We Methodists were outliers in the old hood where the action was taking place inside that big old St Galls church where all kind of whatnot was going on, They had the legacy of Rome and the Romans were lawmakers, so they had a legal procedure for getting into Heaven, and part of that was being without sin, and they could wipe that slate clean whenever they wanted, This didn't seem quite right to us Methodists. It seemed too well, pat. But we envied it a bit. The message from the Methodist preachers seemed to me was that as long as you weren't an axe murderer, and you went to church reasonably often enough, and were polite enough, you would be issued a harp. But the procedure was never spelled out as clearly in Elsdon as it was at St Galls.
I've never been in the army and Beagles has never been to college. I don't know what to make of the idea that the army was more like real life than school. College is nothing like grade or elementary school. Well it was a little like them, there was homework and grades, and I don't know, I thought there would be more of sitting around and discussing Great Ideas (in high school the only ideas that could be discussed were the ones that everybody else already believed.). but there wasn't much of that. There was this fear of flunking out, there were rumors of this or that (particularly rhetoric) class being designed to flunk people out, so a lot of that time that could have been spent discussing Great Ideas was spent studying for that chemistry test because a B in chemistry would offset that D that was surely coming in German and keep you from flunking out.
But if we didn't spend a lot of time discussing Great Ideas we did have a lot of freedom. Hell we could do whatever we wanted, we could skip class or sleep in it, none of our teachers cared. They could flunk us out, but they never told us what to do. The army seemed the worst thing that could happen to me. It wasn't so much getting killed in the unpopular war, I thought the army would realize that i was a smart cookie and put me in some cushy job. I was probably wrong about that. But it was wearing the damn uniform, having to have my buttons polished and my shoes shined, having to salute those officers, the knowledge that at any time some dickwad could order me to do pushups, and I liked to mouth off, which was kind of fun at Gage Park High, but I didn't think it would go over so well in the army. Beagles and Old Dog tell me that it wasn't that bad. Still neither of them reenlisted.
The comments part of those classroom rules, especially in light of the juxtaposition with hands and feet, was probably not a proscription about commenting on the issues of the day, as Beagles surmises, but of insulting your classmates, leading to the use of hands and feet.
Beagles and I well remember white flight because it happened in Gage Park. Well not quite in Gage Park, more to the east and maybe to the south, somewhere out there they were moving towards us block by block, and if we didn't sell today we would have to sell later for a pittance, or worse yet end up living among them fearing daily for our lives, Actually even that didn't happen until after we had joined the army and the college and we heard about it secondhand.
There was the prisoners dilemma thing. If you all stand pat, then you win, on the other hand if your neighbor doesn't hang tough you lose big, but if you turn before he does you end up not so bad off. Of course this sounds terrible because your normally laudable solidarity with your neighbors comes about because you are being solid against black people, which is, well, racism.
Old Dog speaks of a mix in the neighborhood, and sure there was a mix of everybody who wasn't black, but living in the bungalow belt, there was a remarkable similarity in income. Nobody really rich and nobody really poor, and even if there was some disparity in income it wasn't that noticeable because everybody lived in the same damn kind of house.
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