Drove down to the old neighborhood the other day, just to remind myself how many of my years are behind me. And how the world keeps turning no matter how much we wish it would stop in its tracks, or better yet reverse course.
What I discovered was the world is never going to do either. And that's OK, because it's how these things work and always have.
And so I almost drove past the street I grew up on -- Castle Drive -- because the trees have grown large and encompassing around the entrance, as trees will do after 60 or so years. The house I grew up in looks pretty much the same, except, again, the saplings of my childhood are mighty pillars now. Which makes the yard look like a postage stamp compare to the yard I remember.
And the neighborhood?
Different, too. When we moved there early in the 1960s, it was almost exclusively white, de facto racial and economic segregation being a thing then. Now it is largely black, Hispanic, Asian, and Middle Eastern, the entire American palette a certain species of American fears and loathes these days.
And yet ...
And yet the kids who live there now still ride their bikes up Castle and across the little cut-through to Stinson (dubbed Sitko Drive for Emil "Red" Sitko, a 1940s Notre Dame football star who lived on Stinson). They cruise the same streets and follow the same paths we blazed on our Schwinns and Huffys six decades ago.
In other words: The world changes. But only cosmetically.
I wish more people would understand that. I wish they wouldn't be so easily exploited by the demagogues and fear-mongering politicians who love to prey on them.
Which brings us to our esteemed Lieutenant Governor, Micah Beckwith, who has raised fear-mongering and demagoguery to high art.
As both Loot Guv and an ordained minister of the fire-and-brimstone sort, he has both a bully pulpit and a literal pulpit, and he's used both to advance a theology a lot of Christian folk find alien to their scriptures. But we're just plain old Methodists or Episcopalians or Presbyterians, and perhaps are not as privy to the Lord's revealed wisdom.
Or perhaps it's the Loot Guv who isn't.
His latest pronouncement -- that he hates Islam because it's a "demonic cult" -- not only united Muslims, Jews and Christians in public condemnation, but summoned echoes of another demagogue in a collar: Charles Coughlin, the virulent radio priest Charles Coughlin from the 1930s. Increasingly extremist (not to say unhinged) the longer he had a microphone and an audience, by the end of his 15 minutes of fame he was all but Sieg Heil-ing the madman of Germany, Adolph Hitler.
It goes too far to say, at least right now, that the Loot Guv is following the same trajectory. But he does seem to get more irrational every time he opens his mouth, ignoring the clearest of ironies: That he's every bit the religious extremist he accuses Muslims of being.
He seems to have cozied right up to the crowd that wants to throw all the Muslims out of the country, on account of we're a Christian nation and the Muslims want to take over America and institute Sharia law in Mayberry and Mount Pilot and every other wholesome All-American town.
This is of course preposterous; no community in the U.S., even those with large Muslim communities, operates under Sharia law or anything remotely close to it. But never the twain shall meet between hysteria and reality -- only the supreme irony of the pot calling out the kettle when it's the pot who are the extremists, given that it's they want to banish an entire religious sect in violation of one of America's most sacred constitutional principles.
Speaking of Sharia law, or a version of it.
Which brings me back to the old neighborhood again.
We've taken the long way around the barn to get there, to be sure. And maybe I've gone on long enough.
But come back with me anyway. Because there's one more thing I want you to see.
No, it's not the faint outline of the old cinder track behind the now-boarded-up Village Woods Junior High, grassed over now but still carrying the faint memory of oxygen debt. And it's not the overgrown field where we used to play baseball, with someone's sweatshirt serving as first base, someone's mitt serving as second and (invariably) someone's brand-new jacket serving as third.
It's this building over here, a few yards away.
In my kidhood, it was the Southeast YMCA. Now, though, it's a masjid, or mosque. And it serves the Muslim community on the southeast side of town just as St. Henry's over on Hessen Cassel serves the Catholic community, or Bethlehem up on Anthony serves the Lutherans.
That's America, you see. And no matter what the Loot Guv and his ilk say, it's exactly what it should be.
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