“Single mother.”  I like them individually.  I like married mothers.  What I do not like is the response that “single mother” is understood to immediately provoke:  a brave soul who must endure a special hardship.  Women should conceive children within the confines of a marriage or partnership.  The success of children depends upon adequate care.  Children are meant to have two parents.  Children are not meant to be the burden of a lone parent who most often needs the resources of the state to raise the child.   I care about all my fellow human but I have no special sympathy for the many mothers who decide to bear children without a permanent partner.

“First responders.”  Part of a typical news show format is to feature first responders as a breed apart.  Paragons.  Always valorous.  Most policemen and women, firemen, and paramedics are admirable service-oriented people.  I respect them and appreciate the dangerousness of their jobs.  I remember being in awe of the firemen from Dennis Smith Report from Engine Company 82 when I read it in my youth.  I am still capable of awe but cops, firefighters, and paramedics are very much normal people.  They are not paragons automatically worthy of worship; they people with dangerous jobs.

“Wounded warriors.”  I was in the Army.  I was not wounded.  My father fought in WW II.  My grandfather fought in WW I.  Soldiers of all stripes interest me.  I am interested in their jobs, duty stations, and equipment.  Yet I do not genuflect when I hear the utterance of “wound warriors.”  I do not like the false patriotism that the term brings to mind in a Joseph Heller Catch-22 sort of way.  In our times soldiers are people who follow a career path and willingly submit themselves to the policies that political leaders set forth.  Just because someone served in Vietnam or Iraq does not sanctify that person in my eyes.  I respect their service even in the cases of deployment that I do not admire.  Vietnam was such a case as are most of current deployments in the Mideast.

I have trouble remembering my life in the segregated 1950s and 60s.  People who are half my age and less must think of those times as just so many cowboy and Indian stories.

I saw movies at the Indian Chief Movie Theater next to the courthouse in Saluda.  Colored people or niggers as they were routinely called could only sit in the small balcony in hard seats.  I sometimes ate in Frank Hite’s cafe with its twin doors; the right hand side was for colored people.  None of my classmates from the class of 1967 were African-American.  I lived in a racially divided world.

Racial division exploded with the big city riots of the mid-1960s.  Segregationists like Senator Strom Thurmond championed the benefits of separate but equal.  The modern racist Republican party was born to thwart the work of LBJ and MLK.

The leading segregationist of the era was Alabama’s Governor George Wallace.  He is back in the form of President Trump.

I broke out of my childhood bubble at about twelve and adopted the cause of MLK as mine.  My world view was formed in the fervent belief that all humans are equal and much more alike than different.

For me reliving the re-popularization of racial division is painful.  The new segregationists are feeding the beast that led to the Civil War and pulled our country apart in my youth.  Trump is their momentary triumph.

His revival of racism will continue to  wake me up at night and darken my life but it will fade.  Racism and segregation is a walk backwards and young people will not see the attractiveness of the modern Republican’s revival.  They will walk forward.

Trump’s legacy will be the giant tear in the fabric of our country that will take the death of his–my–generation to repair.   Racism could re-emerge but the possibly of its thriving in the twenty-first century as a popular political expression in the United States is likely impossible.

My hope is that as we come to repairing the big rip created by President Trump’s election  a more unified country will emerge.

I usually keep one or more plastic grocery bags in my pocket.  On my daily walk around the neighborhood, I pick up trash.

I got started in a big way more than ten years ago when I would use big garbage bags to collect trash around my neighborhood every few months.  I would then circle back in my pick-up to take it to the recycling center. In the last few years I have started picking up trash each time I walk.

I think I first began this habit in the 1970s when my son was a child.  I would pick up trash but concentrate on aluminum cans.  I needed money to supplement my teacher’s wage and we had fun being outside.  He would trail along on a bicycle.

Now I pick up trash out of habit.  I have formed a kind of need or compulsion to do so.  At times I have photographed outlandish juxtapositions of items.  I once found a hundred dollar bill.  I have picked up cartoons of bullets and various electronic devices.  Maybe six or eight times, I emailed photos of my trash finds in an attempt to amuse or astound people.

Motorists do not understand the volume of trash along our roads.  What you see at road speed is just a tiny fraction of trash.

My far neighbor on Ragin Lane is in a wheel chair.  Once he and his wife stopped to thank me.  No once else has.

Yet I do what I do because it satisfies me to see a clean shoulder.  My dog Sun accompanies me on most walks, and we sometimes have short walks when we do not pick up anything.

Today I read letter in The Charlotte Observer about David Bradley.  He is moving from Charlotte to Brevard; the letter writer thanked him for picking up trash in his neighborhood.  He keeps a blog entitled pickupyourpath.com that details his walking work.

He plans to transfer that work to Brevard.  I checked his blog and emailed him to say he had a twin of sorts in Rock Hill.  I like knowing that I am not the only crazy old guy doing what I do.

My friend Barry Neal does what I do on his road along Lake Wylie.  Maybe there are more picker-uppers than we know.

January 12, 2018