Thoughts on Struggles, Learning from the Past, and Other Related Things

Over the past month the wife and I have been through a lot of challenges - we both lost our jobs in a relatively close proximity of time, and we have had to refocus a lot of priorities and other things in order to make some sense out of what happened.   In doing so, however, I have thought about a number of things and wanted to just talk about those a little.

We are at the crossroads of a new chapter of our personal lives - I am about to start graduate school finally, and we will soon be starting new jobs and beginning the process of getting things back on course again.  The whole point of starting a new chapter, whether we think about it or not, is learning from our shortcomings from previous chapters of our lives and building upon our past successes.  No one can continue "resting on their laurels," and moving on is a necessary aspect of our life's pilgrimage.   However, it can be an intimidating prospect to face, and stepping into something new is always something that takes some adjustment.  Consider, for a moment, if you buy a goldfish from a pet store.  You don't just dump the fish out of a bag into a bowl, do you?   If you did, the fish would go into shock and possibly die.  What you do instead is you set the bag in a bowl of water, and let the water inside the fish's bag acclamate to the temperature of the water in the bowl.   We need to do the same thing - baby steps are often safer to take than huge leaps, and we adjust better with baby steps.   For those of you facing some challenges now - perhaps some of you reading this have either lost a job or started a new one, you have gotten a major purchase such as a house or a car, or you may have a baby on the way, just for a few scenarios - I encourage you to just take baby steps.  Don't try to leap ahead, but proceed at a pace that will help your adjustment to the new paradigm shift in your life be a smoother transition.  These are words of wisdom I have come to appreciate, and they do help.  That being said, I have a few reflections now I will share with you.

I have for several years now been engaged in writing down a lot of my life story, as some of you may know already, and it has been a daunting task.   It is something I will print and make a bound copy of, but many of you will never see it because it isn't meant for publication.  However, much of the material I put into these articles is drawn from that story, which I call the "master book" of my life, and although I have not shared a lot of the negative aspects, I like any other human being have had my share of upsets and unfortunate circumstances.    After some pondering, I have decided to share some of this with you today in large part due to some recent political developments, as there are some segments of our society who think everybody owes them something because of physical differences - they play the "victim" and are assaulting innocent people in the name of "justice," and what I am about to share shows that in many cases some of us have been a lot worse off than these fools, yet we don't resort to beating up innocent people and Balkanizing our nation over it.    So, it is time for you to hear a part of my story that is hard to write about, but it has a good ending - I have overcome a lot, and with the grace of God I am a better person today because of some of this stuff and perhaps there is a reason why some of it happened - my spiritual mentor, Fr. Eusebius Stephanou, has a great quote that I feel applies to my situation which goes something like this - man's disappointments are God's appointments.   And, I have had my fair share of disappointments - growing up for me was not easy, and at a certain part of my life I have had to grow up fast and may have missed out on being a kid when I was younger.  And, that is what I want to talk about now.

I mentioned I am a native of West Virginia, where I was born and raised.   I come from a pretty decent family, although they are not perfect, and my earliest years were pretty stable.  However, my parents - both Vietnam war veterans who met and married on the island of Okinawa - were not really that compatible with each other, and at an early age they divorced and I was largely raised by my mother.   My dad had very little interaction in my life - over the course of my childhood, I had seen him three times after my parents split - and as a result he and I never really got along as father and son (unfortunately, we are not on the best of terms even as I write this, due to a disagreement we had six years prior to this writing).  As for my mother, well, she did her best but she wasn't perfect either - a bad childhood for her, a bad marriage to Dad, and some other factors led her to develop a bad drinking habit when I was a kid, and for much of my childhood up until around my high school years we spent much of the time migrating between relatives - we stayed with all of my grandparents, my great-grandmother, and a couple of aunts over those years.  Most of the time, we didn't have a lot of money either, as from a period beginning in 1979 all the way up until 1986, my mother was never even employed at a regular job (she did some housecleaning and a few odd jobs for people, but that was the extent of it) and by and large we lived off food stamps and my dad's monthly child support check of $100 when I was growing up.   It was a rough existence, and oftentimes I do remember having to use safety pins to patch up holes in my clothes as well as stuffing plastic baggies into my shoes because they would often wear holes or the soles would come off.   And, we lived on a lot of food that was not the most nutritionally valuable - a lot of canned roast beef, boxed macaroni and cheese dinners, canned ravioli and soup, and in some instances I didn't get a dinner at night and had to resort to butter and saltine crackers or potato chips.   Summers were better, as fresh vegetables were readily available and people would often give us the excess in their gardens.   And, the food stamp rations at the beginning of the month helped too, as then we could eat such luxuries as chicken and cube steaks for a week or two.   My grandparents had a little more of a stable household where they lived outside of Augusta, WV, at the foot of Short Mountain, but they were not rich either - my grandmother and step-grandfather didn't have running water in their house for many years, and the "facilities" consisted of an outhouse while a woodstove provided both heat and cooking appliance provision.  They were also a little more resourceful in that my step-grandfather hunted for a lot of their meat - venison, groundhogs, squirrels, and other things that could be readily hunted in the woods were part of the fare at my grandparents' house, usually served with sides of things like wild mushrooms, poke greens, and ramps, among other things.  And, we also ate a lot of potatoes - potatoes were cheap, readily available, and in large quantities, and on some occasions a boiled potato with butter would be a full dinner of a night too.   That was essentially how I grew up.  

When I got into high school things got a little easier when Mom took a job when I was 16 taking care of a dear lady in her late 90's out on Salt Lick near Terra Alta, WV.   It was one of the best places I had ever lived to that point, and my high school years were relatively good and stable as a result.   Despite these circumstances, I managed to work hard to get a good education, went to college, married a good woman (we will soon be celebrating 20 years together), and many other great things happened over the course of the past 20 years I have been a self-supporting adult.  Adulthood has had its challenges too, but a need to survive has kept my head above water and I have always managed to overcome, with God's help, a lot of adversity even in my adult years.   And, that leads me to a point where I need to soapbox a little.

There are evil men, like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and our current President (to name a few), who are exploiting the myth of certain people being "oppressed" when in reality they are out to stroke their own egos and cause division among people of different ethnic backgrounds in this nation.    I know what I may say here is not "politically correct," and it may be misunderstood and may even cost me some friends, but it needs to be said.   The people that the "plantation pimps" such as Jackson and Sharpton are stirring up and inciting to commit acts of violence against innocent citizens are people who by and large grew up better than I did, but they call themselves "oppressed."   Let me tell you something - these "gangstas" with their $500 shoes, thousands of dollars of expensive stereo equipment, and their expensive drug habits in many cases don't know what "oppressed" is.   Some of those idiots, with their buttcracks showing and their stupid outfits, would not know what to do if they had to use an outhouse or cook on a woodstove - I had to do both, and not out of choice either.   I had to fight my way to get jobs, a good education, and to honestly get what I have today, and didn't have to gang up on people, beating them up and causing violence, under the delusion it was "owed" to me.   As a matter of fact, it gave me the resolve to rise above it, advocate for change by making it happen in my own life, and thus I achieved many things that circumstance otherwise would not have afforded me.   Unfortunately, there are some I grew up around that didn't pursue that, and one of them is now in prison on a serious charge.  I was thinking about this particular individual one day, whose name is Randall, and realized first of all how blessed I was, and secondly my heart broke knowing that someone ended up like this.   I knew Randall's family well - they were not particularly close to us, but they lived in the same town and they were poor like us then.  Randall came from a family of five kids, and his parents were both alcoholics and very abusive to him and his siblings.  His one sister, who was developmentally handicapped, was even exploited by her own father to give sexual favors to old horny local men for money when she was a young age - it was a shame, as she was actually a pretty girl and otherwise had a sweet personality that had gotten hidden among all the crap she had in her life.   My mother was poor and drank too, but she never abused me - on the contrary, she made sure (to a degree) that I did my best in school, and that I even had some religious convictions.  Unfortunately, she was also aloof from many of my activities in school too - for instance, although I was in the high school marching band and lettered, she never came to one of my parades or concerts.   It is not for me to say what her reasoning was behind that, as she just never got involved for some reason.   That does bother me sometimes, honestly, but on the other hand she let me develop my own interests and felt that I had the freedom to do that, so I could appreciate that too as I got older.   And, although she didn't show it a lot, I know she was proud of me - the little things she did to show it said that, and on occasion (usually when she had a couple of drinks) she would actually say she was proud of me, and that encouraged me as well.  Her greatest compliment to me though was in recent years, when she told me that I reminded her a lot of my dear great-grandmother, Ottie Stevens Turner - she said I had her convictions and that I also thought and acted a lot like her.  That spoke volumes, as Granny was one of the great influences of my life and I do love and miss her a lot.   I only wish Randall and his siblings had that blessing in their lives at times, because today Randall would not be in prison.   With all the big hoo-hah over this Trayvon Martin stuff recently, I find it sickening that the color of one's skin is what gets people noticed.   There are many of us who came from poor Appalachian backgrounds that were not as blessed as Trayvon Martin was in his life, yet when something tragic happens to one of our people, it is largely ignored by the news media, as it always has been.   Some people have debated about Appalachian people being an ethnic entity within the American "melting pot," and as I get older I realize we are actually an entity - the signs of an ethnic group are a distinct culture, a body of literature, and a language - we people in the Appalachians have all that.   And, although we come from diverse origins - some are Scots-Irish, some Cherokee, some French, some German (as were my folks) and also a huge number of African-Americans and people who came over at the turn of the century to work the mines, lumber yards and railroads - we have become one people.  We in Appalachia are a microcosm of what America is supposed to be; we forged our identity as a people when others like Jesse Jackson, Jeremiah Wright, Al Sharpton, and Barack Obama are trying to divide the US over race now.   People get along in mountain communities - we know the "Code" and follow it, something wider society has forgotten for some reason.   And, although we have our Randalls, we also have our Homer Hickhams and Dolly Partons who make us proud, and we love and respect all of our people the same.  That is why Barack Obama, Jackson, Sharpton, and all these other rabble-rousers are people I cannot get - they seek to divide the nation rather than fostering unity among our people, which is what we need so desperately right now.  And, it is something I can no longer be silent about.  It is time Washington, DC, cleans up its act and maybe follows the example of the small hamlets tucked away in our mountains where I grew up - thing is though, Obama would not survive a day in someplace like Thomas, WV, or Morristown, TN, because many people would find his attitude repulsive and not indicative of the way a decent human being acts.  Even many Appalachian Blacks are put off by these hucksters, as the bureaucrats don't represent their interests either and they know - Washington needs to know that moutain people are not as dumb as they think we are!! 

I have spoken my piece about many of the issues I have been thinking about over the past several weeks as I have seen race riots fomenting due to stupid stuff, and also I have learned over the past several years more about who I am.   Yes, I grew up in a way that some might say is "disadvantaged," and it was not easy, but God used it to give me a character and standards.  Therefore, if the people committing so many acts of violence now, all "in memory of Trayvon," would actually get some character and learn to move past it and try to use something like that to bring people together rather than divide them, this nation would be a better place to live in.   Blacks and Whites, as well as other people of other backgrounds, need to mutually respect each other and appreciate the common humanity we share - however, that respect goes both ways too.  Whites are often treated as if we are the cause of the Blacks' plights, but in reality some of that plight is self-inflicted and it is time some of those people rise above it.   I did, and you have just read about my history, and if I can do it, they can too.  Question is though, although they can do it, will they??   And, that is the question I leave you with today.