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I can remember the very first time I heard Johnny Cash. I was at my grandparent's house, and he was on TV. My grandfather...then still a hard drinking truck driver with entire wars on his psyche...sat in rapt attention as the Zenith pumped out Ring of Fire. I couldn't understand the music, but I loved the guy's voice, and he looked like my grandfather: big, dark, voice deep with a southern fried accent. He had a sinister sort of sneer to him, like he'd seen the worst of it. Yet there he was.
My grandfather is a huge influence on me. My time spent with him (we spent weekends and some weekdays with them from the time I was 3 until they moved to Virginia when I was 9) was where my America started, where it's origins are. You want to know the source of my ideals, it's my family, but mainly a select few. My grandfather was a mechanic, a truck driver, ex-infantry, a bullet catcher with German lead still in him, a supply sergeant who stood on a Korean mountain and saw a million Chinese regulars, and knew his wars were over. He had conviction, sincerity, brutal honesty, and a work ethic that was surpassed only by my mother. He believed in the systems that he helped create and support. He raised a flag every morning, and pulled it down every night, teaching my brother and I how to fold it in a military fashion. He taught me how cars worked, how politics worked, and what good music was. I've written about him, the accident he had that broke his back. He was on his feet in record time, and his strength continues to amaze me. His tenacity of belief continues to amaze me as well. I was raised with a southern Pentecostal underpinning, a system of belief that started with God and ended with Me, with the president, the Army, and Elvis all in there somewhere. My America was the southwest, which is a very different place to grow up. I grew up in a literal frontier, in the space between the US and Juarez, Mexico, where the old west died in the 1930s, some 40 years before my birth. The smell of gunpowder was still in the air, the tar still fresh on the highways. The southwest grows and changes much too fast for the kind of nostalgia that I have grown into, but it also clears your head of any lingering sympathy for failed systems. When I was a child, I was taught by schools that Columbus discovered the US, but that the Conquistadors really did more with it and to it. I was brought up with a Mexican accent, a distinctly El Paso trait that sounds foreign to my ears now. My America was a place of promise that millions wanted into, a place filled with possibility: if you could get a job, you could eventually own the land, you could eventually manage the factory, you could eventually work your way into power. And that's how it worked. I saw my uncles and aunts working their asses off, toiling under a recession in the 70s that should have killed us off, but we managed as plumbers and electricians and secretaries and truckers and con men. Blue collar back before it was cool. I had one uncle, Art Jr., who was an engineer. He helped design the heaters for the Alaska pipeline, and worked for El Paso Natural Gas. To this day, I have no idea what an engineer does for that company, but he did it for thirty years. We survived by the grace of God, the kindness of family, and the tenacity of our spirit. My mother, after the divorce and before marrying my stepfather, would go hungry two days out of three so that my brother and I could have tortillas and queso, those .25 cent cans of concentrate cheese mixed with water instead of milk. She would stay up all night working the finances, finding change, making sure we could survive. My dad would come by with groceries and whatever extra cash he could afford. We made do. Fast forward, the world working exactly as designed as all the hard work my family did paid off, for the most part. Even at my worst, I always had a roof, sometimes barely, often mobile, but always had support. The country that I believed in, those ideals survived well into my twenties. I loved this country, every aspect of it. I was a screaming liberal, but only because, hey, the country was born in the fire of revolution, why not try more? It hadn't worked in the sixties, not completely, but society changed drastically then. I was prepared to do my part, to carry the fight forward: freedom, peace, and possibility. ----- I remember getting an email from a friend back in 2000. She was frothing over Bush's win, was ready to lead the charge. She wanted him to pay for his coup, to be handed over to the crowd for democratic payback. She protested, she worked hard against the system. I did as well, giving cash and time and effort to a handful of different collective groups, political allies and unions, homeless shelters, food banks. We worked out a plan to give out survival kits to the homeless: boxes with food, clothing, money, and a very concise book of political indoctrination, plus maybe a knife or a handgun. We had crazy ideas. We worked hard to shift the power back to the people, to ensure our ideals. ---------- In 2002, after the 2001 attacks, under the new regime, my friend was at a protest, walking from the protest area to a coffee shop to meet friends. She was told to stop, then she was shot in the face and chest by a beanbag gun. The cop who shot her then beat her for a while, as did several others, eventually breaking two ribs, her nose, and three of her fingers. In jail that night, she was raped. She was released in a week, and found that her collective...the folks she lived with and shared with...were gone, vanished. Scattered in fear. It wasn't much longer after Bush won the second time that she left the country. --------- In 2005 she emailed me from Amsterdam. She was selling drugs. She was a drifter. She seemed empty, lost, sad. The beliefs she'd clung to were replaced by fear and crime. --------- Maybe my America died with her. But more than just with her, it died with the shattering of a lot of grade-school ideals that, given real-world chaos, had proven themselves for many years. My family really had worked from the ground up, in trades and in the military. They'd succeeded, thrived in places. They were mostly OK. And they'd all, to a single one, forgotten what we believed, how we'd succeeded, and they replaced their belief with hate, almost to a man, all of them caught in this new darkness. Because fear, war, terror, and blood. The totality of it, the arrogance of a leader above the law. The stupidity of the people who elected him, or the people who wrote his software. And now, we're a mess. A teeming mass of cynics who hide, hide in fear and anger behind our cynicism. Hide our lost and lonely selves behind the wall of language and data that we create in places like this. ------------------- I love my country. But my country is dead. Maybe we can salvage what is left. I just don't know; my heart's not in it. Not because it "should" be different or "could" be different, but because it was different and now, now? Now? Hopeless. ---------------- I was listening to Johnny Cash the other night, and thought of my grandfather. He's still around, he and my grandmother. Long-lived stock, we are. They still believe, they love the fictions created in the darkest parts of the party and it's appliances. And I can't argue with them, just like I won't argue with you. Some people, their country is still alive, or was stillborn. ------------ That's where my America comes from: my heart and a hundred years of people working their asses off to live in a land of promise and adventure that still shimmers somewhere under a layer of oil and money and blood too thick to penetrate. Our brutality, often kept in check by our kindness, became out trademark, our way of life. Can I leave it? I don't know. Your arguments in my hole entry, many of them cynical and buried in the stress of modern life, make sense. I'm going to have to wait and see. Maybe this country will improve, but you don't often see mudslides going up hill.
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