GOING TO THE RACES, AGAIN
(Revised at 9:33 p.m. and still going).
Well, I never attended college, unless you want to count six months of night school some time after I quit the Sea. Those who served in the Merchant Marine during WWII did not get any Veteran's Benefits, even though serving on what were essentially auxillary warships, since we were armed with cannon and had a Navy gun crew to man them...with the assistance of the merchant seamen as potential loaders.

Yet, I thought that I'd already had a fairly good education, having visited 28 different countries, and had months of leisure time at sea in which to read and learn. At least the geography I had studied in school became more a part of my life.

Just a Traveling Man
Then, after the war I went into sales, mostly selling items direct to the consumer from business-to-business or house-to-house. Over the course of time I was in 46 states on the mainland, plus Hawaii, and traveling in this manner I have been in more homes across the nation that just about anyone you know. I doubt that there are 1 out of 10,000 people in the country with that kind of experience, and who have visited in more homes than I have.

It was another continuing geography lesson, visiting the different states, their capitols, little towns, big cities, clear around the country. I didn't have any difficulty knowing one state from another, because in school we were taught such things. Today many students cannot name the states adjacent to their own.

For awhile I was selling household items for which we collected $1.00 each week in southern Connecticut. New Haven, Bridgeport, Waterbury, etc. I also ran a sales crew doing the same type of business in Tulsa, Oklahoma. You really get to see how people live. every race, color and creed. It's interesting. You get to sit in their living rooms, dining rooms and kitchens. Within a few minutes you become acquainted with the whole family, and at times even their neighbors when they suddenly drop in.

I worked through almost every type of neighborhood you've ever heard of, and did it without any problems, day and night.

After TV became a staple in the home, I had to learn to contend with it, so usually asked them to turn it off or even turned it off myself before giving a sales pitch. After all, I wanted their undivided attention. That applies to your home as well. If you want to get a kid's attention, take the remote and shut the damn TV off. Never try to compete with the TV. You cannot do it; they're professionals on the tube and they know how to keep the viewers attention. So eliminate the professional attention grabber from the arena by shutting it off.

Don't think you can do it by turning down the volume. Most bars with a TV screen up in the corner don't have the volume up, but just watch people's eyes when you're talking to them. They constantly flick up and down. You don't have their full attention, and that motion on the screen may be absorbing more than half of it.

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Section B

In my experience I found that close to 99% of the people you encountered along the way in life were decent, courteous people, no matter what their race, no matter what their culture. I found it in the north, I found it so in the south. I found it in the east and in the west. Sure, I traveled in the south in the forties and fifites, and I saw those signs all over the south: No Colored, Whites Only, White Fountain, Colored Fountain. Yet, most people had nothing to do with those signs. They had to live by the same rules, as I did when the bus driver insisted that I move up front (see below).

Certainly it took the Civil Rights Movement to change things, and some southerners fought it every step of the way. But it wasn't all southerners. Most of them simply sat on the sidelines and watched things unfold. Up north too, most people simply minded their own business. As they saw it, it wasn't their problem and so they didn't get involved. On the whole most Americans are decent law-abiding citizens, and they treat their fellow Americans decent enough to their way of thinking. Some people of color or different race take unbrage at the way they're treated, not realizing that some people treat almost everyone in the same manner. They get insulted, not understanding that the man or woman may simply be a jerk, rude or ignorant to people of every color, including their own.

I saw a black woman walk out of a gift shop recently because she thought she was being ignored because of her color. I had been in that shop several times and found the clerk rather slow and inefficient, while also rough in her treatment of customers. There was a Post Office in Los Angeles staffed mostly by African-Americans, and from numerous visits I can tell you that they were seldom courteous to Whitey, but always friendly to Black people.

Then again, could my perception of the situation there have been as erroneous as the woman who left the gift shop in a huff?

Today, There's More Hate than Ever
Today, there is definitely more hate than ever. In fact, I think that in many areas of the country, they teach Black children to hate Whitey. They ignore the fact that most Whites never did hate Blacks. Sure there are those who do, but I've known Irish guys who hated Italians, and Protestants who hated the Irish Catholics. Such things go on all the time. Just read the newspapers and you'll see it is all around the world. Look at India, where tremendous clashes between Hindu and Moslems have left thousands dead. Or in Liberia, or Bosnia, Kosovo.

We are currently teaching people to be super-sensitive, thin skinned, resentful, nasty and contentious not only in the schools and colleges, but through contemporary songs and music, on TV. The game gets deadlier all the time. Instead of ignoring inadvertent or ill-advised remarks, we're teaching people to be confrontational in minor situations that are at best unfortunate mistakes and making major problems out of them. In other words, too often they're making mountains out of molehills.


(More to follow, tonight.)

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