Who I am January 13, 2017

Bench in Winter

MAD. I am just MAD. Mother, forever the Kansas City Cub reporter even if she never wrote another article, would correct me. She would say, "No, dear, your are angry."

Me, ever the smart ass as she would say, replied, "I am so angry I am mad."

After the ACA procedural vote I am livid. And I hate white men.

"Now, dear," Mother would say, "Isn't hate the wrong word?"

Loathe. I loathe white men. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell were in my nightmares last night. The better part was when I had them on the rack. Must have been a good dream because I slept in.

There is an old Lone Ranger joke which has him and Tonto surrounded by hostile Indians and the Lone Ranger asks, "How are we going to get out of this one, Tonto?"

"We, White Man?" Tonto replies.

Part of me really wants to be Tonto this morning. I want to grab my guns, pile into pickup with the fur kids and head for the hills. Dad, the one white man I still look up to, taught me survival. He raised me as a boy and never corrected my English.

But to give Mother credit, where it is due, I do know how to write a concise, and on point letter to my congressmen. See, white men again. Which may bring me to why I didn't vote for Hillary. She is every older woman I ever worked for in the professional world: More white man than white men.

But this morning I am also angry with white women. At least the ones who want to wimp out.

"Never talk politics or religion, my dear," Mother advises from somewhere beyond her grave. And too many of those white women of my age took her advice. Mind you not me. I spoke outside the Student Union in defense of free speech and was disciplined.  Which meant I then participated in the protest when the makers of Agent Orange came to college to offer white men jobs poisoning Asian peoples.

I marched in Washington to end the War in Vietnam and gave flowers to the military lining the streets when Nixon declared Marshall law in DC. He may never have lifted it. Which means the Orange man can use it against the women in the march on Washington the day after he is crowned. The last big May Day March I manned the phones at the National Council of Churches on the ready to bail anyone out. We were the telephone number everyone in the march was to commit to memory. Nobody called because the protesters were rounded up by the military and held without due process at the Red Skins stadium. Some of those people, my friends, I never saw again.

Today all those memories are so fresh there is a pain deep in my belly and I am so totally MAD, Mother.


Note: I am not marching on the 21st. I have volunteered to man the phones. And every morning I contact my congressmen about some issue making me angry.