ONE TIN SOLDIER

Now I wonder who the tin soldier is this time around.

Listen people to a story
That was written long ago,
'bout a kingdom on a mountain
And the valley folks below.
On the mountain was a treasure
Hidden deep beneath a stone,
And the valley people swore
They would have it for their very own.

Go ahead and hate your neighbor,
Go ahead and cheat a friend.
Do it in the name of heaven,
You can justify it in the end.
There won't be any trumpets blowing,
Come the judgement day,
On that bloody morning after,
One tin soldier rides away.

So the people of the valley
Sent a message up the hill,
Asking for the buried treasure
Tons of gold for which they'd kill.
Came the answer from the kingdom,
With our brothers we will share,
All the riches of the mountain,
All the treasure buried there.

Now the valley cried with anger,
Mount your horses draw your swords
And they killed the mountain people,
So they won their just rewards.
Now they stood before the treasure
On the mountain dark and red
Turned the stone and looked beneath it
Peace on earth was all it said. 

Go ahead and hate your neighbor,
Go ahead and cheat a friend.
Do it in the name of heaven,
You can justify it in the end.
There won't be any trumpets blowing,
Come the judgement day,
On that bloody morning after,
One tin soldier rides away.

Songwriters Brian Potter, Dennis Earle Lambert

MEMORIES

It was spring of 1968. Fifty years ago. I was a senior in a small logging town in Oregon. We had a new teacher for junior year US history. He was young. He was an army veteran and somehow, some way, he had access to archive films from the end of WW II.

I suspect his students had to get permission slips. I don't know. maybe not. Seniors who had study hall were invited, I don't remember that we needed them. After all it was 1968 and there were still plenty veterans who were still around.

The films were taken in liberated concentration camps. Bodies so starved you could not tell if they were men or women being bulldozed into mass graves. Soldiers wearing masks in hope of cutting the stench.

Survivors, if you could call them survivors, huddled together. Some in scraps of prison uniforms. I could not keep looking. I could not look away. I don't remember if there was a soundtrack. What could be said anyway? Such and such a camp? So many dead? So many so far gone they wouldn't survive? So many who would wish they hadn't survived? A few would build new lives?

I haven't remembered this in years. A plague on those who voted for Trump, on those who stayed home, those who were too pure to vote for the candidate who had chance. I'd say the hell with it but I still have a sliver of hope.

WHO ARE YOU?

An adaptation of something I wrote several years ago.

I was the song, I was the singer.

I was the earth, I was the willow.

I was the hill, I was the badger.

I was the stone, I was the moss.

I was the meadow, I was the deer.

I was the flower, I was the bee.

I was the marsh, I was the heron.

I was the river, I was the salmon.

I was the sea, I was the dolphin.

I was the sea, I was the wave.

I was the wind, I was the gull.

I was the sun, I was the mist.

I was the dream, I was the dreamer.

The line about the gulls was influenced by something we saw on on the coast several years ago. We were watching gulls flying up the beach against the wind. A few minutes later a white blur could be seen flashing in the other direction. It was the gulls. Fighting  against the wind so they could ride the wind back down the beach.

It was fun watching them.

HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF: OVER AND OVER AND OVER

Read this quote first, do not skip to the bottom. The little blank hides the identity of the subject of the passage. Source is after the quote. But does this sound dreadfully familiar?

 "In a state of constant self-suppression, for the one thing their master could not bear was for anyone to disagree with him, to have an opinion apart from his own. What he seemed to seek in his surrounding was a chorus of approval from persons who had sunk their own personalities, submerged them for the the time, while they themselves played the role of listeners. At first I rather despised this complacent courtier-like attitude, yet insensibly  I too fell into it, found myself searching for points of agreement with ......., rather than risk displeasing him by any form of polite argument. "

From George, Nicholas and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins. The subject was the German ruler Wilhelm II. He does sound a lot like "he who shall not be named." Wilhelm had the attention span off a gnat, hated to read anything of substance, insisted on constant approval, had trouble finishing what he started and so on. The quote is from Anne Topham, an English governess in the German court. English governesses were quite popular in several European courts.

BUT WE STILL HAD BOBBIE, THEN BOBBIE WAS GONE

Martin Luther King was murdered in April 1968. Against the advice of his staff Bob Kennedy kept a campaign stop in a black neighborhood in Indianapolis. From the back of a flat bed truck he made the announcement that King has been murdered. Over the next six minutes he made a speech that few ever knew existed. But, in a a night of rage, grief and fire their were no riots in Indianapolis.

Some folks comforted themselves that Martin was gone but we still had Bobbie. 

"It made my mother scream.

That’s what I remember. I had been lying dozy in bed, but at the sound of her, I scrambled into the living room. She was standing before the television watching an image of chaos in a hotel ballroom.

Although I grew up in the 1960s, very few of the signal events of that tumultuous decade managed to penetrate my childish, oblivious world. I have little firsthand memory of the Watts uprising, the 1968 Democratic convention, or the moon landing. But I remember the night, 50 years ago this week, when Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was shot.

I remember that scene in the ballroom. I remember a crude graphic on TV news showing where a bullet had entered his skull. I remember hearing that he had 11 children and feeling sorry for them that this had happened to their daddy.

But then, you tend to remember the things that make your mother cry.

In many ways, Bobby Kennedy was an unlikely figure for mom’s great grief, a slightly built rich man with an upper crust accent, sad eyes, a rabbity smile and that shaggy forelock he was forever sweeping off his forehead. Because he was the runt of a rough-and-tumble clan, he was always obsessed with proving his toughness. So as a Senate lawyer, as a campaign manager for his brother Jack and as attorney general, Bobby was the unwavering scourge of communists, gangsters and anyone — he famously approved the wiretap of Martin Luther King, after all — he felt threatened his brother’s political fortunes.

Then Jack was killed.

In the five years between that tragedy and his own assassination in Los Angeles while running for president, a different Robert Kennedy emerged. He’s the one my mother mourned, the one whose example haunts this fractured political moment.

He’s the one who went to Bed-Stuy, Appalachia and other broken places politicians often do not go. He’s the one who went to California to join Cesar Chavez as he ended a 25-day hunger strike. He’s the one who went to the Mississippi Delta, knelt on a dirt floor and tried to coax a listless baby whose stomach was swollen by hunger.

He let those kinds of things get to him, let them trouble, shatter and remake him. He reached out to people living on the margins, and they reached back with such fervor that his aides had to physically anchor him to keep him from being pulled out of the car when he campaigned in certain places.

It turned out the tough guy had an instinct for the underdog and a deep, moral indignation over the unfair treatment that trapped them in their hoods and hollers, barely subsisting in the shadows of plenty. He saw their humanity. This, I think, even more than his opposition to the war in Vietnam, was what drew people like my mother.

There was in that last ragged campaign of his, this sense of the possible, of the new, of fundamental, systemic change. There was this sense of a more compassionate America waiting just below the horizon. There was, in a word, hope. Or as Rep. John Lewis, then a campaign aide, consoled himself in the grim weeks after Martin Luther King was murdered in Memphis: “At least we still have Bobby.”

Then Bobby was gone.

Fifty years later, as immigrant children are taken from their parents at the U.S. border, as the rich get richer while the poor work full-time jobs for part-time pay, as hatred flows from the top of our government, hope feels like a bygone relic of an outmoded age, like blood from a wound that never healed.

That night, Mom cried for a loss greater than she could have known. She mourned a good and decent man.

We mourn a nation that might have been."

Column by Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts.

For me, personally, it was the next morning. I listened the primary results on my radio, then turned it off. Probably about ten minutes before history changed forever. I don't really believe in might have beens, What if King and Kennedy had survived? What would the world look like today?