darfur’s fields.

by Doug LaVerne, 2014 ff.

[This piece is a poem that is in and of itself; it is not a copy of or a version of another. I put this in a reply to an organization’s forceful postings on the disparity in world reaction to “Charlie …” in Europe and Garissa in Kenya. “Darfur …” was one paltry offering in these matters].

Favorite Quotes, from FB

• • “After observation and analysis, when it agrees with reason and is conducive to the good of one and all, then accept it, practice it, and live up to it.”–attributed to Buddha.

    “When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of Truth and Love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and, for a time they seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it–always.” –Mahatma Gandhi

    “Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.” – Helen Keller

    “The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have made some difference that you have lived and lived well.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson. Duh! Good way to be (omigosh) happy.

    “Brother! You say there is but one way to worship and serve the Great Spirit. If there is but one religion why do you white people differ so much about it? Why do you not all agree, as you can all read the book?” – Red Jacket, Iroquois (Thanks Chuck).

    “Trouble no one about his religion.
    Respect others in their views and demand that they respect yours.
    Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life.
    Seek to make your life long and of service to your people.”
    –Chief Tecumseh (1768-1813)

    “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
    —Albert Einstein

    “Women are not inherently passive or peaceful. We’re not inherently anything but human.” ~ Robin Morgan
    Thanks Kr. D.

    “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself….” — Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” [cf. Bartlett’s 489:21]

The Difference Between the Political Parties: Letter to the Editor

If Democrats tax and spend, Republicans no-tax and spend.

Doug LaVerne …

Oak Ridge, TN 37830

[This was it, nine words. Published I believe 2007 or 2008 in the Knoxville News Sentinel’s Letters to the Editor. I am trying to find a copy of the printed page. This was not edited down. There is a tee-shirt of the above with professionally done graphics. Obama’s campaign returned the tee I sent them saying “No gifts”; no one else did].

Civil Government, Power, and Religion: Letter to the Editor

From: Doug_L
To: [Knoxville News Sentinel]
Subject: Letter to the editor

Re Cal Thomas’ Wednesday 11/10 column:

Have liberals kept from imposing on the rest of the population these many
years? No. Will the right wing keep from imposing on the rest of the
population, having gotten power? No.

All through the 80s and 90s when I donated politically, to whomever, I wrote
on my donation slips “If those in charge of the Congress don’t solve the
problem of budget deficits, the system is going to go belly up and the
social programs they themselves prize will be down the tubes.”

Now the Right wing, the Religious Right, will make the mistakes that come
with getting power. It make take two or three decades to play out, as it has
with liberals and moderates, but it will happen. People are people.

The Religious Right will attempt to impose theocracy. They may succeed. Cal
Thomas may not be of the religious stripe of the new ruling class.

Mr. Thomas says everything except that theocracy _isn’t_ coming.

Faith and belief belong in the hearts and minds of individuals. Religion,
one brand of religion, does not belong in the civil government. Would you
want a Mormon sect to come to power, then impose their religious vision on
the public, the whole public? Muslim? Catholic? The Founding Fathers took
pains to believe, write and act on the idea that the civil government,
rather than being explicitly of, for, or by one religious view was neutral
in respect to all views.

Mandate? No. Johnson against Goldwater was a mandate. Nixon against McGovern
was a mandate. 51% is not.

I am not approving or disapproving any of the above. I am
warning, [warning] conservatives and liberals, even moderates.

For their own good, for everyone’s good, those in power need to exercise
care. They need to realize there are always values, serious values, other
than their own.

Doug LaVerne …
Oak Ridge, TN

[Published in Knoxville News Sentinel, Knoxville, TN, 2004. The foregoing is more the original than the edited, published version. I am trying to find a published copy. Realize also Letters to the Editor were limited to 300 words].

Pilfer This Post: Freedoms, Costs, and the Human Prospect

PILFER THIS NOTE: Freedoms, Costs, and the Human Prospect

September 8, 2013 at 4:10am

“Freedoms, Costs,and the Human Prospect”

Doug LaVerne

Non-fiction

Word Count: ~1,200

FREEDOMS, COSTS, AND THE HUMAN PROSPECT

I am free to run down to Subway deli at midnight to get a sandwich, or to drive hundreds of miles to Memphis to view the exhibit “World War II Through Russian Eyes,” or to cuss the politicians, all without interrogation. It’s the American way.

I had an acquaintance called, simply, Nasta, who lived in Croatia. He’s known worldwide in a sub-culture focused around an obscure pre-Mac, pre-PC computer. Several years ago he found it important that he drive to a computer meeting in Western Europe. Messages in electronic discussions revealed he had to be careful to find out first which roads were being shelled.

Also, several years ago I started corresponding with a woman in Ontario. She told me her job was to adjust immigrants and refugees to life in Canada. One man from Eastern Europe surprised her. He was quite happy despite living in a hole of abasement. He explained, “Nobody’s shooting at me here.”

Winning and preserving freedoms has often involved war. War is not all glamor or glory or sightseeing, as some of Bill Mauldin’s civilians thought in his book “Up Front” (Henry Holt and Company, 1945). We fortunate civilians should make ourselves aware of what those on the front lines go through. In a way it can’t be done, but we have to try.

Consider the article that appeared in newspapers June 7th, 1999,entitled “The Fight for Freedom Never Ends” by Ian Phillips of the Associated Press.  Veterans observing the D-Day fifty-fifth anniversary said they were proud of their 1944 D-Day exploits but wouldn’t wish warfare on anyone:

” ‘War is the greatest catastrophe known to mankind,’ said 81-year-old Belton Cooper, … who waded ashore onto Omaha Beach in 1944. ‘It must be avoided at all cost.’

“Len Lomell, a Ranger from New Jersey who scaled cliffs at Pointe du Hoc on D-Day … said: ‘War is insane. Ridiculous. I don’t want to see one American boy die in the Balkans.'”

Lomell appears in Stephen Ambrose’s book “Citizen Soldiers.”

Paul Fussell, a historian and a WWII veteran who appears in Ken Burns’ “The War,” has written a graphic, classic article on the horrors of war. It’s the cover essay of the August 1989 “Atlantic Monthly,” entitled “The Real War 1939-1945: An Exercise in Horror and Madness.” The article is so explicit one usually does not quote details in polite company. Why?

Hear some paraphrases of Fussell—I can hardly improve on him (these are paraphrases, not quotes):

Front line soldiers might be hurt, even killed, by violently detached parts of friends’ bodies. If someone asked a wounded Marine what hit him, they wouldn’t be prepared for the answer “My buddy’s head,” or a leg, or the sergeant’s heel or hand.

A coxswain of a landing vessel at Tarawa Atoll went mad from steering through all the severed limbs and heads floating near shore.

Marine Eugene Sledge’s unit spent endless days on a muddy Okinawa ridge where there were no latrines and no moving in daylight. You crapped in your hole and flung your load out into already foul mud. Shelling uncovered dozens of Marine and Japanese bodies turning various colors. Losing your footing meant you slid down the back slope and arrived at the bottom vomiting because fat maggots were pouring out of your pockets, your leggings, even your cartridge belt. (Sledge also appears in Ken Burns’ “The War”).

On the beach at Peleliu men were “simply hosed down by machine-gunfire.” Hosed down. Hosed.

—see Paul Fussell, “The Real War 1939-1945: An Exercise in Horror and Madness”, “The Atlantic Monthly” 264:2 (1989):32-48.

These accounts only begin to portray the misery of normal decency and integrity, both of mind and body, being not just broken down, but erased. In most film and books, death is dignified and bodies are whole. Even in previous centuries’ wars, such as the American Civil War, the madness went on: On Cemetery Ridge, near where Pickett’s Charge briefly broke the Union line during the battle of Gettysburg, I read a plaque quoting a Union artillery commander:”Double canister at ten yards. Ghastly.”

If, though, you still want to get an idea, a partial idea, of the nature of combat and what the defender of freedom goes through, catch the opening D-Day scene in the popular, fictional movie “Saving Private Ryan.”

Bill Mauldin, the cartoonist veteran mentioned above, famous for drawing his soldier characters Willie and Joe in World War II, writes: “… The vast majority of [American combat soldiers] are so sick and tired of having their noses rubbed in a stinking war that their only ambition will be to forget it…. No normal man who has smelled and associated with death ever wants to see any more of it…. The surest way to become a pacifist is to join the infantry.”—Bill Mauldin, “Up Front” (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1945), 14.

Cooper, Lomell, Fussell and Mauldin are right. Despite that, another tale must be told.

Andy Rooney was known as the curmudgeon on TV’s “60 Minutes.” He was also a World War II veteran. And a pacifist.There is a story about Rooney in Tom Brokaw’s bestseller “The Greatest Generation.” Rooney tells of seeing the reality of the concentration camp Buchenwald right at the end of the war, after hearing rumors for months. Rooney says at that moment, for the first time, he felt that it was not true that any peace was better than any war.

Hear some phrases which question the idea that “Any peace is better than any war”:

First,one word: “Munich.”

Or four words:“Peace in our time.”

“.. . I am not a pacifist . . . . There are times when the force wielded by one immoral faction must be countered by a faction that, while never moral, is perhaps less immoral.”—Chris Hedges, “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning”  (New York: Public Affairs, 2002), 16.

“To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.”—George Washington, wiser than many entire rooms; John Bartlett and Justin Kaplan, eds., “Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations” (Boston:Little, Brown and Co., 1992), 337.

Yes,many, including Cicero, Butler, Franklin, and Jose Ortega y Gasset would differ with Washington, or Hedges. There are many views.

Cooper, Lomell, Fussell, Mauldin and Rooney are all right. While the citizenry cannot bow before tyrants and international thugs who trample humanity and freedoms, neither can we casually send young citizens off to fight without having our eyes open to what they will suffer.

What must we say of the human prospect? For the immediate future we must heed Washington’s “prepared for war” thought above. The human race’s dark sides remain and cannot be left unguarded. But as we teach preparedness, we must also teach peace and conflict resolution, as a recognized, unified, clear field of knowledge, for the race’s toys are getting too big and dangerous. One can start with www.nationalpeace.org. We must, along with preparedness, come into living by anew version of a famous Martin Luther King phrase, “…that day when all of God’s children, black … and white … Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing …”

–Doug LaVerne, Oak Ridge, TN USA 2000s & ff.