When Looking Back Soothes The Soul

Nebraska Grasslands, image courtesy of the USDA

The mounting tremors emanating from the circus of the absurd that is Washington give me a wonderful opportunity to pause and reflect on a place in my early life. A true halcyon locale and time that was, in part, so far removed from today's Babelian incoherence the epicenter of which is triangulated by social media, cable news, and dysfunctional government.   

There is a much longer narrative preceding and following this excerpted post, but let me just lay a little groundwork for what follows: I was a military brat, the son of an Air Force officer who, after serving in combat in World War II, rose appropriately in rank, title, and command responsibilities. By the late 1950s, he was assigned to command Strategic Air Command (SAC) bases in the Midwest and South. Three of those bases were Clinton County Air Force Base in Ohio, Lincoln Air Force Base in Nebraska, and Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. The dates of his  SAC commands encompass my preteen and mid-teen years--roughly 11 to 16. 

Prior to those duty assignments, our family had spent almost five years in Germany (Wiesbaden), and five years in the Washington, D.C./Pentagon area, where I was born in 1949. This post picks up just after my father had received orders to leave Ohio, and take over new duties as the base commander of Lincoln Air Force Base, a B-47 bomber base on the edge of the Great Plains. 

The move from Clinton County Air Force Base, near Wilmington, Ohio, to Lincoln Air Force Base, just west of Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1961, was like going back in a time machine to the prairie life of the 19th century, at least as far as the landscape and populations were concerned. 

Lincoln, a pretty town in my opinion, was not a major metropolitan center in the early 60s. Although it is the state capital, and home to the University of Nebraska, Lincoln's population of 128,000 in 1960 was less than half that of Omaha, about 50 miles north. But Lincoln had such a broad sweep to it, and the tall and stately Capitol building, with its golden dome topped by the statue of The Sower, spreading seeds across the farmland, pinned the city firmly to the rich earth.

 

The Sower, by Lee Lawrie, atop the Capitol dome, Lincoln, Nebraska

I’m of two minds when it comes to writing about Lincoln. I fell in love with the prairie right away; the sky is huge, the stars almost reachable; the air is sweet and clean, and you can see thunderstorms coming from a hundred miles away. In the summer, I would ride my bike out from the base and pedal down farm roads, leave the bike at the edge of an ocean of shoulder-high grass and, wading into it, listen to the wind and the songs of the meadowlarks, bobolinks, and other plains birds. 

I could almost see and hear Conestoga wagons filled with pioneer families headed west, lurching and bumping across the rolling grasslands, tin pans and iron pots clanking, the bellow of oxen straining as they pulled the load, the tinkling of a cow bell on the milk cow following behind. In some places, the ruts formed by thousands of wagon wheels are still visible more than a century later. Pretty heady stuff for a preteen.

The other view I have of Lincoln…during our first tour of duty there…was the brutality of junior high school applied to the vulnerable psyche of a rootless 12-year-old. I’ve written often enough about my experience with bullying at Whittier Jr. High School, so I don’t need to go into it here, but beyond the bullying there were the mean-kid cliques, closed-groups, animosities, whispered threats toward military kids, and teachers and administrators whose willful ignorance of the mental and physical violence going on in their classrooms, halls, and grounds endorsed the "us vs. them" attitudes of the town kids. 

These observations could have been isolated incidents in my life, perhaps unique to the relationship between the base kids and the townies of Lincoln. But, of course, such perceptions of hate, rumor-mongering, peer-level gaslighting, and ruthlessly-applied taunts and physical assaults are common across life, whether the targets are barely-cognizant children, or senior citizens nearing their ends. That such willful and debilitating strikes still occur and make up an unbreakable thread in the fabric of American life continues to baffle me. Why aren't we past all of this? Why do we see it at the highest level of government and among what should be otherwise reasonable people. 

I didn’t realize it at the time—I simply did not have any prior comparative intellectual or social experiences—but what happened to me at Whittier was a level of white-on-white bigotry and us-vs.-them classism that I would soon see being waged against blacks when we moved to Louisiana. My sense of injustice and recognition of the reality of being a voiceless minority were profound, and shaped, I’m sure my anger, fear, and frustration at being so callously prejudged and summarily dismissed as a person, laid the groundwork for my intolerance of social, racial, religious, fiscal, and political inequalities. 

As an aside: The bus route took the base kids over a bridge above the Lincoln cattle stockyards and slaughter house. There is no adequate way to describe the sound and smell of a slaughter house from a bus traveling overhead on a hot morning—but to this day I can hear and smell it, and it is never lost on me that those sounds and smells, filling the bus as it carried me to Whittier every weekday morning, made my anxieties about what was ahead for me in that school day all the more worrisome.

Is it any wonder then that I sought out the solace of the tall grasses, the textures and rich smells of newly-plowed fields, the shadowed hideaways among small stands of trees where the bitter voices of angry children were replaced by the calming whispers of a non-judgmental natural world?

It was during the quiet times like these—left alone to my own devices out in the middle of the prairie—that I think my first coherent thoughts formed about the span of American history. I can’t put much of a philosophical point on it because I was still being formed myself, and all I can recollect is that such quiet times were very comforting and became big-thinking opportunities. 

If that alone time out in the tall Nebraska grasses had any significant impact on me, it is that when I feel most stressed and conflicted—personally or politically—I can go back there in my mind and very quickly settle the internal storms or anxieties just by recalling the trill of the meadowlark’s song and the gentle push and rustle of the ceaseless wind.

"Zooming Out" To Find Common Ground

The path to enlightenment is never straight, nor is it well-marked. Nor is there just one path. We all walk our own road to, or away from, understanding.

A few days ago, Joe, a friend of mine, reached out to me to see if he and I could—via this blog and other social media platforms—engage in a public series of discussions and debates about the pressing issues facing the nation and, in a broader sense, the world. It was an intriguing suggestion to say the least. 

I am the elder of the pair; he is in his mid-30s, and I am in my late-60s; I was born shortly after the beginning of the Atomic Age and the Cold War; he was born after Vietnam, but before 9/11 and the onset of the seemingly endless wars in the Middle East. The America I grew up in was filled with white-male machismo and women-as-objects; the world Joe entered was moving out of that stone age fog and into a new epoch of myriad equalities (not yet attained, but at least acknowledged).

There were no personal computers in my world until I was in my late 20s; he grew up in a world where microchips were ubiquitous, and social media dialog was becoming the common bond of the global communications community. I witnessed the first American space flights; he will probably see an American on Mars.

I was already a working journalist 50 years ago when Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. My generation believed fervently that the Civil Rights movement would take hold and sprout love and brotherhood. Joe’s generation grew up to see an accelerating polarization between conservatives and liberals, and the widening disparities separating black aspirations from white opportunities, and the wealthy one-percent from the middle class and the impoverished. Politically, we are not quite oil and water, but we acknowledge we do have diverging points of view on a variety of issues.

So it was quite thought-provoking when Joe messaged me his idea for starting a public discussion about our perceived differences and our potential commonalities…whatever those might be…and how we might examine our individual frames of reference through reasoned, supported, defended, open-minded dialogue.

Here is part of Joe’s message to me:

“Startlingly, most people seem to have no interest in finding truth or cementing a principle that can be agreed on through debate. Maybe I am too young to remember political discussions of days gone by, but it certainly seems that vitriol and hyperbole are at the forefront now when perhaps there was more compromise or agreement in the past. 

I often think about something that was said by President Bush (43) at the memorial service for Dallas police officers who were killed in July 2016. At that service, he said,
‘At times it seems like the forces pulling us apart are stronger than the forces binding us together. Argument turns too easily into animosity. Disagreement escalates too quickly into dehumanization. Too often we judge other groups by their worst examples, while judging ourselves by our best intentions. This has strained our bonds of understanding and common purpose.’

 That has really stuck with me and is something I warn students about and am dismayed about when I see it on political media of whatever form. I am certain that you and I have a love for America and probably approach some of the issues in different ways and would disagree, but I am curious as to why and how those disagreements take place.

Whenever someone asks me how I came to some conclusion in political affairs, I always tell them I, "zoomed out." By that, I mean that I try to focus less on the intimate details of each situation and find something in philosophy or time-honored tradition that supports what I think is right. Sometimes, that leads to me positions that you might think fit in nicely on the right, but many other times I find myself at odds with older Conservatives who can't understand why I wouldn't care about something like legalizing marijuana or gay marriage. I believe the younger generation of conservative/libertarians probably finds a lot of common ground with people who consider themselves solidly on the left. I am wondering if the reverse can be true too.”

The path to enlightenment is never straight, nor is it well-marked. Nor is there just one path. We all walk our own road to, or away from, understanding. No one would have predicted that I, a once-staunch Goldwater Republican, who worked for Reagan and George H.W. Bush, would vote for Barack Obama; would become a vocal advocate for gun control; and would, last November, take out a bonded license in Fairfax County in order to officiate at the wedding of two women who love each other very much.

Now, in this new, yet-uncharted socio-political era, Joe and I are going to examine some of the foundations of our choices and perceptions and test Joe’s question of just what it means to be left or right, conservative, liberal, libertarian, or independent, and whether there are common bonds that can soften the edges enough to overlap and blend the differences.

We have chosen this blog as our starting point, and as often as we can—we are both involved in other pursuits—we will ask a question or pose an idea and, “zooming out,” use this forum as our debate stage, espousing our philosophies, revealing our positions, opening ourselves up to cross-examination, all in the spirit of better understanding and comity.