THE "N" WORD AND THE COUNTDOWN TO DEMOCRACY

AFTER A CAMPAIGN WITH THE PALIN LED GOP "PALLING AROUND" WITH VIOLENT EXTREMISTS

THE NEW "N WORD" IS "NERVOUS"

By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER

Ask any person of color in the US how afraid they are that President Obama will be assassinated by a "lone gunman" with ties to big oil, defense contractors and the GOP elite, they will answer:  VERY

Last real popularity poll had "W" at 11%.  AOL polls, always the most "Republican" give scores from 20-30 percent on individual issues involving confidence in Republicans in General.

Next week I am scheduled to be in DC for the inauguration, a guest of Republican friends who quickly ingratiated themselves into the new power group.  I am supposed to "work the crowd" on veterans issues and concerns tied to support for aid missions in Africa and the Middle East.  After spending the last few months riding veterans, military and diplomatic officials about their disasterous, imbecilic and, perhaps, criminal behavior, it will be interesting to see if I don’t have an accident myself.

I have spent the last few days communicating with people here like Amy, Tom and others and talking to friends in government and the military.  How much time can any of us spend trying to fix the world when keeping our own families together, ourselves healthy and sane (or less very crazy as the case may be)  and our friends OK can seem utterly exhausting?   

If only I were terrified of being forced to get an abortion or having my guns seized by angry Democrats.  Then I would have the energy and focus to ignore economic disaster, race hatred, totatitarianism and live in the dream world so many have relegated themselves to. 

I grew up in America, the child of an auto worker from Detroit.  I remember the 50s, 60s, 70s and so on.  I knew the America I wanted to grow up in.  With Detroit moving from boom to bust, crime and riots and a chunk of my "young adulthood" spent dragging a rifle thru the mud of Vietnam, my hope was for a time that I would see the promised land, maybe not the exact same one Dr. King spoke of but a promised land just the same.

I wanted a job with no layoffs, a car that would start in the winter and the ability to see some of the world other than northern Michigan and Southeast Asia.  I wanted to see kids go to college without depending on GI bill and 2 part time jobs. 

I also had things I wanted politically.  I wanted to spend my life in a world that was more "Kennedy" and less "Nixon."  Seeing America ignorant, fearful and hate filled for much of the last 40 years has been a poison for my life and has destroyed much of the world I wanted for my children, a world I supposedly fought a war for as had the generation before and the one before that.

I grew up white in a racist city in a racist country.  Where I lived, in a city with a higher percentage of people of color than any other except Washington DC, I never saw anyone who wasn’t white.  Segregation.

The Marine Corps and Vietnam changed that.  I ended up with a Black best friend and we have been brothers for 40 years.  Everything everyone I grew up around thought was a lie.  Big surprise there.

The world we built, the post war generation, "post WW2 generation," has been something quite different than I expected.  We were a generation that asked every question and questioned every answer.  We were the generation that questioned sexual and racial stereotypes and swore to end hypocracy and oppression.

Why then have we lived much of the last 40 years watching America turn into a totalitarian hellhole with a declining standard of living, an economy approaching the disaster of the 30s and a population with millions seething with race hatred and continually spouting ideas steeped in ignorance and evil?

Women who want equal pay are "Feminazis" and African Americans who complain about being arrested for DWB (driving while black) are "militant troublemakers."  People who stress strength and dialog are "soft on terrorism" and people who will have a wide variety of friends risk being accused of "palling around with terrorists."

Sarah Palin

She might well have been the last straw.  Talk about a piece of work!  I could have blindly picked a better vice presidential candidate off death row.

50 years has passed like a minute.  I remember walking past the blue and white 59 Ford Country Squire wagon in our driveway.  It had only just started to rust away, being several months old.  I walked the 7 blocks down Vassar to Volney Smith School. Dullard Eisenhower was president and had been for most of my life.  Russians were winning the space race and talk everywhere was of nuclear war.

Half the auto plants were closed and the economy was in the tank.  Of the 60 or so car factories in Detroit then, only a handfull survive today, most only working one shift.  I had no idea what bad would really be.

Most of the people from then, the neighbors, teachers, prettymuch everyone, the people I saw on TV, they are all dead now.  My parents are dead.  Even one of my kids is dead.  I watched friends die in war and watched the survivors die, one by one, in their 30s, 40s and 50s.

Is America a job or a car or a TV show?  Is there really something greater than those things?  Are the important things to each of us really those made of hope, dreams and pride as we had all promised ourselves long ago?  

 I remember these things and I remember what I had dreamed of.  I am surrounded by people, not always, but too often, who either never dreamed or let those dreams be crushed somehow.  Those who have replaced hope and belief with the lies of politics and religion are the real cowards.  Personal courage requires belief and sacrifice, not hiding behind ‘mama’s skirts’ or an empty hat.

We are facing one of those crossroads, perhaps for the first time in many decades, more decades than most reading this will have been alive.  We may be getting a government in this country that could restore dreams or it could be an empty promise.

Even an empty promise of goodness is better than one fulfilled, a promise of hate and tyranny. 

How did people who are supposed to be so smart, so good, so religious and so patriotic created a hellhole that Jefferson would put a match to in a flat second?

WWJD.  What would Jefferson do?  There are no doubts.  He would put pen to paper and draft something.

I can imagine the first words:  "When in the course of human events……"

Gordon Duff is a Marine Vietnam veteran and regular contributor on political and social issues.