Dear Mr. Bageant,
I read the title of your book Deer Hunting With Jesus and immediately ordered it from the only independent bookseller I know. In the meantime I read some of your postings. I am almost ten years older than you and I thought you might find some of my experiences interesting. I find them ominous.
I was born in Mississippi and reared there and in East Texas. When I got involved with the civil rights movement, my mother, a very proper Southern lady, wanted to know where I got such radical and foreign ideas. I told her they came from that nice Episcopal church she sent me to. When they told me that God said I should love my neighbor, I never realized they meant I should love my WHITE neighbor. My mother hadn't wanted me and I had been cared for by a live-in black woman, so I had never picked up the required prejudices.
I was opposed to Vietnam from the start and did that protest, too. My first husband had an experimental project using helicopters out of Ft. Hood and I got to know their pilots in the mid-60's. They all went to Vietnam. I sent cookies and cakes to them all. They all died. And we cut and ran anyway, with screaming people hanging onto our helicopters!
I was in Austin, Texas when JFK was killed. The Klan burned a small cross in my yard because I was seen openly weeping. Before that I had gotten hate mail from anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic Birchers. What kind of people threaten a woman whose husband is overseas, who has three small children in the house? I actually went to Mississippi for a short breather.
Ended up in Potomac, Maryland, married to an attorney who was a political appointee in and out of the FBI and DEA under our Republican presidents. He didn't much approve of my subversive activities but he didn't do anything to stop me. I taught Head Start, nutrition to poor women, volunteered at D.C. Village, etc.
I came here to Florida because my mother was ill and needed help. Let me tell you, southwest Florida is as bad, maybe worse, than anything I saw in what is supposed to be the "real" South. The ignorance and bigotry are appalling. Thought I would join a book club but the first book assigned was The DaVinci Code so that was the end of that.
I was a cardiac nurse. You would be dumbfounded at the ignorance of the people I worked with. We have, as you know, many elderly people here in Florida. When the patients would talk about "The War" the younger nurses thought they meant Vietnam. They had no concept of any historical period any earlier. They also cannot speak a grammatical sentence.
I have had multiple sclerosis for many years. Two years ago I was diagnosed with an atypical form of epilepsy. I don't have convulsions; I just lose consciousness and fall down wherever I am. There are no warning signs. You can imagine the injuries! Obviously I couldn't drive or work. When I applied for state unemployment I was told that I would have to be out of work for six months before I could even apply!
This is OK for me; fortunately I have some other income. But what about people going paycheck to paycheck? One of my nurse's aides, one of the best and kindest people I ever worked with, and doing a thankless job, was 75-years-old and couldn't afford to retire because she couldn't afford the Medicare deductibles. She lost her house when she became ill and lives here with me now, not a guest but an equal.
Before my epilepsy was diagnosed it was thought that I was having mini-strokes. A nurse with whom I had worked many years, whose husband is a Lutheran pastor, brought me one of the LaHaye' Left Behind books. She told me that she wanted to be sure I was "saved." Well, as far as I can tell I haven't been saved from much, but the book was horrifying! What kind of sadistic God do these people believe in?
I renewed some old ties at my high-school reunion in Texas last fall. One man, an old friend, was a war correspondent in Vietnam. When I asked if he had known David Halberstam he told me that Halberstam was anti-American and "we should just bomb all the gooks and camel-riders and niggers off the earth and let God sort them out." Even at my age I am still shocked.
Here in Florida I married a man who didn't finish high school, was drafted during Korea and made the military a career, having no other options. My children are doctors and attorneys. Of his four children, one is financially successful. The others work in factories which may close at any minute.
Anyone who believes in equal opportunity in this country can't see what is plainly in front of their faces. Poor people can't see that their enemy is not other poor people of a different color but the businesses that run the country. (And I agree with you about immigration.)
Of course we may not have to worry about it much longer because Mother Nature may be fed up with us eating her alive. I am really pessimistic; I have been on the frontlines, in the trenches, in politics, in homeless shelters, everywhere I thought I could lend a hand. Nothing makes any difference that I can tell.
But I hope that you will continue to give 'em Hell!
Sincerely,
Anne in Florida
PS: This warped religion business reminds me of Flannery O'Connor, who said religion will suffer the final degradation: "It will become popular."
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Dear Anne,
If there is anyone who will understand my book, it is you, living on the cusp of the class line. I live much the same life, when it comes to family. By my second wife, who has a PhD in physics, I have two children, one in UC Berkeley Law School and one at Cornell. My oldest son, child of my first wife, a local woman whose background was the same as mine (she just got her degree at age 58; Salute!) is 40 and works as a custodian at the University of West Virginia.
Yet there is education and there is education. Timothy (named for Tim Leary), who grew up in the school busses and freedom of the Sixties, is a strong realist and has deep insight into laboring America. He sees right through the crap and is my best friend and intellectual companion in all matters class and labor. True to the old white working class values, he thinks constantly about how to help his parents in old age. To that end he bought a house remolded into three apartments. He walks in the tracks of his Blue Ridge forefathers. At the same time I think of my efforts in Belize, Central America, as providing possible future escape for my children.
I guess what I am trying to say here is that when it comes to children, awareness is the greatest gift we can leave them with. Even if we do so by making many mistakes in front of them, which I surely did. So now they are all equally aware, but from different vantage points.
Like you, on most days I tend toward pessimism -- a dirty word here in Zombieland USSA. The only respite I get is in the little village of Hopkins, Belize, where the money, folly and darkness of America are irrelevant at the practical level of everyday life.
All we can do is live each day with as much dignity and truthfulness as we can humanly muster. Somehow, the company of so many fellow travelers such as yourself gives me strength, which I try to repay in the only way I know how -- writing, trying to say that we are not alone in our thinking and what we see around us. I'm no good for anything else at this age. Hopefully, these simple reportage based essays help us feel a little human unity amid the vast distances, loneliness and ominous silence regarding the truth about this new work camp/shopping mall we now call America.
We may thank god and/or the cosmos that with age comes toughness.
In art and labor,
Joe
