6 POLITICS, SIN, AND MONEY

Major, Lenora, and Lela May Strolling Through the Sporting District

POLITICS, SIN, AND MONEY

Children, no one has the final perfect answer to anything, not your parents, your teachers, your religious leaders, your elected officials.  None.  Nada.  I learned this the hard way.  Being on my own at the age of 11 and being passed around amongst any relatives willing to give me shelter, I learned that each segment had their own set of beliefs, affiliations with various groups, and definitions of right and wrong based on those.

A Family Divided

For example, Major's family were staunch Democrats, going all the way back to the Civil War when the 'Lincoln-loving Republicans' burned Georgia to the ground and ushered in the era of Reconstruction, during which the family and everyone they knew lost everything.  Lela May's family, however, were die-hard abolitionists before the Civil war began and continued as die-hard Republicans thereafter.

What was so interesting to me was all the stories my great grandma told me about growing up in Kansas during the Reconstruction and up until the eventual slow grinding end to that era in our nation's history. Meanwhile, my father told me about his mother and those family members who were smart enough to leave Savannah before Sherman got there, ended up in Hempstead, Texas, starting over from scratch as farmers. 

Here's an easy quote from Wikipedia:  "The term Reconstruction Era, in the context of the history of the United States, has two senses: the first covers the complete history of the entire country from 1865 to 1877 following the American Civil War (1861 to 1865); the second sense focuses on the attempted transformation of the Southern United States from 1863 to 1877, as directed by Congress, with the reconstruction of state and society. With the three Reconstruction Amendments, the era saw the first amendments to the U.S. Constitution in decades.

Three visions of Civil War memory appeared during Reconstruction: the reconciliationist vision, which was rooted in coping with the death and devastation the war had brought; the white supremacist vision, which included terror and violence; and the emancipationist vision, which sought full freedom, citizenship and Constitutional equality for African Americans."

Yes, We Owned Slaves - a LOT of Them

Face it ladies, your grandfather (Dorothy's father) was from a large family spread out all over Georgia, growing crops and livestock using 'purchased labor' - aka slaves.  My father told me with great pride that the 'house nigras' were armed and in the upstairs of the house helping shoot at the Union soldiers coming to burn the place.  His grandmother had refused to run to Texas and had stayed in Georgia and her servants stayed loyal to her.  He was mute about the field hands, however, who, I suspect, took off at the first opportunity.

So - I was hearing about politics in the 1940's and '50's from people who still could remember the Civil War and the Reconstruction Era.  And they were diametrically opposed - which sure made Thanksgiving Day gatherings interesting when politics crept into the table discussion.

San Antonio - The "Wide Open" Center of Sin in Texas

In the 1940's, the Democrats were in power in San Antonio and Major was very involved in how they got that power and hung onto it.  He and his Sporting District cronies would take large trucks, go to Travis Park and other set gathering points, load the trucks with Mexicans and poor whites, and take them to pay their poll tax so that they could vote in the elections.  Needless to say, it was the Democrats who raised the funds to pay those poll taxes for the indigent.   Then, on election day, the trucks would once again make the rounds, over and over, throughout the day, picking up the 'voters' and taking them to the polling places where they were told how to vote and then paid for doing as requested.

The slate of candidates for every local position in Bexar County was decided by this group who were protecting the financial interests of the Sporting District.  They were also acting on behalf of the agricultural community who needed cheap labor.

Sitting in the back room at Major's office listening to the discussions that went on, I learned that, to these men, wasting law enforcement dollars on 'victimless crime' was ridiculous.  The underlying philosophy was if people wanted to get drunk, get high on drugs, hire the services of prostitutes, gamble away their paychecks, and make loans at higher rates of interest to those the bank would not loan to, it was nobody's business but their own.  Or as Major once put it, "Government should not have the power to legislate morality.".

If it was up to him, all of those 'sins' would have been legalized, regulated, and taxed.  He pointed out that not only would they provide a lucrative source of revenue for the city's coffers, it would also drastically cut the costs of law enforcement and the incarceration of criminals.

Later on, when Barry Goldwater ran for President, his campaign slogan was, "In your heart, you know I am right.".  Everything my father taught me just made good sense but, being around people like my mother who were shocked and horrified by what they perceived as 'evil' made me understand that, most opinions and beliefs were based on emotion and not on logic.

My Grandma, Fern Hannon, was right in the middle.  In family discussions, she would agree that Major had a valid argument.  On the other hand, she said, she was not sure about turning all the idiots loose in the candy store and then not expecting some of them to eat too much and vomit on the floor.  Uncle Paul argued that making all of it legal would take most of the fun out of it.

Grandma Was Wrong About Pot

I always wondered if Grandma and Paul were right - at least until marijuana was legalized in Washington State (it was already 'unofficially' legalized in Hawaii where law enforcement was told to 'look the other way') and in Colorado, California, etc and there has not been any increase in usage.  NO increase in crime.  NO increase in gateway usage of hard drugs.  In other words, keeping it illegal was ridiculous.  And if you saw what I have to pay to the State of Arizona for my 'card' to be registered to legally buy medical marijuana, plus the tax on it, you would see that Major was right.  And Jeff Sessions is a blithering idiot.  Trying to criminalize it now is like trying to put toothpaste back in the tube after it has been squeezed out.

So why have our nation turned into a collection of 'legal' junkies?  Because doctors were pressured into taking on "pain management" as part of their medical practice and writing prescriptions for opioid drugs.  At the Senior Center, I was playing Bingo each Wednesday with a lot of old ladies who were half-stoned on 'arthritis' medications such as Vicodin, Percocet, Oxy, and unable to decrease dosage and definitely unable to come off them 'cold turkey'.  And they were talking about how California was going to hell in a handbasket now that medical marijuana was legalized.  

How To Get Away With Being An Independent Cynic

My own personal politics had started in 1952 when my best friend, Ann, and I went door to door campaigning for Ike.  We did it on Halloween night and most doorbells we rang assumed we were trick or treaters.  After getting a substantial sugar high from all the candy we were consuming, we decided 'to hell with it', Ike can take care of himself, and we settled in to watch TV on the 12-inch screen of the new DuMont television set and eat the rest of the candy.

Later, when I was old enough to vote, I would spend hours reading the campaign literature, agonizing over the planks in platforms, and making the mistake of assuming that it really mattered who got elected.  Then, because I was living in New York City at that time and working for a large multi-national corporation, I began to realize that the national elections were just the macrocosm, operating very much like the microcosm of San Antonio.   Our nation was NOT a democracy - it never had been and it never would be.  It was a republic.  And the electorate had to believe that the people they would vote for actually gave a shit about them and would represent their interests in Washington.

By the time the reality of PACs, and lobbyists, and campaign funds, and special interest groups, and pork barrels, finally began to come to light, it was too late to back out of what we had become:  an oligarchy.

So I stopped voting. "What was the point", I told myself, "no matter who is elected he won't be representing me and my opinions on how to make this country better."

Being a Self-Righteous Non-voter Paid Off

That position paid off for me in 1979 when I got my first consulting job as a subcontractor on a U.S. State Dept. A.I.D. project in Mexico.  At the State Dept. briefing, my friends on Capitol Hill warned me not to align myself with any political party because, if I wanted to keep doing consulting work, I needed to be considered 'safe' by whatever party was in power at the time.

Thus, my first paid project was under the Carter Administration, and that was followed by a string of contracts during the Reagan and Bush, Sr. Administrations, followed by more work under Clinton.  I almost got caught out by James Watt when I was doing numerous projects for the Dept. of Interior and they invited me to Washington for a meeting.  We had lunch downstairs in the cafeteria and he noticed I was a vegetarian.  He got very annoyed and remarked to the Deputy Secretary that he didn't know they were hiring a "bunny hugger".  I fell back on my old reliable, "I have a serious case of gout, sir, otherwise I would be tearing into that greasy overcooked steak like a ravening wolf."

Don't ask me what I think of Donald Trump.  I think this country is being divided, once again, into three groups, none of whom trust the others.  It's too reminiscent of Berlin in the 1930's when the German population was suffering from the economic destruction wrought by WW1, crippled with unemployment and eager for someone to tell them he could fix things - even if it later became evident that he could not.  The term for it was "The Big Lie".  Just keep repeating short phrases, over and over again, in a highly emotional atmosphere pumped up with fear and resentment, and the sheep will not question if what you are proposing is even remotely possible.

I am just glad that my Grandma and my uncles did not live long enough to see what happened to their political party.  I already have to commiserate with so many of my 'old time' Republican friends who are appalled by what is going on.  And my 'old time' Democrat friends are so dispirited and lost at this point that all they can do is rehash "what went wrong".

And I remain, totally, fiercely, and unrepentantly independent...so I can have fun taking pot shots at both sides anytime they get ridiculous.