driving that train

I liked the story of the locomotive.  I googled it and I found Olds but no locomotive.  Well it didn't sound like a likely story.  How sparse could the Cheboygan area be that a locomotive could be mired in a swamp and nobody know where it was?

But I think that the story is a good simile to what I was talking about.  Gage Park wasn't rural, but it was blue collar and it was totally white, and it was pretty conservative, unlike those libertines on the north side,  The church was powerful, though it was the Catholic and not the protestant church.  We had our bungalows, the best housing in the world.  Our schools weren't the best as I learned when I went off to college, but they were adequate, people learned to read and write and do enough arithmetic to balance their checkbooks.

Pretty much everybody was a democrat.  Well the dems had recently given us social security, and they backed the unions which those who worked in the abundant factories appreciated.  The dems were just fine with us.

Except for Ike, we all liked Ike.  I was just starting grade school so I wasn't the astute observer I have become.  I remember being at some assembly and the guy was talking about eggheads, actually he was defending eggheads, he was saying something like it was a shame that people were being called eggheads.  At the time I wondered what is an egghead.  Years later I put things together.  He was talking about Adlai Stevenson who was derided as too intellectual among the plain folk who flocked to Ike with his war hero record and folksy charms.  It was not that big a deal, Ike was no demagogue, he was ok.

Adlai was a liberal, but there were lots of liberals in both parties at the time, and the dems, with those horrid southern dems, were hardly the party of the left.  They weren't eager to do anything about racial equality, neither were the reps.  It even seemed for awhile that both parties had an even chance to be the civil rights champion, but then along came LBJ.

And eventually the whole problem came north.  Beagles doesn't remember Gage Park as being as racist as I do.  The word Nigger was thrown around with abandon and every white person I knew was against them, didn't want to live with them, didn't want to work with them, hated even taking a bus through their neighborhoods (which had once been perfectly fine nice white neighborhoods, but see how they looked now, just the way our neighborhood would look a couple months after we allowed one of their families to move in, which we would never, never ever do).

But what was a good liberal to do?  Didn't the constitution say everybody should be treated equally?  Wasn't it the right thing to do?  And if it was the right thing to do, then weren't the people opposing it in the wrong.  Well they were otherwise good people, good family folks who loved America, so they could be taught,  We could just go out to them and explain things to them, use logic and facts and surely they would come along and join us marching arm and arm, black and white, into the better world.

But they decided they would rather drive the train into the swamp.

That was fifty years later of course, but I think this point was where the foot on the gas of the locomotive first got itchy.