The two sentences in the title are slightly unrelated. If the first sentence was "Why Am I Here?" or "Why I blog?" those sentences would relate nicely but I wrote "Why Are You Here?" just in case you relate to this dedication and feel like leaving a comment. Why are you so involved in the future of this nation?
This personal story is a follow of a Got a Happy Story from a month ago and a good place for a reminder that that four year old community diary is changing nights. Tomorrow evening will be the first Monday Got a Happy Story? Please stop in and offer a happy story.
That prelude called Got a Happy Story? School Daze Edition was really just a photo diary about my walk around the property of my grammar school that has gone back to nature. The relevant part of that introduction being that it was a boarding school.
This is a tribute to a greatly respected and fondly remembered progressive teacher. A Roman Catholic brother who was ahead of his time and shared truths with his students. Truths that would have been stopped had those students been going home to retell them after school.
If this all seems too self indulgent, another one of my personal stories, then let me apologize before I start. From the day another Howard Dean supporter told me about this form of people powered politics I knew I belonged here. This is very much a community and it is one that has accepted me.
I never had the college experience. Transferring directly from high school to the blue cooler world I didn't receive enlightenment through education so I should be just like the people I grew up with. But instead I'm like you and still in the blue collar world, in my seeming isolation, I am so grateful for you.
As much as it seem that I am imposing on your acceptance and writing some Sunday navel gazing here, this reconnection of Brother John needs to be written. I don't know if he is still alive but I hope he is. The school I attended closed in 1972 and there is no trace of the related schools either. He was a wonderful teacher who showed me the advantages of civic activity and I wish there were more teachers like him.
There is one thing that I find very disappointing about Daily Kos. I'm a dreamer but when I joined I thought by now jotter would be writing about "90,000 recommending readers and viewed by 2 million." As a member of those 7500 or so recommending readers in this community do you feel different? Do you ever feel as you go out in the world amongst the uninformed that you want to go back to your command center like Warlock in the movie Live Free or Die Hard?
Judging by my peers I feel very different. The friends I grew up with are all ecstatic over the inauguration of President Barack Obama but none of them feel any urge to take an active role in the future of this nation. Most sat in foxholes through the Bush years and really didn't want to know about it but they found little to be interested about their government before Bush too. Some who claimed not to have an interest in politics were actually waiting for a Bush and were happy for the chance to share their skewed talk radio view of the world. But now those Rush Limbaugh parrots have seen the results and have grown quiet again.
I really shouldn't be like you the Kossack. In the Bronx environment where I grew up I should be like the people I grew up with. I didn't grow up in a blue household. Well there was a blue silence because my Mother never forgot where she came from. My paternal grandfather Walter Brady who died before I was born because of a lifetime delivering coal, owned the first livery in New York City to sign a contract with the teamsters and had his life threatened many times for hiring African Americans. But I grew up in a household where woman's opinions were unwelcomed and the only concession allowed by my dad, because he liked to eat, was the photos of John F. Kennedy and the Pope that decorated the dining area. I grew up in an apartment where Bob Grant would become the god of reason, dirty fucking hippies should learn to love America or leave it and Nixon represented some sort of just cause. In the apartment where I grew up "all Democrats were useless" except George Wallace because he had "good ideas."
There was that outside world to contradict everything I learned at home. One of my earliest lessons in American government came from a button that was popular in the 1960's. The words "Question Authority" were something everyone my age heard and anyone who read a newspaper knew there were many reasons to ask questions. On top of the political unrest and the lyrics of Rock icons, there were head shops that sold posters challenging the status quo and literature from pamphleteers. But everyone my age who was even slightly urban saw those and so many of the people who were young and involved back then don't seem to care anymore. Even the right wing nuts of today had some exposure to a better way. Hey Cheney was a draft dodger and you know Bush saw the inside of a head shop.
I also had one experience in my teen years that was very different from the mainstream. I had found a progressive high school and switched back to Catholic school in eleventh grade. There was an amazing social studies class that I attended and each class was about the Op-Ed page of The New York Times. Not only did we each get a free copy of the newspaper, a habit I stayed with for life, we debated and were tested on the words of people like Scotty Reston, Tom Wicker and Craig R. Whitney whose name still appears on The New York Times masthead.
Talk about a blogger's inspiration, there was even a little Seymour Hersh for some serious truth. It turns out that journalistic integrity and true investigative reporting is so rare that poor Sy just can't retire. In 2004 when I was already feeling my age but surrounded by many who didn't seem to care I discussed the uncovering of the horrors of Abu Ghraib with other disgusted Kossacks.
More current to my high school years there Fox Butterfield of Pentagon Papers fame. Exposure to such earth shattering events as being part of a nation that would produce false evidence to go to war at age sixteen was pretty advanced for high school but this was not my first rude awakening. As a matter of fact this high school lay teacher was a bit to the right for my taste because of the earlier influence of Brother John and that high school class in Immaculata was the only one where I can recall being argumentative.
In eight grade I was in classroom discussions about current events that probably didn't get discussed in many grade school classes. This grammar school discussion of Seymour Hersh's uncovering of the My Lai Massacre was overseen by an anti war FDR Democrat that would have been judged a cynic in his day.
Brother John was a big man, I mean Bill Bradley big and as the man who was playing Forward for the New York Knicks while I was learning to see the world from Brother John aged, the Basketball star turned U.S senator began looking like my former history teacher. Brother John's personality is a little harder to pin down. My fellow students always compared him to John Wayne but that was way off. He was a quiet man and greatly respected for far more that his size but he was the calmest man I'd ever met and always seemed content. Trying to think of a movie star with a personality like Brother John's probably Morgan Freeman would describe my inspirational teacher.
I had a flashback of Brother John in 1991 when I went to see the movie JFK. It was the first scene in the movie, that farewell speech of Dwight D. Eisenhower. When I saw that movie for the first time it was not the first time I heard of that speech and "military industrial complex" was a familiar phrase.
I'm sure Brother John's introducing students to the fact that elected officials would allow mass murder for the sake of capital gain would make many parents angry. Even now most American parents refuse to believe that but even if they did it would seem harsh to tell students that out lily white government has blood on their hands, so soon after learning that there was no Easter Bunny or Santa Claus.
Of course at my young age I didn't believe for a second that elected officials would allow innocent people to die just to make money but my teacher had planted a seed and I would hear it many more times in my life. Now forty years later with millions killed by the American military industrial complex in my lifetime I've come to believe that I am a citizen of a nation with a morally bankrupt leadership.
Brother John's most important lesson was teaching the fact that we the people could change that. He didn't go about it through conventional teacher methods. Brother John challenged our leadership with the statement "the primary purpose of government was to get people disinterested in the government because a non participating public is how they take from the people."
I fought that statement actively in class and carried it around with me for life. I can only remember being the teacher's pet once in my life and arguing with Brother John did not seem like an option but I took offense at that statement and argued. Even though a twelve year old is much less than half armed in a battle of the wits against an aware adult history buff I tried and lost. After giving up I decided that Brother John just said that so students would see the importance of active participation and never actually believed it himself.
That seed planted in mine and many young students heads was probably the reason I saw for trying to change the unchangeable. Most likely the reason that I showed up, still too young to vote, at the Kingsbridge Democratic Club asking "What can I do to help George McGovern get elected?"
Then as a young active Democrat I learned more and more about government and and found mounting evidence that the government was working to keep voters disinterested. That Kingsbridge Democratic Club close due to a lack of interest during the Carter administration and now that I've passed the age he was when Brother John made that statement, I'm thinking he was very serious. Now that I live in a era when the popularity of Congress has sank as low as nine percent, having spent forty years pondering the truth of the claim that they want to keep us fat, dumb and stupid, I just don't have any argument left.
My relationship with Brother John really only lasted for two years because he taught and coached only seventh and eighth graders but I remember that three times a day as the school let out of the basement cafeteria Brother John was always standing on the terrace above calling down with encouraging words, even for the lower grades. It was also his habit to walk rapidly around the school track each evening during the student's intramural sports period. He always used a hockey stick that had the business end cut off to support his large frame and as he observed the activities he would offer pep talks like "Master C if you show that speed on the field at tomorrows football game those Andover boys will be mighty sad getting back on their bus after the game."
When the students were leaving that cafeteria talking was against the rules so we could only smile at Brother John compliments. During the evening sports leaving the field of play was "off limits" so we could only smile and make a short reply. But for students like myself who lived too far away from school to go home on weekends, Brother Johns Friday, Saturday and Sunday evening walks were during a free period and many students would follow him around that track for a very special treat.
Brother John would tell his young students about current events and he would engage us about how we felt. We would discuss the goings on in the world but Brother John really came to life talking about the past he lived through. He was such a huge fan of progress and promised that Franklin D. Roosevelt's life would greatly improve our young lives. He was also a fan of and had a similar personality to Harry S. Truman.
He would share his mixed feelings about then president Lyndon B. Johnson, domestic progress mixed with senseless war. We knew from other brothers that the reason Brother John wore cotton in each year was because of a World War II injury and kids being kids we begged for war stories but Brother John never explained the cotton. He never told us about his experience in Japan or Europe. Brother John just told us that "war is not the answer."
I remember Brother John trying to explain the importance of Medicare to students who could not imagine getting old and I remember him explaining how a small Asian nation posed no threat to America nor Democracy. How the war was just about rich people getting richer. The weekenders walked that track with Brother John on that sad evenings of April 4th and June 6, 1968. We walked and learned through the insanity of that election year. As a student of Brother John's I wrote letters to both Johnson and Nixon but as a weekend walker I knew that Nixon had no interest in what students nor adults wrote about. The weekend walkers in my graduating class left Sacred Heart with a proper fear of Richard M. Nixon.
Brother John also loved to talk about and enlighten his young students about the civil rights movement. He spoke of Martin Luther King Jr. with that same respect he showed to F.D.R. I remember some very insightful words from Brother John one night that has haunted me for many years. During a discussion about the accomplishments of Dr. King, Brother John said that the nation was not changing because of the words of one good man. Brother John said "This government is changing because of who they would have been forced to deal with next if they did not acknowledge the pleas of Dr. King."