First for four years and now for16 additional months I have heard a blatantly prejudicial and crude voice from the White House, a language that insults me to the very core.
I am a liberal minded, intelligent woman of advanced years. I would like to claim that I am not a prejudiced woman, but I can say that I am in recovery and working to stay there.
School has always been a magnificent place for me, a place I yearned for every September from my 6th through my 65th year when I followed Thoreau’s pattern and left for as good a reason as I had started. During those years I found values and responses outside my home. I learned prejudice early – in the fourth grade.
In my first grade I learned patience. As a third child, I could read before I started school. Numbers were necessary when helping to set a table for seven. My classmates did not have such an advantage. I was allowed to help them, to perfect my printed words, and to read anything I wished.
In the second grade I started my lifelong battle with the Palmer Method of Cursive Writing and I learned the seductive nature of smells. At noon we ate at our own desks before going out to play. I had never eaten bread other than what mother baked, made into sandwiches, put in our lunchboxes. But the boy sitting at my right had sandwiches of Wonder Bread and bologna! Never had I smelled a sandwich so delicious, so delightful, so able to turn my sandwiches to sand and wallpaper. I loved my mother’s baking but the smell of his sandwiches opened new worlds. A country kid, I was too shy to say anything, but how I longed for his sandwiches!
In the third grade I learned of war, that “we” were at war with Japan, then Germany. I could find those countries on the globe, but war was something unknown. I did listen to the radio. I enjoyed the solemn voices and accepted the proclamation that Roosevelt would save us.
I knew my grandparents were in Norway and Norway had been taken over, whatever that meant. All far away and mostly words. My parents went about their business, school added alarms when we would stand in line along the walls in the halls, but war was not real in any sense… until it was.
In the fourth grade I learned change, large schools, and the beginnings of prejudice. My father, with five children, was given the option of entering war work. We moved to Seattle: my father worked in a shipyard: my mother worked at Boeing: my Grandma Howard rode the Greyhound Bus almost 1500 miles and arrived to care for us. We lived on a five-acre truck farm that had been confiscated from a Japanese family sent to camps… those were words I knew but not what they meant until later.
The house was big enough for our comfort, our lives were comfortable, our country was winning a war. We went to school, worked in the gardens, listened to the radio, gathered metal and paper “for the war effort.” We heard and repeated words of racial prejudice. We picked up hate words that felt forbidden, seemed adult, were seductive. Seductive because we didn’t have to think, didn’t have to check moral standards, yet could sound so certain and feel part of a group that looked like us.
On the West Coast, Orientals were the enemy. Those were the people our language slurred.
However, the only Japanese I met during those years were two women who visited some weeks after the dropping of the atomic bombs. One woman was a lawyer, the other a member of the family on whose land we lived. They were well-dressed, kind, spoke both English and Japanese. I was impressed that the lawyer was a woman, that she was bilingual. More than anything, I was impressed with their kindness.
They thanked us, even each kid, for taking care of the farm: they shook hands with each of us, even each kid. I was embarrassed because I couldn’t think of a thing I’d done to deserve being thanked and because of the names that, even the day before, I had been calling them.
That was the year I learned I did not want to be ugly with words. Their kindness make me think about the words I’d used to describe these kind women. I didn’t like myself for that, didn’t like the words. I decided I could choose my own words; whatever I would say, I would remember kindness. I haven’t always been successful. I still try.
Now, I hear slurs, insults, prejudices from the president. I wonder that a man who claims to be brilliant can have such a limited vocabulary, that a man who travels the world can have such a jaundice view. He presents himself as stupid and cruel. His words – crass, vulgar, unkind – are not the words or the morality of We the People. For the moment, he heads this country and he misrepresents us, the people. For the moment, he polishes his golden statues and unkind vocabulary. Six months until elections.