Dynomite!: Good Times, Bad Times, Our Times--A Memoir (28 page)

I pledge allegiance . . .

Michael Newdow of Elk Grove, California has periodically sued to have the Pledge of Allegiance banned from being recited in public schools because the phrase “under God” offends atheists.

The great thing about the freedoms Americans have is that Newdow has the right to leave this country anytime . . . unlike in Cuba. He also has the right to speak his mind . . . unlike in China. Okay, so he is offended by “under God.” But I bet doctor/lawyer Newdow won’t burn any of his American money because the phrase “In God We Trust” is printed on every bill.

I’m offended too, like when a pretty woman doesn’t give me the time of day. I’m offended when I get my tax bill. I’m offended by the prices at Starbucks. I’m offended by boy bands. But I get over it!

“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

If anyone is offended by that, then don’t say it. But you have no right to stop anyone else from saying it either. If “under God” ever becomes illegal, then call me an outlaw!

I strongly believe in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights—but as living documents. I am not a strict constructionist. I know this may come as a shock to some of my conservative friends, but the world has changed since the eighteenth century. Once upon a time blacks were declared to be three-fifths of a human being and women could not vote. America changes. We must deal with new realities.

Family values, for example, have changed. Comedians love politicians who trot out that photo of their smiling, happy family. We love speeches about family values—and they come from the mouths of liberals, conservatives, and everyone in between. Let’s get real, people. Marriage does not work for most people in the modern age. Marriage is a great concept, just like there should be no racial hatred and there should be no poor people. But most marriages end in failure, called divorce. The traditional family is no longer Ozzie and Harriet. Today, a mother and two kids is more traditional.

Marriage does not even work for gay people! For me, marriage is between a man and a woman, as it has been for, oh, all of human history. But gay marriage is here and is not going away. Gays have a rallying cry of “We’re here! We’re queer! Get used to it!” Even though I oppose gay marriage and, instead, support civil unions, they are right. So let’s not waste our time—the time of our government—trying to turn back the clock. Divorce will do for gay marriages what it has done for straight marriages—create millions more single-parent households.

I feel the same way about the new reality of illegal immigration. Illegal immigrants, mainly Latinos, are here and will continue to come here—and there is less and less we can do about it every day. There are already too many who have made it through. They have overwhelmed the system. The toothpaste is out of the tube and cannot be put back in. We acknowledge that we have failed every time we declare an amnesty.

At this point I say children should receive amnesty but not the adults who came in illegally. At least with children, they can be Americanized, including learning English. I love going to a fast-food restaurant and listening to three generations of Hispanic women at a table. The grandmother speaks to her grown-up daughter in Spanish. The daughter talks back in Spanish but then turns to her child and speaks English. I think we should all learn other languages, especially Spanish, but we live in America, and English is the language that has bound us together in the past and will in the future.

If nothing else, insisting on English being spoken is a statement that illegal immigrants ought to adapt to our country, not the other way around. Unlike the legal immigrants who arrived here in the early twentieth century, today’s illegal immigrants feel it is a right and not a privilege to be in America. Yes, the Statue of Liberty is inscribed with “Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” But nowhere does that refer to
illegal
immigrants. Yet now that they have gained political power and can vote politicians in or out of office, they are not going back.

The new number-one minority is Hispanics. Blacks had been the country’s largest minority since the 1600s. Now we can’t even hold that job!

Recently I learned about my own heritage. Most blacks in America are not raised knowing much about the generations who came before them. Many are afraid of what they suspect they will find—slavery.

I knew nothing about my father’s relatives. I knew only a little about my mother’s Perryman family further back than her generation—her and her sisters, such as Inez and Birdie Mae, and her brothers, among them Cornelius and Herbert. Fortunately, Cornelius Perryman has never been a common name for a black man born in Alabama. With my mother Lorena conveniently named for her mother and Cornelius for her father, my coauthor, Sal Manna, was able to trace that side of my family back nearly two hundred years.

I learned that my great-grandfather George was married in Dallas County, Alabama, in 1875 to my great-grandmother Ella. His parents, my great-great-grandparents, were a farmer also named George and a woman named Eliza. They had been born in South Carolina—he in 1818, she in 1822.

Because census documents prior to 1870 list only the sexes and ages of slaves, not their names, we do not know the whereabouts of great-great-grandfather George before that year. Upon emancipation, though, a majority of slaves took the surname of their previous owner, and a slave owner with a large plantation near where George lived was named Jeptha Vining Perryman. Perhaps he had been George’s master.

In any case, by 1870 George had been emancipated and was living with Eliza and their children, including great-grandfather George, in Lowndes County, the county in Alabama that a century later was referred to as “Bloody Lowndes” for the civil rights struggle there. In 1965, more than a hundred years after blacks were freed, most of the residents of Lowndes County were black—but not one of them was registered to vote.

I am proud to say that my family has been in this country at least since 1818. We came in chains. We were immigrants of a sort, but we arrived on these shores legally. We survived. We persisted. We are here today. Let us not wallow in the past. You can keep the forty acres and a mule. The idea of reparations, compensating the descendants of slaves for the forced labor of their ancestors, is an idea whose time will never come. Instead, we should celebrate our freedom and our achievements.

We will always be a minority, and politically, I will always be a minority within that minority because I treat each issue on its own, not according to party.

I believe in Planned Parenthood, for example. A lot of parents today do not want sex education taught in the schools. They need to open their eyes. Your daughter is not fat. She is due in September! Just in time for back-to-school baby clothes!

I also believe that when the Declaration of Independence says that we, as Americans, have the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, health care is included. Without the availability of health care, there is no life, no liberty, no pursuit of happiness.

One of the few stories my mother told me about her growing up involved Aunt Vivian. She had two sons, Harold and Lloyd, and Lloyd suffered from asthma. She would take them and ride the bus—the black bus—some seventy miles from Selma to Birmingham to visit the white doctor who treated blacks for free one afternoon a week. He was inundated with patients and often did not finish until after the last black bus had left to return to Selma. If she missed that bus, Aunt Vivian, who worked as a maid, slept in the bus station with her kids until the next morning’s first bus home. She did that every other week for many, many months.

One day she came home and told Aunt Inez, “I’m just so tired.”

“You’re being lazy,” said tough Aunt Inez.

Vivian lay down, closed her eyes, and went to sleep. She never woke up. My mother did not know the cause of death, except to say that “she just wore out.”

Stories about the difficulty in obtaining health care are still heard today. I am sick and tired of hearing about people who do not go for medical help because of the cost, about people with insurance who are turned down for treatment, about people who do not fill their prescriptions or are removed from hospital beds because they do not have the money. We have some of the best medical technology in the world, but most people in the United States cannot afford it. The price of medical care today has grown too high. One of the leading causes of bankruptcies is medical costs. Even if you have done everything right—insurance, savings accounts, and so on—a serious illness can decimate everything you have accumulated in a lifetime.

The health care system that exists today does not work. We are losing money, lives, and hope. Every American has preexisting conditions—it is called life. Universal health care will cost everyone, but there is nothing more essential to us as individuals and to our society than our physical well-being. America is the last holdout against universal health care in the civilized world, and that needs to change.

Some of our wounds in the health care system are self-inflicted:

America, we are junkies, drug addicts, and I’m not just talking about crack, coke, or heroin. No, I mean the prescription kind—Oxycontin, Vicodin, Zoloft. The majority of people in drug rehabilitation aren’t there for heroin or cocaine but for some kind of prescription addiction. And what’s worse is that Americans think this is normal.

We need drugs to stay awake, to go to sleep, for pain, to be happy, to slow down, to speed up, to fight depression. Who knows when it started, but it is now out of control. The phrase “natural high” doesn’t apply to Americans. Add in alcohol, and the United States is the number-one drug-addicted nation in the world. Students, teachers, actors, athletes, talk show hosts, housewives, business executives, young and old are doing some kind of prescription mind-altering drug. People on these drugs function daily in our society and would never think of themselves as addicts.

It’s all in the family too. Kids take them from their parents’ medicine cabinets and use their parents’ doctors to get prescription drugs. Multibillion-dollar drug companies and doctors are the pushers. Addicts know they can get drugs from their doctors anytime as long as they check in once or twice a year. And if one doctor won’t give them the drugs they want, they’ll just go to another doctor. According to water pollution experts, people in America should be warned that our water supplies have traces of many prescription drugs.

I would love to say I or someone else has a great idea about how to stop this abuse. I don’t. But the first step toward recovery is recognizing that you have a problem. America has a problem.