I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Category: racism

  • ROAD TRIP! GRANDBABY ON BOARD!


    Over the spirited reservations of both Papa Williams (NanaT’s father) and NanaSlo (me), NanaT (Pretty) moved full steam ahead with her plans for our granddaughter’s first car trip “up the road” as we say in our family whenever we drive to the upstate foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Landrum.  Mama Caroline gave NanaT just the encouragement she needed to override my worries about packing our grandbaby Ella who is just 11 weeks old today into the back seat of our old Toyota Camry yesterday for the wild adventures of her first road trip.

    I’m wondering what this contraption is? 

    Thank goodness I have my cap, blanket and favorite pacifier.

    My NanaT has the prettiest smile – 

    she’s so happy I’m in the back seat with NanaSlo

    our first stop was to get NanaT an iced tea for the road from Rush’s

    NanaSlo whispered to me that NanaT never went anywhere without 

    picking up an unsweet iced tea from Rush’s

    are you telling me I have to watch from the Back Seat

    and Face Backwards until I’m TWO Years old?

    If I could walk, I’d stage a protest march.

    Hey, hey, ho, ho – facing backwards has got to go.

    Papa Williams and his wife think I’m a Rock Star!

    I think Papa Williams is the Bomb – he’s focused on the Big Things…

    like milk and impeachment.

    it’s a big responsibility being the entertainment for an entire family

    Aunt Darlene thinks I’m up to the challenge, though

    all good things have to come to an end so I said goodbye to the upstate

    and got back in the car to go home.

    I tried to sleep going home but NanaT stopped the car and NanaSlo woke me

    to feed me my last bottle.

    Did somebody say Last Bottle?

    Get me outta here, Percy.

    And so we did get Baby Ella home safely last night after an awesome day with lots of smiles from everyone in the upstate. NanaT was brave to make this first trip, and I freely admit my trepidations were unnecessary. Ella is a trooper just like her NanaT. They are lucky to have each other. I predict many more trips to the upstate and look forward to sharing our love of the foothills and family with our granddaughter.

    Stay tuned.

     

     

     

  • a hard candy Christmas


    I’ll be just fine and dandy,

    Lord it’s like a hard candy Christmas.

    I’m barely getting through tomorrow,

    but still I won’t let sorrow bring me way down.

    ——  Carol Hall lyrics from the musical

    The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas

    Gosh, the hard candy Christmas has gone viral.   I thought we could keep it local with just a few hits along the holiday trail stories but nope, Newtown, Connecticut changed the name of that tune.   We Americans have a tragedy of unspeakable grief that will quickly reverberate in cyberspace around the world to a populace who will ask themselves, What is wrong with those people in America?

    I think it’s a fair question and one that we must ask ourselves.   What is wrong with us?   How do we enable and encourage this rage and senseless violence against our own?   Why do we have a Columbine in our not-too-distant history and how will these same historians record the massacres in Aurora, Colorado and at Virginia Tech?  What can possibly be written about the Sandy Hook Elementary School horror of losing twelve little girls and eight little boys and six adults who were their educators in a few minutes on a regular Friday morning at their public school.  Much will be written through the coming years, but what we do in response to these shocking events will define our culture and our country.

    To the politicians in Washington I say, You need to become statesmen and stateswomen.  You need to set aside your vitriolic verbal attacks on each other.  You are the adults in our family, and we have placed our trust in you by electing you to represent us and when what we see on our Ipads and Iphones and other high-tech gadgets as well as on our regular old television programs is bitterness and bickering and bashing each other verbally, you’re setting a bad example for your children.  You make them believe that rage is not only acceptable but necessary.   Take a deep breath.  Step back for a moment.  Look at yourselves and see what images you project for your people.   Could you please just play nice.

    To the parents who have brought children into our world and have great expectations for their futures and who now are bipolar between anger and anguish, I say I’m so sorry.    No one deserves this.   No one is being punished for removing God from Sandy Hook Elementary School.  God isn’t in this equation or else we would have to blame Him for allowing the assailant to have weapons, wouldn’t we?  Not so fast, my friend, or as my daddy and Ann Richards used to say, That old dog won’t hunt.  But what can we do?  Should we as parents insist on police protection for our children in all public schools regardless of age?   Would police protectors be able to thwart the enraged and armed assailants?  These are the questions we ask ourselves.

    Which brings me to the central dilemma of the complex  challenge of early identification and intervention for our Angry Ones and that is, of course, beyond Thunder Dome to me.  Our children are now raised in a culture of violence.  They play games with it, they sing songs about it, their heroes are violent athletes, their movie stars make action movies with so much “action” their hearing is impaired when they leave a theater, their country sends soldiers to places they have to learn to pronounce and spell like Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria…Viet Nam…Korea..and these soldiers kill other people in the name of peacekeeping.   Our children are surrounded by violence.   They may go to sleep with the sound of gunfire in their neighborhood and on their street corners.  They may wake the next morning to find a friend, cousin, uncle, father or brother has died during a battle over what?   Drugs?   Gangs?  Money?   Territory?  Aha.  There we have it.  There is no escaping the violence so why on earth would we be surprised that these children who are accustomed to violence, who have access to weapons, would shoot us when we make them mad or when we are, well, just being ourselves and they don’t like us that way?

    This is the season of hope, joy and celebration for some; the Prince of Peace and Santa Claus are the bearers of Good News and Great Gifts for many of us. But it is also a season of sadness for those who have lost family during 2012 and who will be reminded that their holiday season is different this year. The season won’t be the same – ever.  Some people will struggle to find the money to give their children what they want under the tree.   Friction and tension will make family gatherings more problematic than peaceful.  In our sense of hurry and anxiety over putting food on the table we might miss the opportunity to say: I love you today, I love you every day and you will always be special to me.

    I remember a hard candy Christmas with the disappointment of not getting what I wanted from Santa Claus but rather getting a sack of penny candy of bright different colors that tasted alternately sweet and sour but couldn’t be chewed at first because it was so hard.  Gradually though, if you waited long enough, you could bite the smaller piece in two and swallow them both.  Success.  Astonishingly delicious.

    I expected a hard candy Christmas personally this year for a number of reasons, but I wasn’t prepared for a national one.  Regardless, here it is and my hope is that America will never be the same – ever.  That our national consciousness is raised to include in our vocabulary the words kindness and reconciliation and forgiveness and a genuine passion for a better world.   We’ve waited long enough.  We have tasted both the sweet and the sour and, as Dolly Parton sings through the lyrics of Carol Hall, we won’t let our sorrows bring us down.

    Stay tuned.

    (Originally posted on December 16, 2012)

  • OK, BOOMER? let’s see what you got first


    Pretty will be the first to tell anyone that I am the world’s last to know anything about pop culture because I am not a twitterer, instagrammer, pinterester, redditer, or snapchatterer. I am not linked in, tik tokked, or tuned in or up on most days. I’m not passing judgment on any of these or the countless other social meda platforms nor am I necessarily proud of being uninformed although I remain stubbornly committed to Facebook regardless of whether anyone is bothering to influence my vote in the 2020 election. Just try. Please try. I will get you.

    I do, however, continue to watch CBS Sunday Morning faithfully because it is one show that Pretty and I can enjoy together. (Remember she continues to boycott all real news programs since the 2016 elections but instead gets her news information from Twitter.) So yesterday Pretty half watched CBS Sunday Morning by herself until I straggled in from our bedroom in a semi-conscious state thirty minutes into the broadcast. Segments came and went as I ate leftover sweet potato casserole from Thanksgiving for breakfast before taking my morning meds.

    I was shaken out of my television reverie by the Faith Salie commentary called OK, BOOMER in which she humorously described ok, boomer as a recent put down by the Gen Z (1995 – 2010) population of their aging Baby Boomer elders (1946 – 1961). Hm. What up, Gen Z?

    Apparently we the Boomers are being blamed for “rising waters, disappearing species, crippling debt and crumbling democracies.” Whaat? That’s all our fault? Easy for you to say, 48-year-old Faith Salie (Gen X 1961 – 1981).  Where were you guys when we were ruining climate change? Ho, ho, ho – and a merry old millenial (1981 – 1996) to you all for a holiday season free of guilt for any of the world’s most dangerous threats. The Boomers did it.

    Anyhow, as my now deceased Greatest Generation friend Libby Levinson used to say whenever she was about to change the subject,  Faith’s sally struck a nerve that I usually reserved for my free-floating anxiety over the current criminals in charge of the country. It was a bridge too far.

    I can’t bear to be thought of as old and irrelevant, I ranted to Pretty who was quite familiar, of course, with the OK BOOMER memes. Then I got irritated with her for not feeling disrespected because she was, after all, one of those Bad Old Boomers herself. The only person who can ever make you feel disrespected is yourself, Pretty said. Oh, sure, I said. Go ahead and quote one of my favorite Eleanor Roosevelt quotes back to me. Sigh. I could feel the air being let out of my anger. That Pretty.

    Today I sat in the pedi chair that belongs to the great pedicurist/philosopher Esther Isom who was responsible for the title of my last book: Four Ticket Ride. I couldn’t let the Ok, Boomer thing go so I was still raving about it from her chair which reminded me somewhat of a throne so I’m sure I had my proclamation tone in full force. I couldn’t believe Esther hadn’t heard of the funny haha put down from our children either, because she also was always in the cultural know, but she took it with a grain of salt.

    Tell them let’s see what you got first, she said with a laugh. Of course we won’t be around to know how they’ll do, she continued, but they’ll learn life isn’t as simple as they think it is.

    Point taken. I am not unaware of my generation’s shortcomings – we have been poor stewards of our planet, insensitive to the needs of the poor, squandered the earth’s resources to keep gasoline in our vehicles, failed at equality for people of color, elected corrupt public officials at every level of government – to name a few. I sadly recognize and confess my Baby Boomer sins.

    But hey, we’ve been on the front lines marching against the Viet Nam War, opened up amazing opportunities for women in the work force and athletics,  secured marriage equality for same sex couples, fought for civil rights; and worked, worked, worked to achieve the American Dream. We were competitive but with the spirit of a rugged individual. We were the original gangsters so… before you write me and my cohorts off as ancient and irrelevant, let’s see what you got first, kids.

    In the meantime, show some respect.

    Stay tuned.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • a pre-thanksgiving meltdown


    Pretty and I have so much to be thankful for this year I plan to do a Very Thankful Thanksgiving post in the next few days – complete with pictures of our six weeks old baby granddaughter. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday between Halloween and New Year’s Day because the traditions of family times and places on that holiday  linger in my memories alongside my hopes for the promises of a new year.

    However, I also have much for which I am not thankful as the year comes to a close. I live in a polarized country that now has the weight of an impeachment process in the Congress, the  “almost third” such process (I saw Nixon resign and walk away with his now famous V sign in 1974) in my lifetime. Nixon. Clinton. And now Trump. The public hearings that began this week gave the American people a better understanding of a president who apparently serves at and for his own pleasure. This is not a pretty picture, and as Wanda Sykes likes to say when she makes fun of white people and our free-floating guilt, it makes me sad.

    As if the impeachment process weren’t enough to make me less thankful, I find the more compelling news articles in 2019 weren’t articles of impeachment but those regarding the creation of detention centers along the southern borders of my home state ofTexas and other states to accommodate the thousands of Latino refugees seeking asylum from persecution in their own countries.

    An image forever etched in my brain is of Salvadoran Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez and his 23-month-old daughter Valeria who drowned trying to cross the Rio Grande River from Mexico to safety in the United States in June of 2019. Their story is only one of many who made the treacherous journey to the US only to find – not freedom – but incarceration in a detention system run by for-profit companies that are often more interested in what they are paid than the people in their care.

    According to The Guardian.com the number of persons living in detention centers throughout the United States totals 52,722 as of September 10, 2019. Unbelievable.

    On our way home from babysitting our grandbaby tonight, Pretty asked me to please stop being so negative about the football coach, the football team, the rainy weather, the cold weather, politics, the president and whatever else we were talking about. Evidently I had a pre-Thanksgiving meltdown right there in the car. She told me my passionate outpourings made her more worried and raised her anxiety level. When I asked her whether she didn’t share my thoughts, she said she did indeed about almost everything I’d brought up but she preferred keeping her opinions to herself and offered a suggestion to me that I do the same. I told her I felt less anxious if I spoke up and shared my worries with her.

    Hm. Maybe I should limit my negative opinions to my blogs. Now there’s an idea Pretty will support.

    Stay tuned for my Very Thankful Thanksgiving post.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • PT – I see light at the end of the tunnel, but the train headed toward me today


    Good morning … or afternoon, he said glancing at the clock on the wall, why don’t you come over here and we can talk while we wait?

    I glanced around the usually filled waiting room at the rehab facility to see an elderly man  sitting by himself. He was wearing a Vietnam Veteran cap so I knew he was retired military and probably about my age.The white hair definitely looked like my hair color. His blue jeans did their best to hang in there under the weight of a man whose belly fell over the belt struggling with the blue jeans. I recognized that look and the battle with the jeans because I fought that same battle every day. Yep, we were two old people sitting in a rehab waiting room. Evidently one of us was looking for conversation.

    Sure, I said with what I hoped was an air of conviviality, and sat down in a chair across from him. Not too close but closer than I would normally sit with someone as I waited for my PT trainer to appear  with a wave that signaled I was up next.

    What would you like to talk about? I asked him, expecting a dialogue in which we compared our progress in rehab and complained about how hard it was to get better once you’d had knee replacement surgery or some other body part that was now a foreign object in opposition to our own natural parts that had worn away with age.

    Politics, he said rather abruptly, but seemingly something that popped out of his mouth with no forethought.

    I was stunned. I was on the short side of time with my second knee’s rehab, and I had sat in that same waiting room 44 times during the past six months, and not one time had anyone mentioned the word politics to me. Just my luck – I was ready for the light at the end of the tunnel, and here comes a train.

    Uh, actually I don’t think politics is a good topic for us today, I said with what I hoped was a degree of innocence.

    Why not? he asked.

    Well, I said, as I quickly ran through 40 years of political activism in my mind, I don’t think you and I would be quite on the same page in a political discussion. You see, I’m what’s now referred to as an ancestral Democrat and I’m very aware that this county has only a few of us – I’m guessing only one in this waiting area.

    He thought about that for a second, then frowned. I gave 21 years of my life to the military and another 25 in civil service, he said. I’ve got two types of health insurance – Medicare and another one, and you (pointing a finger at me) have got candidates running around talking about Medicare for all and taking away my health insurance plans. I don’t like that. I don’t want to hear about it.

    First of all,  I said, thank you for your service to our country and I believe you should have any benefits available so I am very happy for your retiree benefits. Some of the Democratic candidates have other ideas for health care so we won’t know until the primaries whose ideas will win the day. He continued to frown.

    Luckily, I was saved at that moment by my PT trainer who brought this man’s wife out from the training area. No wonder we hadn’t talked about rehab – he wasn’t there for his own sake. He had brought his wife who was celebrating her last day in PT.  She hugged my trainer who had already motioned in my direction.

    I saw the train whiz by without incidence as light reappeared at the end of the tunnel. Only four PT sessions left. Get me out of here, Percy.

    Stay tuned.