One Voice

“There is a discrimination in this world and slavery and slaughter and starvation. Governments repress their people; and millions are trapped in poverty while the nation grows rich; and wealth is lavished on armaments everywhere.”

That’s our world, our poor, troubled world early in the second decade of the 21st century. The rich get richer and the poor amass debt and buy guns.

“These are differing evils, but they are common works of man. They reflect the imperfection of human justice, the inadequacy of human compassion, our lack of sensibility toward the sufferings of our fellows.”

We tend to forget that only God, however we define Him, can provide perfect justice. Whatever we do is by nature flawed by the filter of our own weaknesses, viewed through the prism of our limitations.

“But we can perhaps remember – even if only for a time – that those who live with us are our brothers; that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek — as we do — nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.”

Do we really believe that all men are brothers, that all women are sisters under God’s rule? If we did, I doubt any of us could ever use words like “nigger” or “raghead” or “kike” without feeling guilty. I know I don’t think there are very many people in this world who would reject purposeful, happy lives if they had the chance to live them.

“Surely this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men. And surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again.”

Forget Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein and look a lot closer to home. If those of us who have been hateful toward those in power can accept the Bushes, the Cheneys and the Gingriches on the right or the Obamas, Bidens and Clintons on the left as fellow men and women who want only to do the right thing as they see it, and they can accept us the same way, we will go a very long way toward solving our problems.

“Few are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change. And I believe that in this generation those with the courage to enter the moral conflict will find themselves with companions in every corner of the globe.”

It’s going to take a great deal of moral courage. Not the false courage that demands others follow the same path to God we do, or live the same lifestyle we have chosen. No, we need the courage to stand up and say children are starving, women are being tortured and men all over the world are being denied basic freedom and dignity.

“For the fortunate among us, there is the temptation to follow the easy and familiar paths of personal ambition and financial success so grandly spread before those who enjoy the privilege of education. But that is not the road history has marked out for us. Like it or not, we live in times of danger and uncertainty. But they are also more open to the creative energy of men than any other time in history. All of us will ultimately be judged and as the years pass we will surely judge ourselves, on the effort we have contributed to building a new world society and the extent to which our ideals and goals have shaped that effort.”

Is there a clue here as to the speaker of this amazing piece of rhetoric? The speech was made by an American, far from American shores in a part of the world in desperate need of freedom and dignity at the time it was delivered.

“The future does not belong to those who are content with today, apathetic toward common problems and their fellow man alike, timid and fearful in the face of new ideas and bold projects. Rather it will belong to those who can blend vision, reason and courage in a personal commitment to the ideals and great enterprises of American Society.”

In 1966, speaking to an audience of young people at South Africa’s Day of Affirmation ceremonies, a 41-year-old United States senator from New York spoke in favor of people doing the right thing.

“Our future may lie beyond our vision, but it is not completely beyond our control. It is the shaping impulse of America that neither fate nor nature nor the irresistible tides of history, but the work of our own hands, matched to reason and principle, that will determine our destiny. There is pride in that, even arrogance, but there is also experience and truth. In any event, it is the only way we can live.”

Bobby Kennedy in South Africa

His name was Robert Francis Kennedy, and I believe his assassination in June 1968 probably changed American history for the worse more than any act of political terrorism since the killing of Abraham Lincoln.  Bobby Kennedy died nearly 44 years ago, and in that time we have not had a single effective American leader who urged us to try and be better than ourselves. This year is another election year, and much is at stake. But whether we re-elect Barack Obama or turn him out, we can do far more for ourselves and our country by listening to the words Kennedy spoke 44 years ago.

They aren’t “ragheads.” They aren’t “niggers” or “gooks” or “skinheads.” They’re people, just like us, trying to raise children and find happiness.  And if they hate us, the way we defeat them is not by hating them in return. Not by killing them or conquering their countries.

That isn’t it at all. We defeat them by accepting them as people at the same time we reject their actions.

“Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men. And surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again.”

We don’t need any more Nixons, those who play one group against another to gain money, fame and power.

We’ve been there, done that and have lost much of what once made us special.

Somehow, we need to try something different.

Some years back, I was riding in a car on a country road outside the small Ohio town where my mother was raised. I noticed something back in the trees. It was a decaying wooden structure that had once been a smallish roller coaster, the featured ride in what had once been a local amusement park that probably had gone out of business in the late 1940s or early 1950s.

The land hadn’t been needed for anything, so nature just sort of reclaimed it, growing in an around what was left of the park until it was almost invisible to the eye.

When I visit Virginia and see the town where I grew up, I usually see two things — I see Fairfax as it is now, and maybe in the background I see it as it was when we moved there in 1963. Ball fields, restaurants, movie theaters and stores that I frequented during my high school years have been gone for a long time, but to me, it would take just a couple of steps sideways — not even back — at the right time and I’d be there, looking at them again.

There are 11 different major league baseball stadiums where I saw games as far back as the ’50s and as recently as the ’90s that no longer exist. Things change, and it’s easy to lose track if you don’t keep up.

I wonder how many people remember that for five years in the 1960s, there was a theme park in New York City that was bigger than Disneyland.

That’s right, from 1960-64, in the northeastern part of the Bronx, the 85-acre park known as Freedomland USA operated as a U.S.-history themed amusement park. Disneyland, which had opened five years earlier, was only 65 acres, and it was way out west in Southern California. The chances that I would ever see it as a kid living in Virginia were pretty bleak, but we went to New York every year to visit our relatives on my dad’s side of the family.

For some reason, I have it in my mind that we didn’t actually go to Freedomland in 1960 or 1961, but the next two years — when I was 12 and 13 — we went once each summer.

We didn’t go in 1964, which was the first year of the New York World’s Fair, and Freedomland closed at the end of that season. I figured it had been killed by the Fair, but what I read now says that it was never really doing that well financially and it had operated for five seasons without making a profit.

The park was actually shaped sort of like the United States, and its seven different themed areas each represented a part of the U.S. We saw the Chicago Fire re-enacted in one part and the San Francisco Earthquake in another. Ironically, the part devoted to the future was the Southeast, mostly because of Cape Canaveral.

Amusement parks weren’t a big park of my childhood. I didn’t see Disneyland until I was 28 years old, and I was 30 when I finally made it to Disney World in Florida.

I may be leaving some out, but I think Freedomland was pretty much the only theme park of my childhood. In the 1970s, Kings Dominion and Busch Gardens came to Virginia and I saw them both.

I’ve been to some pretty good parks — the thrill rides at Six Flags Magic Mountain in Southern California are pretty great — but I’m not sure I ever saw a park that thrilled me as much at the time as Freedomland.

Five years was all it lasted.

I wonder how many people even remember it.

I know I’ll never forget it.

I recently discovered something on the Internet that absolutely blew me away with how terrific it is.

If that sounds a little too “gee whiz,” let me explain. There are both good things and bad about the ‘net, and some of the bad things are really bad — hate sites and other sites that allow people whose behavior is well beyond the pale to communicate with each other.

I had heard about Pandora before, and I listened to some of the music when I was visiting my daughter in Seattle and she was playing it on her laptop. I put it out of my mind, but today I was goofing around and I called up Pandora on my own computer. I don’t know exactly what I was expecting, but it was more. I thought I would be able to listen to stations that already existed, but it’s better than that.

Since 2000, the founders of Pandora have created something called the Music Genome Project, an attempt to capture the essence of music at the most basic level of all.

I don’t know how many thousands of songs are in the Pandora database, but I created a station — starting with the music of Eric Bogle — and what I realized very quickly is that Pandora created a playlist filled not only with Bogle’s best songs, but with great songs by other artists that someone who likes Bogle might also like.

Pandora showed me Jackson C. Frank, a ’60s folksinger who had roomed with Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel in 1964 in London. He made one great album, produced by Simon, called “Blues Run the Game.” Frank died in 1999, and an expanded version of his single great album was released after his death.

It’s a great album, and without Pandora, I would never have been aware of it.

I also heard some great stuff by folksinger John McCutcheon, another person I discovered through the Bogle channel. Now I’m looking forward to trying all sorts of musical combinations.

It really is wonderful.

And for some reason, I was reminded of one of my favorite movies. In “Notting Hill,” Hugh Grant says something to Rhys Ifans about opening Pandora’s box.

Ifans’ reply:

“I knew a girl named Pandora once, but she never let me see her box.”

When was it that the primary goal of our economy became making people who were already wealthy even wealthier?

We live in a time when taxes of the very wealthiest among us are at an historic low, and budget deficits are at all-time highs, yet conservatives battle like demons to keep even the tiniest tax increases from being passed by Congress. Indeed, Republicans running for president refused to agree to even one dollar in tax increases for every $10 in spending cuts.

For more than thirty years, Republicans from Reagan to the Bushes to the current crop of candidates have been attacking the role of government in our society. They have turned dozens of government functions into ways for rich campaign contributors to get even richer.

Maybe the worst part of all the changes we have been put through is that we have gotten rid of most of our manufacturing jobs — the folks who actually made things — and have replaced them with an entirely new category of jobs where people make massive amountsd of money simply by moving money around.

In his brilliant “Bonfire of the Vanities,” Tom Wolfe’s main character, banker Sherman McCoy, describes his job as not the person who bakes the cake, not the person who buys the cake, but instead a person who puts together the deal by getting the baker and the buyer together. His compensation is nothing more than a few crumbs that fall off the cake.

Of course, those crumbs add up.

Of all the “moving money around” jobs, there is one particular type of job that I’ve always thought was the most evil. Call them “corporate raiders” or whatever you want; they’re the ones who come in and buy up companies, sell off their best assets, lay off workers and then sell the shells and walk away with big profits. Lots of working class and middle class people lose their jobs. A few rich people make massive profits.

This year, one of the men who wants to be president is one of those corporate raiders. Mitt Romney, whose government experience is limited to four years as governor of Massachusetts, has worked for much of his career as one of the biggest corporate raiders of all. He has amassed a personal fortune estimated at $264 million, without ever working for a company that actually made anything.

There has been a lot of talk in the last year or so about the 1 percent and the 99 percent. And while government has been slanted toward favoring the wealthy ever since Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, it has been getting sillier and sillier since George W. Bush took office in 2001 and slashed taxes on the richest Americans.

I don’t think Mitt Romney is ever going to be president. He’s got that same politically geeky quality that hurt Al Gore and John Kerry so much in their races for president. I’ve always hated the idea of people voting for the candidate they would most like to have a beer with, but that’s one thing that won’t be working in Romney’s favor this time.

Poor Mittens.

He might just have to settle for the money.

When I was in high school, the coolest guy in the world was British.

1965

Of course he was also a fictional character, but if there was anyone who didn’t want to be James Bond, I sure didn’t know him.

Bond was suave, sophisticated, great with the ladies and capable of doing all sorts of impossible things for Queen and Country.

Of course there have been all sorts of actors playing Secret Agent 007 since the series began in 1962 with “Doctor No,” including Woody Allen,  but for those of us who were the right age to see the original films in their first release, the only real Bond is Sean Connery.

It has been nearly 40 years since Connery did his last turn as Bond, and at 81, he is in semi-retirement. But just as Connery played Robin Hood at the end of his life in “Robin and Marian,” it might be interesting to see him as an older, retired 007.

Actually, his role in “The Rock” as a British secret agent who has been in an American prison for decades could easily have been a Bond takeoff.

I don’t think “Thunderball” was Connery’s best turn as Bond — “From Russia With Love” and “Goldfinger” are probably competing for that honor — but there was something special about it. Maybe it was that Connery was maturing as Bond, or maybe it’s just that I was 15 then and had read most of Ian Fleming’s Bond novels.

For whatever reason, I still enjoy “Thunderball,” even though I’m watching it on a 37-inch television instead of the massive movie screens of the ’60s.

We adjust, and anyway, it’s the memories that matter.

If you can’t be optimistic at the beginning of the year, I’m not sure you can ever be optimistic.

It’s certainly easy to be negative when you’re looking back on a bad year. I don’t remember which year it was that Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain referred to as an annus horribilis; I think it might have been the year Chuck and Di got divorced, but I’m not sure. My friend Mick thought she had said anus horribilis, which is a whole different kettle of worms.

At any rate, we all have bad years in our lives, and most of us don’t anticipate them in advance. It just isn’t human nature.

There certainly are years I will remember as bad ones, and without giving it really serious thought, I probably would have put 2011 fairly high on that list. Almost all of the progress I made in getting into shape in 2010 was lost in 2011, and as the New Year starts, I find myself starting all over again.

Cue Mel and Tim …

Ah, “Starting All Over Again,” another one of those ’60s songs that no one remembers except me, Mel and Tim.

But I wrote about 2011 yesterday, as fast away the old year passed.

Now it’s 2012, and some great things are going to happen this year. For one thing, I’m going to get back into shape. For another, I’m going to finish my book, which has essentially been on hold — two-thirds finished — for most of the last year. For a third, I’m going to see to it that Nicole becomes healthy and happy again. Heck, we might even take a cruise together.

Years ending in “2″ have been a mixed blessing for me, but one thing tops everything else. It was 20 years ago that Nicole and I met, fell in love and got married after knowing each other only 51 days. This November, God willing, we will celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary.

I’ve got a feeling it’s going to be a really good year.

I was going to write about New Year’s Eve tonight, about how I’ve had very few wild ones in my six-plus decades on Earth.

But then I saw a post on Facebook from one of my friends, Tina Bacas Gibson. Three words. Three simple words.

“Fuck you, 2011.”

I don’t blame her. I certainly don’t know all the reasons she might have had for feeling that way, but I do know she lost a sister to cancer this year and that might just be enough.

Years are rarely all good or all bad, but we generally remember them for the overall impression they leave with us. I lost my job in January 2008, but eight months later my little granddaughter Madison Nicole was born. That’s why I can’t really hate 2008, even though my dad died in March of that year.

This year hasn’t been all that great, although it followed a year in which a number of wonderful things happened. We have been really struggling in the second half of the year, and my lovely wife’s health has been a big problem.

But calling 2011 a total loss would be a mistake, because once again Pauline and Ryan came through and gave us another grandchild. Little Lexington Wesley was born in November.

Maddie, Lexington and Ryan

Next year may be a good one. Virgile and Sterling will return from Greece for language training in Washington, D.C., and Pauline and her family will wrap up their tour in Surabaya and start three years in Jamaica.

Our whole family will be in two time zones.

That in itself ought to make 2012 better than 2011.

Hope it’s better for Tina, too.

“Probably everybody be nice to you if they knew you were dying.”
“Everybody knows everybody is dying. That is why people are nice. You all die soon enough, so why not be nice to each other.”
– MARK HARRIS, “Bang the Drum Slowly”

Robert De Niro as doomed catcher Bruce Pearson.

Everybody knows everybody is dying. From the moment we’re born, it’s an invisible countdown to the end, invisible only because none of us know exactly how many years of life we’ll have.

So we do our best to ignore it, taking it seriously only when someone near to us has a serious illness.

Nicole and I have been through several tough illnesses in the nearly 20 years we have been together, and the older we get, the more serious the implications can be. I’m certainly not complaining. I have friends whose health problems are every bit as serious as ours. My friends deal with their problems by continuing to put one foot in front of the other and taking one step at a time.

It’s really all you can do, and while people certainly do seem to be nicer to you when they know you are dying, I think most of us are nicer to the people we love when they are simply ill.

My wife said something to me recently that served to make me both happy and sad at the same time. She said that one thing she liked about being ill was that I am so kind to her when she is ill.

I was happy to hear it, but disappointed in myself that it should take an illness to make me be nicer to the person I love  more than anyone else in the world.

It is a step, though, and as health improves, maybe we can hang onto the feeling that made us be nicer in the first place.

After all, everybody knows everybody is dying. That is why people are nice.  We all die soon enough, so why not be nicer to each other.

Nobody does despair like the Irish, and nobody does Irish better than the Pogues.

They’re not actually Irish. The entry in Wikipedia refers to them as a Celtic punk band from London, but their name comes from pog ma thoin, loosely translated from the Irish as “kiss my arse.”

I had heard of them before, but I had never bought anything of theirs until I got their version of Eric Bogle’s “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda” off iTunes. Then yesterday I discovered their great Christmas song, “Fairytale of New York.” Viewers on VH1 Great Britain voted it the best Christmas song of all time, although it’s like no other Christmas song I’ve ever heard.

Shane Macgowan and the late Kirsty MacColl

It’s a story of an aging alcoholic who finds himself in the drunk tank on Christmas Eve, remembering happier times with a woman he knew. The song turns into a back-and-forth between Macgowan and MacColl, in which they insult each other lovingly.

You’re a bum
You’re a punk
You’re an old slut on junk
Lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed
You scumbag, you maggot
You cheap lousy faggot
Happy Christmas your arse
I pray God it’s our last

The boys of the NYPD choir
Still singing Galway Bay
And the bells were ringing out
For Christmas day.

There actually is no NYPD choir, but it hardly matters. There haven’t been many Christmas songs that look at the other side of the holiday, at people who don’t have families to visit and won’t be getting any gifts they don’t buy for themselves. Christmas is the time of year when more sick people die and when the suicide rate spikes. Christmas may be for the family, as Dennis Day sang in one of my mother’s favorite Christmas songs, but if you have no family — if you have no one at all to share it with — Christmas is anything but the happiest day of the year.

The YouTube version of the song from St. Patrick’s Day 1988 has been viewed nearly 7 million times, and as much as any song I’ve ever heard, it’s a reminder that while there are people dressed to the nines for Midnight Mass or waking up early to look at the presents under the tree, there are people freezing in the streets, detoxing in the drunk tank and just living without any hope of happiness of the kind we grow to expcet.

Two miles outside the gates of the retirement community in which I live, there is a trailer park. It isn’t even a particularly nice trailer park.  Several of the units visible from the road are broken-down and abandoned, but if you look a little farther, there are at least two or three not-so-mobile homes decorated very tastefully with Christmas lights.

These folks don’t have much, but they believe.

The boys of the NYPD choir
Still singing Galway Bay
And the bells were ringing out
For Christmas day.