In response to my “There are no Careers Today” Joe writes,
“Are all the clamdiggers gone too? I grew up on the bay. I don’t see how that could have changed very much. Last I heard duckshit had polluted the bay and the clamdiggers had to stay off the bay. Duck farms, you know. Them ducks have a tendency to dump a load now and again. They tell me it got into the bay and polluted it. Those were the days. I have many fond memories of working out on the bay. I knew nothing about the people who have a stranglehold on our country today. Real freedom seemed to exist in those days. If the criminals in charge today have their way, our children and our grandchildren won’t ever know what that freedom was like. Who would have dreamed such a thing could have happened in our country?”
MY REPLY:
Last sentence first. As anybody who knew me will attest, I was saying these things would happen in America when I was a teenager.
When I was fifteen I would come back from my lunch to my high school and somebody would shout “Federal Troops!”
Unlike absolutely everybody else who would tell you now they knew it, I took it for granted that the Federal Government would use Federal troops to enforce integration.
Everybody thought “Federal Troops” Bob was being ridiculous.
The list of my ridiculousness back then is endless. My sister remembers when I said the old ladies walking on Green Street near the University would not dare do that in the future and she thought how extreme that sounded.
There is not a thing happening now that I was not ridiculed in the 1950s for taking for granted.
That was then.
It happened in the 1960s when I was predicting fifty years ahead, and no one believes what I say about 2010. Likewise the 70s and the 20s, and so on.
No one takes me seriously today.
I’m used to it.
I’m tired of talking about that, so let’s go on to what may strike a chord with some readers: I do not know the difference between clams and oysters. I do not know the difference between frogs and toads. I expect someone on the Blog to let me know.
I do know that oysters clean the bays.
I watched my father wade with me in the bay and look through oyster shells and find one with an oyster in it and eat the damned thing raw.
But he also pulled his nose hairs with tweezers.
And I worked on the brick plant long before I was old enough and never passed out.
I was TOUGH. And I resent the fact I had to be.
Pain is CHEAP. A decent civilization is one which does not ask people to suffer, but a society that makes people WANT to live in it.
What I realized in the 1950s is that we could have had a joyful future.
We blew it.
I don’t miss the 1950s. I don’t miss outhouses and raw oysters.
But I do miss the future we could have had if they had listened to me.
#1 by joe rorke on 10/15/2005 - 4:30 pm
I can’t imagine why people would not take you seriously, Bob. I find you extraordinarily interesting. What amazes me is the foresight you had as a teenager. As a teenager I was a person who knew very little about the world. As an orphan growing up in the forties and fifties I was a person who was considered expendable, not worthy of being well-informed. That’s the way it was for orphans where I grew up in a lovely respectable conservative community. I will never forget how they looked down their respectable conservative noses at me. As for the swine who call themselves “respectable conservatives” today, I expectorate in their collective eyeballs. They didn’t have the guts to be what they claimed to be.
#2 by Mark on 10/15/2005 - 10:19 pm
“It happened in the 1960s when I was predicting fifty years ahead, and no one believes what I say about 2010.”
Ok Bob, this agnostic pain in the ass is declaring his faith — in your powers of prognostication no less! Tell us what is gonna’ happen in 2010 and tell us now, please!
#3 by Elizabeth on 10/16/2005 - 3:30 pm
I don’t remember the ’50s, but I’m very glad I was born after both antibiotics
and polio vaccine were discovered. Polio had become such a non-issue that, in
my twenties, difficulties experienced by its survivors became national news.
I’d already found out about it from reading old magazines with articles by and
about people spending time in iron lungs.
I had thought, in my early to mid-teens, that, at my present age, I’d be
living on the Moon or Mars, or even on a space station. What has happened to
the space program over the past three and a half decades hurts me deeply when
I think about myself as a hopeful high school student.
When I was ten, my parents decided not to buy a really wonderful house because
the sellers had divorced and they were concerned about inheriting that social
ostracism. Five years later, they were divorced and I was the one who got to
experience social ostracism. Within the ensuing 30some years, I’ve been called
names more times than I can count because I’m hanging in there waiting
to meet a good man who takes marriage as seriously as I do.