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Last Updated: March 15, 2008 - 3:24 PM
Practical spirituality for a complicated world.
“I once had a beautiful Fatherland. It was a dream.”
Heinrich Heine
I live in New Mexico, which is a minor administrative district in the
Super-Empire called the United States of America. I was born in the
United States of America, five years after the end of
World War II. I
grew up in the 1950’s, when the middle class was at its apex. The US
had won the war, and was engaged in an ideological battle with the
Russians, both sides backed by enough weapons of mass destruction to
blow up the whole world several times over. I was young, but as Bob
Dylan once wrote, “I was so much older then”. I didn’t know a lot about
the Russians, except that they were the bad guys and we Americans were
the good guys. I remember in 1959, we had a special ceremony at school.
We all gathered around the flagpole. Our school principal lowered the
old flag with 48 stars, and raised the new one with 50 stars. Hawaii
and Alaska had become states. Our small school band played the national
anthem. It would have been a modest affair according to most standards,
but to my grammar school mind, it was grand, indeed.
My world was small. It revolved around my dog, Princess, school, my
difficult parents, my little sister, and thank God, my paternal
grandparents, who were my salvation. Many people in our small
semi-rural community in South Mississippi did not have televisions. We
did, although reception was a problem. Television was only on at
certain hours. We got WWL from New Orleans, and later on, stations in
Hattiesburg and Biloxi, but bad weather often interfered. My favourite
programmes were “My Little Margie”, “Ramar of the Jungle”, “Gene
Autry”, “Roy Rogers and Dale Evans”, “Our Miss Brooks”, “The Life of
Riley”, “Ozzie and Harriet”, “George Burns and Gracie Allen”, and “The
Mickey Mouse Club”. My Grandmother Odom bought me a Mickey Mouse hat
with mouse ears, and I wore it while I watched the show. I rode my
bicycle to school. There was a long metal rack in the school yard,
where everyone parked their bikes. There was never a bike stolen. The
community was so small, a theft could’ve never been concealed. The
entire school was on one campus. The elementary school was in its own
building, as was the junior high, and high school. The school cafeteria
served the most delicious food you could ever imagine. Lunch was five
cents, and always included fresh baked rolls and homemade dessert. At
recess, we bought small half pint cartons of chocolate milk for two
cents. I went to that school for twelve years, from first through
twelfth grade. I cannot remember one instance where a student sassed a
teacher. It would have been unthinkable. If they had, they would’ve
been expelled. There were a few thugs, of course, but they usually
dropped out in the 7th or 8th grade and hauled pulp wood. Generally,
our community valued education, and supported the school. It was, along
with the churches, the centre of the community.
Every Halloween, we had a carnival, with a haunted house, bobbing for
apples, and a small rummage sale where the adults could purchase things
on the cheap. Even the fundamentalists participated, and no one ever
mentioned worshipping Satan or paganism. Each class had a group of
“Room Mothers” who helped the teacher with the Christmas party, an
exchange of Valentine cards, and the end of the year party.
I was always a good student. Back then, they gave us a grade based on
how we behaved, called “Deportment”. I always got A’s in Deportment,
mostly because I knew what would’ve happened had I misbehaved. The
resources our school had were quite limited, compared with today’s
multi-million dollar budgets. Yet, we all learned to add, subtract,
multiply and divide. We memorised the multiplication tables, we learned
to read and write. All of us learned those things, with only a tiny
fraction of the tax money and other resources available today. Drugs?
Yes, the adults had alcohol and tobacco, but that was it. Metal
detectors in school? I don’t think metal detectors had even been
invented, yet.
Perhaps you will find this difficult to believe, but there were no
burglaries. Most people never locked their doors or windows. After I
finished college, my parents sold the house I grew up in. They couldn’t
find the key to the back door. We never used it. By that time, however,
things were beginning to change. Even in that isolated corner, the new
USA was emerging.
All was not love and light in those times. We lived in a community
where racial discrimination was the law of the land. This was a
terrible injustice that can in no way be justified. The government
should never be allowed to legislate for or against someone based on
race, religion, gender, or gender orientation. There were laws and
social customs that held women at a great disadvantage. That was wrong,
and I’m thankful that those barriers were removed. There is still work
to do, but much social progress has been made. I wonder, though, why we
think that in order to remove unjust barriers, all standards have to be
abandoned. I wonder why, when we mention European-American
civilisation, or the USA before the tumult of the 60’s, everything is
defined by its shortcomings? Why must an entire way of life be totally
discredited because there were injustices? This is especially confusing
to me since so much progress has been made. Why are people so insistent
on holding on to resentments, and hatreds? I’m the first to admit that
awful things happened, but why still define ourselves by those terrible
things? It is unhealthy to define yourself based on your failures,
instead of on your successes. We’ll never be able to heal until we’re
willing, as individuals and as a people, to move on, and to live in the
present rather than the past.
Perhaps the USA I grew up believing in, never really existed. I don’t
know. But, I do know for sure that our little corner of it was a lot
more peaceful than today. White and Black families were mostly intact,
functional or not. Gangsters and hoodlums in both communities were
called gangsters and hoodlums, not heroes. Segregation as the law of
the land was a poison to both White and Black communities. People of
good will in both communities realised this, and knew that things had
to change. What puzzles me today is why so many of the good, positive
aspects of that society had to be shelved in the process. It seems as
if the revolution, which indeed it was, devoured its own. There are
social evils that I am happy we got rid of. There’s still room for
improvement. But, there are simpler values and standards we could
return to, and be the better for it.
As a gay man, I have been, in many ways, the beneficiary of the social
revolution begun in the ‘60’s. But, I’ve come to see that we cannot
change people’s minds. We can only encourage them to change their
hearts. We cannot legislate equality. The most we can hope for is to
remove legislation that forbids people from the opportunity to
participate equally. We don’t want to continue throwing out the baby
with the bath water. Unfortunately, many social activists seem to be
ruled by their passions rather than a reasoned approach. Many of them
seem more motivated by a hatred for European-American, Judeo-Christian
civilisation than by a sincere desire for social justice. They spend
little of their time in dialogue or debate, because they’re always
screaming and shouting. It’s a pity.
If you found anything in this column you can use, take it and enjoy it.
If you have no tolerance for what I’ve written, tear it up and throw it
away. In either case, we can both be part of the same community of
concerned people who want to make things better. We don’t have to agree
on everything to get along, do we? OM
Robert Ransom Odom is an internationally published author and teacher.
Robert has been a leading figure in the metaphysical spiritual
community of Santa Fe since 1990.
To ask Robert a question, visit his website at www.RobertOdom.com, email desertrj@msn.com or send mail to PO Box 33, Santa Fe, NM 87504.
© Copyright 2000-2008 by Robert Ransom Odom
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