SLOW AND JERKY by Jim Redwine

Gavel Gamut

By Jim Redwine

(Week of 02 November 2015)

SLOW AND JERKY

It is time to leave the Osage and get back to JPeg Ranch in Indiana. The family said goodbye to our old church, both the movie theater and the pool hall are long closed and they tore down our old school. We really can’t go home.

In small towns across western America fifty years ago those four institutions were the town. This was especially true in my small hometown out on the prairie. What time we boys did not spend at those institutions we could not avoid, school and church, we spent at the Saturday movie or the pool hall. I’m not sure where I got more education.

As Professor Harold Hill said in The Music Man:

“I consider the hours I spend with a cue in my hand golden. Help you cultivate horse sense and a cool head and a keen eye.”

One lesson I learned from the movie theater was that Black kids had to sit in the balcony. In legally and de facto segregated Oklahoma, the races could not and almost always did not mix.

In 2015 the vestiges of slavery are subtle. But before the race riots of the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s from Boston to Los Angeles, the sins of our forefathers were clearly evident. White people made the rules, both commercial and social, and Black people obeyed them or paid a heavy price.

When African Americans became Black Panthers or Black Muslims or litigants in civil rights cases such as Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka Kansas (1954), white Americans at first reacted badly then slowly let the mantra of “No Justice, No Peace” permeate our collective psyches.

Slowly, painfully, incrementally, that’s how we in America addressed the “Negro Problem”. Our approach to the “Indian Problem” was different. Absolute power over indigenous, multi-tribal peoples enabled industrialized white Americans to either eliminate or marginalize Native Americans. This latter approach is what Israel’s Jewish citizens have tried with Palestinians since 1948. It has not and cannot work, as there are many more Arabs than Jews and, unlike Nazi Germany in the 1930’s and 40’s, the whole world is now watching.

What might work is the former approach. Starting from an attitudinal change that justice is a better plan than extermination, Palestinians and Jewish Israelis could perhaps climb that same mountain we continue slowly working to summit.