How We Have Become Prisoners of Our Own Making

I came home from Vietnam, left the Marine Corps in 1969, and returned to college. I had flunked out of said college a few years before and lost a baseball scholarship through the over-enjoyment of fraternity keg parties. My time in a war led me to re-evaluate what my father meant by his admonition that “fools learn through experience what wise men learn by being told,” and I decided that a return to education from books would be healthier than to one by bullets.

During one summer break in the early 1970’s, my good friend Spyder O’Neil and I traveled from campus to his home town of Chester, New York where we spent the summer working as maintenance men at a bungalow colony on the edge of the Catskill Mountains. The whole area was heavily populated with these properties spotted with small cabins and full of Manhattan families every summer in those days. If you’ve seen Dirty Dancing, you get the idea of setting and place but without the Hollywood romantic nonsense.

The pay was decent, and the work less than challenging, luckily because we didn’t know the difference between pliers and saws. More importantly, the state of New York was experimenting with a lowered drinking age of eighteen at that time. Consequently, we drove to nearby Middletown two or three nights a week full of energy and sporting a pocket full of cash. On most Middletown nights the streets were full of young women home from college themselves and Spyder and I were filled with the hope of picking up any number of beautiful coeds. Although this hope was dashed on a regular basis, we never gave up.

One particular night, we ducked into a small bar somewhere off the main drag for a quick shot of whiskey and a glass of draft beer. The cave-like room was dark, dimly lit, and nearly empty. Sawdust and litter scattered around our sneakers as we walked over to some stools and climbed on them. The bartender brought over two Schafer drafts in frosted mugs and, since I had declared myself on a psychedelic sabbatical, Spyder dropped a hit of mescaline into his alone. After twenty minutes and another beer, he began to ride a solitary rainbow composed of traces from the neon lights above the mirror that hung over the shelf of bottles behind the bar. I smiled as I watched him breaking pretend bubbles of various colors, jabbing them with a finger and giggling like a two-year-old.

A new customer entered. He took a seat on a stool two empty ones away from me. Taciturn and with a left eye that twitched every few seconds, the man appeared to be around fifty years old. His dark hair was neatly trimmed, graying around his ears, and swept back into what we used to call a duck tail that passed out of popularity after James Dean managed to kill himself in a car wreck. The skin on his face was worn leather, deeply tanned and well- scuffed with wrinkles. The nose spread a little too wide and flat and crooked at the bridge, a sure sign it had been broken before. The jeans were new, and his shirt stiffly starched and buttoned all the way up his neck to the collar. Even in the neon glow of the bar light, I could detect a yellowish tint in his eyes. All in all, he seemed to be lost. Every minute or so he glanced over his right shoulder to check the door as if waiting for something or someone.

After sipping about half of a Budweiser in a bottle, he turned toward me and offered an opinion. This wasn’t that unusual in those days. There were no strangers in a place like a tavern.

“Cars look a lot different now than they did fifteen years ago.” I nodded. But, he said nothing else while he drink another beer.  Finally, he turned to face me on his stool and asked if I knew of any restaurants nearby that were cheap and made a good cheeseburger. I was struck by how gently he spoke and how sad his eyes looked, almost like an old dog in a kennel that had accepted the fact it would never be rescued.

“There’s a McDonald’s if you walk to the stoplight on the corner, turn left and walk a block. You’ll see the big yellow arches.” I answered and smiled. “I can’t guarantee you’ll get a great cheeseburger, but it will be cheap.”

“McDonald’s? What kind of food do they serve? Is it a fancy place?”

“It’s a McDonald’s, my man. They got the same menu from New York to California, and all stops in between.”

“That don’t tell me nothing. I’ve never been in one.”

“No?”

“They didn’t exist fifteen years ago. Almost nothing is like it was.”

“Fifteen years? You been out of the country in the Army? I spent some time overseas myself.”

“Not exactly. I been in prison.”

That’s where the conversation ended. I was curious, but sometimes you don’t press a man for information. If it’s personal and he wants, he’ll explain. If not, it’s what we used to say in grade school. It’s a nunya, none of your fucking business. This seemed like one of those occasions. For a long time my perspective on this was uncomplicated, and I’ve written about that before. I used to believe freedom was being able to do what we wanted that was safe and comfortable without being challenged too much and without hurting other people. When we can’t do those things that we are used to doing or expect to be able to do, no matter how trivial, especially those everyday things we take for granted, things get confused, disconnected, out of balance. We’ve lost our freedom. What has given me a new perspective was a re-thinking recently when remembering that the man in the bar left shortly and tried to break into a jewelry store. Soon arrested, the authorities sent him back to prison for violating his parole. The story in the newspaper that I read about that incident quoted him as saying that “he felt freer in prison and wanted to go back.”

After living in America for the last fifty years since this incident, I believe now that I got things wrong. What many of us “white folk” in America—and I’m basing this on what I read, conversations with the public, and comments on social media—is a freedom from change. We want to never be uncomfortable with our thoughts, our beliefs, our environment, or our opinions. We want an invisible caste system in which we are the dominant and controlling caste. In this new world, one in which whites will become a minority in a few more years, the only way to do that is to isolate ourselves by building our own cage out of fear. Currently, whiteness holds a vast majority in the United States, and all the levers of power that control the country are controlled by mostly white males. 49 of our 100 senators are male. Six of them are Hispanic, three of them are black, and two are Asian, and this is listed as our most diverse senate in history. 90% of the Fortune 500 corporations have white male CEO’s.

What keeps us in this status quo, what rules our actions regarding educational curriculums, foreign policy, immigration, economics, and social constructs, is an inherent fear that social change will diversify and weaken our majority hold on what we consider our inalienable rights as white citizens to control this very same status quo. We seem to have the feeling that comfortableness is the same thing as happiness, that the natural, fluid evolution of democracy, which comes from progressive thinking, inclusivity, and compassion, are, ironically, the enemies of democracy. To me, this attitude has become a prison of our own making.

Thankfully, not all of us feel this way because there has never been a time in history that I know of when isolation has proven to be conducive to constructive growth for a society. No single race of humans that I know can fulfill all the needs of an increasingly diverse society by refusing to accept change, by fearing the contributions and ideas from sources other than the status quo. The failure of Colonialism and slavery in the 19^th century and the horror of the 3^rd Reich in the 20^th proved this, at least to some of us. We are at a stage when we can choose stagnation and the limitations that come from walling ourselves off from the influences of other races and other attitudes. But, consider the fact that the recidivist rate in the United States prison system is over 70%. If isolation or control of power and policy by a single race is the key to making better citizens, and fear of change the key to emotional and spiritual growth then why is more than two-thirds of our criminal population incapable of progressing to a better life when the opportunity presents itself?

I don’t know. Maybe this is a stupid analogy for our great thinkers and leaders. I am neither a great thinker nor a leader. But when I see the Supreme Court overturning progressive laws like the right for women to control their own bodies, when I see South American children drowning because of a river strung with barbed wire to keep people of color out, factual history deleted from high school textbooks, LGBT citizens treated with hatred, transgender teenagers denied health care, politicians refusing climate change, or the worship of a demagogic con man as a raison d’etre for our county, it seems isolation and consolidation of money and power is the direction we might be headed. And, I am not convinced it’s the right one.