I am trying to think of a topic that will get you talking. You, like any human being, want to sound profound, but that is not what I am looking for. It may sound sexist, but in this respect you cannot beat a mature, intelligent woman.

Shari and Elizabeth say what they are thinking about. Shari is too modest about her thoughts to suit my taste, but that doesn’t keep her from simply saying what is on her mind. Elizabeth will go on about her family or other personal things, but there is always a point I can chew on. The average male ego would rather die than say “merely” personal things.

Women’s Lib would be deeply offended at my making a general remark like this about women. But I have yet to find a single thing a man can say about women that Women’s Lib is NOT offended by, so I am interested in the Elizabeths and Sharis who would hunt me down and mount my head on their wall if I called them Women’s Libbers.

To return to my original topic here, I am trying to find a topic that will get you talking. I got some good stuff out of “Fear,” so I’m going to try it again.

Let me risk saying that almost every member of this seminar has some fear about money. Let me give you some background on that.

One biographer of Teddy Roosevelt talked about Theodore Roosevelt’s cowboy days. He said Teddy was a good, brave man out on the range and he was fearless in fighting during the Spanish-American War. With good reason when Teddy dealt with cowboys and soldiers, he considered himself “one of the guys.” He was hurt by the fact that he wasn’t fully thought of that way by his buddies, and he never understood why.

This biographer had a terrific insight on this. The writer said that Theodore Roosevelt was considered to be a brave, highly skilled man and a good friend by his fellows, “But he never shared with them the daily, humiliating fear of being without MONEY.”

Roosevelt’s father was proud of this fact: “I have left enough money to my son so that, if he is not profligate, he will never have to work for a living.” It wasn’t just that Teddy inherited money. There was also the fact that his father never expected him to ever have to work. He did not have to earn his father’s respect by striving. His family did not require him to EARN their respect.

That is a million miles from where his buddies lived. That is a million miles from where you and I live.

Another example. A WWII vet in the program was leveling with me. He had lots of combat experience in the Pacific Theatre and he had the medals to prove it. He told me about an island where he and other vets spent some time when they were not in actual fighting. The island was under the command of a particularly obnoxious colonel.

That colonel was no coward. That colonel who was in command and everybody else there had been in combat, plenty of it. But the colonel had one awful habit. When he got drunk at the officers’ club, he got mean. He would bang into people on purpose. Nobody dared to object to it. Finally one of the combat vets there actually knocked the hell out of him for it.

The guy who knocked hell out of hte commanding colonel went to military prison. The man who was talking to me admitted that if he or anybody else had gone to the court martial and testified as to how that colonel acted, their fellow combat veteran would not have gone to prison. In fact, the colonel would have probably been up on charges.

NOT ONE of the defendant’s beloved, loyal buddies dared to testify for him! There were dozens of them, but not one of them had the courage to speak up. This was something the vet who was talking to me had kept inside himself for years. He said I was the first person he had ever admitted it to.

So why didn’t these brave combat officers save their buddy from prison?

The reason was that none of these officers who chickened out had ruled out the possibility of remaining in the service after the war. Testifying AGAINST a senior officer in a court martial would put them in the same category as a doctor who testifies against other doctors in a malpractice suit. There are no legal penalties against it, but it can be suicide for a career.

They had ALL shown heroism in the nasty fighting on Pacific islands. None of them would have hesitated to risk death or lifelong disabilityto save their buddy’s life in actual fighting.

But NONE of them had the guts to risk his career, his MONEY, for a combat buddy in desperate need of their help. They had all been through the Depression, and the idea of hitting the job market at the age of thirty or forty with no non-military skills scared them so much that they let a buddy go to prison rather than risk a possible military career.

So it makesme sick to my stomach when these same WWII vets would tell me that nobody knows REAL fear unless they have been in COMBAT.

Bullshit.

I have been shot at, and I have faced the prospect of losing my high-paying job and hitting the job market at age forty. Getting shot at is nothing by comparison.

And THAT is what Theodore Roosevelt simply could not understand or empathize with.

I almost flunked out of high school. Two things saved me. First of all my mother had had a year of college and she had been a public school teacher in the 1920s. The other was a special characteristic of the backward State of South Carolina in the benighted age of segregation when everybody else was smarter than we were.

South Carolina has the highest proportion of military veterans among all the states in the Union. It has been that way since I was born. That proportion has always been even higher than the Volunteer State of Tennessee. When the GI Bill of Rights came in at the end of World War II, this presented a problem. A lot of vets qualified for the GI Bill of Rights but they hadn’t finished, or even gone to, high school.

This was before we had the GED, where a person above 19 years of age could take a test and get the equivalent of a high school diploma. Back then, what we now call the SAT was called the National College Boards. The University of South Carolina wanted to say that anyone who passed the National College Boards, which, after all, were NATIONAL, could enter the University of South Carolina.

The national accreditation board went berserk. If a university down in what they called “peanut” and “hillbilly” country were allowed to do that, it would destroy the value of a high school diploma, which they also accredited. They threatened to take away South Carolina’s accreditation if it adopted that rule.

On the other hand, the University was not about to keep thousands of self-educated veterans out of school if they didn’t spend years going back to high school. So a compromise was reached. The University adopted a rule that a person who scored in the TOP QUARTER of the national college boards could enter whether he had had any formal schooling or not. So the national accreditation group accepted that.

My mother knew that the reason I was almost failing out of high school at ages fifteen and sixteen was because I was bored into helplessness. So she arranged for me to take an intelligence test. That was before my drinking days, so My IQ was out of sight. That convinced my father to let me go ahead, take the College Board exam at sixteen, and go to the University.

If my mother had not been a teacher or if I were anywhere but South Carolina, I would have flunked out of high school. I had already done plenty of manual and skilled work on our brick plant, so I would have become a skilled worker.

Whenever Mensa, the high-IQ group, is discussed, reporters always comment on the large number of manual laborers who belong to it. There are, of course, endless numbers more who would qualify but it never occurs to them to try. If you’re not “educated” you’re not supposed to be smart.

So, besides my being raised with working people in Pontiac, South Carolina, there is this other reason I am able to deal with leaders of grassroots, working-class protests. I respect them, and it shows. So they trust me.

Let me add one more part of my history which shows just how smart these “educated” people are. When I was flunking out of high school, there were national SUBJECT tests. That is, all the students in selected schools throughout the country who were just finishing a course in basic algebra or second year history or whatever were tested on their knowledge of the subject in order to compare teaching nationwide. Columbia High School, which I attended the last two years of my high school career, was one of the schools in that national test.

My teachers always made damned sure that I was part of the group taking EACH of those subject tests. I made them look good. In every single subject I scored above 95% in subject knowledge, and usually at 99%, compared to the NATIONAL average, including the much-publicized, highly financed schools with rich kids in New England. I was specifically selected as the shining example of a South Carolinian who learned all about the subjects in our poorly-financed school system which was forty-eighth in the ranking of forty-eight states.

The SAME teachers who insisted that I show how much I knew about each subject were the SAME teachers who gave me Cs and Ds in their courses!! They were following the grading techniques Mommy Professor had given them in college.

It never once occurred to a single one of these teachers that there was something wrong here! The fact I was their star example of someone who knew the subject and that they were giving me low to failing marks never struck them as the slightest contradiction. It never even occurred to them that there was something wrong with what Mommy Professor had taught them.

And that, boys and girls, is what I mean by Militant Ignorance.