 |
|
This is the story of how I got here.
My ancestors came to the United States from Europe just before the turn of the century, well after the Civil War. They arrived with only what they could carry, having worked and sacrificed all their lives for passage to the New World and a railroad ticket to the frontier state of Iowa. They left their ethnic identity and cultural history forever behind and forgotten in favor of integration into the limitless opportunities for a better life for themselves and their children as productive citizens of their new homeland.
In spite of their dedication to becoming one hundred percent Americans, that opportunity was slow to materialize. My maternal grandfather was home only often enough to father eleven children, supporting his family as a Mississippi riverboat gambler, the only skill he knew. As a result, his wife, my grandmother, was functionally a single working mother. After he abandoned the family, she died when my mother was eight years old. This left mom to be raised in turn by each of her older brothers and sisters, who where also busy starting their own families, as a matter of family responsibility, honor and pride.
My Catholic paternal grandfather was abandoned by his church when he married his staunchly Lutheran bride. He made his family's income as a self-employed, self-taught carpenter until he died when my father was seven. He left my minimally educated grandmother to raise my father and his older blind sister, my Aunt Grace, alone, with no help at all from her holier-than-thou Catholic in-laws. Unable to earn enough to support both of her children on anything more than subsistence income, Grandma arranged for my father temporarily to live on an Amish farm. There he worked for his keep under conditions that differed not at all from slavery. From dawn to dusk, he learned self reliance, fair dealing, and the virtues that would make him later on a successful and devoted husband and father. I like to think that he passed at least some of those virtues on to me.
My mom used what little college education she could afford to get a job teaching at an Indian school outside Tucson, Arizona. My dad roamed the country playing drums in one-night gigs in a little combo, putting away what he could until he had enough money to afford to marry mom. With what they had both saved, they moved back to their home state of Iowa, where my 23 year old dad capitalized on his musician contacts to open a little store selling sheet music and used musical instruments. My mom kept an immaculate apartment, listened to the news on the radio about the war in Europe, and researched names of historical heroes to prepare for my birth. (She decided upon "John," the Apostle, not the Baptist.)
When I was less than a year old, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, bringing the US into WWII. My father immediately closed his music store and went to work for a company that packaged artillery ammunition, some of which would eventually be fired over my head 25 years later in another war. He was ordered to report for induction, but received a deferment as a critical civilian employee. Given his Amish upbringing, he was, in fact, a conscientious objector, and could have been deferred on that basis alone. But he saw it his duty to serve his country in a way that would support those who were risking their lives on the battlefield without sacrificing his pacifist principles. He became one of the very few military aged men of the time who never served in the armed forces.
Actually, he probably would not have made a good soldier. Although he was an honest, patriotic, law-abiding, and conscientious employee, he refused to consider anybody or anything his master. He abhorred vice of every kind, and practiced moderation in everything, including drinking and smoking. Although he suffered from severe diabetes later in life, he never let anyone know about it until just before it killed him at age 87.
Before entering kindergarten, I helped the war effort by locating paper and metal scrap, working in our family "victory garden," and collecting our cooking grease to be made into soap for "the troops." World War II was not a good time for any American to have a German name (or a kid to have a non-military father), but wartime rationing made everybody aware that "we were all in the same boat." When somebody called my dad a "kraut" or a "deserter," he did everything he could to win that individual's respect. He was tolerant of everyone, often observing that every person was put here for a purpose, even if that purpose was to serve as a warning to other people.
After the war, like many families, mine moved into a new suburban, "Levitown-like" residential community. This one was on the outskirts of Davenport, Iowa, called "Sunnymead." My dad worked very hard to afford to buy our own home with his postwar job as a traveling building materials salesman. It fit well with his independent attitude, but sometimes kept him away from home overnight. He insisted that I join the Boy Scouts to provide additional opportunities for male mentoring, maintaining that scout leaders encouraged the same masculine virtues he had learned on his Amish farm. Although a professed Lutheran, he put my brother and me through expensive Catholic grade school, high school and college, for he believed fervently in the value of education in strong moral values.
Religious training outside of school was handled by my Catholic convert mom. Dad managed to be home every weekend so he could drive mom, my brother and me to confession on Saturday and church on Sunday. As Catholics, we learned personal responsibility, the evils of antisocial behavior, and the necessity of treating everyone as fellow children of a loving God. Our pastor often preached about the evils of the world and the misfortunes that befell those who perpetrated them. We were constantly reminded that our destiny was in our own hands, that we, and we alone, were responsible for the consequences, both good and bad, of the exercise of our God-given freedom of choice.
Although a good student, I came to hate the adolescent social aspects of middle and high school. Realizing that dropping out of school was not an option, I took extra high school courses and graduated a year early, the only student in my school's 85 year history to have done so. Probably the most useful skill I learned in high school was in written and oral communication, in which I won the school's top competitive award, and typing, which greatly aided my literary abilities. Having saved my dad a year's high school tuition, I used my communication skills to talk him into sending me to Loyola University, where ROTC at that time was mandatory.
Initially, I disliked ROTC, but I began to see the advantage of being a reserve Army officer in the looming Vietnam conflict, to avoid the draft if nothing else. So I enrolled in senior ROTC, earned a commission, learned how to fight, jump out of airplanes and build roads and bridges, and eventually served ten years of reserve and sixteen years of active duty, over three years of it in Korea and Vietnam, and two years of it getting my master's degree in Aerospace Engineering, courtesy of Uncle Sam.
My military career is probably best described as unspectacular. After marrying and starting a family, I retired as a lieutenant colonel, using my engineering degree subsequently to get a job in turn with two different Lockheed Martin companies as a registered safety engineer, a certified safety professional, and a certified manager. When my children were grown and out on their own, I took advantage of favorable company retirement opportunities finally to retire four days shy of my 59th birthday under two separate retirement plans. With the pension I earned from my civilian employment, the Army and Social Security, I am making more now than I ever did while working.
With four married children and a paid-up mortgage, I now happily spend my days as a widower doing pretty much what I please, including flying my personalized airplane, occasionally visiting New Zealand, the Home of Middle Earth, and helping to raise several biologically unrelated children. One of them has become in every sense a true loving and faithful daughter. Having been awarded a PhD in physics from the prestigious University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, she is currently making her mark as a lecturer at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne and an internationally recognized activist for women's rights, environmental enhancement, and social justice.
Sixty thousand years ago, more or less, my forefathers and their families abandoned their ancestral homes in Africa where humanity evolved, in search of a better life for themselves and for their future progeny. They survived tens of thousands of years of countless untold dangers and catastrophes. They braved millennia of bitter cold, centuries of inadequate food, years and years of hunger, thirst and sudden attacks from strange and fearsome animals. They survived fetid jungles, burning deserts, impassable mountains and the limitless expanses of vast oceans.
They evolved pale skins to produce vitamin A while covered in warm clothes made from grasses and animal skins, and long noses to enable them to work and breathe in the frigid air of northern Europe. They invented art, agriculture, ranching, industry, science, technology, engineering, seafaring and government. They did all the right things, because those who did even one of the wrong things, even once, perished miserably, and usually violently, along the way.
So today I and my family enjoy the heritage of over three thousand generations of wise, tough, courageous, industrious, innovative and dedicated pioneers who passed on what they had produced, endured, learned and discovered. They obeyed the laws of nature and their society and the biblical admonition to "be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it." I followed their example by personally seeking out and exploiting available opportunities for growth, advancement, and gain, accepting the considerable sacrifices involved in return as the cost of progress. Along the way, I made my share of non-fatal mistakes, hopefully learning from them and doing what I had been taught was right no matter what.
Yet today there are people who dismiss those billions and billions of man hours of toil and sweat and risk and sacrifice, by myself and those who came before me, as just the luck of the draw. Their predecessors stayed home until some of them were kidnapped and brought to this Country, unwillingly to be sure, to serve masters who were never any ancestors of mine. Whether their predecessors endured more or less hardship overall than mine is perhaps a matter for endless, and possibly fruitless, debate. Nevertheless, too few of them, it appears to me, are as willing as I and my family to take advantage of the opportunities to which their status as residents and citizens of the greatest society in the history of mankind has freely provided them.
Instead of working and bettering themselves and learning skills for which others are willing to pay them, they reject the many blessings our society provides, voluntarily segregate themselves and their communities, violently protest unchangeable historical events, loudly complain about perceived injustices long past, and willingly sacrifice themselves to the dishonor, degradation, shackles and chains of lawlessness and prison. Many of them identify themselves as only "partly" American, and do everything they can to isolate themselves from mainstream society, culture, manners and decorum. Some of them pointedly disrespect our Flag and way of life.
They condemn, castigate and criticize me and mine, as if the benefits that accrued from my personal accomplishments and those of my forebears just happened accidentally, that I am no more personally entitled to them than anyone else. They call it "white privilege."
As far as I'm concerned, they can kiss my ass!