Musings of a Dumb Ass

Musings of a Dumb Ass ....... We all go through life in our own little bubble. Our bubbles are created by events and desires as we grow and the thickness or strength of our bubble is determined by the emotion or pain we experience as we progress. What we see from inside our bubble isn't always what those outside of it see. Perhaps because February is black history month there has been emphasis on the history of the American civil rights movement or maybe it was just the right time for me to reflect on it and think about it. As I grew up my family was transient and by the beginning of the eighth grade I had been to 14 schools, some of them 3 or 4 times. We were dirt poor and between repeated abandonment by the man of the house and just simple hard times we always seemed to be in a stage of resettlement or waiting on the welfare check. There was of course intermittent times that were better, but we were still white trash in every respect and lived accordingly. Ninety percent of the time we either lived in nigger town or on the edge. I remember very well the separate bathrooms for black and white, the separate water fountains, the area set aside for blacks in the movie theatre, and the absence of black faces in the greasy spoon cafes. Even with remembering those conditions I don't remember recognising the terribleness of it until later, and back then it was 'just the way things were'. I had black friends, close ones, that I whiled away time with at the swimming hole, and visited with. But socially we didn't frequent the same places and no one ever talked about it, but just accepted it as 'the way things were'. In 1957 as the National Guard was called into Little Rock Arkansas to desegregate Central High School, in my little town a hundred miles away we paid little attention to it, black or white. At the height of the ballyhoo some of the activists came to our town to organize whatever, and the blacks joined with the whites to run the strangers out before they caused troubles in our community. The differences stayed the same for years in my little town, and there was a clear division not only of color but also of society through wealth. As white trash living on the edge of nigger town I never had the opportunity nor the desire to date the rich girls I went to school with, nor did I dream of working at any of the better jobs, because they weren't available to my kind. My family was entrenched in what they were and would never change for the better. Thankfully I had the nerve to leave when I was very young because I knew there was something out there better for me, and I was right, there was. I suppose my point is, at that time, all us trash lived together, black or white, and done the best we could with what we had and prayed for a better day. As a person with little education and less couth, I suffered discrimination in the same spirit as the blacks I knew at the swimming hole in Spadra creek at the workplace and at society's door, but I overcame that, as many of those at Spadra creek did also. After almost 50 years beyond Central High School I'm still uncertain if the elitists and the idealists and the visionary's and the politicians have done anything towards true equality. It appears to me their greatest accomplishments have been to make welfare and dependency respectable while filling urban neighborhoods with those with no hope and doing nothing to spark the spirit of the ones stuck there. Everyone I knew so long ago that wanted to live better, done so, because it was there to do. The rest remained the same niggers they always were, black or white, and still are today